This was a different kind of paint scheme. It’s kind of a green/blue grey, with black accents. I call this my mint chocolate chip army.

For those of you not familiar with the war game, this faction is basically AI robot people. And the soldiers are AI recreations of the cast of the Illiad.

The doctor and the sniper.

The one on the right was the test mini for this scheme. Originally she was more grey, but it was just too bland. Switched to the greenish color, and some blue inks, but still wasn’t there. Then the middle one, with more purples, getting there, and for the infantry test I used the hacker on the right.

By these, I’ve got the paint scheme worked out. I love the red head. 🙂

Myrmidons.

 

 

The robots probably could have used some more contrasting colors. But I had to rush them.

I kind of slopped the free hand on these guys, but they were a rush job to have some sentry robots done in time for a game night.

Now Mr. Hammer Time here, (Ajax) I think this mini came out fantastic.

 

Sorry for the lack of blogging, but it has been a really busy the last few weeks. I’ll keep these short:

Working on the new place.

 

That’s going to be the view off the back porch. That’s one tiny part of the view. Every direction is like that. The spot we’re going to build the house on is a ridge about four hundred feet above most of the property. I will install a zip line from my gun tower to the mail box. 🙂

Had excavators come out. You know you’ve taken on a significant project when you have to build your drive way in phases.

 

In writing news, I got the edits done for Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge out the door.

This morning I turned in a short story for Mike Williamson’s Freehold anthology. I got to get my samurai drama on again. Full on grumpy Toshiro Mifune.

Today I’m working on a short story for an anthology that hasn’t been announced yet. It ties into a movie franchise that I’m a fan of, so I had to do it.

Then I’ve got one more short story I owe to Jonathan Maberry for his Joe Ledger Unstoppable anthology. I got demons.

After that, I can concentrate on the next MHI, Owen book, haven’t decided on the title yet.

 

In release news, up next for me is Into the Wild in April. As soon as there is an Amazon link I’ll post it.

Then Grunge comes out this summer.

In really cool top secret release news, I can’t tell you yet, but it is really nifty.
In appearance news, I’ll be at SLC FanX at the end of the month. You can find me at Kevin J. Anderson’s Wordfire Press booth, where I’ll be signing books.

I’m trying to throw together some Book Bombs for people. I’ve been too busy and didn’t have one last month. I don’t know if I will be able to have one for April, because I’ll be in Europe for a bunch of it. This month I’m going to be doing one for the 2112 Anthology, because Rush and sci-fi just go together, and I’ve got a bunch of friends who’ve written stories in it, and the Galactic Games anthology.
Travel news, this year I’m going to Europe and doing some signings and events there. I’ll have a post up with that schedule soon. I’ll be visiting England, France, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
In political news, I’ve been arguing with a lot of Trump fans. In short, I think he’s a huckster populist demagogue telling angry people whatever they want to hear. Then I’ve been arguing with Bernie fans, and mostly my take away there is that they don’t understand how math works. Yes. The current system sucks and you are right to be mad. But don’t be so mad that you elect someone worse.

I mean, come on, let’s target the women and children? That’s your winning strategy? War crimes?

My primary is on the 22nd, and for once my state’s primary looks like it will actually count. I’m voting for Cruz. Because if I was giving them report cards for how they align with my beliefs, he’d get a B. Rubio gets a C. Trump lied and said his huge magnificent dog, like you’ve never seen such a dog before, totally ate his report card but it was a really super great report card, like the best ever in the world, with scores that would blow your mind (it was a D-). Bernie scribbled over his F and assigned himself a score that isn’t actually a letter, and Hillary tried to sell her report card to the Russian mafia.

If you want a fun FB thread, I posted that Misses link

https://mises.org/blog/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-states-they-would-be-among-poorest-states

showing that by cost of living adjusted median income the little Euro socialist states the Bernbots love so much are poorer than most American states, and a bunch of hippy dippy feel good types showed up to feel smug they pay 75% in taxes but get “free” healthcare, and shout LIES without actually refuting anything (seriously, the methodology is all right there), my take aways were:
1. Bernie supporters don’t know what the word “median” means.
2. Bernie supporters don’t understand how accountants can place a value on health care, because apparently that is an unknowable mystery.
3. Once they can’t refute any of the stats, they suddenly are all about telling you “money can’t buy happiness”, which is funny, since a minute ago they were trying to take more of my money so they could be happier.

 

In business news, I put together my tax packet for my CPA. When I saw what my total withholding was for the year, I decided that the next hippy Sandernista who tells me rich folks don’t pay their “fair share” and I should be super happy to pay for their gender studies degree because they are “following their dreams” I’m going to punch them in the throat.

