Author Archives: Captain Spud

Ripping Off the Space Band-Aid

I haven’t posted in a while, but it isn’t because I haven’t been working– I’ve done some cool conversions, made an assload of drawings and designs, and also started a massive terrain project.

And while I sometimes get in a funk where I work but don’t feel like posting, that also isn’t the case here: I have three half-written articles in my queue that I’m really excited to finish up and share with the half-dozen vagrants who still wander by here to shoot up in the comments section.

The reason I haven’t posted anything is that the stuff I’ve been working on isn’t Warmachine- or even Privateer-related. And speaking just for myself, I always get really annoyed when I start following a blog or podcast because it talks about something I like, and then the staff pulls a bait-and-switch and starts talking about things I don’t care about. It happened when my favourite D&D live-play podcast switched from D&D 4E (which I played) to something called Saga (which I’ve never heard of); and it’s happened on WM/H blogs when people started padding their posting schedule with video games or SDE or whatever else. I hate it when this switch happens to me as a reader, so I’ve felt really crappy at the prospect of doing it to whatever can be considered the “audience” of this blog.

In my head, I figured that the best way to make the transition would be to confront it head-on with a “really big post” to mark my (likely temporary) change of focus– eg, a long essay about all the awesome things I like about the game I’ve been playing lately, or a really awesome scratch-sculpt for my army, or… something.

But it’s now been almost two months, and I’m still waiting for that “big post” to hit me, and I’m ready to conclude that it probably won’t happen. The “awesome sculpting project” keeps getting pushed back by a lot of smaller and individually less impressive projects; and I wrote a comprehensive “why I’m doing X now instead of Y” essay, but it was really long, really self-indulgent, really boring and basically just a waste of your time and mine. Especially when the entire thing can be summed up in one paragraph:

“I still like Warmachine, but I’m bored with my armies. I have lots of ideas for cool armies that really excite me, but they all require 6+ months of extensive modeling and painting work, and I just don’t have that in me right now. So I’m taking 6-12 months off as a WM/H vacation to recharge my batteries, and playing something else I’ve had my eye on for a change of pace.”

So, you know what? Nuts to my “big post” idea. This post is about all the column inches I want to waste on apologizing for my infidelity (and to reiterate: I DO feel the apology is necessary, as I’ve been on the other end of this situation before and it was annoying as hell). And now I’ve said it, and I can get back to posting cool stuff. And, hell… this doesn’t even mean I won’t do any Warmachine stuff at all during my vacation. I’ve just finished making an awesome Warmachine terrain board that I need to write up, and I’m still doing some paint exchanges and gift models in the next 6ish months for my various gaming associates that I’m really excited to start working on.

But it’ll be mixed in with some other things that aren’t Warmachine, sometimes for a couple months straight, and I’m apologizing now if that isn’t something you find interesting. I’ll come back and rejoin the legions of Magic Robots in time, but for now, I need to shovel my free time into a different furnace.

And so, for better or for worse, this stands as my official declaration:

Spud plays Infinity now. It’s cool, and has pretty models, and the rules are stupidly complicated, and Spud loves things that are stupidly complicated, and Spud is basically just excited to play games again in a way he hasn’t been for the last year.

Alright, drama post over. I’ll post some proper content this weekend.

-Spud

Tom’s Camel Has Wifi

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People really need to think harder about when they decide to be born.

Gdaybloke, for example, was born right after New Year’s. This was a terrible decision, because it means that when his birthday rolls around, I’m just winding down from my holiday gift model production and in the last desperate weeks of Templecon model production. This leaves little to no time for any additional projects to be added to my docket, and as a result, Gday’s best-case scenario is an IOU; worst case, it’s a “Sorry, maybe next time you should try to hold out a little longer in the womb.”

He wouldn’t even need to wait that long in there– four months would do it. See, Templecon is in early February, and then I usually collapse in exhaustion for a month or so afterward. March is largely spent planning the next year’s project list and attending to various small projects I’ve had to put off for the sake of the November-Through-February meat grinder.

