Guilt-posting

I admit it, I fell of the wagon. I've got several posts in the works but they've all grown into monsters and need to be edited or parsed out. In lieu of my usual high-quality content, I'll simply update you with what I've been doing offline, 40k-wise:

My ICs Hobby Challenge: Dark Angels

If you don't know by now, I'm a big fan of the Independent Characters' podcast. I've known the hosts and their circle for quite a while and been a guest twice. So when I heard about their upcoming Hobby Progress Challenge preparatory to Adepticon 2012 (head over to their forums to check it out), I was thrilled! It came right at a time when I'd decided to hang up Eldar for a while.

OH but what to build?

D-Day minus 1: Kub-Waaagh is go!

Well, this is it. Last day before Kublacon. Tomorrow I will trundle up to the convention in the wee hours of the morning to try my hand - one last time - at playing Eldar competitively in a tournament.

GW Haters are Hating GW!

I've read the same articles as you, the same blogs as you, the same forums as you, and I've been around long enough to be surprised when something that GW does actually - er - surprises me. The last week of business announcements, for example; resin releases with simultaneous price increases, countrywide embargoes for online retailers, etc., has certainly been an aggressive set of moves.

Overall it looks like they are pulling a money grab, and putting the screws to us, the consumers. Looks like. But is that what is really going on?

Farseer Fail's Dirty Little Secret

And it has nothing to do with the ex-governor of California...

I've got a dirty little secret. It's something that's been hidden in the background, behind all the glitz and glamour of my fabulous life. I tried to ignore it, but... it's been weighing on my mind now for a while. Things came to a head during the last week, when I was busily prepping my army for Kublacon... 

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When I should have been working on my Eldar army, modeling up jetbikes with real guardians (not the old '90s conehead riders that come with them) and tooling up my jetbike Seer Council, finishing my fire prisms, and so on, I was instead spending time with... with... 

the other army. 

Yes, my fans, I'm afraid it's true. I can now join the ranks of other famous cuckolders (is that a word?) like Elliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenneggerrggugung, and Jesse James. There's another lady in town. She lives in my closet. 

Her name is Dark Angels. 

Hard to say how it all went wrong.

It started off as an idle thought.  I didn't intend to stray... I was just curious. I wondered what the cheapest army was, at the time. After a little digging and some creative thinking, I came up with Deathwing. See, around this time, Assault on Black Reach was fairly new, and flooding eBay with cheap orks, deffkoptas, tactical marines and, yes, terminators. 

Soon I found myself parked in front of my computer, furtively bidding on those precious little 5-man units. It seemed so harmless! I could pick up five terminators for as little as 5 or 6 dollars, whereas the retail on a box of assault or shooty terminators cost nearly ten times as much. How could I resist?

Of course, then I crossed the line. 

After accumulating several AoBR termie squads, I realized I would need to fill in the blanks. How do you fill in the blanks with Deathwing? Well with Ravenwing of course! Those Dark Angel upgrade sprues that came with the Ravenwing box allowed me to start upgrading those termies with assault cannons. 

Then there were the close combat weapons; thunder hammers, lightning claws. I needed a box of those, at least. Then a friend of mine told me he was getting out of the Dark Angels to play Black Templars; I snatched up his loot like a bullet-sweating crackhead. Veteran squads, a DA battleforce, and more…

Oh but transports! I need transports, of course! A Land Raider Crusader… which turned out to be one of the old plastic-metal ones. Well, I could use this one for my tactical, vet or command squads. I picked up another Crusader, a new one. Ah sweet. I picked up another Ravenwing box, too, so that I might bring a full Doublewing list if I wanted. More devastators, a razorback, another rhino, some more vets, more devastators, and so it went. 

The first step is to admit you have a problem. 

So instead of painting up my faithful Eldar last week, I found myself slaving to the call of the Deathwing, assembling terminators and a Land Raider. The shame, the shame! 

Don’t do plastic-crack, kids. Like Whitney Houston says, “Plastic-crack is whack!”

I just ran across this interesting article over at Neogrognard. While the article focuses on the relationship of R&D to Marketing within RPG businesses, it also relates to the difference between the crunchy player and the enthusiast player in the 40k realm. I found it very relevant to my earlier article on Hype.