The Big Picture

This is the first of a new series of posts that I'm calling The Big Picture. Basically every Sunday I'll post a selected picture from my archives. I normally scale down photos for the Blog to save space but for this series I'll post my pictures at the biggest resolution I can, hence the name of the series.

Why am I doing this, I hear you say. Well there are several reasons but its mostly comes down to time. I'm a painfully slow writer and each post takes roughly an hour (sometimes more) to put together, and like most men with chores to do and kids to look after, I often find I just don't have time to sit down and write every day. What I tend to do is try to keep a couple of days ahead of myself with some pre written posts so that at weekends I can use something I prepared earlier (yes, I'm a child of the Blue Peter era!).

As I mentioned in my Showcase article a few days ago I have on occasion spent time blogging when maybe I should have spent time gaming or painting instead. So I made a New Years Resolution to paint more and game more and to facilitate this I need to make more time out of my time. So every Sunday I'll be posting a Large picture and a few words instead of a longer post that I'm maybe I'm not quite happy with.

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I took this picture at the Broadsword show in June 2004. The game being played was "War of the Worlds : London Stands Alone" by North London Wargames Group. This game won Best Participation Game at Loughton and Best Created Game at Salute 04.

People in Glass Houses

I've been scanning some old news articles and found one from the BBC website from a couple of months ago that caught my attention. The article was about the rather mysterious scene known as Furries. Born of comic cons in the 8o's and fostered by the Internet in the 90's this has grown into a vibrant community. But a recent murder plot by two Furries has brought the community into disrepute and cast an unwelcome and often judgemental eye on this previously little known hobby.

Does this ring any bells with the roleplayers out there? This is sounding very akin to the uninformed furore that has surrounded D&D for the last 20 odd years. Don't get me wrong, dressing up as a cat or a fox isn't exactly 'my thing' but each to their own. The worrying thing I found was that some Internet forums (I won't say which to protect the innocent) for more mainstream gamers - if there is such a thing - seemed to have a high volume of mocking content in them.

There does seem to be a hierarchy of superiority within what I loosely call the gaming community. It goes something like this.... Historical Wargamers look down on Fantasy Wargamers; Tabletop Wargamers of all types mock Computer Wargamers, All Wargamers consider themselves superior to Roleplayers; Roleplayers mercilessly mock LARPers; LARPers can't understand Card Gamers; and pretty much everyone think Furries are plain scary. The sad thing is all of the above have something in common, love of 'the game' whatever that might be. We should be embracing our sameness rather than emphasising our differences (not a bad philosophy for society in general either IMHO).

When people outside our hobby mock us its bad enough but when we mock other groups we should know better. As the saying goes, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

The Spoils of War Lunch

Well its now 2010 and like many people I was partying hard last night. We had family round to our house accompanied with lots of booze and even more food. None of us are big drinkers so most of the alcohol remains unconsumed (that's me sorted for the rest of the year!) and we also had lots of uneaten food. So today, after cleaning up the mess (and suppressing the hangover), we had a Spoils of War Lunch - basically chilled leftovers. And it was very nice I must say.

Now I'm full, warm and tired... so I'm going to have an afternoon nap like the old fart my kids think I am. Toodle-pip.

New Years Resolution

Its that time of year when millions of people make promises to themselves for the coming year. Most New Years Resolutions barely survive the month of January before they get forgotten. In fact I recently read that while the majority of people were confident of success when they set their goals the actual success rate was as low as 12%! [Source]. Unless that is you go and do something silly like upping the stakes and publish it on a Blog or something....

Never one to do things the easy way my New Years Resolution comes in four parts. Think of it as objective setting for 2010.

• Paint more miniatures than 2009. I'll be measuring this against my tally published yesterday. I'm never going to be a high turnover kinda painter as most of my projects are single figures. None the less I will be trying to increase my productivity, if only to give me something to write about!
• Complete the 3rd story arc for my Campaign Setting. I've let this writing project slip and need to get back on track. This means getting to grips with the prospect of GM'ing 4E so I will also need to make myself more familiar with the DMG and MM.
• Continue building my Blog. To do this I'm going to try and maintain the daily posting schedule but will also try and get more varied input from my gaming group in the form of Guest Posts. These have proved popular in the past and I sense an as yet untapped pool of knowledge just waiting to be exploited!
• Play More Games! I'm hoping my gaming group can get more games in this year as our schedule was shot to pieces last year by all manner of unforeseen events. But we also decided to play more boardgames and CCG's when we couldn't roleplay and I'm looking forward to continuing this policy into 2010. I'm also looking forward to playing some FoW games with my brother in law. He moved house a few months ago but he's settled in now. Fitting in some games (as opposed to decorating) should be an easier prospect in coming months.

So there you have it, my overly complicated New Years Resolution. I expect you, dear readers, to give me hell if I break them!