Heads up: Kromlech 10.5cm Feldkanone 48

Just a little heads up. I saw that the 10.5cm Feldkanone 48 from Kromlech finally is avaliable to buy over at MaxMini. It might make a perfect replacement for a grot kannon.

I guess we'll know in a week or so since I've ordered one to add to the pile of stuff I don't have the time to paint. -.-

Pro-Tip; Additives, solvents & effects

A friend of mine is getting into the hobby after a long hiatus – much like myself – and I was acting "Living FAQ" for him when he went shopping for paints, brushes and airbrush. Most of the paint stuff was kinda easy to explain. Mostly "You want Vallejo colors, buy opaques, washes and some starter set."

Then I went onto the other part, additives. And there was this looong explanation of what things do, what I do with them and what it really was. So I thought I should put that up here as well. LBursley goes through them pretty well in one of his videos, so hit YouTube and look it up. They might work for you, they might not. I know that Natalya Melnik doesn't use any additives at all apart from water. She's a pro though, I ain't! :)

From left to right...

First up is Micro Set and Micro Sol. If you've ever thought of using water transfers pick these up. If you're like I was and thought that water transfers was the suck. Pick these up and try them. Applying transfers is a dream with these compared to doing it oldschool-style and using nothing but water.
The Micro Set is like a slow drying thingie, and Micro Sol is some sort of acidic (don't drink this stuff, don't drink any of the stuff in the picture!) solution that softens up the transfer and makes it conform to the surface you're applying it to.

Next is rubbing alcohol. Isopropyl is the technical name for it. I use it mainly for making washes, it really kills any surface tension and makes the wash behave almost like an oil based wash. You don't need much. A drop or two is sufficient. You can also use it for fixing pigments.

Flow Aid is one of these "Get this!"-items. I use Liquitex, but that's mostly because that's what my local friendly artist store has on the shelves. There are a ton of other brands, I can't vouch for them, the Liquitex Flow Aid does wonders though. I mix a couple of drops together with a 1:1 solution of medium and water to get "Gunk" for thinning paints. This is a great item to buy with friends since the recommended mixing ratio is 1 part flow aid to 20 parts water, so you wont be using much of it.

Slow-Dri, well it works, but it's kinda "meh". Mostly because I suck at wet-blending and haven't really had the time to use it properly. It's great for airbrushing as well since it prolongs drying of your paint which equals less needle-cleaning.

Matte & Ultra-Matte Medium are basically like colourless paint, which is part of the "Gunk" and to make paint a little transparent. The matte medium is kinda semi-gloss, so I went out and bought an ultra-matte as well. It's not noticed much when using it for thinning paints. But when making washes the LBursley-way I prefer the ultra-matte since most artists inks are kinda semi-gloss. Besides, you'd still put a coat of matte varnish on top of your figure when done. So it doesn't matter too much which one of them you use.

Water effects... well. There are better brands out there but it's kinda easy to pick up while you go get the latest issue of White Dwarf. I use mine for... water effects(sic!).

Turpentine! A must if you're going to make oil colour washes or want to fix pigments onto your mini before sealing. Preferred if you're spraying on varnish since it sucks bad if you happen to move around pigments with your airbrush / spray-can. Make sure you buy odourless since the normal one smells really bad. Use good ventilation since even though it doesn't stink it's still not healthy to inhale. (And don't drink this one either, ok? :))

So, that's about it for additives I use. I'd love to hear what you use, how you use it. Or any reasons why you don't use it. Please leave a comment.

So you think you're pretty ace at painting?

Ultarmarines from the Diorama section over at Stuff of Legends.

At least I try to think that I am. Then I look at the US Golden Demon 2010 entries and realize that many of my models that I consider to be "pretty dang good" barely would be able to enter in the Youngbloods section.

Which also makes me pretty goddang impressed! :)

It's also nice to check out the winning entries and see that the highlighting and shading techniques isn't just as smooth as they look when viewed in 1:1 scale or in White Dwarf. Still awesomely good. But not unreachable. Then of course you'd [I would at least] have to learn to do proper NMM, have a good grasp of composition and the ability and concentration to actually sit and do cape-highlights for a whole week. But let's forget that and just think, for a moment, that it's actually within reach to stand there with a golden demon in one hand, while raising a slayer sword with the other. Hearing the crowd cheer, the lamentations of women and...

