Sin Synn Guest Post

Those of you with long memories may recall that I used to write articles for a blog network called the House of Paincakes. One of my fellow writers on that network was a strange creature known as SinSynn who has decided to return to the world of blogging that quite frankly has been lessened by his absence...well...there's less tentacles at least...

Having no desire to manage a blog of his own will be utilising mine so here's his triumphant return in article form....

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Hey, folks. SinSynn here.

Our 'hobby' - this strange, amorphous, all-encompassing thing we do...'Tis an odd beastie, it 'tis.
The hobby isn't just some random thing we do when we're not working or touching ourselves in an impure manner. It's a lifestyle. It's a whole crazy thing.

*Air quotes always help*

When I say 'the hobby,' I mean like, all of it.
From cosplay to waifus. From hotels packed with feverish gamers getting their Con on (and all the fiendish debauchery that accompanies it) to the 10 year old kid who crushes you at Call of Duty. We're all vaguely connected, thanks to the hobby. The CoD 'MLG Pro' kid might brush elbows with the Cosplay expert on some random website somewhere, click a random linky and be exposed to some new element of the hobby and have their lives changed forever.
The hobby does that to peoples. We tend to dive willingly down rabbit holes.

There aren't a lot of things in this world that'll make me go all Homer Simpson drooly and say stuffs like, 'This is the greatest thing ever in dis world,' but I'll be darned if the hobby hasn't provided me with oh-so-many of those moments.
For every 'ohmygawd' moment, there's a few hours of equally important yet completely different moments spent in quiet contemplation...maybe assembling and painting figs for whatever minigame I'm wrapped up in at the moment. Maybe there's a podcast goin' in the earbuds, maybe I'm listening to Satan music, I dunno.
Regardless, those moments spent in serene, blissful, uncomplicated quiet time are ever so satisfying. There's something strangely therapeutic about sitting down at one's 'Hobby Area,' whether one is limited to a tray that hasta be stored on a top shelf somewhere cuz lil' kids run rampant or one has achieved the Ultimate Dream - a 'den' is what they're often called, but some folks might try to disguise their true purpose by calling them an 'office' or somesuch.
You can't get away with calling it a guest bedroom unless you can somehow convince visitors to sleep on a game table. They can use a large hill terrain piece as a pillow, amirite?
Seems totes legit.

*Hey, man. Can I get a gaming mat as a blanket, maybe?'
Pfft. Crybaby*

'Well gosh, SinSynn,' you might be thinking, 'the title mentions quitting. Why for would you wanna quit this magical thingy?'
Sigh.
I don't think its entirely possible to like, completely separate from the hobby. Besides the friends who will undoubtedly attempt to hoodwink or bamboozle you into returning, often by their mere existence (curse their eyes), the temptations are legion.
Worse still,you will suddenly find yourself with entirely too much time on your tentacles. Despite the fact that if you're anything like me, you: A) Have very impressive tentacles (Terran females, you maybe wanna jot that down. Just sayin.'), and: B) Managed to complain about the lack of quality gaming time you were allotted constantly, cuz stoopid responsibilities an' whatnot.
When you're no longer spending time at your Hobby Area, you'll be surprised at the amount of hours you actually managed to sequester yourself there. Safe and comfy and cozy and away from the awful, terrible world and its...responsibilities...and whatnots...
Stoopid...whatnots.
-_-

*I haz no idea how you Terrans deal with only having two of those awkward 'Hands' thingies*

Oh, sorry...what was I talkin' 'bout?
Tentacles. Right.
No, wait.
...
Too much free time. Got it.
This very concept is inconceivable to many people; working Terran parents with a clutch of larvae, by way of a for instance. Any spare time you manage to stumble across will likely be immediately filled with both responsibilities and whatnots.
If you ever do quit minigaming, or videogaming, or cosplay, or Dungeons and Dragons, or whatever particular, peculiar branch of the hobby you're into, ideally you'd like to take that precious free time and apply it to...something else, amirite?
For me, this just resulted in a return to videogaming in force, both on PC where World of Tanks was my preferred poison, and the consoles, where I was grabbed by the boo-boo and pulled headlong into the expertly crafted Gothic Horror/Action of Bloodborne and the Dark Souls series by From Software.
It's hard to classify that kinda thing as 'quitting the hobby,' I suppose. More like sidestepping.

Fer sure I was swearing up 'n' down that I wasn't gonna touch a mini ever again for like, a hot minute.
Ya gotta realize that for someone coming from a videogame background, the way minigame companies handle their franchises seems absolutely retarded and bordered on traumatizing.
Watching what Games Workshop did to 40k was practically physically painful to watch. Same with Battlefront's Flames of War (late war).
Battlefront decided that they needed to start selling moar Americans. Nobody played Americans. Since Battlefront has a fully-supported tournament circuit, and is very much a 'what's the latest OP List' type of game because of this, how do you think Battlefront went about selling moar Americans?
If you guessed 'introduce a ridiculously powerful unit, and then let folks build entire Armies around that unit,' then kudos to you, friend.
You've likely seen this pay to win kinda tactic employed by game companies of all stripes before, if you've spent any length of time in this hobby, sadly. When I saw the same Army List take like, 7 of the top 10 spots at the FoW Late War Nationals, I was content to toss my FoW armies in the closet.

*The American Tank Destroyer Platoon. They'll have 4 tanks, and the lil' scout vehicles will get pulled off the board and replaced with the TD's, who have a lovely 8 inches to deploy within. Then they get to shoot normally. They immediately wipe out an enemy tank platoon upon arrival. Gawd I hate them SO MUCH!*

Then two things happened around the same time - Infinity Version 3 released, and nerfed my Shas'vastii All-Camo Army so badly that the List was not just bad, but was now incredibly frustrating to run thanks to the ridiculous amount of Face to Face rolls you'd end up having to contend with.
T'was a sad day at The Project Xeno Death Camps that day, I gotta tell ya.
I was mad salty 'bout it, of course, and there might've been some butthurt sh*tposting.
Don't you judge me!
I was vexed, I tells ya.
Ah, waddayagonnado?
That's the minigaming gig in a nutshell - Each game has it's top tier armies, and then there's everybody else, and when sales start dipping it's time for a shakeup. That shakeup might mean your army army disappears from the game altogether, fer cryin' out loud.
If yer lucky you get da Nerfbat.
Blah, I say.

The second thing that happened was that my current Good Time Gaming Buddy Nascar (I live in the Bronx, NYC. Nobody uses their real name here. We all have dumb nicknames *shrug*) got hisself a fancy new girlfriend, and he disappeared as guys with fancy new girlfriends sometimes do. You can't get mad about this kinda thing; iz just life,
However, Like I said, I live in the Bronx, NYC. No one 'hobbies' here. you're better off trying to find likely candidates and corrupt them, if you want gaming partners, actually.

So that was it for me, at that moment in time. Clearly, the Dice Gods were angry with me, and I was being driven from Eden.
So, then...what made me come back?
Well, the aforementioned railroading, hoodwinking, bamboozling friends, for one. The Ultimate Rival introduced me to Battlefront's new-ish Team Tankee game, which features Cold War Era vehicles, including American Abrahms tanks...and those are awesome.
My initial misgivings about the game all proved true - the 15mm models are waaaaay to big for the 6x4 foot table. These more modern vehicles have fire ranges that are just insane. Why Battlefront didn't go with 10mm scale for this game is baffling. That would've allowed for more models, more potential for maneuver and all the good stuffs that comes with it.
As it stands now - the forces just line up and it basically comes down to a dice RNG game. The person with the better dice will always win. Tactics will rarely play a part in it since tanks can blast each other straight away from turn one.
Games never make it past turn 4, and a game that goes all the way to turn 6 is considered a 'Unicorn,' but whatevs. The models look cool and it's an excuse to hang out with a friend..all the while avoiding both responsibilities and whatnots.
:)

*Believe me when I tell you that these things are bigger than three Stugs from Late War FoW, but since it's that much larger, it'll actually be visible from more than two feet way so it'll be worth putting a cool paintjob on*

So I'm gonna build a lil' Team Yankee Army to play with the Ultimate Rival. The good news is that I can do something wacky with the paint jobs fer my 'Mericans, since I have little interest in 'historically accurate' paintjobs when these tanks are just crying out for a more Xeno - Styled paint job than yer conventional 'olive drab' with some wash on'em, I dunno...but I'll prolly...Nope, check that.
Imma definitely gonna do something off-the-wall, I think.
Zebra Tiger Stripes a lil' too much maybe?
:D

On the flip side, Nascar and the fancy girl are history, so he's available for gaming again, I believe.
Not sure what game we'll be playing. We were dabbling in a few,..

And then, my most horribly masochistic minigaming weakness of all is raising it's ugly head again in the form of the desire, nay- desperate need to build at least one 40k Dream Army before I die.
Grrrr...Imma do this, so help me.

I need to say this:
Those Horus Heresy 40k Black Library books, man...They're really to blame for my whole inability to get out from under all this madness. I'll admit something, and I swear I better not receive any judgement for it: The 40k Universe is my favorite sci-fi or fantasy Universe ever. I've read dozens and dozens of those books, man. I know so much about that universe, man, so it wasn't like I was gonna stop reading 40k books now, was it?
Sure, maybe subliminally setting myself up for failure, but whatevs. sad as it may be to admit, I am never not reading a 40k book nowadays.

*Do want. That I can spell Aaron Dembski-Bowden without having to check the spelling should tell you that  I'm a lil' bit of a gushing fanboi...YOU DON'T JUDGE ME!*

So you see, it's gonna be pretty hard for the average hobbyist to escape.
I broke down, and here I am. I iz weak. I haz shame.
But not too much. I missed this. I really, honestly, truly did.
Gettin' ready to dig up those dusty boxes filled with paints and half assembled models, figure out where I'm at, what my priorities are, where I wanna jump back in, etc.
So, I'll be back to droolin' over some new kit coming out, or the latest Dark Souls cosplay. I'll be spending the odd, quiet evening alternating between cursing and cheering my own minor successes when I'm assembling figs.

*An example of Dark Souls cosplay. This is Knight Artorius, the Abyss Walker...his story doesn't end well, but hey - that's Dark Souls for ya*

Maybe I'll have a podcast goin' in the earbuds, maybe there's Satan music, I dunno.
But I'm pretty sure I'll be grinning an overly toothy Xenos grin as I plot on a ridiculous paintjob for those big-ass Abrams tanks.
:D

Hope to see you in the next one, folks. This should be quite the comedy of errors, as I learn to do everything all over again,and I'm a clumsy oaf at the best of times.
Feel free to share your own 'quitting' stories below.
I'd never judge you.
;)

Until next time, folks...
I, uh...gotta come up with a new catchprase.
Suggestions welcome, cuz why not?

- SinSynn