In nerd news, new Writer Nerd Game Night campaign starting up. And this time it is Steve’s problem. Yay. We’ve not played together since Zach passed away. Man, I still miss that guy. But we will eat snacks and say ridiculous things in his honor this weekend.

 

In tank related news, which is now a thing, I found a British Chieftain for sale. (plus, working cannon, original, not a demil, on a Form 4) The lovely Mrs. Correia said go for it. I have witnesses. She gave me permission. Like a literal tank. But that one sold (plus, apparently they have transmission problems and lack leg room 🙂 ). But now I’m thinking, tank, because what good is a mountain, if you don’t have your own main battle tank to drive around on it? This has now officially been added to my bucket list. #34. Own a Tank.

If I slap a snow plow on there, and I can even pretend it is practical. Because tank. How often do you see cars slid off the side of the road in winter? All the time. How often do you see tanks? Never. See?

Commuter lane? Hell. Whatever lane I’m in is the commuter lane, and that includes if I feel like driving into oncoming traffic.

I would just add that to my business cards.
Larry Correia
Screw you. I have a tank. 

Plus, think about it. You would win every argument after that for the rest of your life.
“Socialism works great in Denmark!”
“I have a tank.”
“Huh?”
“I win.”

“You aren’t a *real* author!”
“But I have a tank.”

See? You can’t argue with a man who has a main battle tank in his yard. I don’t know if I win, so much as I wouldn’t care. Because tank.

 

 

 

Today’s geeky hobby mini painting posts, I’ve got light box pics of my Haq army from Infinity.

This color scheme was picked because I really struggle with shading yellows, so I figured this would be good practice.

I am very pleased with how these faces turned out. The fact that the dude in the middle looks just like me is purely a coincidence.

Yellows are tough to shade, and I find that white highlights on them never blend right. so I started with some brown base coats and worked up with golds to bright yellow.

For bases I wanted a kind of sandy desert look. Middle dude was an original test paint scheme, but the browns and blacks just didn’t pop enough, so that’s when I decided to go for the yellows, which resulted in the sniper on the right, and then I ran with that for the rest.

The camo pattern was an experiment, but I kind of like it. Looking at the glamor shots I wish I would have spent more time getting some reflections on the visors.

 

I’m done with Twitter. If you follow me over there, I’ll leave the account open to post blog links back to here and book ads, but other than that I’m not going to use it for any sort of conversation.

You’ve probably heard about how Twitter is falling apart. Their stock price has been tanking.

Recently they created a Trust and Safety Council, to protect people from being triggered with hurtful dissenting ideas. Of course the council is made up of people like Anita Sarkesian, so you know how it is going to swing.

They’ve been unverifying conservatives, and outright banning conservative journalists. Then there were rumors of “shadow banning” where people would post, but their followers wouldn’t see it in their timelines. So it’s like you’re talking to a room that you think has 9,000 people in it, but when the lights come on you’ve been wasting time talking to an empty room.

For the record, I don’t know if that’s what happened to me or not. Some of my posts have just disappeared from my timeline entirely. Other tweets seem to show up for some followers, but not others, and it wasn’t just replies. Beats me. Either something weird was going on and I’ve violated the unwritten rules of the Ministry of Public Truth, or their technical interface is just getting worse (never attribute to malice what could just be stupidity). Either way it is enough of a pain that it was getting to be not worth the hassle.

Then today they disappeared all of my friend Adam Baldwin’s tweets. Ironically, his only visible post (out of 8,000) was a link to an article about how Twitter is banning conservatives. That was the last straw.

So I’m done there. Twitter can take it’s Orwellian “Trust and Safety Council” and stick it.

 

A little while ago I posted a cryptic little comment on Facebook. “I just bought a mountain.”

Then there were several hundred guesses about mountain of what, or pics of the big dude on HBO, or guesses about my secret volcano lair. No actual mountain. Okay, here’s the deal. We just bought a bunch of acres of mountainside several miles from our current home, and we’re going to be building a compound… err… I mean house. Yes. House. Like normal people own. We will be building a “house” there.

We’ve been looking for the last year. This was a real score, but I’ll talk more about that. It will still be called Yard Moose Mountain, of course. We’re still in the same county, across the valley on the other slope. We’re only seven minutes further from the city than we are now.

