I didn't win a Golden Demon & WarhammerFest 2023 Review

 Posted on May 1, 2023  |  Dave Megins-Nicholas

Golden Demon As predicted in the previous post I didn’t win a Golden Demon. I made a good go of it despite losing enthusiasm fairly quickly. I “finished” Fire Support the day before submitting it. After a crunchy fortnight beforehand. Photos below: Under the nice lighting of the Golden Demon display case I thought it looked quite good. I didn’t feel like I had let myself down. I named the tank Jungle King and gave it a serial number. [Read More]

Book 'Review': Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

 Posted on April 30, 2023  |  Dave Megins-Nicholas

I read Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton after reading Terence Eden’s review of it. I thought it was fine. Probably a really good intro to this sort of speculative fiction about tinkering with biology with a nice change of perspective for the protagonists. Glad I’ve read it but I doubt I’ll re-read it. The ultimate fence sitting review. Just holding myself accountable to posting when I’ve wrangled my brain to pay attention to an entire book. [Read More]

Everdell

 Posted on April 9, 2023  |  Dave Megins-Nicholas

I’ve just played Everdell. It’s a pretty breezy worker placement game with a very cute forest animal theme. You are tasked with building a city of cards in your tableau over the course of a year. You’ll be placing workers to gather resources and play cards from you hand as well as from a communal pool (called The Meadow). What’s different is that playing cards (which you do by spending resources) does not consume resources. [Read More]

Book Review: The Last Battle

 Posted on April 3, 2023  |  Dave Megins-Nicholas

The Last Battle by Stephen Harding was a total impulse purchase. A different Stephen recommended it and I picked up the audio with an Audible credit. For those who’ve not listened to the Sabaton track with the same name. It’s the siege of Schloss Itter in the Tyrols. Essentially there are some VIP French prisoners held in a castle during WW2. They manage to get help from a variety of sources. [Read More]

Herts of Lard 2023

 Posted on March 28, 2023  |  Dave Megins-Nicholas

Two weeks ago I went to my first Lardy Game Day at Herts of Lard 2023. It was absolutely brilliant. Many thanks to @Joe_Wargamer for running it. If you aren’t familiar, Too Fat Lardies are a company that produce wargames which are mostly historical in setting. Their motto is “Play the period, not the game” which is very much my jam. At a Lardy Game Day volunteers host games by providing a scenario, armies, a table full of terrain, and GM in some fashion. [Read More]

Book Review: Second City

 Posted on March 16, 2023  |  Dave Megins-Nicholas

Book two of 2023 is Second City by Richard Vinen. I picked it up on a whim from The Heath bookshop in Kings Heath (which is lovely). It’s an incredibly in-depth history of Birmingham from its geography & mythic Anglo Saxon origins, through The Enlightenment, its rise as an industrial city, the role it played in the British Empire, then onto the Second World War, its transition into the car centre of Britain (and decline there of), finally the 21st century. [Read More]

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

 Posted on March 16, 2023  |  Dave Megins-Nicholas

A year after my last post on Assassins Creed I have “finished” Valhalla. It didn’t take an entire year because I took a huge break after playing the first couple of hours. Why the break? Going straight from endgame Odyssey, Eivor feels so sluggish. Valhalla’s combat feels much more brutal and parry focused than the way I built Kassandra in Odyssey. Kassandra would cut about care free slashing everyone into ribbons but Eivor stands waiting to parry and do stun attacks. [Read More]

Book Review: How Music Works

 Posted on March 6, 2023  |  Dave Megins-Nicholas

Aim 3 of 2023 is to read more. I’m going to post reviews as I go. March is still Q1 but this does feel like a very late start. I’ve picked up the guitar again after 12 years away. I wanted a refresher on the things I’d forgotten. So I picked up How Music Works by John Powell. It tells a very neat story from the foundations of “what is sound” all the way to selecting a key for your composition and thoughts on audiophiles. [Read More]

ARM to Bicep

 Posted on February 10, 2023  |  Dave Megins-Nicholas

At work we use Azure for infrastructure and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to define it as code. Microsoft released Bicep as a nicer way to write your templates. We’ve recently finished porting a service to use Bicep. It took a lot longer than I’d hoped but we got there. Here are some of the things I learnt along the way. Decompiling You can decompile your existing templates with the Azure cli: [Read More]

KATA: Full English Time

 Posted on February 1, 2023  |  Dave Megins-Nicholas

At work, we have a weekly Code Gym. Someone will bring a kata/problem along and we’ll split up to tackle it. Usually pairing across normal team boundaries. Pretty normal stuff. We have been doing this for two years now and feel like we’ve run out of kata. So we’ve been trying to invent new ones. I am going to post ones I’ve created which should hopefully be useful to someone. [Read More]