Monthly Archives: January 2010

2009 -> 2010

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2009 

In general, 2009 went by far, far too quickly.

I found a set of gaming resolutions I’d written up back in December, 2008:

  • Finish! Finish my Skaven army.  Work on a few Dark Angels.  Return to painting Tau.
  • Paint! Get 2500 points worth of Tyranids painted.
  • Compete!  I’m doing the Baltimore Grand Tournament again this year.  I’ll shoot to win three of my games there, instead of the two in 2008.

Results:

  • Finish! – HAHAHAHAHAHA.  Not even close
  • Paint! – I abandoned the Tyranid army midyear.  Lost interest, and sold off the minis.
  • Compete! – Again, not even close.  I did two tournaments this year, total: the Fantasy Escalation League early in the year and Dragon Wars.  That’s it.  Not getting to the Baltimore GT isn’t really my fault, though.
I started out the year playing Fantasy with Skaven.  Slid into War of the Ring with Fallen Realms for a few months then back home to 40K with Chaos Daemons.  Finally, back to Fantasy with the new Skaven book.
Did a lot of painting: Skaven, Harad, Skaven… but never got anything really completed.  That’s a shame.

Some notable accomplishments:

  • I was a Golden Daemon Finalist at Baltimore Games Day 2008, with my Deathwing Techmarine.  I’m quite proud of that.
  • I started up this blog.  First post was April 1.  Since then, I’ve done something like 85 posts, and have some number of readers (19 followers, 23 in Google Reader: not sure what the overlap is).  This has given me a lot of motivation to paint, which is never a bad thing.

2010

You know, last year’s goals (in general) are pretty solid.  Let’s stick with them!
  • Finish! Finish stuff.  I need to try to close the door on a project before opening the door to a new one.  Let’s start this off by finishing off my Khornate Daemons.
  • Paint! Yep, pretty much.  I need to set more tangible goals and work towards them.  Since Bill posted about them, I’m going to check out the Lone Pilgrim points scheme.
  • Compete!  Do some tournaments.  Organize and participate in.  I had a lot more fun a-tournamenting with 40K in 2008 than I did meandering from game to game in 2009.
On a related note: somewhat unexpectedly (the voting made it clear aways out, but I found the votes unexpected), I was elected to the Iron Fist League council for 2010 as one of the two members representing Game Parlor Chantilly.
This is really just further motivation to get out and be more involved with tournaments: locally and regionally.

Video vs. Writing

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More and more, I see people turning to video battle reports and reviews.  Bell of Lost Souls has done them for nearly half a year, now, and Jay’s gotten really spun up on them.

I gotta say (and, because this is the most appropriate place for saying it, Imma say it here): I don’t like ’em.
I mean, I’m not ideologically opposed to them.  I don’t think they should be purged with cleansing fire, or anything.
I just can’t do anything with them.
Video requires a wholeness of attention and an investment of time that’s much greater than written word.  I can quietly scope out a battle report like Salvage’s most recent one in a moment or two and, if so inclined, read through it in a few minutes.  Watching a video battle report requires 5-10 minutes, of undivided attention.  And requires audio (which always makes killing a few minutes of work difficult).
I don’t think I get any more from video reports than written ones, and it’s certainly a lot harder to get anything from them.
Now, I fully admit that I don’t have much of a leg to stand on here: it’s not like I write much in the way of battle reports (not much there, and what I do have is more “musing” than “report”).   But, still.

What do y’all think?