We scored our current house right when the economy tanked, and a bunch of developers had lost their butts and were trying to move lots for cheap. At that point I was a successful accountant who needed to be close enough to the city to commute (I was just starting my writing career) but we were still living in the little house in the SLC area we’d picked up out of foreclosure on my entry level accountant’s salary and repaired over seven years. We sold that house for way more than we bought it for, and used the money to build this one. (seriously people, debt to equity ratio, learn it, live it, love it).

When we built our current house it was all open fields around us. There were houses near, but we had a little room to breathe. I’m a country boy at heart. I don’t like people all up in my business. We even had a moose come and live in our yard. That’s why we started calling it Yard Moose Mountain. He just kind of camped out under my son’s bedroom window, then he’d wander out and eat our neighbor’s trees, but he never messed with my trees. Good moose.

It was really nice.

Over the last five years our area slowly filled in, until one day I woke up, and realized that rather than living in the country anymore, we were living in a small neighborhood. Sure, it was a nice commuter neighborhood (I’ve got 12 doctors in my ward, no joke) and the people are about as nice as you could possibly ask for, but it was still a neighborhood.  We landscaped and put in a fence for privacy, but it has lost its charm. Add to that, I’d retired from my finance manager job a few years ago to just be a full time author, so I no longer needed to be close enough to the city to commute.

Being a failed D List nobody hack pulp writer with an irreparably damaged career who will never be a *real* author and who can’t even manage to get measly five hundred people to a book signing, my income had still somehow gone up dramatically, but we’d not really changed our standard of living (well, except for more guns and minis, but those don’t count). Plus, because I have a pathological hatred of debt I had been making lots of extra house payments, to the point that I’d knocked 27 years worth of our 30 year mortgage payments out in 5. Because screw debt.

So last year we decided we wanted to move, and this time we were going to move someplace where we’d never have to move again. The problem is, I really like the county we live in now. To me it is the best place in Utah. Problem is, lots of rich people agree with me. So property is in demand.

For those of you who haven’t been to Utah you’ve got to understand what it is like. This state is huge. We have vast swaths of desert nothingness (I used to live in Delta!). Out there, land is super cheap. But you’re a million miles from everything, and in lots of those areas the weather sucks, freezing winter winds, and then summer is hot, dry, and windy, when it isn’t on fire, and I really hope you like sagebrush. But it’s big, affordable, and it certainly isn’t crowded.

Almost all of our population lives in a narrow strip of valleys between Provo and Ogden. This is called the Wasatch Front. This is where most of the jobs are. The problem there is that it is a dense city. Despite how the media portrays Utah as a bunch of bumpkins and our women are wearing butter churning dresses and floral bonnets, we’re actually one of the most urbanized states in the country, because everybody lives in the same damn place. It has all the negatives of city and suburban living, with other humans everywhere, lousy traffic, no space, shooting off your porch results in a SWAT call out, and land isn’t cheap. It’s all small lots, I’d guess quarter of an acre average, or maybe an occasional acre sized plot for way too much. Anything bigger gets subdivided.

Now, to clarify, when I say way too much money, I mean way too much by Rocky Mountain state standards. By some parts of the US standards, all of Utah is cheap. The equivalent to our current house in my wife’s home area California would be in the four or five million dollar range, only we couldn’t actually price that out because there are no lots the size of our current lot listed in Santa Clara county.

I used to live on the Wasatch Front. The worst part is that during the winter we experience what is called “The Inversion”. Now, you might be familiar with that winter weather effect, where because of the difference between the warm and cold air, the air in the valley will get stuck there and not circulate out, but in Utah, where we decided to stick two million people into what is basically one skinny valley, for a few weeks every winter we get to have the worst air quality in the world. Suck it, Bejing. If you have asthma like I do, it’s like sucking hot death through a straw.

So, expensive, crowded, and a few weeks a year the air is made of poisonous gas. Yay.

But there are a few sweet spots in Utah near the population center that aren’t desert, but rather pretty mountains, that aren’t all crowded, which are above the inversion, or better, on the other side of the Wasatch where the air is clean and all our pollution gets blown down to Salt Lake every morning. Now these peaceful mountain valleys were originally owned by farmers, who then figured out they could get stupid rich by subdividing it out and selling the land to ski resorts and movie stars.

That’s how you get Park City. Where the super rich go to ski, and Quentin Tarantino might yell at you over a parking space at Starbucks. Oh, it’s snooty, but we shopped for land there too. Last year we even seriously contemplated buying a piece of land there but then Katherine Heigl would have been our neighbor… I’m not making that up. Only I don’t want to raise my kids in the kind of neighborhood where people who make romantic comedies live. Next thing I know they’d be hanging out with Seth Rogan or something.

