Two movies seen the past couple days

Screw work.  Seriously.  Im sure many of you had to work XMas eve and the day after XMas just like I did.  I think it sucks.  Big time.

So, in my attempt to rage against the machine, I rented two movies and watched them on my ipad at work.  Boss is out this week, so there was not a lot of fear of getting caught.

The first is "The Bourne Legacy"

This one was pretty good.  If you have seen the other Bourne flix, this one is basically the same thing.  Good action movie though, and definitely worth a rental.  Jeremy Renner has turned into my newest man crush, and he is great as 'Aaron Cross' - the 'other' Bourne.  The movie completes with plenty of loose ends for more sequels.  7 out of 10 Raptors Claws.

The next is "The Devil's Double".

This one was spectacular.  Its based on the supposedly true story of Latif Yahia who was 'hired' (read: forced) into being Uday Hussein's body double.  Ive been wanting to see this one ever since I heard about it.

The exploits of Uday began to become clear as the 2nd war in the Persian Gulf was wrapping up in the mid 2000s.  He was a serial rapist and murderer, taking women from their wedding day, snatching young girls (14 or 15) up from school as they were walking home, using them and then murdering them.  He was also a violent psychopath in charge of Iraq's Olympic Committee, and when sports figures did not perform well (or even if they DID perform well) they were beaten, tortured, and killed.  He appeared to kill on a whim.  Obviously, being Saddam Hussein's son, he was wealthy beyond all imagination while his country crumbled around him.

For a long time, it was widely speculated that Uday was being groomed to be the successor to Saddam, until even his own father and brother began to realize that he was a psychopath, and slowly pushed him to the side.  Eventually, the United States, after receiving numerous tips on their location, cornered Uday and Qusay (his brother) in a compound and killed the pair.

Anyway, as mentioned above, the movie itself is about Yahia who is forced into being Uday's double.  Anything ranging from rallying troops to making public speeches to having sex with Uday's numerous women (some forced, some caught up in being Uday's current toy) was fair game.  Latif is a good and moral man, but due to threats against his entire family, is caught up in the life of a sadistic criminal.

Very uplifiting!!!

The truly awesome part of this movie is Dominic Cooper (many productions such as Captain America and Band of Brothers) who plays both the psychopath Hussein and the moral man Yahia.  Many scenes are about Yahia learning the mannerisms of Hussein, his facial expressions, his maniacal laugh, and his fits of rage, and you totally forget that there is only one actor on screen.  I will be on the look out for more Dominic Cooper movies from here on out.

9 out of 10 Raptors Claws!

I am undead.

My wife and I ran in the The Run For Your Lives 5k that I posted about a few weeks ago.  My goal was to be a 'survivor', but that didnt happen.  Melissa ALMOST made it!!!!  It was very exciting!  Here are a few pics from the run:

The scene at 7AM. Its really a huge festival.  You can see the stage where bands were playing all day on the left, food and beer tents on the right.  In the final results, there were about 7,000 runners.  Thats not including people like my wife who didnt get their race timed, so thats a pretty big turnout!

Zombies early in the morning.  Hard to see, but undead 'Thor' is in the first picture.  He was an idiot, but fun to watch.  The other pictures are zombies in a 'corral'.  Walking up, I was like 'oh man, this is gonna be easy'.  There were hundreds, if not thousands of zombies there.  BAD ASS.

And, technically, this WAS easy.  However, in the course itself, zombies were 'clumped up' in very narrow paths.  Maybe 10 zombies in an area that was about 6 feet wide and 30-40 feet long.  Very tough to get by without losing a flag.  And, some zombies were 'runners' - you would get by, and think you were safe, but there would be 3 or 4 running behind you as fast as they could!!!  My personal pride of this race is that none of THOSE fuckers got me.

The obstacles were great - none that were too hard, but none that were easy either.  Lots of mud pits, a few sets of barbed wire (real!) you had to army crawl under, a maze with zombies in it, some big wooden hurdles, a smoke house with electrified wires hanging down (not enough to kill ya, but certainly enough to let you know you dont want to touch them). and then this was the final obstacle....a huge water slide into freezing mud water, followed up by an electrified fence you had to crawl under.  My big ass touched the fence, and I couldnt feel it for an hour or so afterwards!!!!

Victorious!  Melissa and I after the race.  My time was 44:10, which was good enough for #689 out of 6386 timed participants.  Not too shabby!

Clean up.  Thats right ladies....there is just a thin hotel towel between you and ecstasy  HAHAHAHAHA

Without a doubt, I would 100% recommend doing this race if you ever get the chance.  I hope I get to do it again!

Great image from Jim Wappel

Gonna help Jim out with a little 'beta testing' of his DVDs over here http://wappellious.blogspot.com/.  He sent a cool pic that pretty much sums up what I try to learn and get better at

Some spectacular sports gifs

Jesus, I had to do something to get yesterday's post off my screen when I open The Raptors Nest.  So, here are some random cool sports gifs I got off of senorgif, so the dancing man with the bra moves down the list a little bit!

