I’ve finally got some new pictures of my 40k models.  Unfortunately, the pictures aren’t so good…

I got a new camera from a guy on CraigsList…  A Kodak EasyShare CX6230.  Not the most amazing camera, but good enough for me.  Unfortunately I’ve got little idea what I”m doing with it.  So these newest pictures are pretty rough.  Hopefully that’ll be corrected as I better learn what I’m doing.

Anyway…

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *These three guys are, I think, basically done.  There’s a little touch-up to do here and there…  And I’d like to seal them somehow…  But I think I’m mostly done painting them.

I’m pretty happy with the level of detail I managed.  It’s nothing like what I see on the 40k websites, but I think it’s pretty decent for how little practice I’ve got at this point.

I like how the yellow turned out now that it’s been toned down a bit.  And I’m very happy with how the horns turned out.  The little guys are decent, but don’t have quite as much personality.  Still, I think they turned out OK.

Yesterday I accidentally finished Fallout 3.

I was getting sick and tired of all the combat in and around the metro area.  Three Dog wanted me to go fix his relay dish…  And the folks in Rivet City wanted me to go look for my father beneath some monument…  And the loony author in Megaton wanted me to go play with mirelurks…

And I just did not want to deal with any of that.

The combat system isn’t bad.  It’s actually kind of fun in small doses.  It’s neat to stumble across a small band of raiders out in the wasteland…  Or a lone robot…  Or a few super-mutants…

But the metro area is just plain painful.  Every two or three steps you’re getting jumped by someone.  And the ruins are full of impassable barriers, so you can’t just go from point A to point B…  You have to keep ducking into the tunnels, which are stuffed full of enemies.

Making my way through the metro area really reminded me of playing Quake 2…  With super-mutants instead of Strogg…  And a much higher chance of death.

So I got fed up with all the combat.  Figured I’d go wander the wasteland – that’s what I was having the most fun with anyway.  Wandering across the barren wastes…  Stumbling across deserted towns…  Making my way through the ruins of civilization…  Occasionally having to fight off a radscorpion or two…  Good stuff.

I basically just started wandering off to the west.

I stumbled across some kind of military base, which I carefully avoided.  The whole reason I was out there was to avoid the excessive combat in the metro area.

I saw something fly overhead one night…  And got irradiated…  And then found a bunch of alien power cells…

I located a big ol’ toxic waste dump…

Freed some slaves here and there…

And then I stumbled across some kind of gas station with a vault hidden in the basement.  This vault, unlike some of the others I’d found, still appeared to be functional.  I was greeted at the door by a robot who told me to put on a jumpsuit and go sit down in some kind of relaxation pod.

I did, and was dumped into a virtual reality simulation of some kind.  I worked my way through a number of quests and eventually ended the simulation – and rescued my father.  Somehow I managed to bypass a big chunk of the storyline and stumble upon my father completely by accident.

The game didn’t seem to know what to do with me.  I still had a quest telling me to go look for my father beneath some monument…  And there didn’t appear to be any way to abandon the quest.

More importantly, I didn’t really know what to do with myself.  I could certainly continue west and see the sights…  But that didn’t seem nearly so engaging now that I knew how it would all end.  I could go do some of the other quests I had – like the mirelurks, or fixing the relay – but I still didn’t want to deal with the combat.  I could reload from an earlier save…but that wouldn’t erase the knowledge of how things end.

I contemplated starting the entire game over again…  I thought I might enjoy myself more if I rolled up a more combat-oriented character this time around.

I actually created a new game, started running through the character creation/tutorial stuff…  But before I even made it to my 10th birthday I was disinterested.  I just didn’t care enough to go through all the lowbie stuff again.

So, I’ve un-installed Fallout 3, and I’m glad I never got around to spending any money on it.  I wound up playing for about six hours, not counting all the dying and reloading.  I’m sure there’s hours and hours more gameplay if I actually bothered to go through the storyline, or if I did more of the side-quests…  But I just can’t be bothered.

Originally, we had a copy of Fallout 3 pre-ordered and paid in full.  We were just waiting for it to be released.

But as the release date drew nearer, and more reviews became available, my interest waned quite a bit.  It looked more like a shooter than an RPG.  It looked like it had been simplified and dumbed down a bit too much.  It looked like Oblivion with guns.

Even though the reviews were generally positive, I had the sneaking suspicion that this wouldn’t actually be the game I wanted it to be.  So, we wound up canceling the pre-order.

And, until recently, I’d completely forgotten that Fallout 3 even existed.