But April? April just works. I’m relaxed from my post-TCon break and not yet buried in brand-new projects, which I generally save for warmer months. If I have a random whim to knock a model together in April, I can generally pull it off with little to no collateral damage to my schedule.

And that is why I must dole out rare praise to my perpetual cab passenger, Tom. By nearly any rational accounting, Tom has proven to be an utter waste of the biological, financial, and nutritional resources his parents deigned to invest in him. To call his long-term and day-to-day decision-making “questionable” would be an act of abject charity. Yet in spite of all that, when it came time to make the one decision that mattered, Tom chose wisely.

Displaying a level of clarity that he would utterly abandon in all the years that would follow, Tom burst forth into the world on a day that would, decades later, place him in the ideal position for collecting Spudgiftery year after year after year. When April rolls around, Spud is feeling renewed and ready to commit unrepentant acts of creation. And Tom, most generously, is always standing there, palm upturned, waiting to receive them.

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Addendum

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There has been a further development.

“Mr. Spud,” he pleaded, “you have to sell me one of those Journeymen.”

Scott was, of course, incorrect. But I was feeling generous, so I made him a counter-offer.

“These ones make up a set,” I explained, in the tone I reserve for small children and mischievous puppies. “But if you’re a very good boy, you can go to the wall, pick a mini, and I’ll make you your OWN Journeyman model. How does that sound?”

“Gosh! You really mean it, Mr. Spud?”

I did. I was enjoying making them, and they weren’t exactly difficult to construct. Some armor plates, a tacked-on backpack, and you’re pretty much done. Scott skipped off excitedly toward the Privateer wall, clapping excitedly the way he does, while I turned back to my work. Some time later, he returned; his face flushed with innocent joy, and his arms loaded with possibilities.

“Alright, now you can’t have ALL of them,” I reminded him, peering over the top of the glasses I don’t wear but that I have on for the purposes of this story. “You’ll have to pick.”

He deflated slightly, but after a few minutes of rummaging through his precious cargo, he made a selection. And while his choice was unusual, I think that ultimately, he made the right one.

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And so, once my own work was complete, I set about the task of bringing joy to yet another young heart.

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Bloody Allison and the Hot Tub of Deception

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Every year, I go to Templecon. It’s the only event to which I travel any significant distance– I won’t even drive the 90 minutes to events held by 3rd-Best-Toronto-PG Northblade, no matter how lucrative the proffered bribes.

Because Templecon is my “one big event”, I like to bring something new there every year– whether new models for an existing army, or a wholly new one that I rush to complete in time for the event. The past two years I’ve taken the latter road; last year yielded my orange Legion army full of conversions, scratch sculpts and retina-searing paint. When I built my Legion army, my goal was to build a collection of display models; I sculpted and painted every model to the best of my ability, resulting in an army that took 14 months (on and off) to build.

This year, however, I didn’t want to work very hard.

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The Ghost of Christmas-Last-Month

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deneghra_139

I don’t help people.

People ask me to do a lot of conversions and sculpts for them, and as a rule, I turn pretty much everybody down. It started out as “no commissions, but I’ll do favors for people I know” because of the sheer amount of time I was dumping into those, but then I found myself agreeing to so many other people’s projects that I was having to book them six to nine months in advance. This made me a terribly sad Spud.

The main problem is that in order to drag myself through the weeks and months of work required to complete a project, I need to be excited about it. I need to think the idea is great, or badass, or hilarious, or whatever other adjective may apply, and be excited to finish it and reveal it to the world. Without that spark of excitement, it’s just too hard to dredge up the motivation to sit down for an eight-hour Saturday of rivet application. And as much as it sucks, I will just never be as excited about another person’s ideas as they are; people bring me projects with a look of glee on their faces, positive that I’ll think it’s awesome and be happy to take it on; but when they explain it, it usually turns out to be based on some inside joke I don’t understand or a reference I don’t think is that funny, and I’m left having to shatter this person’s excitement.

So I just cut everybody off. It’s easier to let people down due to an ongoing policy than to have to tell them their specific idea is f***ing terrible.

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Lava so hot it make you sweat