Monday 31 December 2012

Christerval and Wintermas

Well, it’s been a while since I last wrote on this thing, due to a confluence of events.  Stuff gets busier towards Christmas, naturally, and I also had coursework and studying taking up most of my lunchtimes.  Or at the very least, I had worrying about coursework and studying taking up most of my lunchtimes.  I didn’t think after leaving University that I’d be stuck with coursework again, and I’d underestimated just how insidiously it would annoy me and make me slightly less happy.  Every time I’d do something I’d normally enjoy, the spectre of coursework would be there, squatting at the back of my mind, idly scratching itself, just reminding me that it was still undone.

But that ended on Monday, just in time for me to be ill. Yay, I guess.  Regardless, here I am now, work has slowed down to a thoroughly lethargic pace and I can at last alleviate my boredom with waffle.  In the spirit of the season, I proffer you all belated and ill-considered Merry Christmas and Happy New Year platitudes, without the receipt for either, so you can’t exchange them.  For me, this has been the Christmas of IT problems.  My Mum received an iPad 3 to replace here old model and I spent most of Christmas and the Boxing Day transferring her seemingly insurmountable pile of crap from one device to the other whilst reconfiguring a used laptop that she had been given as well.  It was an experience so aggravating that I may well elect to get a non-iPhone come upgrade time, purely to put more distance between myself and fucking iTunes.

Anyway, with luck I can get the blog back on track and, thanks to one of my three commenters, I have a subject to occupy myself with here over the next several days.  But before that, there is the standard Christmas update to be had, and I have a ton of GW stuff to assemble.  So much so that I haven’t actually done any of the painting I had scheduled for the holiday.  I’ve just been too busy during my non-unpaid technical support time to get round to it and I much prefer gluing models together than getting them actually looking decent.  It’s just not an aspect of the hobby I really enjoy.  If I have the time and patience to figure out airbrushing then that might make the prospect somewhat less daunting.  At least a vague colour scheme has now been worked out for the Missionaries of the Whispered Word.  Grey base colour, black trim and red/purple spot colour with generic metal colours in the usual places and probably washed to crap to disguise my ineptitude.

The Warpsmith will be painted Iron Hands colours though, so: black.  The Chapter symbol will be red and bloody instead of white/metal, but that’s going to be the only Chaosy colour deviation for him.  He’s still an Iron Hand after all, just one who has lost his mind over protracted periods of bloodshed and sanity strip-mining in the Eye of Terror.  He’s just had the superstition surrounding warp entities removed from his mind and now treats them like any other resource to be modified and engineered.  The Imperium probably isn’t ready for that though.  Philistines.

The big announcement for the New Year will be my resolution, which is going to be quite a challenge by all accounts.  I’ll be giving up buying GW models for the year.  I’ll not be giving up the hobby as whole; far from it.  I’m going to Adepticon after all and I’ll still buy the paints and various books, but I’m staying away from purchasing more of the models.  I spend a lot on them (cue the regular jokery), and I don’t think I use a lot of them enough to warrant the expenditure.  At least for a while.  I am the type of person who will drop a far old whack of money on a couple of big kits for an army idea and then never use them again.  This resolution will help me better appreciate the models and armies I have now and at the very least, I’ll have saved some money in the process.  All that said, I have seen some of the new models for the Dark Angels and they look pretty sweet.  Damn…

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