So long, and thanks for all the memes

So first off, Merry Christmas one and all! Here’s hoping Santa has left your threadbare stockings full to bursting with hobby related goodies!

As you may have noticed, I have suddenly gone AWOL from the blog, as well as facebook and pretty much every other hobby related social media that I use. I don’t really want to go into it here, but needless to say this is down to a pretty major crisis in my personal life which has led me to take stock of what I do with my time and re-evaluate my priorities.

Unfortunately, in the face of what is going on in ‘real life’, the blog (and indeed the entire hobby at large) has been found wanting, and so I will be taking an extended leave of absence while I try to deal with the real life issues. When comparing losing the hobby to what I could be losing in my life, there is no real comparison, and so it is the hobby that must go.

Or rather, for now at least. I hope to be back in the future, but near or far I do not know – we shall have to wait and see. So lay off the Sherry and have a proper drink, and if the mince pies don’t get you over the festive season we will, God willing, see each other again the other side!

CA 2018 wishlishting

With Chapter Approved 2018 due for release in the next few months, it is hard not to get caught up in buzz as the interwebs are flooded with articles and blogs talking about their hopes for changes to the game in general, as well as addressing specific issues with some of the more popular factions.  As someone who has never passed up the opportunity to ape someone else’s idea, I thought I would give my two penny’s worth and chip in with what I hope CA 18 will bring for the Greater Good.

I am Kroot! Blackstone Fortress

Ok, so I am a little late to the party here but NEW KROOT MODEL!  Wohoooooooo!

I was already eyeing up the Blackstone Fortress Game as a possible xmas present from myself the wife, as the other Warhammer Quest games are pretty great fun (as stand alone pieces) and could only really be improved by a grimdark setting.

The models were also probably going to be awesome too (as Silver Tower and Hammerhal testify), but I didn’t really have my hopes pinned on anything other than a few interesting Space Marine characters.  How wrong I was…

Everyone gets FAQ’d!

 

So the Big FAQ finally drops (and on the eve of the big tournament no less!) and it seems to be full of good things for all lovers of balance (or at least the illusion of balance) in our favourite game of toy soldiers.

Having had a very quick read, here is my very biased (T’au’va!) and ill informed first impressions

The year of living prudently…

 

When Labour came to power in the late 90s, it was not (as some suspected) a socialist spend fest of epic debt building madness.  Far from it.  In fact, Chancellor Gordon Brown’s buzzword for the first couple of budgets was something much less exciting – prudence.

No, not the name of his mother, pet cat or favourite car.  He meant prudent spending – not spending more than you earn, and in fact spending significantly less so as to try and get the whole economic ship back into shape.  So, ignoring the fact that labour soon tired of this approach and went into full on ‘spend mode’, I have decided to try and live the coming hobby season as prudently as possible.  Here endeth the historically inaccurate and grossly over simplified political commentary for this post.

Tooth and Claw: Unboxing

 

Another week, another juicy Games workshop boxed set.  This week Last week WEEKS AGO we saw the release of Tooth and Claw – a Space Wolves vs Genestealer Cults boxed set, which just happened to arrive during the home packing chaos, building up to the big house move.  I didn’t even have time to open it – it went straight from the postman’s hand and into a box labeled divorce exhibits A-Z Geek stuff.

Now that the hell fun of the move is behind us and we are a bit more settled in, I judge myself to have made sufficient progress unpacking boxes of stuff we need to live (oh toilet paper, where art though?!) and decided I could probably let myself have a few minutes of geek time to peel back the cellophane layer and have a quick gander inside at the juicy contents therein.

The 2018/19 Hobby Season ‘Call to Arms’

 

Dave Weston, of 40kaddict fame, has once more issued his annual call to ‘painting and modeling’ arms, encouraging all of us harbouring a grey tide of embarrassment to get a move on and start making some headway with a proper ‘To Do’ list. You can see Dave’s original post at his blog.

Last year my focus was mainly on building, with only a small amount of painting targeted. That list was also massive and unwieldy and presented me with little hope of completing it. For this year, my main focus will be on trying to get some balance between the painting and the building, as well as setting realistic targets that will give me a sense of achievement as I progress rather than crushing the will to live out of me denting morale before I even begin.

On the Move!

 

Yes, that time has come again when human beings decide to put themselves through the horror of discovering how much junk has been accumulated over the lifetime of a home and realising it wont fit into the next pace.

We are once more on the move, although this time only down the road rather than across half the globe. As a result of the carnage chaos my organizational skills, there may well be a bit of a lag in blog posts for the next month of so while I discover where exactly the boxes of geek stuff ended up and how best to retrieve them.

See you all on the other side!

 

Adeptus Titanicus: unboxing

 

So the deed was done with little or no remorse for my wallets feelings – I begged, borrowed and stole misappropriated reassigned funds intended to feed & clothe my young and used them to preorder Adeptus Titanicus.  I am a bad man.

Well, that’s not quite true – a combination of good fortune (selling an Imperial Knight on eBay that has been listed for months), good timing (it being my Birthday last week) and past prudence (continued downsizing of the plastic crack pile collection with minimal impulse buying) meant that I could order this boxed set without having to part with a Kidney. Which was nice, as I think evolution gave me two kidneys for a reason, and yet I probably would have flown in the face of Darwinism and risked my genetically enhanced survival status by parting with it.

So now that I have it in all its glory, I though I would take some photos and share some initial thoughts. As with my Kill Team unboxing, this wont be a rules review but rather a good look at the contents and what I think of it in terms of quality, value etc. However, the first issue I want to address was the preorder itself.

2017/18 Hobby Season review

So the Hobby season is almost over, and as real life now threatens to curtail any further meaningful progress on the list, it is probably a good point at which to call time on the 2017-2018 season and have a quick review of how and what was achieved.