But then Terri started talking about it again…  And they released the new DLC stuff…  So I decided to track down a copy and give it a try.

They’ve done an incredible job of creating the wasteland.  It really feels like a post-apocalyptic world.  I feel like I’ve just stepped into Mad Max or Six String Samurai.  The voices…  The characters…  The visuals…  The over-all setting…  They’re terrific.  Absolutely amazing.  I’m thoroughly impressed with the job they’ve done in creating the world around you.

However, the gameplay and plot aren’t quite doing it for me…

The gameplay is a little too much Oblivion and not nearly enough Fallout.  I miss the complex, roaming, rambling quest lines of previous Fallout games.  The kind of quests where you weren’t really sure whether you were doing the right thing or not.  The kind of situations that were genuinely morally vague.  Things are a little too simple, a little too obvious in Fallout 3.  It’s usually pretty clear what the right choice is.

And the main storyline…the quest to find your father…just isn’t doing it for me.  In previous games you were sent out to save you vault or re-build the world…  This time around you’re just running along behind your father, trying to figure out where he’s gone and why he left.  Again, it seems a little too small, a little too simple.

So, I’ve pretty much grown bored with the main storyline.  I’m now wandering the countryside looking for adventure.

The gameplay is a little too shooter-y for my tastes…  There are lots of encounters that boil down to simple run-and-gun gameplay.  And the V.A.T.S. thing just doesn’t really seem to do much…  Sure, it’s a nice way to specifically target a body part, but I can usually do almost as good by aiming manually.

Ultimately I’m just not feeling terribly compelled to keep playing.  It’s a decent enough game…  It’s a great setting…  But it just isn’t engaging enough to make me put up with all the annoyances.

Slashdot | Mythbusters Accidentally Bust Windows in Nearby Town

In an effort to knock Buster’s socks off, the Mythbusters accidentally created an explosion so large it shattered windows in a small town over a mile from the blast site. The Mythbusters had the broken windows replaced the very same day. The Esparto, California fire chief says that several firefighters were on hand for the blast, but he didn’t notify residents because, ‘Mythbusters is supposed to be a really popular show. Everybody would have been out there. We would have had to cancel it because it would have been too dangerous.’

After watching Knowing, Terri asked me at what point I realized that the aliens were here to help, rather than hurt.

The aliens are presented as pretty creepy guys…  They just kind of stand around, staring…  A couple times they pull up outside the house, at one point they’re talking with the kid.  Then they show up in his room.

There’s a very strong “strangers with candy” vibe going on.  They seem sinister.  It seems like they mean to do harm to the protagonists in some way.

Of course we eventually find out that isn’t the case.  They aren’t looking to abduct any children…  Well, ok, maybe they are.  But they’ve got a really good reason.

But, rather than actually answer her question, I wandered off on a tangent.  Because I don’t think I would call those aliens terribly helpful.  In fact, by any kind of human standards, I’d have to call them criminally negligent at the very least.

These aliens have apparently known about the coming distaster for literally thousands of years.  We find out that some of the prophecies in the Bible were actually delivered by these aliens.  They’ve apparently been warning people for years, trying to prepare folks for their return visit.  Most recently they warned that little girl who wrote those numbers and sealed it into a time capsule.

But, even with thousands of years notice, the best they could do is save a handful of children and relocate them to another planet.

I can accept that maybe the aliens didn’t have the capacity to stop this huge solar flare.  Maybe they aren’t that god-like.  But they had thousands of years.  Literally.

Even if their space ships could only carry a couple kids each…  Even if the trip takes a hundred years…  They still had time for at least 20 trips.  They still could have saved more than a handful of kids.

Or maybe they couldn’t have.  Maybe it took them all those thousands of years to get to Earth in the first place…  But they still sent those warnings.  And by the end of the movie it is obvious that they’re quite capable of communicating complex ideas to the kids.  So why didn’t they send a better warning?

That picture we see, the ancient one from some Biblical source, is pretty darn accurate.  Obviously the aliens managed to convey a fairly detailed picture of what was going to happen.  Why didn’t they say more?  Why didn’t they suggest we build a big rocket and lob ourselves out of the solar system?  Why didn’t they suggest we start building bunkers miles underground?  Why didn’t they send blueprints so we could build our own spacecraft?

Of course it’s just a movie…  It’s about an atheist/agnostic guy discovering that there really is more to the universe.  And these aliens are really angels.  And they’re taking the kids to a modern-day garden of Eden, complete with giant tree of knowledge.  I understand all that from a storyline point of view.  If the screenwriters had wanted the aliens to do more to save the world, they would have.  It’s just a plot device.

