Spengler

Not that anyone who reads this blog cares, but "Spengler," who writes for Asia Times, has revealed his identity.

Battlestar Galactica Homeworld Mod

This is a nice looking Battlestar Galactica mod for Homeworld 2. I'm going to download and try it, but from the trailer and screenshots, it looks good.

Cigarettes

This is an interesting article on why a man started smoking. Choice quotes:

"China has become so polluted, he told me, that it's better to breathe through a cigarette filter than just take in the air on its own. And if your lungs are going to get shot to hell anyway, you might as well enjoy it."

Past and Future

"There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past."

- G. K. Chesterton

Freeman Dyson

This is an interesting interview with Freeman Dyson. I think we should know who he is. :)

Minds

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,"
- Allen Ginsberg

"I have seen some of the most mediocre minds of my generation destroyed by too great an interest in the Beats."
- Theodore Dalrymple

Pirates and Harry Potter?

This is a good song that mixes Talk Like A Pirate day and Hermione. :) I didn't know that day is her birthday.

Warhammer 40k Tournament

Well, I finally got some time to write about the tournament I played at on Sept. 1. It was quite a lot of fun, with 40 40k players using the Hall of Heroes rules. Hopefully this'll be the first of many tournaments held in Edmonton. (the Games Workshop guys hoped that this would put Edmonton on the map for GW events - if you look on the Canadian website right now it's all about cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary)

At the tournament, each player had four games, and depending on the score either rose or dropped between the higher and lower tables. I played my Godzilla army, as I mentioned in my earlier post, and not surprisingly it did pretty well - a lot of the time Warhammer 40k is all about the army selection. Despite some bad moves and bad luck, I still won three crushing victories (the second best kind) in the first three games and rose to fight on the second highest table. I was hoping the two highest players (one of them actually played an army very similar to mine) would play each other to a draw, and I would get a good victory out of the last game to win. That was not to be :( I made some bad decisions early in the game (I was a little too aggressive and made a bad gamble), and later bad dice rolling sealed my fate. I actually had a crushing defeat and probably did poorly in the final results. (they still don't have the information posted online yet, and I haven't had a chance to go to West Ed where they have it in the store)

The whole experience was a lot of fun though, and I'd definitely do it again. :)

I brought my camera to the tournament to get pictures of all the cool miniatures I could find, but the camera ran out of batteries half-way through (should've checked...) and I didn't take as many as I would have wanted... I uploaded the full-sized pictures to my Facebook account.

The first army I played against - Eldar (space elves) with grav tanks and the Avatar, which is a giant moving statue of the Eldar war god. The scenario we played was "Head Hunting," which involved killing the enemies' HQ in addition to defeating the enemy army. Of course, my HQ was the Hive Tyrant, a giant monstrous creature. His HQ was the Avatar, another monstrous creature. I managed to kill his Avatar early on in the game, and gained a lot of victory points. But I think in general his list just wasn't as strong as mine, no matter how he could have played it. My genestealers ate up his troops, even his dedicated close-combat troops, and the monstrous creatures shot up his tanks. The end was a crushing victory for me.

The second army I played against were the Daemonhunters, a branch of the Inquisition in Warhammer 40k. This included an Inquisitor and his retinue, plus numerous Grey Knights, space marines specialized in hunting down daemons, and assassins. These are very good, but very expensive (game points-wise) soldiers. In general, the Daemonhunters are not considered a very competitive army. Still, the guy I played against really knew what he was doing. In the first turn he used one of the assassins to kill one of my heavily protected gunfexes. In another attack he killed my flying Hive Tyrant with his Grey Knight grand master. But despite all that, his army was just too few in number, and I eventually gunned down most of his Grey Knights. It was another crushing victory for me.

The third army I played against was an Imperial Guard army. The Imperial Guard are regular human soldiers in Warhammer 40k, as opposed to the space marines, who are genetically-engineered super soldiers. The Imperial Guard are weak individually, especially in close combat, but have a lot of fire power as a whole, with tanks and artillery. My opponent parked his army on his side of the table and basically waited for me to come to him. In a normal scenario this would've been disaster for me, to march into his fire like that, but this particular game was Dawn Raid, where the first three turns were at night. This meant special rules in play that made it harder to target. His troops had search lights, which made it possible to kill some of my genestealers, but it wasn't enough to make a difference. I managed to charge home against him and the genestealers (remember that they rip up space marines in Space Hulk :) ) killed most of his infantry. He had a tank, a mobile artillery piece, and some combat walkers, but those were all shot up by the monstrous creatures. The end was another crushing victory for me. At the beginning of this game I no longer had any power left for my camera, and so I didn't have any pictures.

The last game I had was against Necrons. Basically think undead robots. :) This was a tough but slow army that had a lot of firepower. The table itself had very little terrain, and the game had the Escalation rule, which meant that all my monstrous creatures had to come in later as reinforcements. This caused me to do a risky gamble at the beginning - I charged my genestealers as quickly as possible toward the only units my opponent had on board, some basic Necron warriors who were quite vulnerable to genestealers, and hoped enough of them would survive to tear through his army. This ultimately failed and I only killed some of his troops. His heavies (he had to follow the same escalation rule too) came in and they were terrifying. His main heavy "vehicle" was the Monolith, a floating pyramid that dished out a lot of firepower. This and his remaining warriors killed all of my genestealers, so my monstrous creatures ended up facing them alone. I didn't have the firepower to kill enough of their models to do anything for the rest of the game, and bad dice rolls during shooting didn't help either. This ended with a crushing victory for my opponent.

During the intermissions between the games, I also browsed through all the other armies people had. Many of them were quite nice looking. Too bad I had such a poor camera and couldn't do them justice, and I ran out of batteries to boot. Oh well, the rest of the pictures I took, as I said before, are here.