Is 3d Printing the Hobby Messiah?

I've taken a fairly old, haphazard series from here on the blog called Deepthought and transitioned it over to video format on my YouTube Channel. This was my most recent episode, where Hydra and I had some deep thoughts about the possible impacts CAD sculpting and 3D printing are having on the hobby. It's definitely a longer one, so maybe put it on in the background while you're doing some hobbying.

And here are the other episodes that I've recorded in this series:

Sexy Warhammer Ladies: On being a female hobbyist in the #WarhammerCommunity (Xenos Alchemist Podcast)

Coming hot on the heels of our special #Krootoberfest episode of the podcast is this more serious episode, which I recorded back in September with hobbyists LadyDothPaints, Norn.Queen, and Hivfleet_Horror. 

When we recorded the episode it'd been three months since Games Workshop posted its Warhammer For Everyone message on its Twitter and Facebook accounts, unleashing a deluge of gatekeeping, hating, and other bullshit. We look back on all of that and ask the question "what can male hobbyists do to help female hobbyists feel more welcome and secure in the #WarhammerCommunity?"

Turns out it's not that complicated. 

If you listen to only one episode of the Xenos Alchemist podcast, it should be this one. 

No, we're not perfect, and yes, we've all made mistakes. But it's our job to learn from those mistakes and do better. Here's hoping that this episode is a good place to start!

Here's the YouTube version of the episode, complete with links in the description to all the accounts we reference in the actual episode.

And here's the audio version of the episode:

Also, let us know what you think of the episode in the comments below. Or if you want to confess a time when you might have been a less-than-stellar hobbyist to someone from a different group, you can do that too! Whatever you do, just don't be a jerk ;)

I'll start by admitting what I admitted in the episode: That I, too, was once judgmental of sexy warhammer ladies. But then Charlie set me straight.

What's your hobby confession?

An Open Love Letter to Independent Retailers

So I failed at Flesh Friday this week, and I'll be sharing the following as a FLASHBACK Friday post instead :)

This is something that's been sitting in my drafts for a long time. I'm not sure why I never posted it back when it was current, but I'd like to share it now in the hope that someone somewhere might learn something from it about the value of independent retailers.

It's a lesson that can be carried over to far more than Games Workshop/Model retailers. I've applied similar logic to my book purchasing. I only buy books from my local shop these days. Never from Amazon.

Anyway. Enough preaching. Here it is. I hope you can empathize :)

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You have all, of course, been talking about it for years: how your FLGS's have been closing up shop and moving on: how discount online retailing is dropping long-ranged, SCUD missiles on the Mom-and-Pops.

Well, yesterday I woke up. I opened my ears and finally listened as I drove by my local independent model retailer from my teenage years and discovered that it was gone.

Here's the letter that I sent through to the email address listed on their site (which I pray is still active):

Deepthought: Accommodator (or, On the Life of a Friend)

This is a hobby editorial. I went to school to become and try to make my living as a writer. Though I love the hobby, and I'd like nothing better than to sculpt all day, posting amazing things on here for all to ogle, there are times when the urge to write strikes, and I try to use these interludes to delve deeper into important parts of the hobby. I hope you find the following article interesting, and I promise to get back to posting cool models soon!

When I started writing this, it was titled "On the Death of a Friend," but then I realized that, were I in your shoes, that is not the type of title that would inspire me to read an article. Thus, I changed it, and I like it better already.

This is an anniversary of sorts, i guess, though it's hardly a thing to memorialize. This is the 3-year anniversary of the death of a good friend of mine, who went by the name Ross Nickle under the sun and the stars, but who was known as Accommodator in the digital world of posts and threads. Ross was most active on the Tyranid forum Warpshadow, and for the years when he was as our administrator, that board ran like a well-oiled machine. You may have run into him on other boards as well: particularly those that had anything to do with Titans and Titan Legions.

Like the passing of Brimstone (for those of you who can still remember Brimstone), Ross' death was an odd thing. It happened once in Real Life, happening to families and friends and co-workers. But then it happened again Online, weeks later, when the news was released to the communities. And in those communities, that news spread further than it ever could in Real Life, for over these information superhighways we touch more lives than we know.

If you knew Ross online (as Accommodator), you may not have known him as well as I had the fortune to in Life. As an attempt at remedying any disparity, I am finally getting around to this: something I've been meaning to write for some time. In it I hope to capture the Ross that I knew, and I hope to further fill out the Ross that you might have known. I'm not sure why it came to me now, but here it is.

