Generalship

It seems like these days, the focus of gaming is more on making the army list rather than playing the game.  Army list posts on blogs and forums are extremely common.  You hear about "unbeatable" army lists with [insert awesome weapon of the day] spam.  Much (if not most) of the excitement generated by a new codex is determined by the rules/units available, and what units players can get to increase the power of their army list.  In order to succeed at a a tournament, it's a given that if you don't have a "competitive" army list, you needn't bother playing. 

Still here...

The past month or so has not been so friendly to me with regards to either blogging or playing 40k (or anything miniature related).

Fun-wise, I've done paintball twice in the past month:

You might think that a significant portion of my time would be taken up by playing this...

...but you would be wrong.

For the most part I've been busy with the backlog of chores and other jobs around the house that have piled up. Every time I think I'll get back into painting something, another distraction comes along. I still have hope though that in the near future I'll be able to find some time to do some painting.

One of my big chores is to reorganize all my storage--since my daughter has been born, baby stuff has been displacing everything else in the house, and the clutter has been piling up in a rather disorganized, space-inefficient manner. So I've had to move lots of crap around, while throwing away lots of stuff that I no longer need. In the midst of this I had to make a heartbreaking decision. My garage has long been the home of lots of my 40k scenery, including a bunch of cityfight terrain, featured in multiple battle reports, for example:

• Orks vs. Space Wolves Meeting Engagement
• Orks vs. Lanterns Meeting Engagement
• Eldar vs. Tau Meeting Engagement
• Eldar vs. Tyranids Meeting Engagement
• Imperial Guard vs. Tyranids Meeting Engagement
• Tyranids vs. Orks Coup de Main
• Brazen Claw vs. Orks Meeting Engagement

Well, the cityfight terrain has been sitting on valuable shelf space for years now, and so I had to make the decision to destroy the city. I hadn't had the chance to use it in years, and when I examined it, it was covered with a thick layer of dust, cobwebs, and other detritus.  While I liked the terrain, it was just way too bulky and underused so I couldn't justify keeping it.  Someday, when I have more room, I'll have to rebuild my terrain collection, and I think my terrain building ability has improved somewhat, so I'll probably be able to do a better job. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

I do have several blog articles that I've worked on sporadically, but none of them are finished yet. Chances are I'll be able to finish one or more of those and post those before I'm able to get back into painting.

So anyway...I'm posting this update to try to tell myself that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and that soon I'll be able to get back into painting etc.

The past month...

The past month has been very slow in terms of my 40k hobby, much of it being out of my control. First I got a cold which laid me up for a week. After having recovered, I was able to work a little bit on miniatures, but then I got hammered by sickness again that in all probability was the H1N1 virus. The whole family was sick for a week of hell. We're all essentially better now, but I still have a lingering cough that won't go away.

In the intervening week we've gotten a new living room set (a hand-me-down), painted the kitchen, gotten one car repaired and are in the process of looking to replace the other. Needless to say there hasn't been much time for 40k. Grrr...

I haven't played a game in months--I've been busy doing other things, and my usual opponent Badelaire has been busy taking graduate classes, so it just hasn't happened.

Hopefully in the next month or so that will change. In the meantime, however, I have managed a little bit of fun--I've had the opportunity to play paintball a couple of times. A ton of fun and a bit of exercise.
The audio is a little crazy--the sound of my gun is insanely loud, while everything else is pretty faint, so be prepared. There are also subtitles to the video, which help the video make a little more sense--if you mouseover the icon at lower right you can turn on the captions if they are off.