Not a New Years Resolution...

I don't make New Years resolutions for a number of reasons...the main one being that real life has an unfortunate habit of taking note of them and then throwing obstacles in their way with worrying enthusiasm...

...the other is that I have the attention span of...well...some-one with a very low attention span...which makes keeping promises to myself somewhat problematic, lol.

I have however noticed a worrying pattern with my various hobby projects and that is a tendency towards procrastination. My job is both repetitive and tiring which means I tend to arrive home and immediately fall into a pattern of being 'just about to start something' and instead end up messing around on the internet for no clearly defined purpose, watching TV that I've already seen or annoying my better half by complaining that I haven't got enough time to do anything, lol. I then put things off till the weekend which I then waste in a similar set of unproductive pissing about.

Therefore rather than make a stupidly specific new years resolution that's inevitably going to end up being broken I'm instead going to just make an effort to generally be more productive...well...that's the plan at least...

The main thrust of this new attempt at productivity will be in the area of 'finishing off stuff' or in many areas 'actually starting stuff' which will hopefully at some point lead into the aforementioned 'finishing off stuff'. I currently have a number of projects in the 'pending' pile in varying states of completeness which I'll cover more specifically in a future post*

*Me and my fellow blogger Citizen_W were having a conversation along these lines so this might end up being a 'joint' post with us both explaining how and why we've prioritised and de-prioritised projects recently...It'll be more interesting than it sounds, I promise...and if not I'll liven it up with some pictures, lol.

A couple of the areas in which I've been failing this year are updating the various tabs along the top of the blog (I'm particularly lax with the 'Hobby Newsletters' one, though the 'Unboxing Malifaux' one is missing a few entries and the 'Guest Articles' and 'Other Galleries' ones are terribly out of date as well) and more importantly in the area of finishing off article series. The series I started on other Steampunk games managed to get to a single intro article and one feature on Wild West Exodus before me getting sidetracked and I'd like to get back on track with that as well as actually writing some things that could be considered actual articles rather than 'look what I glued together today' posts.

The issue with the blog becoming moderately popular in certain circles now is that the expectations of it have increased somewhat and whereas a few years ago me not doing something I said I was going to would only have bothered three people now I have to worry about ten or even eleven people being disappointed.,,In actual fact I bounce between fifteen hundred and two and a half thousand views a day but I'm guessing that some of those get here after typing 'Hot Steampunk Girls' into search engines and then scrolling down a bit...

On that subject the 'Wednesday Gallery' will still be keeping it's usual spot as it's now an intrinsic part of the blog, I actually like doing them and it gives me a day off from having to think about something to post. The few digs about sexism that I occasionally get aimed at me have been addressed as much as they're ever going to be in that I now stick to fairly themed Gothic, Steampunk or Cosplay ones rather than anything in the 'celebrity cleavage' category and will sometimes include a guy at the end if I can find one that matches the theme. There's also more than sufficient warning in the intro to those features...

See...there's totally a guy in this picture...and he seems unnecessarily pleased with himself for some reason...

...but we're straying from the point a little now.

I came to the conclusion about my increasing levels of procrastination when I today decided to tidy-up my hobby room only to discover that the clutter consisted of two half finished Warmachine armies, one extremely randomly worked upon Warzone Resurrection Dark Legion force as well as bits and pieces from the Batman Miniatures Game, Judge Dredd Miniatures Game, Star Trek : Attack Wing, Dungeons and Dragons : Attack Wing games, a whole host of Mantic Games systems that I'd had indifferent attempts at and that's before even mentioning the pile of Kickstarters that I've got no further than opening the boxes of. The worrying thing about the Kickstarters is that at a quick count I've got about twenty more of those arriving over the next twelve months**

**Though being as we're talking about Kickstarters here that estimate could be waaaaay out...

Believe it or not, I'd actually already tidied it up a bit when I took this picture...

I'm also planning on giving more coverage to RPG's as I'm currently rather enjoying Wyrd Games's 'Through the Breach' RPG system and may possibly be joining a group that's planning on starting a campaign using the Warmachine based 'Iron Kingdoms' RPG system. This shouldn't be particularly difficult to do as long as I remember to make notes during the sessions as most of the work will have been done by the person running it, lol.

Those of you who were fans of the 'Crew a Week' project (mainly I'm guessing to laugh at my painting or to watch me fail...and laugh at that instead) will note that I've attempted to restart it on at least three occasions and failed on each attempt due to a number of unforeseen circumstances so instead it's going to become the far less snappily titled 'Crew I'm Currently Painting That I'll Probably Get Around To Painting at Some Point' project. I'll also most likely attempt to make the earlier discussed 'finishing things off' more interesting by the simple trick of adding 'project' to the title...

So that's it then. My 'Not a New Years Resolution' is basically to waste less time and get more shit done...though the fact I've just looked at the clock and this blog post took me three hours to write isn't a particularly promising start...

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.