Deepthought: Wisdom of the Norns

This is a hobby editorial. I went to school to become and try to make my living as a writer. Though I love the hobby, and I'd like nothing better than to sculpt all day, posting amazing things on here for all to ogle, there are times when the urge to write strikes, and I try to use these interludes to delve deeper into important parts of the hobby. I hope you find the following article interesting, and I promise to get back to posting cool models soon!

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Alright. So. I've been kind of out of the world for some time, but every so often, I think about Modern Synthesist and worry that I should be getting back to it. I've been dealing with some change and uncertainty in real life, which has caused me to switch trains, slightly, and put models on the back burner as I looked for work that actually paid.

What's more, as it's a subject that relates to this article (which I wrote MONTHS ago), My Norn Queen of just over two years is no more. Well, she's still around, just not with me. That being said, she is a remarkable person and was the inspiration for this article. In the hope that there are more people out there like her, and in the hope that some people can empathize with the weird, personal stigma I felt about 40K, here is the article. Also, I'm not going to go in and change all the language to the past tense because that seems weird.
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This is kind of a weird idea for an Editorial (as most of them seem to be), so please bear with me...

So I've got myself a girlfriend, and I call her my Norn Queen. She does sweet stuff for me, like giving me tickets to GD UK for my birthday last year, and then being so interested in the event that she accompanied me to it. That seems like a perfectly normal act if this were any sane, equal relationship. However, unfortunately, I am a Geek of the 40K variety, so when a girlfriend buys me tickets to Games Day, and then asks to go with me, it is an Event: something to be celebrated and screamed from the rooftops...solely because she showed an interest in my hobby.

And, because you're all like me, you're probably thinking the same thing: wow! Amazing! What a girl! How rare!

Except...how does that make any sense?

Somewhere along the line, I--like I expect so many of us have--came to the conclusion that this Hobby we're into was certainly dorky and possibly reprehensible. It was something to be discussed with other people who I was sure were into the hobby, and not with anyone else. All through high school it was this way: where my Warhammer 40K hobby was my dorky black spot, and I tried to keep it from my non-hobby friends for as long as I could manage.

Deepthought: We. Are. The Hobby.

This is a hobby editorial. I went to school to become and try to make my living as a writer. Though I love the hobby, and I'd like nothing better than to sculpt all day, posting amazing things on here for all to ogle, there are times when the urge to write strikes, and I try to use these interludes to delve deeper into important parts of the hobby. I hope you find the following article interesting, and I promise to get back to posting cool models soon!

First off, I'd like to state that this is not going to be one of those articles.

Anyone who knows me from Warpshadow knows that I don't go in for Games Workshop bashing. Though this may start with a bit of negative sentiment, I would ask you to stick with the article and read it through 'til the end as the end, in a way, is the most important part. That being said, it's a biggie, so best to grab a cuppa something to go along with it.

Though I don't go in for Company Bashing, I got very close last May, when it seemed like The Company was doing everything in their power to squeeze more money out of their Hobbyists (heck, at one point I was planning a revolution). On May 18th of last year, at the height of the Internet furor over price hikes, Finecast (and its further price hikes), and the restriction of UK-based, world-wide online retailers, Games Workshop CEO Mark Wells sent out a letter to hobbyists. If you missed it, the full letter can be viewed on Beasts of War.

There are many things I could take issue with in this letter, but the greatest and most glaring of them is the following, taken verbatim from the letter that Mark Wells, CEO of Games Workshop, sent out to a hobbyist:

...the simple fact is that European internet traders will not invest any money in growing the hobby in your country. Their model is to minimise their costs and free-ride on the investment of Games Workshop and local independent shops in creating a customer base.

For all my lack of Games Workshop bashing, that was a statement that rankled me. Though there may well be some free-riding internet retailers, there are also SCADS more internet retailers who support themselves by selling models so that they can spend the rest of their days writing hobby articles or creating cool conversions for other hobbyists to use. Some of these online retailers who invest a goodly portion of their time into growing the hobby online took the statement as what it was: a direct slap in the face, and they posted comments like this one from Matthew over at Miniwargaming.com.

The gist of this letter seemed to be the idea that Games Workshop invests more time and money than anyone in growing this hobby, so it makes sense to pay their prices and not to support freeloading online retailers. It got me thinking about just how much time and money all of us in this interconnected, online, miniature community invest into this hobby. I had a revelation about the nature of what our communities had evolved into: I thought that if we could ever herd together the 1,000 cats of our online community and convince them to dream a single dream, we would be the ones at the controls of this hobby community and not The Company. I came to a realization that is the first main thrust of this article. It was a simple statement that belies the foundation-shaking strength of the sentiment behind it:

We. Are. The Hobby.

You, and me; what we do here, and the interactions that hobbyists have on miniature-based blogs and forums all over the net. We are the hobby.