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Top-down photo of my cleaned-up paint table featuring only a rack of brushes and three projects: some Slaanesh cavalry, some war hounds of chaos, and a quartet of Kratos tanks for Legions Imperialis.

Labor Day Hobby Update

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Labor Day isn’t technically the end of summer, but it’s often a turning point in everyone’s favorite season. Personally, I’m a big fan of spring and fall, though I have to admit having a bunch of sun is great. I could just do without the heat. It’s the heat that really put a damper on my summer hobbying with a dismal showing for completed projects. In fact, I started more projects than I finished, cluttering up my table and forcing me to do an audit today, wherein I put away some incomplete projects to set priorities going forward.

This post is twofold: I wanted to talk a little bit about my current projects (and in the process show off a picture of my cleaned-up paint desk in the header) and share one thing I did end up painting, which is part of my Labor Day/May Day series.

First up, I have three things on my desk: Some Slaanesh Seekers and Infernal Enrapturess for Age of Sigmar/Warhammer 40,000, some Warhounds of Chaos for Warhammer: the Old World, and some Kratos tanks for Legions Imperialis. A very Citadel Miniaures-heavy lineup.

The Slaanesh stuff is for a forthcoming game of 40k with a friend. They just finished painting 1,000 points of Tyranids, and want to have a game. Having put the majority of my 40k into storage—because I didn’t think I’d be playing it any time soon—I’m left me with only my Slaanesh figures, which thankfully can be used for both AoS & 40k. I need to paint five Seekers and an Infernal Enrapturess to reach 1,000 points.

The Kratos tanks are another project I want to finish in order to have a game against a friend. Another friend brought up the possibility of a game of Legions Imperialis soon. Though I could easily have a game right now, I wanted to take this opportunity to paint up a box of figures that has been sitting on my shelf since last Christmas.

The Warhounds of Chaos are just something I wanted to add to my Old World Warriors of Chaos army so that I didn’t have to use my old pewter Warhounds from my Warhammer Fantasy Battle 6th edition Chaos army. These ones will match my current army better, and are plastic! On the note of Old World: the room in my apartment building where I’ve been hosting game days flooded twice this summer, and is still undergoing repairs. This has been another strike against any gaming and hobbying this summer. I’m hoping the fall and winter will get my group back to the tables.

Now for a little tradition I do. Twice a year, on May Day and Labor Day, I like to paint a figure that represents something akin to the labor movement, revolution, or liberation. For the most part it’s been dwarves from the Mordengard faction of the old Dungeons & Dragons miniatures game from the early 2000s called Chainmail. This year’s no different, but keeping with my lax hobby time is probably the simplest and easiest figure I’ve painted in this series. Still, it’s a good way to show off what’s possible with speed paints. I figure this model took me under an hour to paint not including priming/sealing times.

The dwarves of Mordengard threw off the chains of their oppressive rulers and established a people’s republic, ensuring equality and liberation for all dwarves in Western Oerik (in the World of Greyhawk for those that don’t know). This was the second-to-last unpainted Mordengard figure I own, so going forward I’ll have to decide what else to include in this series. Nevertheless, at the moment I present to you the Stone Spike:

To paint this figure I primed it with Grey Seer (Citadel). I then painted the base Battlefield Brown (P3), the rocks on the base Bastion Grey (P3), and dry brushed them together with ‘Jack Bone (P3). I then painted the whole model Basilicanum Grey (Citadel), and dry brushed it Greylord (P3) when it was fully dry. I wanted to add some interest in its spike hands, and though it’s an earth elemental-type creature, I imagined it could figure out how to make parts of itself into some kind of metal. Keeping with the speed paint theme, I touched up the blades with Morrow White (P3), and when dry, painted them with Broadsword Silver (Army Painter Speed Paint 2.0). When that was dry, I painted the edges with Quicksilver (P3). Finally, to tie it together with the rest of my army, which has orange as the main color (and to use some florescent paints I received as a gift years ago), I painted the inside of the ‘mouth’ Fluorescent Orange (Green Stuff World Fluor). The static grass is Frozen Tuft (Army Painter), and I sealed it with a satin spray (Vallejo). Easy peasy.

I was really impressed by Broadsword Silver. I’m astounded that they managed to get a metallic look with a speed paint. It’s not as amazing as a regular metallic acrylic, but it looks good for the table, and I can imagine using it to make batch painting metallics even easier. In fact, the reason I bought it and Hoplite Gold (same range) was to do a Republican Roman army quickly.

That’s all for today! I hope everyone had a relaxing and safe Labor Day, and hope that tomorrow keeps alive the spirit that together we can accomplish anything!

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Photo of my paint desk littered with fully-painted Chaos Warrior models for Warhammer the Old World. The bases are a work-in-progress as I update them to the new sizes.

Back in the Game

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If you are (or were) a regular reader of my blog, you may have wondered where I’ve been since February 19th, 2024. This was the last time I blogged online, and in the meantime you may have even seen the site drastically change for a short period. In fact, you may even find the website looking not quite right currently. This is because I switched the site from Wix to WordPress, which necessitated me re-building the site from scratch.

