In which I get ready for Dawi to return to The Old World...
With The Old World bringing back two of my white whales from my childhood in the form of Bretonnians and Dwarfs I’ve had a lot of fun projects this year. I wanted to do a slightly different Dwarf scheme than the old green and gold I remember seeing in White Dwarf as a kid and settled on the old Zhufbar livery of white and light blue. It makes for a striking force on the table top and is relatively speedy to paint up as detailed below!
In which I finally start delivering on the promised painting guides...
I have been sat on a fully constructed Battle of Pelennor Fields box for just about a year after purchasing it as a Christmas present to myself at the tail end of 2021. Having signed up to a few "slay the grey" style challenges in the New Year I thought it was time to start with a nice easy paint job.
In which I modify an old family recipe to be vegan friendly...
After successfully turning my hand to vegan Christmas cake I thought it was high time I adapted my old Christmas pudding recipe to be vegan too.
In which I discuss getting the dominant colour from an image quickly...
I have recently made a Discord bot that searches for online versions of board games to help people find games to play remotely. This link will add it to your server.
Discord embeds have a colour bar down the side that can be manually set. I thought it would be cool to have this display the 'average' (i.e. dominant) colour of the board game box and decided to investigate the best way to do it.
In which I plan my holiday tasks…
So it may just be because it is 2020 or perhaps I'm just a bit lazy but I’ve found that I often start holiday breaks with a list of things I’d like to do and by the end of the trip* I’ve not achieved most of them. Whether it’s odd jobs or relaxing activities I wanted to get through I just accidental sit around and don’t do them. This holiday season I decided I needed a to do list and though I’d try out the new Todoist Boards feature.
*Or, let’s be real this year: sitting on the sofa at home.
In which I get ready for Dawi to return to The Old World...
With The Old World bringing back two of my white whales from my childhood in the form of Bretonnians and Dwarfs I’ve had a lot of fun projects this year. I wanted to do a slightly different Dwarf scheme than the old green and gold I remember seeing in White Dwarf as a kid and settled on the old Zhufbar livery of white and light blue. It makes for a striking force on the table top and is relatively speedy to paint up as detailed below!
In which I finally start delivering on the promised painting guides...
I have been sat on a fully constructed Battle of Pelennor Fields box for just about a year after purchasing it as a Christmas present to myself at the tail end of 2021. Having signed up to a few "slay the grey" style challenges in the New Year I thought it was time to start with a nice easy paint job.
In which there is a quick update on an old site category…
The old Soldier category has been here since I launched this site back when I used to play a lot more airsoft. The only real post about Airsoft in the category was form a Stag Do I went to at the start of my PhD. Great fun, but sadly one of the last times I airsofted.
While I still enjoy airsofting I don’t do it regularly enough to warrant having a category for it. The category is in the website name so I do want to reuse it. How to solve such a conundrum? Simple! As avid listeners to The AstraCast will know I have been getting back into the hobby. So from now on Soldier will be a place to store all my posts about wargaming. I have a painting guide I’m putting together at the moment and hopefully some stories of actual games to come later in the month!
Tom Out!
In which I review the year that was...
It's been a pretty exciting year for me. I've started two podcasts, changed jobs and started reviewing food and drink for Luxury London. Less travel in my new job means that I've been able to spend more of my spare time on my side projects. All in all that's lead to:
And I'm hoping there will be many more in 2018.
As of today all comments on all of my websites* will no longer use Disqus. I will be using the built in Squarespace system. For reason why see: https://notes.ayushsharma.in/2017/09/im-killing-disqus-comments-on-my-blog-heres-why
Tom Out!
I've had a lot of headaches recently with WordPress failing on my blog and was already in the process of moving everything into one place on SquareSpace. With the recent complete failure of my WordPress theme (and several back-end issues) I have decided to initiate the transfer immediately.
As the WordPress import is not perfect some posts will have issues I will be manually fixing in the next few weeks. If there is an issue a quick comment using the new Disqus system will bring it to my attention. Thank you for your patience!
Tom Out!
In which I discuss some blog stats...
Firstly thank you everyone who has come to my little corner of the internet to get me to this point. When I started off a little blog about tea 3 years ago I never expected it to be seen by anyone outside my group of friends. Secondly I actually ticked over 20,000 views about a week back but haven't had the time to write this post until now.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here's an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,700 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
In which I celebrate...
Look what greeted me today:
Thank you everyone for reading my ramblings, costume ideas, recipes, geeky computer ideas, airsoft tales, reviews and tea posts! Everyone knows that people who read my blog are the best kinds of people!
Thank you all!
Tom Out!
In which I reassure you that I'm still here...
Apologies all I've been rushed off my feet these past few weeks :/ Normal service will resume next week (with maybe some bonus posts too!).
