100 Followers

Just a quick thank you to all the readers of Too Much Free Time.  I just noticed that the blog has accumulated it's 100th follower!  So thanks to everyone who stops by to read my bletherings and bigger thanks to everyone who makes the effort to comment and share.  I haven't done anything the last few months to encourage and attract new readers, so it's very rewarding to see that people still take an interest.

On a related note, Loki has just picked up his 200th follower and is marking the occasion by giving away a nice looking Saga figure.

Some Shout-Outs and Some Thanks!

First things first, where the hell did the first half of October go?  I'd swear it should only be the fifth or sixth today, not the sixteenth.

Anyway, I wanted to promote a couple bloggers who are running prize draws  Carl over at Hitting on a Double 1 has a bunch of WW2 books up for grabs to celebrate 25K hits on his blog.  By the same token, Jonathan at Palouse Wargaming Journal is marking his blog's anniversary by giving away a variety bundle of earlier books.  Make sure you head over and check out each blog.

Next up I'd like to thank Ian (or more accurately, Ian's wife) at The Blog With No Name for running a Blogger's secret santa this year.  I now know who I'm getting a gift for, although I've no idea what to get them yet!  I'm looking forward to seeing who gets what later on in the year.

Lastly, big thanks to Jody over at Frontline Gamer for hooking me up with the a couple new games; Dwarf Kings Hold and Green Menace by Mantic Games.  Jody is moving shorty to another country and, in an extremely generous move, is offering a lot of games to "good homes" rather than put them into storage.  Jody and I started blogging at roughly the same time as each other and his blog has been a constant inspiration to me.  Best of luck on the move fella.

I love dungeon crawl games, but most of those I own are pretty meaty affairs taking quite a while to set up and play (Descent 2nd and the D&D adventure games in particular.) These Mantic games are a real scoop to pick up, nice and light rules and, best of all, the miniatures have already been assembled and the cards have already been punched out.  Result.

Thanks to all these bloggers, keep up the good work everyone!

One Year Ago...

Another blog-meme is doing the rounds (blame PhilB) based on seeing what you were blabbering about a year ago.  In my case it was llamas and beer - never typed that phrase before either!

Now I know I'm taking some liberties with the specific dates here, but based on the fact it's -1° outside, I like to look back on how ridiculously warm it was last year!

Mobile Blogger App and X-Wing Pics

Yesterday's first post from my Android phone using the Blogger App wasn't without teething problems.  Firstly, it failed to publish the post first time AND deleted the draft in the process. Secondly, I notice it didn't publish any of the pics I'd taken, but neither did it save them on the phone either?  Anyone know what I was doing wrong? Still functional enough to use when I'm out and about.

So what pics didn't appear yesterday?  The new X-Wing releases, that's what!  Oooo, shiny.

First up, piloted by everyone's favourite scum, is Slave 1. It's an impressively large bit of kit, although still dwarfed by the Millennium Falcon.

The coolest Tie variant (at least from the original three movies) is next.  I bought two Tie Interceptors mainly because the game store only had two left, but I'm sure I would have picked up another one at some point in the future anyway.

Lastly, my least favorite Rebel ship (again from the original movies,) the A-Wing.  Meh, nothing wrong with it really, and it's rules look deadly, but it doesn't really do it for me.

For those of you who already have X-Wing, I'd like to point out that the quality of the models and, in particular, the paintwork is a vast improvement on the initial release.  All the weapons point in the correct way and the coloured panels on the A-Wing and Slave 1 have a nice thick colour to them. Compare the first X-Wing model I received where I had to cut all the engines off and reattach them, bend the weapon barrels back into shape and basically have cream paint splashed over black.

Not sure when we'll get our next game in though, next week looks pretty busy.  Maybe I'll have to kick the Mrs out shopping for a while and get some folk round to the house!