Sunday, February 20, 2011

Finding balance

It's been quite a week; home for a couple days with a sick rugrat, I spent some long hours on the hobby side.  It's hard, but I love it.  I've been hoarding drill bits, clamps, various sculpting tools, and whatnot for a decade or more - and it feels great to be using them again.  Just building, not really painting yet: the tally for the week is:

  • sculpting brains for 2 zoans and pinning all 3, ready now for basecoating;
  • built 8 Ymgarls (4 up above to show off how cool the Chapterhouse heads look);
  • fell beast that will be a harpy: stripped the paint, disassembled, re-fit, drilled, and pinned the wings, put on the first carapace, gap-filled it with GS;
  • built my Red Terror so I can proxy Deathleaper or DoM;
  • built my first venomthrope - hardest (stock) figure I've ever put together - truly, less is more when it comes to metal-on-metal supergluing, but very concerned at durability.  Do most people pin all 4 arms?
  • picked up foam tray-building material I saw on HoP here and a big Stanley toolbox to carry things in
  • traced out stealer patterns to cut out on a 2" layer of foam, cut out about 6 holes and realized what a huge pain this was going to be (30+ gargs, 50+ termies, 20+ horms, 40+ stealers counting ymgarls, etc..) 
  • seriously reconsidered the time vs. money ratio for the ~$300 Battlefoam 1520 with custom cut foam; any experience with this case/product?
More on the "finding balance" part of the title after the jump...


Kennedy over at 40k for the New Professional had a couple very thought-provoking posts over the past few days; rather than just reposting some of my more cogent comments here, check out his blog posts:
http://kennedy40k.blogspot.com/2011/02/are-tyranids-really-slow.html
http://kennedy40k.blogspot.com/2011/02/are-tyranids-boring.html

I was also reminded why I started this blog in the first place after a painful foray into one of the tyranid-focused forums.  People have their own agendas, their own interpretations of anything you write, and since each forum thread pretty much lives and dies by itself, the potential to be taken out of context is huge, especially w/o a high post-count and history.  Even so, I did find some excellent info that I'll be posting and commenting on.  Signal-to-noise ratio is horrendous, but since I'm sifting anyways...

On balance:

http://fromthewarp.blogspot.com/2011/02/ftw-being-placed-into-stasis.html says a lot about finding balance.  This blog wouldn't be here if it weren't for Ron and FTW; it was what convinced me the blogs were the place I wanted to be, away from the forum paradigm, and scarily enough, I might be able to contribute something useful.  I wish him nothing but the absolute best in finding his balance in life.  My effort to do so is, and for the time being will be, captured here, as I try to put more hobby into my life to balance out the remaining chaos.  With time on my hands this week, I also spent more than a few hours this week reconnecting with old friends on various social networking sites - something I should have done more of long ago.  Had a great time playing Wii with my boy, coming up with homework for him to do while he was out of school.  Some things are priceless.

3 comments:

  1. well I'll miss FTW...I suppose a lot of us will...Can't blame the man, though. Family is important. More important than our figs.

    Yes, I pin every arm/leg/whatever on metal models.
    I built one metal Hiveguard, hated it, and promptly built 6 Warrior conversions.
    But, yeah- I'd pin the Venomthrope. It's only a matter of time before a poorly balanced model like that falls over and an arm breaks off.

    I guess I'll kit-bash a couple V-thropes eventually- Ravener chest/back/Tail, Tentacle Genestealer head and some Greenstuff for wavy arms oughta do it.
    I hate pewter.

    I have an army bag- not from battlefoam, but it's pretty much the same thing. I don't recommend carrying your army in a toolbox. Where do you put codexes and rulebooks?
    My bag has a zipper front for that stuff.
    I spent too much time, money and effort on my army to try and skimp on storage and travel accomadations for them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you were able to walk away from FWT with more than just hobby stuff.

    Balance in essential and you're right... some things are prioeless. Glad to hear you got them.

    Ron

    ReplyDelete
  3. @SinSynn - appreciate the comments. The silly part is I "grew up" on metal and have never had this issue before.

    @Ron - I almost lost my marriage, my kids, everything that mattered. Gotta find and keep that balance. Thanks for all you've done for this hobby and community.

    ReplyDelete