hobby-fails-2021

[hobby-fails-2021]

Journal of Failure - Feb 2021

Welcome to the first journal of failure entry! We have a lot to cover.

Was Warhammer 40K ever fun?

I had a nostalgic ping around the new year for my pre-teen years playing Warhammer 40,000. Back then I was playing 2nd edition Orks, Imperial Guard and Chaos. Most games were just us arguing about rules, and I can't ever remember actually playing a mission - it was always a fight to the death (or until our parents picked us up).

Now, a lot has changed in that time. 9th edition is the new shiz. But who cares about staying up to date? I'm still longing for building the perfect 2nd edition lists, actually playing a real mission, and maybe taking the rulebooks advice that all arguments can be settled with a dice roll and some civilized conversation later.

So I set out to try to find on eBay an old book which had some great battle scenes. After a lot of searching I found the Battles book. I'm pretty sure this is what I had back in the day, hauling it to summer camp and back.

The book is a collection of White Dwarf articles, a few battle reports, a few special rules, and a new mission.

So my goal, at least originally set out, was to find some mission I would want to play and build armies for it. Just something small. In the Battles book there's one that involves some battle bunkers. It's laid out as a fight of about 500pts between Space Marines and Orks. The Space Marines get two battle bunkers to setup in their deployment zone, and the Orks get additional victory points for capturing them. What's interesting is that the Orks can have an entire 10 ork squad and their dreadnought return upon being killed as a second wave, entring from either the left or right as a flanking attack later in the game.

This sounded great, all I needed was to build these out! But, as I thought more about things (never ends well) I started to deviate.

The first thing was looking at the prices of models. Damn... they're really not cheap at all. Were they this expensive when they were pewter? For plastic miniatures I would expect some price reduction.

Then came the question of whether I wanted to build either of these armies. Space Marines (the entire imperium) are really just facists right? But once you open that can of worms things go downhill rather quickly. Do we really want to glorify war? Are these armies satires anymore?

Searching the internet to try and come to terms with my concerns certainly didn't help much. I left feeling the only viable army was Tyranids, since they're single minded and only interested in the devouring of everything.

Now, interestingly enough back in 2007 I bought a bunch of Tyranids. They sat in a box for years, and I gave some away, but to my surprise I actually had a bunch stuck in the garage still. That was 20 hormaguants, 3 tyranid warriors, 2 carnifexes and some ForgeWorld models that were definitely not in 2nd edition.

At this point I can't say I've made any decision on what I'll do going forward. Maybe I won't build anything. Maybe I'll just build out the terrain and do some painting, but not make any commitments to actually play.

With that, I'm looking into various painting techniques. I had some good luck with dry brushing some hormaguants, but as it was pointed out online, this leaves a rather "chalky" look. Now, what is considered the best way to build up and blend is using glazing. Lots of thin coats of paint using a glazing medium. This sounds incredibly time consuming and tedious. Stay tuned!

Mechanical Keyboards - take my money pleeeez!

For better or for worst I like mechanical keyboards. Now I'm not looking for my hash tag "end game", but I am for some reason still buying and building them. My latest purchases recently arrived - GMK Kaiju and two DZ60 PCBs. Awhile back I bought two MelGeek Mojo60 cases, but I was still using an old holtite-equiped Banana Split board that was very flakey (because of my installation of the holtites most likely).

I'll make another post with some photos, but in general the board is GMK Kaiju, DZ60 PCB, Black MelGeek Mojo60 and box pink Kaihl switches. The fly in the ointment though is that 1. the stabs for delete key were sticking, so I removed them, and 2. even though the internet says differently, I cannot type a backtick using Fn + Esc.

There is of course another thing, and that is I didn't realize that the PCB uses a tap-and-hold right shift that doubles as "/". Back when I was using the foobar (a split gherkin), which exploits these tap-and-hold keys for all the fn keys, I got really tired of them because you can't reasonably type faster than 30wpm due to the tap term settings etc. I tried to adjust these, but ended up with something worse than the defaults. So now I have to dig into his issue again. Great!

In the queue

With 40k, keyboards, sofubi... what other things could I possibly be interested in? Let me list the other things that are on-hold -

Magic, The Gathering

Music

Programming

Well that's all for this post. Hobby on!

[hobby-fails-2021]

From left to right:

JiroJiro Kun (Dark Blue)

Cranston

Slime Adjudicator (Rainy Day)

Wild Hunt (Rainy Day)

Mouthpiss (Milky Blue)

Remember begging to go to McDonald's as a kid, whining in the car to get your gubby little hands on the latest Happy Meal™ toys? Well when you got there you probably sat your pre-diabetic butt down on one of these hamburger stools. How great that now, 30 years later, you can own a vinyl toy inspired by those very same stools? Thank you Science Patrols!