But if we suspend our disbelief for a moment, and just live within the context of the movie, it’s fairly obvious that these aliens should have been able to do more than they did.  They should have been able to save more people.

If they wanted to.

And that’s the central issue here…  These aliens must have had the capacity to do more, but they chose not to.  They chose to deliver a string of numbers to a little kid that was going to seal it in the ground for 50 years, rather than deliver the blueprints for a spaceship to some guy working at NASA.  It was, ultimately, their choice to let so many people die.

And that, in my opinion, makes them at the very least criminally negligent – if not downright evil.

Which brings me, eventually, to one of my major complaints about any religion claiming an all-knowing and all-powerful god.

If your god is omniscient, then it knows exactly what is going on in the world.  Down to the smallest detail.  It knows what I had for breakfast, what color underwear I’m wearing, and who killed JFK.  It also knows when and where the next terrorist attack is going to take place, or the next murder, or the next rape.

If your god is omnipotent, then it is capable of doing anything and everything it wants to.  It can create the entire universe, build a planet, and populate it with humankind.  It can raise people from the dead.  It can put the image of Mary on a piece of toast.  And it can most certainly prevent the next terrorist attack, or murder, or rape.

And yet, terrorists keep attacking.  And people keep getting murdered.  And folks keep getting raped.

So, obviously, your god chooses to allow this to happen.

Of course we can ramble on about mysterious plans and free will and all that good stuff…  But, ultimately, it all comes back to the all-knowing all-powerful god.  Because if that god really was all-knowing and all-powerful it could create the very same exact universe, complete with free will and a mysterious plan, but lacking murder and rape and whatever else.  All-powerful, right?

So, again, it is the god’s choice to allow these horrible things to happen.

Which, by pretty much any standard makes that god criminally negligent at the very least, if not downright evil.

We went to see Knowing over the weekend…

I wasn’t really expecting a whole lot.  Seems like there’ve been a good number of prophecy movies lately…  And a few numerological movies…  And, even though I enjoy Nicolas Cage, he seems to be playing the same character an awful lot lately…  So, I figured it’d be fairly entertaining, but not outstanding.

I was pleasantly surprised.

Nicolas Cage plays the same character he’s been playing in most of his movies lately.  He’s a bookish guy who’s suddenly thrust into the middle of something huge and has to save the world.  Sort of.  If you’ve seen National Treasure or Next then you know the character I’m talking about.  It’s a little predictable, but he does the character well.

The story starts out predictably enough…  You’ve got a creepy little girl who’s apparently hearing voices.  She writes down a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper and it gets sealed into a time capsule.  50 years later it turns out that those numbers predict where and when all sorts of disasters are going to occur, and Cage’s character needs to figure out what is going on before the numbers run out.

What made this movie so satisfying is the way that simple storyline slowly blossomed into something truly impressive.  It starts out looking like just about every other numerology/prophecy movie I’ve seen in recent history…  I expected it to turn into some kind of conspiracy, or maybe the guy was crazy…  But it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger…  Until, ultimately, you find out that this prophecy engulfs far more than just our planet.

Very cool stuff.

I didn’t much enjoy the religious slant everything took on as the story progressed.  I thought it was a far more interesting movie before they introduced God into the story.  But it does make sense, at least within the context of the narrative, so I can’t complain too much.

Definitely some money very well spent.  Terri and I both thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

I’ve always enjoyed Bruce Campbell.  Even in movies that weren’t terribly entertaining, Bruce Campbell was still fun to watch.  I’ve always felt he was an under-recognized actor.  So, of course, we had to rent My Name is Bruce.

Bruce Campbell basically plays himself.  And when some local teens disturb and ancient spirit that goes on a killing spree, they mistakenly assume that Bruce Campbell is actually a seasoned monster hunter and not just an actor.  So they kidnap him and throw him at the evil spirit.  Much hilarity ensues.

Honestly, I’m not sure how much your average viewer is going to get out of this movie.  Sure, it was amusing…  But the entire thing was one big inside joke.  There were references to pretty much every movie he’s ever made.  Lots of winks and nudges at characters he’s played and clicheed plot elements.  I suspect that if you haven’t seen a good number of Bruce Campbell’s movies you wouldn’t appreciate this movie nearly as much.

However, Terri and I being the Campbell junkies we are, we thoroughly enjoyed it.  I was laughing through the entire film.  Definitely entertaining.