It's all your fault, you encouraged them ...

Another day, another post. This time, it's my latest addiction - Firestorm: Armada. It's like Battlefleet Gothic but with no flying castles. I have chosen the Sorylian Collective as my fleet of choice to help the sales push at Wargames Inc. All next week I am running intro games for the peons who blight my life. I'm also proxying enemy fleets with BFG models, so you needn't feel like a lemon if you don't have the toys the cool kids have. You'll just look like that kid in the corner - you know, the outsider who no-one really likes. Which is why hugely muscular male barbarian miniatures are not homoerotic in any way whatsoever. Pictured below is 17cm of resin warship that actually fits together. That's right, it's nothing to do with Forge World at all.

A similar metal BFG ship (Cairn Class Tombship or Marine Battle Barge) will set you back £20, plus you won't actually be able to play a Games Workshop Specialist game in a Games Workshop store as the guys at GW Loughborough found out when the area manager bollocked the GW staff member who had foolishly allowed the regulars to play a GW game in a GW store. Apparently, as it's not a core game it's not welcome as it doesn't encourage massive sales of Space Machines. This was after the aforesaid regulars had done about £500 on BFG product. Really fucking professional to dress down a staff member in front of the customers and on the shop floor.

The above Sorylian battleship is in stark contrast to the latest bolus of plastic shit to be listlessly dripped from the sphincter of the GW design studio's derelict, rotting tract by some form of decrepit peristalsis. These atrocities are actually real models that are expected to sell. Looking like a skinned Damian Hurst exhibit, these things have been on the kind of steroid/antibiotic shit that are force-fed to beef cattle to the nth degree. Un-fucking-believable. Abdominal muscles all the way up to their necks and arms like Nelson's fucking column. All this screams 'I want to be a Rat-Ogre' in a loud voice. Not as skinned-rat looking like the 'Dire Wolves' in the Vampire Counts range, but rat looking all the same. Whoever put this shit together also understands nothing about anatomy, it seems, beyond the basic requirements of a biped - one head, two arms, two legs and a body.

I don't think that creativity should be stifled, but (paraphrasing from an interview with a GW sculptor I read a while back) you need to learn the rules before you can break them effectively. All this seems to have flown over the head of the deaf, blind, dumb and dead moron who okayed the go-ahead of this addition to the range of ungilded turds, who seems to not understand that you shouldn't have biceps over the shin bone. However, the number one crime that has been committed is the fact that they don't have cloven hooves.

Now call me a bitter classisist if you will (and I'll call you a twat) but having standard, clawed legs means these are just large Beastmen. That's all. I imagine that they will be really heavy hitters, but that won't change the fact that these models are just shit. And the fur - my God, the fur - looks like it has just got some doormats stapled to it's skin. Workshop has a shitload of cash invested in haptic sculpting tools and 3d software and spend a fortune on tooling these molds to pump out rotting smeg. They wouldn't do it if idiots (i.e. you) wouldn't buy the shit. That's the only way to make GW change their mind - hit them in the accounts department. However, don't take my rant for it here are the offending miniatures:

Now compare those to this green from Felix Paniagua (fired from the GW studio), a more traditional minotaur from his Avatars of War range:

Note how it looks like a minotaur, even though it is heavily muscled, and the hair looks like hair and not like a rug randomly glued to any extremity available. And it has the traditional cloven legs, not rippling fields of undulating meat contracting like an ocean of giant spasmodic penises. I fucking hate how they have completely ruined the flavour of the Beastmen army, leaving it bland and tasteless. Genericised for mass consumption it's like Big Mac special sauce but with the main ingredient being blood-flecked ejaculate. And it will be you fuckers that perpetuate this artistic blight. Twenty seven pounds sterling for three models. Like Tyranid Ravenors but shit. A massive let-down after the Trygon kit.

Right, it's midnight and I have had enough of the lack of taste that GW preys upon to shift most of it's fucking product. You may deserve this shit, but I don't.

Rob
Angry at the river of cash avoiding him

Madly in anger with you ...

Well, I'm back. I know, I know, I'm a lazy bastard who should blog more regularly. Obviously, I have nothing better to do because I spend most of my time snorting cocaine out of chorus girls' arseholes so I should be able to find the time to pause the hedonism and reconnect with the misfits who read the shit I post about. If I gave two squirts about the readership I would post more, but as I don't you can wait. The only way I'll be a regular blogger is if Metallica decide to follow this excremental tripe. And let's face it, I have more chance of becoming intimate with Gillian Anderson than that happening, so fuck you and your demands.

As to what I have been doing, well, that would be work. Fucking work takes up so much time I yearn for unemployment with it's scads of free time and high social status rather than the retail hell where I have to be nice to the life hoovers that suck away any vitality I have like socially inept, overweight psyche-vampires. Yes, I do mean you, fatty. The pointless tasks I have to perform daily grind down the poet in me like a particularly effective form of cult indoctrination. I am also less than keen on the almost exclusively male province of this past time. Far to many XYs about.

Hold on, I hear you cry. You said 'almost exclusively' which means some form of woman should come into the shop at some point. Why yes, they do. However, they are exclusively of the girlfriend/mother variety. I am reduced to purchasing the culinary services of beautiful women for my thrills. My only social interaction with the fair sex is purchasing a fucking breakfast sandwich or selling them something for their boyfriend/child and that is all.

Enough making you feel better about your lot and on to what little hobby I have been doing. After all, that's what you're here for. As you know, I have decided to do the Tyranid thing for my 40K army and here is the start: one Mawloc. Fully assembled and with some basecoat on the chitinous armour plates:


I am going for a more naturalistic feel than the standard 'nid scheme because I don't see why the most adaptable killers in the galaxy would forgo camouflage just because they are hard as coffin nails. I am also trying to get 20 points of my Skorne done for February, so here they are in their unpainted glory:

It's for a tournament and is as follows: Tyrant Xerxis, a full unit of Cataphract Cetrati, 2 Cyclops Brutes, an Agoniser and a Bloodrunner Master Tormentor - nice and simple and hopefully a quick paint as well. All the models will be painted with P3 paints (the colour on the Mawloc is P3 Battlefield Brown) so with a bit of luck I'll be able to use the fucking range soon.

I also have to paint a random fantasy miniature for a painting competition I'm running at Wargames Inc so if any of you fancy putting brush to model and entering pop on down before the end of February and I'll cave your fucking face in with the till. Or let you enter the compy. It depends on how capricious I'm feeling.

I haven't done any sculpting and my literary output has slowed simply because of the amount of time the shop takes up, which isn't sitting well with me. I always swore I wouldn't become a worker drone but it seems I'm becoming what I hate. Irony sucks. But not as much as you.

If you've managed to force yourself to read this far and are a regular (you really should have something better to do than read this bollocks) you might remember I promised a picture of the last miniature I painted before I had a break from the hobby (got a life and got some at the same time). Well here it is, one old school warrior of chaos (a Perry sculpt, I think):

The pictures are a bit blurry because I took them with my camera phone, but you can't have everything, can you? Otherwise I'd be a lottery winner in a posh whorehouse by now. Or I'd hire prostitutes to come to my batchelor pad. I wonder if you get a cheaper rate if you hire them to clean your flat with no sex? Send me a couple of grand and I'll find out for you.

Well, I'm running out of polite conversation, so I'll draw this entry to a close. I still haven't had any, I'm still a slow-ass painter and I still lose too much of my life to work. Status quo it is. That's right, my life is still the same three fucking chords all the damn time, even in this brand new decade. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, I suppose.

Rob
Angry at the phallocentric nature of the hobby