You see, Wix is a self-contained eco-system, which means that you can’t just transfer the design to WordPress. I tried all sorts of methods to get the site transferred, but it just doesn’t work. Why did I move from Wix? I simply didn’t want to give Wix any more money. Why did I want to re-create the site exactly, instead of using a template? Because my wonderful partner, Taylor, built the first website, and I didn’t want to throw that hard work away.

I had always wanted my own website for blogging, but didn’t have the time, gumption, or know-how to get one started. Taylor built me one as a present one year, and I absolutely loved it; it was one of the nicest things I’d ever received. When it came time to switch to WordPress, I felt terrible about not being able to transfer it, so I used some of the skills I’d developed in a web development class I took a couple years ago (coupled with a lot of sketchy online articles on web design) and tried to rebuild the site myself. If there’s anything you love about this site, the credit goes entirely to Taylor. If there’s anything you dislike about this site, the blame lies solely on myself.

There’s still a lot of work to do, though: I have to manually port over all my old posts (the RSS feed importer messed with the formatting, and only allowed for the latest twenty posts to come over), tweak the formatting of a couple things, set up an email client to send out notices of new posts, play with the layout of the post pages themselves, and work on the mobile site (apologies to my incredible web development instructor, but I worked on the desktop layout before mobile layout. As if it were 2007, or something). If you’re reading this on your phone, I’m sorry. I can only imagine what it looks like.

However, as it stands, things are good enough to get blogging. I have a lot to say these days, especially with a couple Kickstarters that should be arriving in the next little while. So, please bear with me. At this point the website shouldn’t change dramatically; just a little tweaks here and there. Make sure to follow me on my various socials, but I do hope to make this place my home on the Internet.

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Close up photo of a hill on a Warhammer table that's occupied by a unit of ten dwarf thunderers, and two organ guns. They're overlooking a valley occupied by Tzeentchian Chaos Warriors who are suffering casualties from gunfire.

Charging into 2024

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It’s time for another year-end post, wherein I reflect on the previous year and look forward to the next. I’m sure your feed, email inbox, timeline, or wherever else you consume content in this late-Web 2.0 era is full of these kinds of things, so thanks for taking the time to read this one!

So how was 2023? All-in-all pretty good, despite the fact that I didn’t complete my hobby goals. In spring of this year I decided that I would completely paint the Blood Angels Combat Patrol, and the Orgoth Sea Raiders Core Army Starter. Sadly, I end the year with the Orgoth somewhat built and primed, and the Blood Angels on the cusp of completion.

I got back into gaming this year. The pandemic really affected me, and continues to do so, but this was the first full year in a new job away from the public, and a year where I started to really take steps to figuring out my place in this new world. These are all pretty heady topics that are outside the scope of this post, but suffice it to say I took small steps towards getting back into the gaming rhythm that have done wonders for my mental health. I’ve been hosting monthly game days amongst a close group of friends, and I’ve let their whims carry me in terms of what I’m playing, which has been fun, but has probably been the greatest factor in my not meeting my hobby goals. This year has seen a lot of Warhammer Fantasy Battle 6th edition, and Warhammer 40,000 10th edition.

I also decided 2023 was the year that I began to wean myself off of the gaming nostalgia trip I’ve been on since (according to my Instagram) 2019. It’s been fun revisiting Oldhammer and Middlehammer, but there’s so much cool stuff happening in the GW hobby, and wider hobby world, that I felt I was missing out by immersing myself in nostalgia. This has been gradual, and is less of a matter of moving past nostalgia outright, and more about carrying over parts of it that I still find useful into modern gaming. Of course this sounds strange considering I’ve been playing lots of sixth edition Warhammer, and equally strange when I talk about what 2024 holds, but it’s not zero-sum. I’m trying to just put my nostalgia back on the shelf, to probably dust off later.

So what does 2024 hold for me, and this blog? I’m going to set less-concrete goals for myself, and continue to reorient my focus towards feeling good about the hobby, and (more-importantly) the world outside of it. I’m going to continue to host my game days, and I’m even going to try and finish my Orgoth in time for a tournament this year—we’ll see how that goes.

While I want to focus less on reveling in nostalgia, Games Workshop’s not exactly making that easy with the release of Legions Imperialis and Warhammer: the Old World. In a way these are both new, and old, games, so I’m going to consider them the synthesis I’ve been looking for, and embrace the two this year. My hopes are to have a 3,000 point Legions Imperialis army of Blood Angels (and maybe some Ultramarines), and a brand-new 2,000 point High Elf army for Warhammer: the Old World on the new-sized bases. These are less of a checklist of things I want to have finished around this time next year, and more of a representation of the direction I want my hobby efforts to go.

Really, the goal is to find that my efforts result in something I’m happy with, and can enjoy with my friends.

