I recently visited the excellent gaming store Fantasia while on a family trip to Umeå. They had a wide selection of games and miniatures, mostly GW products as would be expected but also quite a few of the independent makers of resin and white metal figures, Maxmini, MAS and the like. thumbs up for that! I bought a MAS resin tracked servitor thingy which I gave away and a MaxMini Plague Beast for myself.
"Taken my arms, taken my legs, taken my soul, left me with life in hell!"
I am kinda dissappointed with it actually. It is quite odd to see such quality of sculpting combined with such terrible posing, something that is quite difficult to see when just looking at the blister. The legs are posed in a way that makes it look like it's floating or balancing on it's tippy toes. The built in bases under the feet are not parallel to the ground, but bent inwards, forcing you to either convert the miniature, "hot bend" the feet or make som kind of custom base to fit the crooked miniature. This is not really obvious while looking at their websites pictures, but it is evident in the preview pictures that was released. I don't know if their master looks like this or if their mold is warped, but I see people around the forums having the same problem.
"WHAT'S IN THE BOOOX?"
On the upside, the parts fit together really well, with almost invisible seams, and the only miscasting was on the strap on the beast's chest, which I could ignore or easily fix with 401 or greenstuff. The details on the skin and face are very crisp, and if you are the converting sort you could easily just buy it for the torso, making your own Varghulf, Chaos Spawn or Daemon, Karanak or similar if you will.
Bubble on the center strap, wouldn't really show when assembled
I will try to bend the legs somewhat to repose and make the feet even before I assemble it, if not, I will probably cut it up for some future project.
Hopefully there will be more frequent updates from now on, me, and Pixel as well to some degree, have had some hobby burnout lately, with this whole GW Leadership fuckup-deal adding to that. Part of me want to boycott them, but I love the IP too much to really quit. I will not be doing the Nid-army that I had planned though, instead I'll save that money for when CSM get their new release in a few years. Fuck it, I have enough unpainted and unbuilt stuff for my army to tide me over.
Being a nerd nowadays is surely the new mainstream. Is there anyone that's a "regular jock" nowadays? If it's not that they play pretend-LOTR during weekends they obsess over fixed gear bikes or analyze the football scores. In a real nerdy way.
So I saw this over at Total Fan Girl and kinda fell in love. Mostly because it was -ages- since I played a proper hack-n-slash dungeon crawl. Or any roleplaying game at all tbh.
Vampire kinda stole the crown of my gaming group when I was into RPGs. With it's more theatrical way of roleplaying (some might say it was finally roleplaying and not rolling dice and looking at tables). After that came the (european style) LARP-ing and one thing led to another and suddenly re-enacting was what I did. And all I wanted to be was in that forgotten land, hacking stuff in the head with my broadsword (1D8+1) and getting the loot and a bunch of XP in the end.
Will it go full circle? Just after I stopped playing RPGs for real I went into table top games. Will I, in a few years be a neckbearded dungeonmaster again? (Not that I had any sort of resemblance to bear when I was fifteen-ish)
So, to recap to the "everyone's a nerd" thing I started with.
I studied advertising school during 2008-2010. Some might say "The leading advertising school in Sweden". Hard to get in, hard to finish. There was a ton of A-type personalities there. And sometimes pretty hostile in a very intellectual way. Pretty high percentage of hipster/jocks there.
So one day, I walked into the school studio (where we did all our projects) with a newly bought AOBR-set, a battleboard and god knows what else I bought that day. The GW store was then just a couple of blocks from school.
And not -one- -single- -person- said something disparaging about the "toy soldiers" I bought. Some asked, and I told them the basic premises and they lightened up and said "My brother did that when he was young. How cool that it's still alive." or "Yeah, I had a Tau-army back in the days!".
Some dudes, with a little less points on their geek-card, asked if it was kinda like World of Warcraft, but in space, and with plastic dudes. And I told them the differences, the history et al. While realizing that these people are ALSO nerds since they immediately jumped to the WoW-connection. Some of them were level 80 wizards already. With robes.
So tell me, do you know anyone, in your age span. Say from 20-40 who has not played some sort of "adventure game" (I clump every dungeoncrawl -> D&D game into that phrase). Do not play "computer games" and talk about it not-hushed tones? Or hasn't gotten any form of nerd-cred? It might be just a simple thing as knowing/nurturing an interest that's work related. One girl I know, she collects viruses. (She's a virologist, so she's excused from the label "Weirdo!")
I think you will find it hard to find anyone around you that's not a nerd in some way. Hell, even a fashionista-girl I knew collected hard to find Chanel-handbags. She knew everything about those goddang bags. Just like a military modeller would know everything about the colors DAK used during the desert wars...
Food for thought...?
In other news. Those of you over the pond that's interested in the paint storage racks I got, can now order them from Warpath. The offial post over at TTG is:
We are happy to write that we have an exclusive distributor for the U.S.A. and Canada. Now all resellers can contact WarPath Games. They have a large stock (become in next time a restock) and will be attending several shows. We think this is the perfect solution, and will provide better communications for all resellers.
"Taken my arms, taken my legs, taken my soul, left me with life in hell!"
"WHAT'S IN THE BOOOX?"
