I had a busy birthday weekend which delayed this week’s update until now but more on that in a bit. This week I got to work on some gaming stuff which was a nice change of pace. The first thing I did was knock out the last piece of fence that I had assembled from Black Site Studios. Each pack of fence comes with seven total pieces. I’m not sure how they landed on that number as an even number would make more sense to me, but I won’t complain as I like how it looks and functions. This piece is perhaps noteworthy in that I scratched up parts of it with that sculpting tool a while back which as I mentioned, didn’t seem to make the fence look any better like I had hoped. I can confirm that it made it harder to base coat and didn’t dramatically change how it looks. As with previous fence pieces, I need to varnish it and put tufts on it to truly be done. I also forgot to paint the base rim so it looks less done than usual but here’s another piece of fence, nearly done anyway.
I’ll be working on more of these in the nearish future as I still don’t have enough done to place them around a house which is obviously the main goal at least to start with. Eventually, it would be nice to have enough for two or maybe even three houses but that will take some time and effort.
The other thing I worked on this week was the second dresser from Kromlech for Hellboy. This was fairly easy to work on and I tried to make sure it looked fairly similar to the previous one. I did shade it more to match the other pieces I’ve done but otherwise, it looks fairly similar. I did the NMM a bit differently without meaning to as it doesn’t look nearly as yellow this time for better and worse. All in all though, it came out pretty well and looks good alongside the other dresser.
Before I discuss some other things, I want to wrap up by saying that I have a couple of hobby related things on order, including the tufts for Lokaris so you can expect to see the finished version of that next time I update. I will say that getting the tufts has been a real ordeal and the place I originally ordered from disappointed me. I don’t want to put them on blast but here’s the gist. I ordered from them and they told me they didn’t have most of them currently but they would be restocking. The restock arrived a month later (because of some mail issues, which is not their fault) but that restock didn’t have anything I ordered in it, essentially. So the root of the problem in my mind is that their website lists most things as being available and potentially in-stock and that is often not true. If you’re willing to wait a long time, you probably can get those things, however, this does not seem like a very customer friendly approach considering you have to pay upfront when you order. Most stores tell you what they do and do not have in-stock so its a mystery as to why they use this system instead. Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll order tufts from them again. I rely on them for some things and will continue to do so but lesson learned here. I will add that I feel incredibly lucky because one of the things I really need for Lokaris is 12mm sized tufts and to my surprise, the tufts I bought and used for the Pangolin a year ago actually are that size (I thought they were bigger than that for some reason). So I already have some of what I thought I needed this whole time. That is a lucky break and saved me some money and grief.
Next up, let’s discuss wrasslin’ like I promised last week. I don’t consider myself a fan of wrestling for the most part but perhaps you could say that I’m just in denial. I really only watched it briefly for a couple of years in what is known as the Attitude Era which is when The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin were in their prime in the WWF as it was known then. That was a very good time for wrestling and it was very popular. Giving people the classy D-Generation X sign and telling them to “Suck it!” was in vogue for highly refined youth. I’m kidding of course, but it was indeed ubiquitous at that time. Since then, I don’t watch wrestling but I kind of follow it in a way. I did enjoy some of the wrestling video games that have been released over the years. I do know who a lot of wrestlers are and I might occasionally watch clips of them to see what their wrestling is like and if their character is appealing. I also used to watch/listen to wrestling “news” channels while painting for reasons unknown. Youtube likes to recommend stuff over and over once you watch a couple of videos and I fell for that, I guess you could say. In more recent times, I will listen to Dark Side of the Ring which is a pretty darn good show and very entertaining while painting. That is pretty much the extent of my interest in wrestling for me.
Having said that, I went to school with someone is an active professional wrestler. This is noteworthy because he’s the only person to really make a name for himself from there as far as I know. I’ve said their name before to a couple of you who are wrestling fans so I won’t say it here to protect my anonymity a bit. This guy was friends of my friends but he is pretty introverted (not unlike me, I suppose) and he rarely spoke a lot when I was hanging out with my friends and him. With that said, he was always nice and humble from what I saw. The person who went on to be a professional wrestler was always into it. He and a circle of friends were doing “backyard wrestling” before he started to become professional. Backyard wrestling is known for being much lower quality and more dangerous than what you see on TV, which is hard to believe when you watch Will Ospreay (an English wrestler) do a Tiger Driver on AEW these days.
