Why do you blog?

It was only the other day I was talking to a couple of guys about my blog and why I do it?

It got me thinking and I realised that I've missed the 4 year anniversary of my quite frankly embarrassing first post...

Cringeworthy!

Its like your first painted model you look back and laugh, but I suppose people have to start some where, since then I've managed to clock up a impressive 279 posts and recruited a whopping 139 followers, to each of my readers I thank you all as its nice to see that my random posts jumping from system to system still gets 100+ views each day!

The recent bolt action board posts drew in a tremendous amount of views so I might be onto something with terrain after all everyone loves terrain!

So why do I blog?

For me its not about trying to show off golden deamon/WAMP painting levels, I'm happy to admit that I'm "ok" at painting their are far more talented people that can paint far better than me.

I'd love to paint like this and I'm sure with enough practise and dedication to the art form it can be done....

however I understand where I sit with being comfortable with my level of painting to a point where I don't spend months on a unit or a single miniature mainly because it would do my head in to have an amazing model blown off the table in turn one!(The only exception to this was the Chaos warhound and that was a real labour of love, and did get killed in turn one in the only game on apoco that I played and the last actually!)

I'd rather paint to a decent table top standard and achieve something along the lines of this..

to show that any one can achieve the highest honour amongst all gamers, A painted army!

Now we all know that even though you'll sit there with your shiney codex and work out 3 or 4 lists (or in Spencer's or Kris' case about a dozen!) and start with the task of buying, gluing, and painting your unbeatable or fluff loving list, you'll get to a point where you burn yourself out and my best example of this for me was the 5th Company and I managed to paint 70 marines before getting burn't out and was bored of painting Dark Angels, I think it was a combo of the army list with the spear point fluff list that people loved but actually trying to play competition type games was really hard and I became quite disillusioned with why am I using a army that doesn't play as it should in my head.

At this point I started looking for another plastic crack fix to get my mojo back on track and along came the ork's I had to think long and hard about these boys as I determined to get the 5th Company finished just for the man points at the local club or wherever I play, more on the Orks another time though.

The other reason I blog is I'll admit I'm a system whore see this lovely post...

hobby out of control?

For a good 10+ years all I knew was Gameswork Shop until I stumbled across warmachine about 10 years ago when Mike McVey  sculpted for them, and this broke me away from GW...

Since then I've tried all sorts of systems both good and bad but had no way of sharing my thoughts and feelings on the ones that I bought in the yearly 2000's and way back in 2010 I started reviewing new systems and games that I picked up.

The reason behind the "First Look" posts was to show a none affiliated review of a game and give a very rough review of how it plays, If I really enjoyed the system and played a fair bit then I'll go in depth however most of the reviews are after the first game which some people won't consider enough tries at a game to give a balanced review.

I just tend to go with my feelings really and if I can understand the game after reading the rule book for a week or so and the initial game is enjoyable then I'll continue to play it as and when I can, of course games come and go within the gaming group that play with and I've had the comment of "what new system are you playing now" from other people in the club that I play at but I believe that variety is the spice of life and rather than playing warmachine/40K/warhammer  for 50 weeks in a year I think its good to mash it up you just have to embrace change and open your eyes to other systems.

The last reason (that I can think of) for my blog is to focus on projects and simply keep on going!

With so much plastic crack out there in the big wide world and certainly with the explosion of the Internet and the indi companies that are slow but surely infiltrating the gaming market place its very difficult to stay on target! 

My blog helps me maintain some sanity with what I'm working on so rather than constistanly chopping and changing I'll work on a small skirmish force or do a slow burn on a bigger army and when I post up pic's of the models that I've worked on I feel a swell of pride that I've managed to finish something else to add to Anton's Warehouse (I've enough painted armies for enough systems that I could outfit a gaming store's display cabinets!)

So not the usual "look at what I've done this week post" but more of a stand back and think about the last four and a half(ish) years and have I achieved what I set out to do in the first place way back when Chris convinced me to start a blog as he thought my painting was great and as I used simple techniques and cranked out a tremendous amount of models.

If your still out there Chris cheers very much fella its all your bloody fault!