At least for moment? :)

Don't forget to watch this video from the Spikey Bits blog as well...

Games Workshop is kinda funny...

GW posted on their blog today about the upcoming Realm of Battle workshop. Under one of the pictures the following was written:

When I showed up in the morning, Blake had undercoated the gameboard Chaos Black, and I found 18 pots of Scorched Brown paint and a Scenery Painting Pack waiting for me.

18 pots of Scorched Brown? They're priced at €3 / $4. Come on! That's $70 in just basecoat?

Now I know they have to promote their own product, but sometimes it gets kinda hysterical. But I guess it's nice to give people an estimate of how much paint they'll need to cover a board. And the gullible ones will go buy their RoB and 18 pots of paint.

My recommendation would be to go to a craft store and buy whatever is equivalent to Skorched Brown – or whatever color you'd prefer as a basecoat – for about a tenth of the price. 3 cans of spray paint from your local graffiti store will work as well. Just don't go and buy 18 pots of Citadel paint. Ok?

The woe of limited edition stuff / Malifaux Rising Powers

I haven't really been able to do much hobby stuff lately. It's one of those periods in life as a freelance designer where you have to work constantly, or think about work constantly. So getting some peace of mind until yesterday which was delivery-day was just not possible.

To my great surprise the stuff I ordered from Wyrd arrived. The limited GenCon version of Lord Chompy Bits and that new supplement Rising Powers.

I have to say I'm a bit torn regarding limited edition stuff. I'm not that "buy and put in safe"-type of guy. But I do know that some stuff will be worth a lot more if you really can say "un-opened box" and put it up on eBay for a stupid amount of money.

More on that later. This is going to be a rant, so I'll put in a page jump here for those of you completely uninterested in Malifaux. Hit that "more" link to read it all.

On the bench: The Short Bus

My sister took of for a vacation to Spain. She has two cats, I have two cats. Now I have four cats! Temporarily at least.

The thing is, pedigree cats are bred for certain looks and characteristics. We both have Cornish Rex (really short haired with big ears). They're bred to be VERY SOCIAL. And I mean VERY SOCIAL! And they're VERY CURIOUS... Normally with two cats that's not too bad. But with four cats, it was a living hell trying to shoo them away from the Shrine of the Aquila while at the same time trying to use turpentine based washes. So I opted for something smaller to work on, something that fit in the spray booth. Like that battle wagon I've been having in the box for a couple of months now.

So... enter "The Short Bus"! Nothing special at the moment. Just primed and the first coats and highlights of yellow on it. I have to figure out a good way to make the stripes on the sides. It's a ton of detail I have to put masking tape on. And how to get red paint in there somehow.

I think I'll just paint the front panel above the window slit in red and write "GO FASTA!" on it. Or perhaps I can try to persuade my opponents that it's actually red?! It's just that the grot painting it was color blind. And it might look yellow, but since he painted it in the go fasta color. It's actually a go fasta battlewagon, in red?

Here's my reference picture. It's gonna be awesome having 20 mentally challenged orks riding around in it later on.

(Riding the short bus: noun. (derogatory) school bus shorter in length than a conventional school bus commonly used to transport students with physical or mental handicaps.)

On the bench: Shrine of the Aquila

So, every time I looked at the sluggas I have left to paint I felt like I wanted to poke a brush in my eyes. Or not really, they just had to rest a little. Like most of the WIP stuff. But I had this urge to paint something, something easy. The Shrine I bought a month ago sprung to my mind. Since it's HUGE it would be pretty easy to build up the base and then just airbrush it. Large surfaces = airbrush = fast painting.

Oh how wrong I was. There's of course a ton of details. And the different wall sections are different. Not to mention that there's about a hundred skulls (Seriously GW, why the skull-madness?). Masking everything would take almost as much time as painting by hand. So I started to do a bit of both.

It's perfect for cats to hide behind!

So here it is. Most of the gold stuff is painted and soon I can start to wash and weather. And I sure hope the washes will cover up all the tiny mistakes. With big stuff like this there's usually a ton of small mistakes after a while. And while no one else might see them, I sure do. And that leads to poking my eyes with brushes. We can't have that! :)

The base is kinda bare at the moment. I don't really know what to do with it. One idea is to cover it with debris and stuff. But that also makes it a hassle to place models on it while playing. Any ideas?