But I digress, the point of all this is that I know this person who went on to become a big-time wrestler was made fun of, probably behind his back, for his love and pursuit of wrestling. I would never wrestle myself, I would never encourage anyone to do it, particularly in light of the deaths now of Andy Williams “The Butcher” and add another famous British wrestler, Pac, who just died not even an hour away from where I live. But with that said, pursuing your dreams is to be commended and to be celebrated and the person I’m speaking of bet on themselves and showed the world that they are talented. They had the ability to make it in a tough business and to last a long time in it. They’re still active today and hopefully have made (and saved) lots of money in the process. The people who made fun of them for wrestling went on to the most mundane jobs and live in a way that looks tedious even to me and my life isn’t all that much to brag on, in many respects.
This finally brings me to what I read recently which is all about chasing your dreams in wrestling. Do a Powerbomb! is by Daniel Warren Johnson, one of Chicago’s finest, just like CM Punk, and me, of course. Johnson brings emotional storytelling and his kinetic art style to a sort of fantasy wrestling tale. The gist is that the main character’s mother dies in the wrestling ring due to a horrible botch when she is young. She decides against a lot of resistance, including from her father, to pursue a career in wrestling. The struggles she has in finding work and learning her craft reminded me of the person who I went to school with. In some ways, it even reminded me of how I attempted to chase my dreams too as an educator and fiction writer. Eventually, she receives a Faustian offer. If she wrestles for this guy who is a necromancer and wins, she can be reunited with her mother. While this type of story has surely been explored in other mediums, it is a riveting one. The wrestling matches are both somewhat real and also completely over the top. The first opponent is a orangutan tag team with finishing move called Attenborough’s Cradle, which I thought was hilarious. In some ways, Do A Powerbomb! reminds me of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which also involves fighting and comedy. And yet, there are serious and emotional moments, particularly at the end. Having lost a parent at a young age, like the main character, I was expecting the ending to be a real tear jerker but it was actually sad and uplifting in equal parts which was a nice surprise.
Even if you find the wrestling over-the-top or even incomprehensible because you aren’t a fan, there are some absolutely insane panels in Do a Powerbomb! The image above gives you an idea of what I mean. Its just gorgeous and well-above what you expect from your typical comic book. So if any of this intrigues you, I’d definitely recommend Do a Powerbomb! Its a book I meant to read sooner but they just so happened to release black and white issues reprinting the story from 2024 and so that is why I finally got around to reading it recently.
To close out, it is my birthday while writing this for a couple more minutes yet so I thought I’d share a few pictures from my trip to the Brookfield Zoo. Last year, I went with my wife to see the Pangolin and it was asleep the whole time we were there. This time I invited my Dad to go and he kindly obliged and so we went with the goal of seeing a pangolin awake this time. I also have now seen everything in the zoo after seeing about half of it on the last trip and most of what I hadn’t seen before this time, with the exception of some buildings which are closed for renovations. To make a long story short, we saw the pangolin awake and foraging for food and it was a magical experience for us, I think. They are very endearing animals despite their strange appearance and I can’t understand why anyone would want to kill one of them as they’re harmless and kind of amazing to watch. They can’t move fast like some animals but they’re incredibly agile in trees. Since they’re in a nocturnal exhibit, its impossible to take decent pictures of them so here is an image of what kind of pangolin we saw instead.
I did get some great pictures this time including a Joey hanging out near its mother.
This quite loud and active Macaw.
And some busy Bat-Eared Foxes that I think were about to be fed as they were checking around for food and seemed to know that something was going to happen soon.
If the Pangolin was the star of the show, the second most interesting thing we saw was Desert’s Edge which unsurprisingly features animals in dry climates. There is an exhibit where you walk through and you’re essentially on a bridge/walkway and the exhibit is both in front and behind you in a U shape. This makes you feel as if you’re completely immersed in the exhibit and the habitat it depicts. In this exhibit, there were two very active and photogenic Pallas Cat. They’re one of my favorite cat species and many zoos have them but I really enjoyed watching them effortlessly climb the rocks. Usually, they’re behind glass and really hard to get pictures of too but shooting the mesh fence worked out nicely with my camera.
So all in all, it was a good birthday and hopefully next update, I can find time to talk about some of the things I got for my birthday as well as the other purchases I’ve made. This post is plenty long as it is though so I’ll stop here and will be back again soon with a final look at Lokaris.