Naughty gif

hehehehe gotcha

Primer?

What primer do you use?

I started off using a spray primer - probably GW.  I hated the stuff - first of all, you get no control with spray.  It makes a mess.  Here in the south east, it is muggy and the spray would sometimes come out all 'gloopy'.

I then tried a brush on primer.  Dont remember what it was - it worked great, but the brush on part kinda sucked.

 Other people I know use ENAMEL primer, like the stuff you can get for cars?

Then, and currently, I switched over to black gesso.  You just 'schplop' the  stuff on, and it shrinks down nicely onto the model.  I kinda like it, but Ive noticed that you can get bubbles, and very occasionally, a rough surface in places.

Ive been thinking about trying the Surface Primer from Vallejo.  Its brush on (which, now a days, I dont mind), and people seem to rave over it.

Any suggestions?  What do you use?

Daryl Dixon

The Walking Dead is my favorite show on TV right now, and could very well be my favorite show ever.  To that end, I purchased 'Not' Daryl Dixon from Studio Miniatures and painted him up.  Cool figure!  He even has a squirrel on his belt!!!

More excitement!

Wow, its been a crazy couple of days for my miniatures!

I just found out that I won 3rd place for my entry in the Paint The City Pink contest over on Hendybadgers blog.  Special thanks to Ian (Hendybadger!) for running this contest for a great cause.  I hope he makes a ton of money for breast cancer research!!!

Riposte!

Update to the magazine picture

From the editor of Desperta Ferro - this will be in issue #15.

Ill be taking requests for autographs....

My Carthaginians.....in a magazine??????

Wow.  I am absolutely stunned.

Leon from Pendraken emailed me last night.  It seems a gentleman in Spain saw my 10mm Carthaginians from a few months back and wants to include them in his magazine.  Desperta Ferro, here I come!  (After checking my google fu, I see that 'Desperta Ferro!' was a Catalan battle cry during the middle ages.  Cool!)

Holy shit.  These were the elephants that I entered into a contest over at The Guild, but finished dead last in voting.  It was a Pendraken contest, however, and Leon voted them as his favorite, so I won a nice gc from them.  I was pretty bummed that I did so poorly in the contest, as I felt that these had been some of my best 10mm work (and some of my best work, period for that matter!)

I post now, admittedly, because I terribly thrilled and proud of myself!  However, I also have another reason - the editor Javier Gomez has requested some pics in high res.  Dont think they will appear high res here on the blog, but do you think these pictures are good enough to submit to a magazine, or do I need to go back to the drawing board on them?  Be honest!

Thanks very much for looking, and sharing my excitement!!!!

Broken Arrow

Back to my super hero theme, I just completed 'Broken Arrow' (Figure is 'Arquero' from Pulp City).

Quickie Nobbla Blackwart

I needed a quick fill in player for a goblin with a chainsaw for my Blood Bowl game today (im a huge underdog  - Im taking the chainsaw, as well as another star player choice (Brick and Grotty I think)

Voila - star player Nobbla Blackwart

Not my best paint job, but not terrible either!  However, I finished him in about 2.5 hours start to finish, so that is HUGE  for me.

Everybody loves other people's vacation pictures right?

Who doesnt like to look at someone else's slideshow right? Right?

Just got back from a long weekend to Phoenix, AZ.  My wife and I decided to tell the family to kiss off, and we enjoyed Thanksgiving alone this year.

A couple pics, just for grins
When we got there, we decided to take a 'moderate' hike up one of the mountains.  Moderate my ass.  We climbed to the top of this bad boy.  WTF??  If you look closely, you can see some people way the hell up there.

But, once we got up there, it was pretty amazing.  This is a view from the top.

Also, we witnessed a rescue.  Apparently, this person had fallen and broken an ankle.  Ouch and holy shit!  (See the person dangling from the chopper????)

Some Grand Canyon pics.  Pictures dont do the canyon justice.  It is just incredibly huge.

Finally, this was a little stop we made on the way to the GC.  This was called 'Montezuma's Castle', one of the first US National Parks.  Supposedly, the original discoverers thought this was made by the Aztecs.  However, in actuality, it was inhabited by the Sinagua tribe.  They disappeared around 1425, and no one knows why, or where they went.  Very non PC of me, but I always imagine plains indians (also non PC!) living in teepees, etc.  Whatever - this was a very neat site, built several hundred feet off of the ground, around the year 700 (!)

64th Regiment of Foot

This is the start of an American War Of Independence 'project'.  This unit represents the 64th (2nd Staffordshire) regiment from Great Britain. It fought in many battles in the AWI, but specifically a lot of battles in the southern campaign.

10mm from Pendraken.  Awesome little figures.  (And as usual, my photography doesnt do them justice!)

The first rule of Zombieland: cardio

Columbus