Watching at a friend’s house at DVD quality on a TV with motion smoothing left on gives the production, especially in the early scenes, the quality of watching a strangely high-budget episode of classic Doctor Who. The film is in general a mess, stuffed with voiceover and exposition to try and over-explain what is happening at all times while still being a muddled, confusing mess if you aren’t already familiar enough with the novel to give you a structure to support the avalanche of scenes that this film throws at you. Still, it’s just kind of a visual delight to watch. I dare say it might actually be better absorbed with all the dialogue muted and just grand musical accompaniment to match the visual spectacle and theatrical acting.

Also interesting to examine as the origin of Command & Conquer via Dune II. Some influences are obvious (harvesters, carryalls), but seeing Paul casually flinging around a prop minigun like it’s nothing makes me wonder if their presence as light infantry weapons in this film is the reason for the otherwise very strange decision that the basic troops in Tiberian Dawn are defined as being minigunners rather than riflemen.

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Some old kitbashes

Caoimhe ⬥ 17th of April 2026

I used to collect Warhammer years ago. Some Fantasy and particularly Skaven as a teenager and then 40,000 Tau in my twenties. I didn’t play very often and I don’t think I ever won a single game. I did really enjoy kitbashing stuff though, even if undiagnosed and unmedicated ADHD made it very difficult for me to actually paint things.

I got rid of most of it years ago but I still kept a few bits and pieces and in particular my more unique conversions and seeing as I wanted to practise with my Canon EOS 5D a bit more I thought they’d make good subjects. I was surprised at how narrow the depth of field was at such close range; the a model an inch in front of or behind the ones in focus are blurry enough to lose all detail, but it is a cool effect.

Some Warhammer miniatures. An armoured soldier painted solid black stands in front of an unpainted hover tank that’s out of focus. — My fireblade, an old metal XV15 stealth battlesuit model with the right arm sawed off and replaced with one from a fire warrior, giving him a plasma rifle instead of a burst canon. The back has a magnet in it so that the backback can be swapped out.

The same figures as before, but with the tank in focus. — My command TX7 Hammerhead is intended as a proxy for Longstrike. It has the cockpit of a KV128 Stormsurge fitted on top and the sensor array from an old vehicle upgrade kit sprue on the front.

Another set of miniatures: Rat men armed with various mismatched rifles and daggers, some with mechanical or extra limbs. Larger rat men with bigger guns stand in the back. The front row is in focus. None of them are painted. — My Nimh, a bunch of Skaven models kitbashed with parts mostly from Kroot and Adeptus Mechanicus to act as Kroot proxies. The more recent Kroot killteams didn’t exist when I made these so all the clan rats were intend to stand in for a general Kroot carnivore unit rather than some of the more specialised ones that exist now.

The second row of rat men are in focus now, showing a few with guns directly attached to robotic arms. — I had some idea of backstory for the Nimh, though I couldn’t tell you much if it any more. Not just Skaven in space and not just rat Kroot but very much a group of scavengers, cobbling together tools, weapons and cybernetics from any source they could get. Cannibalising the technology of what they kill rather than the DNA.

The back row of the human-sized rat men are is in focus now. With them is a single wolf-like beast. — Not very in focus here but I have one chaos hound here that’s intended as proxy for Kroot hounds. I think I have a few more in box somewhere. I could have used Skaven wolf rats but I wanted to lean away from everything being mutated rats and the Chaos hounds remind me of tiberium fiends from *Command & Conquer: Tiberium Sun*, which I have a large amount of nostalgia for. I’ve always associated some aspects of the Tau, with their hover tanks, walkers and rail guns, with the GDI from that game.

The giant rat men in the back are now in focus. One of them is carrying a large machine gun and the other two have similarly large gun barrels attached directly to their hands. — At the back some converted rat ogres as krootox proxies. The middle one with the gorilla pose holding the autocannon is one my favourite kibashes. I broke its shins and lengthened them a bit with wires and greenstuff and modelled some more fur on to make him look less stitched-together.

A close up of the giant rat men with the far one in focus. — The other rat ogre did not get as much as a spruce-up, but maybe if I come back to these and paint them some time he might get some more love.

The same angle but with the nearer one in focus. — And on the much more fucked-up side of things is a dark eldar grotesque with a rat tail stuck on. Doesn’t really fit with the others.

The front line of the rat men at an angle. — My assembled (but unpainted) horde (hrud?)

The front line again from the opposite angle. — I quite like the rat using the Tau shield generator as an actual shield. A distinctly un-Tau-like use of Tau technology.

A different set of rat men, this time in crudely painted blue power armour and two motorbikes and a hang glider in the background out of focus. These ones are painted but much more damaged. — And here are some much older kitbashes that I made with a childhood friend just sticking some clan rat parts on some Space Marines. The paint jobs might be crude but at least we actually painted them.

The rat men in power armour but with hang glider in focus. — I am not sure where that hang glider wing is from. It might not be a *Warhammer* piece at all.

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One X per year

Caoimhe ⬥ 19th of February 2026

I previously posted lists I’ve made picking one game and one film per year since 1990. 1990 acted as a good arbitrary stopping point as it’s a nice round number, it’s the year I was born and the number of games I’ve played at all from before then is pretty small, and it would be be fairly difficult to pick out shows for each year before then for me too. I’ve made a dedicated page on the site for these picks, made a few substitutions, added a pick for each for 2025 and added one series of television per year as well. All put into one table with the ability to toggle off which media you want to see selections for as well as some dynamic rearrangement based on screenspace, all done with (a horrendous mess of) Cascading Style Sheets and no Javascript.

These are not necessarily my favourite from each year. I have tried to be deliberate to give a spread of different styles and series I like as well including some weirder picks. Especially with games I spent a lot of time weighing choices for particular years based on what series I wanted to include and some years are just packed with formative games for me. 2001 has Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Commandos 2 and Halo (and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Advance Wars and Worms World Party…). I eventually gave the year to Metal Gear Solid 2 after weighing up that I could have Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories covering some bases for Silent Hill 2, Shadow Tactics was spiritually taking up a place for the Commandos series and there’s already plenty of shooters there to justify dropping Halo.

Similarly Prey is spiritually covering for System Shock so that I can have a childhood favourite Soleil for 1994 and Half-Life would probably beat out Resident Evil 2 in a head-to-head but there’s already two Half-Life games on there and I wanted it to carry the survival horror water for both the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 and for the REmake that got booted out from the previous iteration to make room for Robot Alchemic Drive. And yes after going on about carefully spreading out my choices I did give three picks to Sonic games, one to another Sonic Team-developed game and two more to Sonic-inspired indie games (and four different series of Doctor Who for the TV list). I will not be taking feedback on this.