Hobby Challenges

    I'd been working on a script that takes a google form and turns the responses into a calendar event, as a way to help get eyes on challenges. It's also kind of just for me to see what's going down because I really like hobby challenges and wish more people would tell me about them. All of my favorite recent creations have been challenge entries. I think it's to do with putting me in an interpretive, editorial state of mind. Making little plastic dudes can be isolating, even though ostensibly we're doing it to play games with other actual humans. Hobby challenges give me a sense of connection to a the wider community and puts the practice into a cool context. 

    I had asked around in a couple hobby discords if anyone had heard of a comprehensive challenge calendar and no one had, though several folks said they thought it was a good idea. So I just went for it. The technical lift was pretty light (it only took me an hour to get it working) but I let the idea percolate for a few more days, adding features and squashing bugs, before making a post about it last Friday.

    And wouldn't ya know, it blew up! A couple creators with big followings shared it and it made its way around the hobbysphere on Instagram. Most importantly, a bunch of people added their events. I do think it stayed a little more around the freak side of things, which is fine, but I do want to get more normie eyes on it somehow. Maybe I can get GW or one of their many dedicated content creators to repost it one of these days.

    You can find the calendar here and the form to submit to it here, and if you want to help spread the word, you can share or repost this post. The plan is to do a periodic recap of the various challenges on this, and of course, do as many of them as I have time and inclination. There's so many challenges out there!

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    On Saturday, I was cleaning my hobby space (which I guess I'm now staunchly against) and took a careless step off the bottom of my basement stairs, turning my foot on the tube of a shop vac and breaking, I don't know, whatever this bone is.

    As trips to the ER go, this one was relatively painless and quick. I left with a cast, crutches (a cruel joke, these; I'd almost rather walk on a broken foot), and some tragically over the counter pain medication. On the ride home, I began to really seriously despair of my ability to hobby with a broken foot. They said this kind of thing heals on the order of four to eight weeks.  My hobby space is in the basement, at the bottom of a very cool but rather tight spiral staircase which at that moment felt unscalable.

    I needn't have worried. My partner and best friend pitched in and helped me move my desk upstairs, and set up a little hobby outpost for me. It's not as big as my workspace downstairs, but it's added a set of constraints that have made the past few days really interesting. In my workshop I've got my too large collection of paints, every brush, thinner, putty, clipper, file, terrain geegaw, and mostly useless gadget I've acquired over the years and barely, or never, used. But I don't have room for all that upstairs, so I had to make some decisions about what made the trip.

    I've been preparing for a Mordheim campaign that starts next month and I'm largely using stock minis (Stormvermin and Clanrats, a some Knucklebones stuff, some excellent sculpts from Manuel Boria) and those are all ready to paint. A game-focused approach to hobbying is not something I've ever tried before, really, and I liked it a lot: thinking about it on the scale of multiple figures, their relationship to one another, WYSIWYG, etc. But I have whatever kind of ADHD that makes context switching easy, and even necessary and often joyful. So I've decided to follow my impulse to switch gears, and I've set up the hobby outpost to focus on kitbashing and sculpting, two things I've not done much of in prepping the Chosen of the Horned Rat. 

     

    I've never really worked with metal minis, this much exposed anatomy, or building so much explicit narrative into a single mini. I'm trying to look at the next four to eight weeks off my feet as an opportunity to adjust my perspective on my practice and view my broken foot as a gift, in spite of how hard it is to go to the kitchen or shower. I'm firmly of the belief that constraints necessitate ingenuity. It's already proving true for me. 

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    I'm also trying to use the time to tackle organizing my massive STL library so it's more searchable than the three broad categories it's currently in (sci fi, fantasy, other). If you have tips for that drop a comment or DM me on instagram.