I don’t want to give you a bad impression of this part of Utah. It isn’t all imported snoots. It is also normal people, who are holding onto their farms in anticipation of selling them for absurd amounts of money to snoots. There are several smaller areas on the opposite side of the Wasatch that aren’t as developed, but still have the perks. Yard Moose Mountain is one of them.

So we started shopping for land in our region, problem is, so is everybody else, because it is still on the long side of commutable to SLC or Ogden. We hired the same realtor who found our current place for us, and gave him our wish list. My wife wanted privacy, and a good view, and no HOA (because HOAs can go to hell, and if I want to put up a concrete manatee as my mailbox, I’m going to put up a friggin’ concrete manatee as my mailbox). My list was I want to shoot off the porch and I don’t want to hear the highway.

If you’re in Utah, and you need a realtor, hire Cade Erickson. You’ll thank me. Dude moves houses like crazy. If what you want is out there, he’ll find it. He sold my last house in ten days for more than we thought we could get for it, right after the housing market fell apart. And when stuff goes sideways during the negotiation, he’s on it. Every oddball county regulation or water right or whatever, Cade is on it.

We looked at a bunch of properties. One nice thing about having your house paid off is that it gives you leverage and the ability to move quickly, so we could afford to be picky. Because I hate debt, I also skipped a bunch of things that were super nice, but would have required me to sell my existing house to finance building the new one, and I’m sorry, I’m never going to do the Sell a House/Rent an Apartment While You Build a House thing ever again. When you’ve got a bunch of kids and work from home that is a pain.

Then a few weeks ago, bingo. This one was one of the biggest plots, priced right, good location, same schools, the works. Score. It was perfect. We made an offer that same day. There were some complications because after we’d put down our earnest money and signed, the farmer selling it had misjudged how much land he needed to keep for himself in order to keep enough water shares. Rather than be jerks about it we just gave back enough acreage so he’d have no problems with his rights (even if they’re further away, you still want to be a good neighbor). It was all final this afternoon.

Score!

Questions I got on the internet so far:

How much did it cost?

It cost none of your damn business.

How big is it?

Pretty big. It isn’t the whole mountain. I was being facetious. Utah mountains are very large, and I’m merely a poor D List author (to be fair, in Alabama, this would totally be a mountain). However, my new lot is now 88 times larger than my current good sized lot. So we’ll get by.

Put it this way, first time I walked around it in the snow, I got really winded. And I’m not that out of shape. Next day tried to tackle the tall part with the kids straight up the middle, only to realize that the drifts got to be about four feet deep on the slope. So you’d climb three feet up, slide two feet down.

But the flat part we’re going to put the house on? It is gorgeous.

Will it have a shooting range?

Yes. My goal was to be able to shoot long range off my back porch. I can theoretically shoot a thousand yards. However, the lovely Mrs. Correia wants to put the fortress compound house in the middle.  So the way it is shaped, off the porch I’ll only be able to shoot about 500 yards, unless I make friends with the farmer below us, because if I could put some targets across his pasture I could get out to about 2,000 yards. I’m actually thinking about using one corner and pushing up some berms to make a couple hundred yard enclosed bays too.

Can I come shoot?

Only if I personally invite you. Don’t be that guy.

Does it have an abandoned missile silo?

No. Though since I don’t have an HOA I can totally put one in if I feel like it.

Does it come with moose?

Haven’t seen one there yet, but probably. Every time I’ve been there I’ve seen between twenty or thirty deer. We’ve got some small copses of trees on our plot, but there are forested ravines all around us. The moose around here seem to love those.

Will you name it Mount Hoooon/Wendell Peak/Some other manatee based name?

Nope. If it stays Yard Moose Mountain I don’t have to change the family logo or stationary. Wendell understands. Aquatic mammals are fiscally responsible. And besides, he gets a cool mailbox shipped all the way from Florida.

Will it have a secret base inside of a volcano?

If I told you that, it wouldn’t be much of a secret base now would it?

Will the secret volcano base have lava?

Only if the Yellowstone Caldera explodes. Then we’ll have all the lava we could ever want about two minutes later.

Are you moving now?

We’re not moving anytime soon. We are planning on taking our time. We’re going to have to put in half a mile of driveway before we can do anything else (Yes, it will be called Yard Moose Mountain Road). There is no rush. Mostly I just wanted to find a good piece of land and lock it up. The plan is build the new one, then move in and sell the current one.

Anyways, that is one of my big secret cool fun projects that has been sucking up my time. I’ve got a bunch of crazy things going on right now, a few of which I can’t even hint at. This is going to be a really exciting year.