DOW II : Retribution...

I giggled like a school girl when I saw this! Orks! Orks orks orks orks! Orks orks! Orks!

Set a decade after Chaos Rising, rather than being stuck with the Blood Ravens, you get to choose your side. Which sides do you get to pick from? Well, as you may surmise from the enormous jaw bellowing at you above, one will be the Orks.

Oh, by the way. Say hello to Lifter.

With that rather unfortunate story, Lifter has joined the ranks of posters here at PX40K. I guess we'll have to switch the name of the blog some day now that it's not only me. :)

Lifter called me one day, about a year ago and we talked the normal bullshit we talk about. Cameras, lenses, zombies and then he said "Oh, I've started to play this '40K'! It's actually pretty cool, it's what the stole the setting from and used in Gears of War!" and I was all like "OMG!". Ever since I stopped playing, slightly after 2nd ed., I've had this urge of just collecting figures and painting again. But while growing up to become an "adult" you suddenly get other priorities and if none of your friends play 40K it's kinda hard to motivate yourself to go buy €500 of plastic stuff.

Summer 2009. About a week after I talked to Lifter on the phone.
The first half of the shipment.

So... I bought €500 of plastic stuff. Lifter bought a ton of plastic stuff as well. And here we are, one year later and it's "all 40K, all the time". (We do shoot the shit about cameras, zombies, BBC documentaries and stuff as well. Don't worry.)  Lifter paints extremely well (just not RoB-boards). I hope he'll put up some pictures of his marines later on. And I think he'll be the perfect co-host of the blog since he's more of a beginner and I'm more of a "Remember when there was mad boyz?".

So. With that said. Say hello to Mr. Lifter! :)

How NOT to do terrain.

Ok, so PX has had a good time showing of some extremely nice and well done terrainpieces. I know him personally and trust me, there's alot more than you can se from this page.

However, the rest of us (I imagine. I hope) are not made of pieces of the emperors armor. We are not demi-gods. We, or should I say I, just do not have that godly hand with terrainmaking. I can fend for my self when it comes to painting miniatures, there I would rate my self just above avarage. Avarage of the beginners.To the point then. PX made me a delicious GW Realms of Battle Board (RBB) with a couple of houses. They all looked top notch so I figured I'd put some sand on the board and re-paint it.

Yes, you heard me.

The decision was a fast one. It basically just popped up when we had finished the Thunderous Tournament I Finale, a good friend and also the winner of the tournament Kristian had heard me talking about putting sand on the board for a long time becaus of the fact that models slide and fall over quite alot on a RBB and asked "Why not do it now?" and of we went and we went at it fast.

Within one or two hours all six pieces of the board had sand glued to them and we felt we could do more with the board since we were all there and all eager to work on it (we were four people, so alot of hands) so we started painting a black protective paint layer over the sand on the pieces that felt kind of dry (yes, this is where the mistakes start stacking up).

When the first layer of black paint was on the board and started drying (not being completely wet that is) we could see that the sand was visible through where the paint was as thinnest. Remedy for this? Why yes, more paint. Right away. Loads of it. I have no idea why we did this, all of us beeing quite familiar with layer painting. All of us knowing that you have to wait for the first layer to dry up before applying the second.

When this had been done to all but one part of the board which still had wet-wet glue (there are levels of dry/wet; wet-wet, wet-dry, dry-wet and dry-dry) were painted with a thick layer of protective black paint that coverd almost all of the texture of the sand (the entire reason to put sand on a board in the first place) and the paint was so thick that you could see the brush strokes in it. I kind of backed up and had a overview look at the work we had done and immediately thout to my self "Crap. We failed it". It felt bad. There was a snowballs chance in hell that this debacle of oil-thick lava (not lava in a cool way, lava in a wreck-your-home and make-you-a-refugee kind of way) looking mess of a terrain board would dry up nice and good. Fortunately that marked the end of the paint session and I was left to my own misery but still hoping for the snowball that could.

Kind of knowing the board was ruined I went to bed with a small hope that maybe the paint would dry down and the texture of the sand would, I dont know, pop back up again? Maybe, just maybe the little snowball actually could. Well, it may not come to a surprise to you that it couldn't, I wasn't surprised either. However I was suprised to the magnitude of the horror that was staring up at me when I woke up the next morning to check on my miseryboard.


