Category Archives: Nerd Cred

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Nerdscape Winners!

As I suspected, this was a ridiculously fun contest. I had a blast laughing over these and I can’t resist posting up a few o’ my favorites in case you missed them in the comments. I applaud your creativity and envy your action figure collection! And I am very glad you’re not too old enough to play with them! Thank you all so much for entering!

Check out this one from Hillary: I love the Mystery Science Theater stand-ins watching Terminator. “Have You Seen This Boy?”

Kristin over at My Bookish Ways, who is Three Kinds of Spiffy and has a Ninja Bird, sent in this Amphibious Nerd Assault:

Evie sent in two really beautiful photos and I suspect she Knows What She’s Doing with a camera. Here is her Nerdscape, and you have to check out the reflection in the sunglasses!

Click to embiggen

Synde sent over this beautifully dark photo with primo vodka, skull action, and a weeping angel (don’t blink!):

Click to embiggen

Random Winners Chosen Randomly from Randomizer Thingie

VVB for Zombies n’ Nutella on a copy of FEED

Braaaaains and Nutella (click to embiggen)

Candice J. for “Dwight’s Hike to Mt. Doom”

Dwight's Hike to Mt. Doom (click to embiggen)

Winner of the Kevin Thinks That is Balls Rad Award:

Teri C’s Dinosaurs and Disney. I don’t know why, but this just cracks me up every time I look at it. There are so many Disney characters I would love to feed to velociraptors. I admire the depth of field here. There’s bonus beer in the background, too!

Jurassic Attack (click to embiggen)

So! Teri C, Candice J, and VVB, please contact me using kevin at kevinhearne dot com with your snail mail address and tell me how you’d like to have your books personalized! Congratulations, and thank you for entering!

Please come on back on Tuesday, my release day (SQUEE!), for a rundown of all the shenanigans I’ll be up to—I’ll have, um, six or seven posts up? I think? And by the way, if you weren’t aware, I’m doing a Babel Clash thingie with Chris Wooding until May 9, and we’ve been talking about filling in the space between sci-fi and fantasy, Insanity Points, and so on. It’s a good time.

Thank you all again for your awesome nerdiness!

Nerd Cred

Still Life with Dwarfs and Beer #1

Okay, so in an earlier post I firmly established my Nerd Cred. Follow me now I descend fully into madness, kind of like those guys who went exploring the House of Leaves.

See, my friend Alan got me started painting miniatures. And for some reason, the idea of painting miniature dwarfs really tickles my sense of redundancy.

I’m painting a dwarf warband to play a game called Mordheim, which is a skirmish-level version of Warhammer where you can start out with six or seven dudes and build up to maybe 15. And when I’m not playing Mordheim (which is most of the time, I swear), then I can just chuckle at the fact that I have a collection of miniature dwarfs.

Alan is a Golden Demon award winner, which means he paints miniatures so well people send him fan mail and pay him to paint their miniatures for them. When Alan decides to paint dwarfs, they look like they’re going to hack you up if you don’t give them a keg of ale right now. (By the way, that’s a dwarf king being carried on top of a shield by two minion dwarfs. I explain that because I originally thought this was a dwarf mother protecting her children.) Anyway, my dwarfs ain’t that cool. But they’re ready to find some treasure in Mordheim, by golly. Left to right, you’ll see my Engineer, one of my Thunderers, and a Troll Slayer.

Still Life with Dwarfs and Beer #1
You might notice that my dwarfs are a touch out of focus; that the beer, in fact, seems to be far more central to the composition. I could not gainsay you. But I am going to make an excuse: I took this with my cell phone, and its depth of focus sucks just a wee bit. My real camera is in New York and I’m in Arizona, so until we are reunited, I must make do with what I can. Still, there is much to appreciate here:
1. The beer is Mothership Wit by the New Belgium Brewing Company. The pint glass is from The Pike Brewing Company in Seattle, an underground establishment I enjoyed visiting a few years ago.
2. The color of the beer and the color of the Thunderer’s beard are remarkably similar. It’s almost like I planned it that way.
3. The modeling paints have excellent names, like Vomit Brown and Graveyard Earth.
4. You can look forward to more of these Still Lifes because I have plenty of dwarfs yet to paint, and it’s not like I’m going to stop liking beer tomorrow. :)
Nerd Cred

Nerd/Geek/Dork Cred

I’m still not sure where I fit on the nerd/geek/dork continuum. I took this test and discovered that I’m 61% Nerd, 48% Geek, and 57% Dork. That adds up to more than 100% so that’s probably pretty nerdy of me to point out. Or maybe it’s geeky?

In terms of geekiness, there’s this flow chart of the Geek Hierarchy, and if we were to stipulate this as being true then I’d be at the very top…or at least I will be next April. However, methinks there is much more to being a geek than simple fiction/entertainment preferences.

There are role-playing games, for example, like the classic Dungeons and Dragons, or Warhammer. There’s some argument out there that D & D is like a “gateway drug” that leads to all sorts of nerdy-geeky-dorkdom, but bah, there can’t be anything to that, can there?

Well, if it’s true, I’m doomed. Or blessed, depending on your point of view. At least partially. I never played D & D, but I got into Warhammer last year with a friend of mine. The rules are slightly different, but yeah, it’s a bunch of nerdy dudes with pizza and beer and many-sided dice talking about what their fantasy characters are going to do. Here’s a sample of what our game play sounded like:

“I’m gonna slide up behind that demon minotaur and take a whack at his low-hanging balls with my axe, bitches.” Except you have to salt that with about four F-bombs and punctuate it with a belch or a fart, then roll the dice and figure out whether the minotaur got to keep his nuts or not. Good times, good times.

 We had a paladin/priest dude, a ranger/scout dude, a messenger sort of gal who had a crossbow, and then there was my character: Oläf Umlaut, Dwarf Runesmith! Oläf was the best dude of the bunch, no doubt about it. He brained an undead five-year-old girl once with his hammer and saved the group from becoming zombie snackage, though the group didn’t realize when he did it that she was freakin’ colder than Hecate’s frosty gazongas. As a result, they all thought he’d killed an innocent little girl and got insanity points. I thought Oläf was so awesome that night; when you can simultaneously save the group and turn them insane, you are a bona fide badass.

Oh, and we didn’t play with little Lord of the Rings action figures, either. We had custom figures made from cannibalized Warhammer figures and painted up all nice n’ special by my very talented friend (and game master) Alan! You want to meet Oläf? I know you do. Here he is, in all his miniature glory:

Check out that braided beard! And the war hammer slung on his left side! In his right hand he’s carrying some blacksmith tongs, because that’s his skill, and in his left hand he’s got a freakin’ stein of ale, because drinking is his other skill! Here’s another shot of Oläf from another angle:

For Alan, painting Oläf was easy-peasy nice n’ cheesy. He’s seriously talented at model painting and Warhammer nerds fork over lots of cheddar to have him paint their pieces. He’s won awards at conventions and shit. Check out this gallery to see what he’s capable of producing.

But alas! Our merry band of nerds/geeks/dorks had to disband because of heinous flakery. We’d only play once a month, but some of the guys couldn’t seem to make it regularly and it fizzled. I’d like to play again sometime, but in the meantime Oläf is retired and enjoying all the frothy ale he can drink. In any case, my Nerd Cred has now been firmly established.