I think that I mentioned an almost identical sentiment last year at nearly this precise time, but I suspect few are genuinely focused on my nonsense enough to care, nevermind remember. So there’s an expression here in Chicago: “I know a guy.”
We use it all the time to express an extraordinary vicarious ability to get some basic improbable, bureaucratic, illegal, mundane, technical, and generally untoward task accomplished. Something outside normal skill sets. You need tickets to the game? I know a guy. You need to make that parking ticket go away? I know a guy. (I don’t, by the way. If you get a ticket in Chicago, you are screwed).
This year, I would like to graciously thank the Lords of AdeptiCon (Matt and Hank), who certainly know a few guys in-and-around the hobby world. In particular, I have to offer thanks to the fellas for setting me up with Kevin over at Flying Tricycle. If ever there was "a guy," he qualifies.
In conversation about two months ago, I mentioned that we would be cutting lumber to make the Zone Mortalis shapes but that I was scrounging around for detailing that would make the ship live and breathe. They put me in touch with Kevin, a quick flurry of emails, and a few weeks later a package arrived on my doorstep with (quite literally) hundreds and hundreds of these little shapes cut in thin cardstock ...very, very thin cardstock.
The idea is a simple one. Give the lumber enough relief and design to distract from its lumberness. Fingers crossed.
I have now embarked upon the extraordinarily trying process of gluing all of these griblets to all those two-by-fours in order to make them appear more appropriately grim and perhaps even dark – at the very least less like two-bys and more like post-industrial metallic hulk products made of steel or ceremite or whatever.
In the same week, Kevin (via Hank) also produced the necessary components to make a variety of these crates, which have been fabricated in a very similar manner. All else has been eclipsed.
But man oh man all that gluing has soaked up some time and attention. I have done little else for quite a while now, and I am ready to move these monsters to the next phase. For those keeping score at home, the shapes shown here represent possibly 25% of the entire shapely collection currently in the manufacture process. Blimey.