So what about this blog? I love it! Whether people read it or not I’m happy to type away at it, and I’m hoping to include more of that as part of my attempt at increased focus this year. I have some ideas for articles that may include:

  • More Horus Heresy Book Club posts
  • The state of gaming social media
  • The latest part of the History of Citadel Colour
  • History of the Epic gaming system (as well as the review of Legions Imperialis I promised in my YouTube video)
  • Update my Online Game Guide

Writing’s good for me and I like it. Another goal of mine in 2024 is to step further back from social media. I do social media at my day job, and I find that it’s no longer personally rewarding. Just today I deleted Threads from my phone, and haven’t been on Twitter in months. I’m still liking Mastodon, despite the fact that it’s definitely more boring than Twitter and Threads, but I think there are better ways to interact with like-minded hobbyists, and I’m going to use this blog as a base of operations.

So to wrap things up here, 2024 will be continuing to find my footing after the pandemic had knocked me off kilter. It will be made up of small steps taken with purpose and effort, and the focus will be on how these discreet actions I take at the paint table, online, or at the gaming table contribute to the feelings in my head and heart. As corny, and cringe as it may sound.

This blog (purposely) does not have a comment section, but feel free to find me on the few social media sites I’m on, and let me know your thoughts, and what you’re looking forward to in 2024!

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Illustration of a group of Orgoth assaulting a seaside dock from the left. The stylized "Orgoth" word is in the top left.

Writing Is My Passion. I Wish I did It More

Lately I’ve been—what I’d describe as—pleasantly adrift, hobby-wise. I don’t have any plans to hit the tournament scene any time soon, so I feel guilt-free in painting whatever I want. Combined with my desire to improve my painting skills, this has led me to collect a motley assortment of models on my paint table, all in various states of completion. Each model was an attempt at trying out a new technique, or a certain color, and they were all great learning experiences. They have, of course, mostly been Reaper figures.

Around the time of the two Reaper articles I posted on this blog (early September) I got the idea in my head that I’d try and do some YouTube videos. They didn’t turn out super well. There were a lot of things I didn’t like about them—some stuff I did—and it just showed that I wasn’t ready to take even a rudimentary plunge into that arena. There are still some delightfully amateurish videos out there on YouTube, but by and large hobby videos have gotten better, and what I had attempted to accomplish didn’t match what I wanted. In my typical style, though, I didn’t get discouraged. It’s a learning experience, like everything in this hobby. Maybe I’ll get back to it again, with a decidedly smaller bite to chew.

Really, what it did was make me realize how much I love writing. It seems so passé these days in hobby circles, but it’s really how I want to connect to a broader audience on the Internet. Social media is fun (we’ll come back to that a bit later), but it can be hard to break into being someone people want to talk to, or with. Not to mention, we’re all experiencing how capricious it can be vis-à-vis its management. Live-streaming, as well, just wasn’t my thing, and while I have had some success in video making in the past, this YouTube experiment has shown me that what knowledge I had is woefully rusty.

There are still hobby bloggers out there who are doing it right. The one that inspires me the most is Mengel Miniatures, who you really should give a visit and maybe a follow. I think writing is a medium that I have some competency in, with fundamentals that I won’t have to (re)learn.

I’m still taking classes in technical writing, and should be finished next year. It’s really teaching me how to communicate effectively—especially over the Internet—and has been a lot of fun. I was skeptical (even a little jaded) about going back to school, but it’s been worth every penny and every goddamn hour learning how to use MadCap Flare.

Oh, and remember how I said we’d come back to social media? Well, my new job is effectively that. I’m a marketing coordinator for a municipal library here in my region, and while that may sound like a fancy title, it’s effectively a poster. I love it actually. Everyone I work with is real nice, the job is very chill, and it’s great to work for a public institution that does good. If you’re reading this, and you haven’t been to your local library in a while, it’s worth popping by and seeing how it’s changed. While social commentary is outside the scope of what I want to touch on with this blog, I do want to say that I think our society is becoming more alienating despite our digital connections, and I think the answer to this lies in public spaces like libraries.

Anyway, back to hobby talk.

I’m going to spend the remaining weeks of this calendar year clearing off my paint table of all the little eclectic models I’ve been working on, and starting in 2023 I’m going to dive into some projects in earnest. By my count I’ve completed 1/8th of my 2022 hobby New Year’s resolution, but that’s not going to stop me from making another one for 2023! I was hoping to leave Oldhammer behind for a little while, having spent a considerable amount of time painting older figures and collecting older paint. Alas, I got suckered into an army challenge for Warhammer 4th/5th edition with a good friend of mine, so I’ll be working on at least 500pts of High Elves from the ’90s. After that, however, I want to step back to the future, and work on some new Warmachine models (the Orgoth), and some Lumineth Realm-Lords. And if there’s time, I’ll throw some 40k in there. Why not?

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this. I know this isn’t a destination in anyone’s hobby Internet circuit, but I do feel bad about not writing more. That will have to change.

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