Craters. The thick paint layer seemed to have dried up wierdly and broken up in wierd craters all around the board. Looking down I could see not the sand glued to the painted board but the painted board with the sand lifted of it.


I tried peeling away at the edges of the crater just to get a feel for it's consistency and it felt like some wierd thick skin laying down on the board. Turned out the paint had bonded with the glue under the sand, leaving the sand in between the two and none of the components stuck on the board and creating a air-tight layer over the board so the glue underneath it had no chance of drying up, so with very little effort the entire board could be stripped of it's paint-sand-glue skin covering it in almost all of the places on the board. Some places, where the black paint had been applied with a normal amount it was less bad (still very far from good and no where nere where I wanted it).


This was on the piece of the board that was in worst shape. Where we had used most glue and waited the least amount of time before applying the black paint. The rest of the board has the same craters where the "skin" has broken up but it is mixed in with places where the glue keeps the skin down and it has to be removed with a little more force.
So there you have it, a fast way to wreck a board. The complete school of how not to do it.

What you should do is this;

1. Make sure you have a PVA glue of good quality. Don't try to shave of a few bucks by getting the cheapo variant. It's just not worth it (this generally goes through the entire hobby so keep it as a general rule).
2. When you have applied the sand/gravel/grass let it dry. When I'm going to emark on doing this again I am going to let the glue dry for at least 24h just to be sure.
3. Fix the sand with something, PVA glue mixed with water, maybe primer spray or some other form of protective paint but apply it moderately. You're still going to paint it in the final color you want and after that apply some other protective varnish. It's important to fix the sand so that it doesn't come of, but as with everything else do not over do it or the sand will lose it's texture.
4. Read as many "how to make terrain" as you can find. I didn't.

I'm now off to persuade my future wife and co-player that even if it is unfortunate we still have to buy a new board and do it again but without the mistakes. I will return and let you know how it goes.

Ok, I'll admit it. I'm a hoarder.

Today I got this from a nice fella from eBay – or nice... he/she got a lot of cash and I got this. Together with the reprint of Insignum Astartes. The thing is, I have 1500 pts+ of Space Marines. And of all that a Razorback and 5 marines are painted... But I still buy more stuff. Just to have it when I finally finish with the orks.

And you have to admit that using this model, with a jumppack, together with a chappy and 10 ass. marines would be a pretty awesome mini death star?

This dude apparently

Oh, and I almost forgot that I also have 750pts of Eldar just sitting there... Good thing I have a can of Army Painter dip for them. It'll probably dry out before I ever get to paint the eldar.

So, what do you hoard? Are you like me or are you a person in control of your urges and spending habits? Please let me know I'm not the only one out here... :)

the Thunderous 40K finale

Im just home from Uppsala after having watched the finals of an informal tournament hosted by my very good friend Lifter for his local gaming group and friends.


The tournament was set up mainly as an incitament to get people painting their armies. The first and most important rule was that everything had to be painted to an acceptable standard. Three colors, and details. No counts-as, and everything had to be WYSIWYG unless vetted by mr Lifter!

As a booster the price for the winner was €30 at Fantasia, the FLGS in Uppsala. An ad hoc price for most painted / effort was instituted as well.

Points played were decided by the least common denominator. If you only had 1050pts painted your opponent only played 1050 pts. Up to 1500 points.

(I was invited to play with my orks, and was soundly beaten in the first round by Space Wolves. It was a very close game, but nevertheless I lost.)

In the finals was Kristian, with chaos space marines. and Martin, playing chaos demons squaring off. A batrep of the final is coming up within the next 48hrs, i just have to write a more coherent story from the notes i took during the game (another use for the iPad in gaming. Can you spot the fanboyism coming? ;)) and check that I got all my facts straight. Mostly since I'm totally unfamiliar with how chaos demons work. There was a lot of "They can do that?" from me during the game. :)

In the meantime, hit the more link for some pics from the final. Both players had a 1500pts of really well painted and converted models. I cant really decide if Christians Defiler-temple or Martins greater demon of Tzeentch was the coolest model on the board. Both were equally awesome in different ways. (By the way, check out Kristians battle-church here. Simply astounding!)

For all you Erectus Astartes guys

BoLS did this three part tour over at THQ in regards to the upcoming title Space Marine. It's actually pretty good considering they have some gameplay shots in there. And it was really nice to see that THQ had a bunch of 40K gaming tables set up. Nothing sucks more than games developers not knowing what they're doing. Then you end up with Call of Duty: Black Ops and stuff like that.

Dakka Dakka Storefinder

I just wanted to plug that Dakka Dakka has a Store Finder in the progress. Currently it's in some sort of open beta, which means that you can add your FLGS (and CLGS) to it (I've already added a bunch of them :)). A service I wish was avaliable a month earlier. Then perhaps I would've been able to find the gaming stores in Frankfurt.

How to hobby when you don't have the time

Buy books. Read them to and from work. At least that's what I've done.

In order to keep the hobby-addiction running I occasionally have to work. In my case that usually means meeting people, meeting even more people, talking about what graphic design really is and how you – with small means – can go from "Looking like Russia" to "Looking like a confident business that you'd like to do business with". (I actually used those two phrases during a client meeting yesterday. Which netted me an assignment with them. Win win! :)) And then I have to sit down, write a ton of agreements and stuff and about 30% of my actual work is actual graphic design. Oh, the glamorous world of being a graphic designer!

To the subject at hand though... reading material. This just recently arrived from the good guys and girls at Black Library.

Horus Heresy: Nemesis, Legends of the Space Marines & Fear the Alien

Really looking forward to put my teeth into Fear the Alien since it contains "the first ever ork viewpoint story". It has to be either really good and funny or a literary catastrophe. I just have to finish Helsreach first.

Tomorrow I'm going to Uptown to watch the finale of a very local 40K tournament. Haven't written much about it since I got beaten by space wolves in the first round. By a small margin though. Three objectives on the map. I held one, the puppies held one, and the one in middle was held by noone. So it came down to points killed. I think I killed 640pts of puppies and my opponent killed like 645pts of orks. Really close and even though it sucks to have to determine a win like that it was really tense while we tallied up the points so it didn't feel too bad. :)


This post is dedicated to Lifter who sent me a message earlier asking if I had stopped writing. "You promised a post every second day or so!". Lifter, this is one is for you!

Tutorial: Czech out my hedgehogs. Part three.

Welcome to the third and final part of "Czech out my hedgehogs"! In this part we will deal with the basing and painting of the hogs. Click read more to czech out the third and final part!

Tutorial: Czech out my hedgehogs! Part two.

Welcome back to the second part of the Czech Hedgehog tutorial. Now it's time to build some bases for your hedgehogs. You know the drill, hit "more" for... more!

Tutorial: Czech out my hedgehogs! Part one.

So, I was thinking I should make a tutotrial for how to make barbed wire / czech hedhehog obstacles for your 28mm game boards. Czech hedgehogs are anti-tank obstacles made of L or H shaped beams, and were used in huge numbers during WWII. Even when tipped over they still function, and if you're dumb enough to try and tip them over with your AFV, you're essentially stuck. 

German illustration of tank traps.
Image from missinglynx.com

With todays tactics of layered / staggered defence I guess they're more or less out of fashion. But they do look awesome on the 40K-battlefield. 

My suggestion is to count these as impassable for vehicles, difficult terrain (dangerous if you add barbed wire) for infantry with a 6+ save. The L-beams don't give much cover, just look at Saving Private Ryan (@4:40 in that video) if you doubt that. 

A note on the hedgehogs you see in SPR. They don't have the end-pieces on because they were on concrete "feet" in order to keep them from sinking in the sand. If you plan to place hedgehogs on fairly solid ground you weld endpieces to them.

Now, Games Workshop makes a bunch of these, in the urban accessories set or something. The problem is that they're completely worthless. You do not want spiked ends on these since that would mean that your one tonne beam-construction slowly would sink into the ground. And from what I've heard, the molds are kinda crap. So hit the "more" link and away we go!

Forgeworld Kommandos sprues

Today the big brown van went by my place with a not so big box containing two of the Ork Kommandos sets and Mek Buzzgob! I was set out to do some work today, but I guess I'll have to ooh and aah a little first.

Since Forgeworld can't put up proper pictures of sprues on their website I thought I would do it here. The detail on these is amazing, as usual with the Forgeworld stuff (or at least the stuff I've been in contact with). There's a ton of flash though, not so much on the kommandos, but Buzzgob is 50% flash and 50% mini.

Enough of that. Here's the promised sprue pictures.

Front

Back

The kommandos, painted up (apart from the nob) can be found here: Forgeworld Kommandos done

Just shoot me, again.

There's this thing with limited edition stuff that I just can't resist. I was happily browsing BoLS or something when I suddenly saw that the Dreamer and Lord Chompy was avaliable to order on the Wyrd site during GenCon.

And I haven't even opened the Malifaux stuff I bought earlier!!! >_<

Ah well, what to do? :)

Six down, fourteen to go.

Flash did fire

So... that's six of them. Only fourteen more to do. Adding grass and sealant will be done when all 20 of them are painted.

Hopefully I can get a full day of painting done tomorrow. Which would mean that I'm finally done with them this weekend. I'm not expecting that to happen though. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. :)

I counted what's left and it kinda scared me. 5 more of the kanz, one battlewagon, 10 shootas, 10 stormboyz + nob. One warboss, 5 nobz and 10 kommandoz (waiting for the Forge World kit to arrive). After that I'm finally done with my orks... sort of. So around x-mas I'm finally able to work on other stuff, hopefully. Those 1500 points of grey Ultramarines is kinda screaming at me to get painted.

The scary/bad part of it is that with orks / horde armies is that you really can't put as much time into them as you'd want. These sluggas kinda prove that point. If you want it done, in reasonable time, you really have to compromise and paint with speed in mind. No fancy weathering, no fancy shading. Two layers of highlights at the most. Heavy use of washes etc.

The upside of it is of course that noone will be able to really look at the paintjob once they're on the table. It's just too many of them. So as long as they pass the one meter test (that's three feet for you imperial units people) it's fine.

I still want to spend a week on each mini though. :/

The weekend failure orks & more workspace.

So... them orks. I started on them before going to Germany, in a vain attempt to actually finish painting them before I went away. Foolish of me, but as wise men say: Per aspera ad astra!

I've finally gotten them all ready for highlightning at least. And after that detailing, and after that basing, and after that... 20 orks takes a whole lot longer than I thought. That's what you get for having high standards and high expectations of yourself. :)

One of my more avid readers asked for a better picture of my workspace, and here it is. 

It usually serves as my dinner table (and gaming table). But when painting this is how it looks. 

To the left; Laptop and a box of "in the works" models. Tonight it's the rest of the orks (1 nob, 10 shootas). A wire-based tree as well that I work on during spare time (while watching TV etc.)

In the middle: Vallejo Model Color set, with assorted extra colors, additives and stuff in the lid. A lid from the Vallejo Model Air set (not pictured) with basing stuff, tools, Kneadite, glue, oil paints and assorted odds and ends. 

To the right: Painting area. On top is the bowl my cat's drink from. The brush holding thingie from here. My wet palette, assorted paints I'm using at the moment, iPhone (for texting Gork and Mork), the orks I'm painting at the moment, two lamps etc. 

Underneath it all is some ribbed rubber thingie I use for protection that I "stole" from a gunshop. 

All in all it's a pretty straightforward setup. I can move everything away when not painting since almost everything is contained in the Vallejo cases / lids. The rubber mat stays where it is (the cat's make a mess when drinking) and if I need any airbrushing done I just move stuff away and setup the spraybooth in the middle.

(Oh yeah, if you look to the right, at the windowsill. There's the Malifaux stuff I've ordered but promised myself not to open until the orks were done... >_<)

What does your painting area look like? Are you fortunate enough to have a man-/girl-cave or do you need to move stuff around like I do? Please leave a comment. 

Review: Thousand Sons

"The book lay there thunderous in it's embodiment of the tragedy that is the Thousand Sons"

So, yeah, as you can imagine from the caption I don't really like Graham McNeill. Sure, he writes good stuff (more about that later) but he always has to use "thunderous" as an adjective. Even in the most weird places. I can still vividly remember reading one of the Ultramarines novels and stopping at the words "[…]his thunderous brow[…]" and thinking "WTF? Is he stoned when writing?". This book however, only contained thunderous in four places. Evenly dispersed through the book. I hope his editor finally caught up with the thunderous plague and put a stop to it. ;)

Spoilers might lie ahead, so I'll do this fancy page break here. Click on "read more" if you want to know more about the book, and my thoughts of it.