Take a step back.

 Hello world.

I'm going to try to keep this (somewhat) brief:

I returned to the hobby about a year and a half ago after purposefully removing myself from it for the better part of 20 years. Before that I spent a good chunk of my youth focusing on it, and a good chunk of that time working inside of it. Even after "leaving" the hobby, I was always side-eyeing it and keeping it in my peripheral if you will. As important as gaming once was to me, Because of lackluster mainstream games, companies leaning into a video game aesthetic, and me moving away from my primary gaming group, I never really felt the need to take the dive back in. However, over the past few years I was drawn back in by the kitbashing and oldhammer community - an appreciation for older art, models and an idea that we won't be drug into a relentless buying cycle and can instead focus on collection and enjoying games. I'm sure a fair bit of age and slowing down has something to do with it too.

It seems that many people in my age bracket also share a similar story, which has lead to a sort of comradery among us, which is what is leading to this blog.

Personally, I've always had a dumb appreciation for older clunky mechanics and an endless search for finding some gold among the discarded, to be brought to the surface and shined a light on for future hobbyists to maybe also appreciate. That goes back as far as I can remember - from old weird video games, to bartertown.org, the first years of ebay ... I always had the urge to keep track of the obscure, knowing that we might have missed that one diamond in the rough.

The long and short of it is this - I want an archive of all of the things i've done in the hobby so i can point people to how to's, show off the things I dig up and see my progress to keep me motivated. I also have a really shitty memory and I honestly forget how I even do things sometimes - I have a selfish interest in writing these things down to avoid future frustrations.

Instagram is an absolute dogshit platform for hobby related posts. Discord, while a great communication platform, also isn't great for archiving and showing step by steps on terrain building, painting, etc. At the end of the day, the blog reigns supreme...

Potentially. 

I'm fully expecting this place to not be updated regularly. Knowing myself and most blogs out there, this will most likely start strong and then taper off.

That said, I love the IDEA of a blog. I love the long format. I love that I can just ramble and over explain things. That there is no push and pull here, no algorithm incentivizing you to post, just free information for the masses to help push the hobby along and bounce ideas off of one another.

I'm going to start by going back and cataloging some of my hobby journey in the past year and things/projects/information that I think are worth having a hard post of in the world. The way our social media landscape works these days it's all about disappearing stories and monetized youtube videos. Not knocking these creators for doing their thing - but at the end of the day I don't really see these platforms standing the test of time because they require the advertising model to function - and I personally see that as a dead end.

Getting off my soapbox though and being realistic about this - we'll see how far I get. Life is busy, blogs require effort, and hobby time is ever shrinking as the hobby expands. the deeper you dig, the more things you have to do, the less time you have to do the things you want to get done. 

Doomed from the start. 

-kev