Tom Out!
In which I look back on a year (ish) of blogging and look ahead to 2013...
Firstly WordPress have provided this nice summary of my year in blogging: http://tinkertailorsoldiersponge.com/2012/annual-report
So this is my first proper year of blogging (I posted a few things before but wasn't really regular at all). It's been a lot of fun and I'm definitely here to stay :) I've managed the majority of my 3,000 odd views this year :)
Let the summarising commence!
I've messed about with Linux and Windows. I upgraded to Windows 8 and enjoyed it (it hasn't pissed me off yet!). I've also spent a fair amount of time learning $latex LaTeX$.
The main event was Project Thor which was a lot of fun and helped keep me in shape.
I didn't do much in the way of Airsoft this year :(
Due to foolishly agreeing to bake a cake for every CAOS rehearsal in order to become Social Secretary I have baked a lot of cakes this year. Also there was the annual Pudding Party!
I've had a placement at AstraZeneca which has been very useful and is still on going. I've also started looking into PostDoc options.
I reviewed a board game based on a TV show you might just have heard of. I also made an advent calendar full of alternative Christmas songs :)
I drank lots of tea and so it was a good year :)
I got featured on http://www.reddit.com/r/tea/ which was awesome! This is thanks to the Great British Tea Test 2012 :)
Having survived the apocalypse let's have a few New Year's Resolutions:
I'll keep tinkering. No particular promises here but expect some more $latex LaTeX$ and Linux stuff along with anything interesting I find out :)
I'm 'contractually obliged' to make cakes until March sometime once a week so expect more cake making. It'll give me an excuse to use my new Mason Cash mixing bowl and silicon utensils :D
I'm expecting to get the following things* to review next year:
*I should go on KickStarter less!
Armed with my trusty new leaf tea, teapot and a new review style I will continue to drink lots of tea!
Tom Out!
The blog has now had 1,000 page views :DUPDATE 1/10/12: As there's increasing interest in this blog I've upgraded to tinkertailorsoldiersponge.com ! :)
Tom Out!
So my friend Neil is getting married in less than three weeks and in aid of this a group of Warwick Airsoc members went on a private weekend shoot at The Grange and RAF Honiley. So what better chance to review these sites and to mention some of the cool stuff I got up to on my weekend?The Grange
For many members (and ex-members such as myself) of Warwick Airsoc this is our home site and has a fondness in our hearts as one of the first sites we airsofted at. In brief this is an excellent, small, woodland site that is easily accessible to anyone in the Midlands.
So how about a fuller tour? The site features two large fields separated by a trench and extensive bushes (perfect for sneaking around in but quite muddy). There are several crossing points including The Compound in the middle of the site which usually ends up being the location for some heated fire-fights. On the far side of the site there is Little Chuffington a village that is invariably used for a pistol-only game to end the day. Nearer to the safe-zone is the difficult to assault location of Bunker Hill which is a perfect location to set-up your sniper rifle or M249.
The Grange - from the top
Hunkering down at the Grange
The site also features a safe-zone with toilets and showers (yes, you can camp here for a weekend of airsoft!) and a nice shooting range with targets where you will find yourself chrono-ing before a day of shooting.
The Shooting Range
There is also a well stocked shop which features Gunmunki's custom guns which are truly awesome.
RAF Honiley
I was new to Honiley and it lived up to the hype. In brief this is a small, CQB/woodland site which is a whole lot of fun.
The site has a central complex with smaller buildings surrounding it and ample locations to devise a good ambush. The main building features a large 'Stargate' room and several control rooms and corridors which can become bottlenecks when the other team gets dug-in (memo to self: buy grenades!).
Inside Honiley
The Weekend's Games
This weekend featured a variety of great games including Compound Football, Zombies!, Bag Tag (c.f. TimeSplitters 2), Army of Two and Towers (an old favourite).
Zombies and Bag Tag were amazing fun and helped change the dynamic of the day ensuring we kept on having fun. The marshalling was great as usual too.
Conclusion
The site is awesome - go visit!
Tom Out!
P.S. This was meant to be posted aaages ago. Go visit the site!
P.P.S. The majority of the photos in this post were taken by the site marshals - thanks to them for the photos and obviously the photographs are copyright them :)
Hello everyone!I have now shut down by old blog (still there for posterity but everything has been moved over here).
Onwards!
Tom
Well this is the first post I'm making here on my shiny new blog.In short I thought no-one would want to listen to my problems etc. (those who do can do so IRL) so I decided to make a blog full of useful/interesting things (or at least it will be).
The name of TinkerTailorSoldierSponge sums up my intention for this blog fairly neatly - these will be the 4 major categories of posts:
