Better Know A Blogger featuring... Me!

Despite barely blogging of late, Michael over at St Andrews Wargaming asked me if I'd mind being interviewed for his Better Know A Blogger series. Of course I was more than happy to oblige, especially since Michael has supported Blog Wars and is coming along to Double Trouble. Anyway, you should all head over to his blog and have a look at my "interview" and also the previous articles in the series where other bloggers have answered the same questions. I've enjoyed reading their responses because I rarely get to know much about the other members of this community.

It's ironic really because the whole point of starting Blog Wars was as a means to get to know more people behind the blogs I read. Sadly, in running the events I didn't get much chance to chat. That isn't to say I didn't meet some great people in the 10 events over the 5 years of Blog Wars but there's only a handful that I know much about out of the 100+ people that attended in that time.

The process itself was a great way of reminiscing about some of my hobby past. It's interesting to think about what got me into the hobby and some of the experiences I've had along the way to where I am now. I lament my lack of time to both paint and play at the moment and tournaments are definitely something that have fallen off my schedule at the moment. It seems like whenever I see one advertised I've already got plans for the weekend in question. A great example of this is the GW Battle Brothers event in July. I'm free for it but my usual partner at these things, Matt, isn't. We just can't seem to get it together lately. Perhaps things will improve as our kids get older.

This lack of time has driven me towards playing more board games and quicker games like X-wing (which is awesome - you really should play it). I think I'd be quite content just to work my way through FFG's collection frankly. I have a bit of an apathy to 40K as a whole at the moment. The game is getting more and more complicated to the point where I just don't feel like I know any of the armies any more. There used to be a time when I could tell you pretty much everything about every army but I'm not even close to that point right now. It's as much about me as it is about the game mind you.

Anyway, head on over to Michael's blog and check out those articles. If you're a blogger too then I'd encourage you to contact Michael and be interviewed too. It's great to get to know more about you all.

I'll have to have a reminiscing post at some point soon where I look over some of my photos of old models and flick back through my 2nd edition rulebooks!

Review of 2015

Well it's been over a week (nearly two in fact) since I've posted for various reasons. A combination of frantically building models for my games with Matt last Monday (some thoughts on the new Tau and Betrayal at Calth were in the previous post), illness, Star Wars and general seasonal busyness have given me very little blogging time.

Blogging

After a big year for From the Fang in 2014, this year was a comparative slump. I had 430,000 pageviews last year compared to 340,000 this year. That may not sound significant but before then I'd seen a year-on-year increase in hits. You can see from the graph that there's been a massive downturn. In fact, September 2015 was the worth month's viewing I've had since Feb 2013! It probably didn't help that I only posted 5 times in September mind you.

There have been some successful posts though, my Imperial Knight magnetisation tutorial has garnered over 2,000 views and the Harlequins posts got a huge chunk too with the first part of the review being read 3,000 times. Seems like I should've done a Skitarii codex review too since my post telling people to go read Jamie's reviews has 1,800 views!!

I wanted to scale back my blogging this year to give me more time for hobby related activities. I've only posted around 80 times this year which is about two thirds of the number of posts last year. You'd think that would translate into more painted models and generally more stuff done but it really hasn't but I'll get to that. I'm pretty comfortable with this kind of pace though. It still means I'm averaging more than 1.5 posts per week. I'd like to even that out a bit though so there aren't droughts followed by a flood of posts. Still, I wish I was getting more hobby content up on here for people as I think that's where I'd like the blog to go.

Hobby Progress
Well, another abysmal year really. I'm still not able to field a full army of "finished" models. I'm not even close. I had the idea of starting an IK army so that I could really go to town on a very small number of miniatures and produce something I'm happy with. I've not even finished the first one and the other three are all in boxes still.

I signed myself up for Dave Weston's Hobby Season but it hasn't been the motivator I hoped it would be. Ultimately I know what motivates me the most. Tournaments. If I know I've got to get an army finished in time for a particular date I make a concerted effort. Otherwise I do little bits here and there. My Tau got quite a bit of love thanks to our friendly mini-tournament at WHW. My Tau look much better for it but there's still work to be done. The problem with working towards an army in that fashion though is that I tend to work on multiple models at once like a production line. Base colours on all of them, followed by washes on all of them, etc. I think I should start focussing on a single model, get that completely finished and move onto the next. That way I actually feel like I'm getting somewhere rather than starting with 10 unfinished models and ending up with 10 slightly more finished models.

As usual, despite trying to avoid distractions I've ended up working on the Calth miniatures and my new Stormsurge in preference of finishing existing stuff. What I need are small weekly or monthly goals to help me structure my hobby time and not feel overwhelmed with the amount I've got to complete. More on that soon then.

Tournaments
This hasn't exactly been a bumper year for tournament play. I played in an Outpost event in January finishing in a respectable 9th. My next tournament was my first X-wing event in March where I placed bang on mid-table which I was pleased with considering how many scum squadrons I played despite not knowing anything about them! The rest of the year consisted of a single game at BW9 and three at BWX. That's it.

The question is, do I actually want to attend more next year? Matt and I have signed up for a doubles at the Outpost in March, there'll be Double Trouble in June (more in a minute) and finally Fluffageddon in November. The Outpost is getting its act together again though so maybe there'll be some more events I fancy in between. I just find the scene a little difficult right now with too many variables of FW, formations, super heavies, etc. I was never doing that well but at least I was enjoying the games and feeling like I was in with a shot of winning them most of the time. We'll see how I feel as the year progresses but at the moment I don't think tournaments (or playing in them at least) will be a big part of my plans.

Blog Wars and Double Trouble
From my perspective BW9 and BWX were the best events I've ever run. They both had nearly maximum attendance with 48 and 50 players respectively. That's awesome but more importantly the feedback I got was generally excellent. Nevertheless, I decided that the format was getting a bit tired and from my end it was growing stale. In 2016 I'll be doing things totally differently. Double Trouble will, as the name suggests, be my first ever doubles event and a departure from BW in a lot of ways. The atmosphere will remain the same theoretically but otherwise it'll be a very different event. I just hope I get the support that you've all given BW over the years. I'm sorry I haven't gotten round to releasing more details or getting tickets up for sale but I'll be doing so shortly after the new year.

DT will be my only event next year know as Matt takes up the reins in November to run a singles event in the form of Fluffageddon. That means a great big chunk of time is freed up for me the second half of the year. I'll be helping Matt in any way I can as it's his first event but expect a similar feel to Blog Wars. Again, I hope we'll get similar numbers to Blog Wars.

Other Games
I'm not ruling out the possibility of more X-wing events in 2015 and in fact, I feel more enthusiastic about such tournaments than 40K ones. Having said that I really haven't been keeping up with the latest releases and we've barely played it recently. Matt got the big star destroyer for Christmas though so I expect we'll arrange something soon. With Matt now being a proud parent for a second time our gaming time is limited so I expect we'll have more evening gaming sessions instead of full days. That probably means smaller games like X-wing and some of the specialist GW games.

Speaking of which, we had a great first session of Betrayal at Calth. It had a lot more tactical depth than I expected with the simplistic rules and despite feeling like the odds were against my Ultramarines early on I finally managed to win a scenario at the end of the session. We'll hopefully finish the campaign soon and swap sides for another play through. I'm really happy to see GW continue to put out these standalone games and it's had the desired effect of tempting me into 30K miniatures. Whether I'll take more of a plunge though remains to be seen. Rumour has it GW is looking at specialist games again so I'd love to see new releases for Bloodbowl, Necromunda and Epic in 2016.

What's been frustrating is that X-wing hasn't drawn more of my friends into the hobby. Scott now has quite a collection of Rebel ships but Sam, Billy and Steve didn't succumb and buy anything. They all seem content to use our models for the occasional session rather than buying their own and making it a more regular occurrence.

Conclusion
My enthusiasm for the hobby (playing and painting alike) has been on a bit of a roller coaster this year. We really haven't gotten many games in at all this year. I hope this changes in 2016 but it's probably unlikely. It makes me question whether I can really justify having a whole room of my house dedicated to gaming or whether I should convert the room into a study where I can still paint models but make the table an occasional addition to our dining room (or even garage) instead. It'd only be a short term enterprise anyway as once my little boy is big enough, that'll be his room.

I'll talk about my hobby resolutions in the next post but it's going to be a period of consolidation rather than expansion I think.

From The Fang Blogroll

Just a quick post this evening to say that I'm always prepared to add other blogs to my "Recommended Reading" segment on the right (web version of the blog only). I know there were a couple of people who'd already sent requests to be added but there's been an issue with Blogger preventing me from adding them so please get back in touch and I should now be able to add you.

I tend to filter through them from time to time and remove blogs which haven't had posts for a few months but other than that there's no restriction. Well, they have to be wargaming related at least (though not necessarily 40K). I'm always looking for more blogs to add to my own reading list so the more the merrier!

Please use the "contact me" link on the right (again web version only) and send me your details and I'll add you as soon as you can. I'd appreciate you linking back to From The Fang in return but again, this isn't compulsory. I get a reasonable amount of traffic, around 1200-1500 pageviews per day, so hopefully you'll see some extra visitors.

New Additions to the Blog Roll

Here's a quick run down of the blogs I've added to my "Recommended Reading" section on the right. I'll try and keep an eye on them and make sure they're all active. These have been added from the comments on yesterday's post. I've not had chance to flick through them in too much detail yet but wanted to get them out there for everyone to enjoy. Oh and come back tomorrow for the first of a series of articles about how I'm trying to make Blog Wars 6 the best it can be.

40K Hobby Blog
Some beautifully painted miniatures on display here and the author is also working on some stuff for the Nova Foundation which is a cause well worth supporting. He's got a warhound titan on his painting table at the moment too.

40K Warzone
An Australian blog who do some awesome commission painting work. There are also tactical guides a few of the 40K armies that I'll be checking out when I've got more time.

Confessions of a 40K Addict
I've come across this blog before in one of my browsing sessions but never bookmarked until now. There are some excellent STC (building templates) as well as some excellent downloads alongside a steady supply of blog posts. He also recently attended the Battle Brothers one dayer at WHW and came second but we all know they let anyone do well at that thing!!

40K Daemons
I'll give you three guesses what this blog is about. Even if you aren't a Daemons player I'd recommend checking them out as it's always a good idea to know your enemy (speaking of which I intend to restart my series and update it for 6th edition).

Immaterium Press
Seemingly a tournament orientated post (which people seem to refer to FTF as too) , the author has also been taking a look at the X-Wing game that I've been sorely tempted to get into.

Den of Imagination
A Polish blog who also do commission painting. In fact your might recognise the Dark Angels as the army used to win the painting competition at Blog Wars. Rest assured that I'll be trying to encourage people to only enter the comp at Blog Wars 6 if they painted it themselves. Still some awesome work on display here.

La Taberna De Laurana (Laurana's Tavern)
As you might imagine this is a Spanish blog so for most of us it'll require Google to translate it for us to enjoy. They cover a lot of rumours and the name rings a bell from the Tau rumours as I believe they were one of the sites with a leak. Still, worth checking out.

Table Top Addicts
Seems like there's a lot of this addiction thing going around. I don't know what they're talking about, I can quit at any time, really I can! Seems like a relatively new blog but already plenty of content on there. Again it seems like they attend plenty of tournaments so worth checking out.

Sincain40K
Some beautifully painted armies with well written background fluff. Always nice to see and a nice easy site to browse.

How To Lose at 40K
Regular readers will know I don't have any problems with that. Anyway, there are some great hobby "How To" articles here and some rule discussion that I'll be looking at as you all know it's something I'm keen on.

L33tlike.us
Some great articles about airbrushing, something I'm always tempted by but never get around to investing in. Anyway, there are some great posts here and they also have a lot of videos if you have the time to watch them.

Facing the Grey Tide
Finally another relatively new blog with a good deal of content already. Some great conversion articles including some about adding lights to models. I'll definitely be coming back to this one.

Right, that's all for now. I'll be adding all of these to the blog roll and hopefully their authors will return the favour. Apologies if I've missed the point with any of these but as I say I haven't had chance to browse them thoroughly.

Updating My Blogroll - Suggestions Welcome

Whilst replying to some comments on a recent post I noticed that a lot of the my "Recommended Reading" blogs hadn't been active for a few months. I've therefore deleted some of the inactive ones but it'd be good to replace them with new and interesting blogs. I'm particularly interested in hobby related blogs as I often flick through them for inspiration. I'll also be adding some of these blogs to my Feedly account to keep me enterained when I'm stuck in an airport or whatever.

I tend to end up heading down a rabbit hole sometimes with blogs as you see an interesting article in the blogroll of a blog you read and then spot another article whilst reading that. By the time you surface a few hours have passed but you can't remember the names of the blogs you read and I'm too lazy to figure it out from my browser history.

Right, I'll keep it short for a change. Please leave comments with any suggestions of blogs you regularly read or even your own blog. Anything I like the look of with regular posts I'll add to my blog roll.