RIP Steve "Stig" Tasso

This week I learned that my old Hobbits Hole clubmate Stig had passed away after a long illness.

Stephen "Stig" Tasso

I had known stig for over 20 years and we were regular clubmates at an earlier incarnation of the Roleplaying Games club, Hobbits Hole, which I co-founded many years ago.

 

We shared many Friday nights together and had many adventures over the years.  My fondest memories of Steve are always filled with his good natured humour and his boundless creativity.

As an early player in my Lands of Dual Castles & Crusades campaign, I will be forever grateful for his creative input and it is entirely thanks to him that my world has a fully explored species of lizard kin known as the Salamankari.

Stig always embraced the weird and outlandish game ideas I dreamed up and basically ran with it.  Being not that much older than myself we shared many similar interests in music and pop-culture including a love of the classic 1980s comic exploits of Judge Dredd and punk rock.

Steve was always a kind soul and I will miss his no nonsense approach to life.  Steve was definitively a "no fucks to give" type of guy.

Long may your star shine bright and I hope to see you again in the heavenly mosh pit.

The Masks of Nyarlathotep - Bunty Rothschild

At my regular friday club Dragons Keep UK we are 10 weeks into a year long Call of Cthulu and I have only just gotten round to printing and painting my character mini...

Bunty Rothschild - Heiress and Supernatural Investigator

Bunty's Story

Her early life in the Hamptons was idylic, being the daughter of the extended Rothschild family the world was her oyster as long as that meant marrying into one of the other rich families that Daddy knew.

Whe she was 16 she was packed off to Paris to study at the famous Sorbonne finishing schools.  However, far from the withering gaze of her father she developed a rebellious streak that even the legendary Madame Guillaume couldn't tame out of her.  

With the outbreak of war she and her American classmates were shipped back to the USA like refugees. Her father being far too busy with the business of supporting the war effort left her to live in the family's 5th Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park.

Of course Bunty was soon getting up to mischief and found herself fronting various high society illicit parties on behalf of the Italian Gandolfini Syndicate.  Her taste for risk and danger often saw her accompanying the boys on a rum run and her skills with the Chicago Typewriter made her invaluable to Don Luigi.

Unfortunately, her success came to an abrupt end when the syndicate fell under the beady eyes of Izzy and Moe, who operated the New York office of the famous untouchables.  She was lifted by the cops in a sting operation and only managed to avoid incarceration due the sworn testimony of her Uncle and New York State Supreme Court Judge.

Tired of his wayward daughter's antics, her father gabe her an ultimatum.  Either she married into one of the respectable wealthy society families or she got herself a job.

Whilst Bunty ruminated on the two equally unnatractive options facing her, fate had other plans.  A chance reading of the New York Tribune classifieds saw her embark on a steamship to Lima, Peru.  

Unfrosted - The Story of the Pop Tart

Unfrosted has been on my watchlist for a few months and I have to say it did not disappoint.

The premise is simple, two warring cereal companies in a 1960s that never was battle to be the first to crack the enigma of the fruit filled pastry breakfast treat. 

Stand out cameos from Bill Burr as JFK, Christian Slater as Mike the Menacing Mafia Milkman and not forgetting Hugh Grant as the English Actor who portrays Tony the Tiger before becoming the QAnon Shaman.

I swear that Hugh Grant is becoming funnier and funnier with age. 

The main cast are also great, each being fed a strong stream of oneliners and tight dialogue that shows off the writing talent of Jerry Seinfeld.

Check it out on Netflix it is honestly so much funnier than last year's Barbie

Time Bandits the TV Series

So Apple TV are going to do a Time Bandits TV Show...

This could suck in so many ways but I am hopeful that they don't stuff it up.

Gillian Anderson - Laser Engraved Coasters

My friend and Dragons Keep clubmate Kat is a Gilliam Anderson superfan.  This makes it incredibly easy to make super special custom gifts for her birthday.

Laser Engraved Gillian Anderson Coasters

On a recent Aliexpress buying spree I bought a pack of 72 plywood blanks for the princely sum of £7.20 so that's 10p each.  Measuring 73mm square and 2.3mm thick with rounded corners, they are a perfect size for a custom coaster project.  I decided to break the project up into a border and an image so I could take advantage of the speed of an .svg file for the outlines and the variable laser power that comes with a rasterized image.

The Border

This is my first really successful project designing something in Inkscape specifically for the laser engraver and LaserGRBL.  The border file was engraved at 20% power and 200mm/minute and each coaster took a little over 3 minutes to engrave.

The Pictures

I assembled a series of 6 images from the internet covering some of Gillian's most famous roles and prepared these in GIMP ensuring that they were scaled to exactly 63mm square.  Trial and error ensured that when I imported these images into LaserGRBL I had the necessary 6mm x/y offset to ensure that they were centered inside the engraved square.

These images were then imported as 1 bit Dithered B/W at 15 lines per mm and the engrave settings were 20% power at 500 mm/minute.  This meant each coaster took between 30 and 100 minutes depending on the amount of black space in the image.   

I could probably have engraved these much faster but I'm still learning how to engrave and I don't mind it taking a little longer rather than having to run multiple passes. 

Gillian Anderson truly is a chameleon of an actress.

Bonus Cats

I also added a bonus portrait of each of Kat's two Cats, Bonnie and Clyde for good measure.