(for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)
Good morning commissars and ethereals, welcome to Day 287-288 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
Yes. I know.
It is a goddamn miracle.
I am writing an entry to the quote unquote “daily series” that does not have over the span of a week between posts. Praise God, Satan, Lathander – whichever deity you choose to follow in life, because Rosalia has chosen to ramble on non-consecutive days in the same week…
…so of course I am going to be launching a weekly segment in this post similar to VTuesday because I am incapable of learning my lesson, but this is something I have had in the back of my mind since the start of the year, and I finally want to make it official.
Wednesdays will now be “Warhammer Wednesday”…
…Warnsdays?
A slightly more catchy title may be in development.
Throwing it back to my bingo card for the year, one of the squares I put down on it was “Get back into miniature painting”, which was essentially code for “Start exploring Warhammer again”, as the hobby was an important part of my formative years growing up and I want to see it with fresh eyes.
Which leads us into the story for today, because I cannot really understate how important Warhammer was for my childhood when I spent damn near seven years playing it regularly before I fell to the dark side of Magic: the Gathering. It was even the first foray into fiction writing in my life when I wrote a short story for a local gaming event that had a writing contest.
The contest was pitched as writing something on the day between games, but given I was an overachiever I came prepared with a two page story about a Dark Angels Interrogator Chaplain getting ambushed by some Warp Talons… think I might still have the certificate I won back then somewhere too.
Pretty much every Saturday in my early-to-mid teens was spent playing Warhammer, initially 40k where an old friend first introduced me to it, which eventually shifted over to a period of playing Warhammer Fantasy for a period of time before it shifted back over to 40k up until I became the sole steward of the club and we started playing other games such as Star Realms, my actual legit favourite card game of all time.
Oh yeah, that is a pretty important detail – this Saturday club was hosted in my local library and after a period of time I was the volunteer running the group, a task I was wholly unsuited for when I started but eventually it was just sort of being the mature/organised one in a group of friends more than anything else. It is what gave me a fierce defense of libraries as third spaces, as my local was essential to my personal development.
Back at my parent’s place there are still tons of boxes filled with my old gear, often acquired through people not wanting their own old stuff and me picking it up at a cheaper price, or in one instance, just for a box of Maltesers. I should be reclaiming some of it soon to add to the collection, but my main joy in the hobby came from building more than anything, hence why painting is my goal as I was not the best at that back in the day.
To that end, what caused my relapse?
This battleforce box specifically, themed around the Farsight Enclaves of the T’au faction. I have always had a soft spot for the Farsight Enclaves as a faction, both for their bold red colour scheme and what they represent in going against the grain of an established society…
…that said, I also hold a great deal of fear for T’au for how utterly dominant they were back in my day of playing seventh edition due to how much they owned the shooting phase and could deal with all sorts of threats.
Or maybe I am just salty because I was a Dark Eldar player and got my shit handed to me on the regular due to the fact I used masochists riding in paper boats as my main fighting force.
Regardless, I figured this would be a good start for getting myself back into building. Geometric shapes and flat panels would also make for easy painting practice once I finally got around to it.
I will be covering the model I started with today, which is of the eponymous commander of the Enclaves himself, Farsight. For this model and the model I built after this I was initially using Citadel Plastic Glue, but I quickly switched to Tamiya Extra Thin Cement after remembering how utterly shit the bottles that Citadel glue comes in.
Even with inferior glue, this was a fun build to attempt. Everything came together relatively easily, which is to be expected for a kit that did not come with many spare bits on the sprue – very few places to experiment with posing or alternative weapon options.
There was something oddly therapeutic about getting to build a plastic model again, something that I spent so much of my younger years doing but now as a much different person, though still the same nerd at heart.
Not too much to say beyond that, it was easy to follow the instructions with the numbers embossed onto the sprue and the model came together in a way I am very happy with.
Later editions of Warhammer Wednesday should cover a bit more detail about how I wanted to put the model together, though progress photos for some later models are a little sparse, so hopefully how I have built them is enough of a story.
Right, I have made something that came out not long after my last post, do I have the momentum again or is this another false start? Only one way to find out, and that is to keep moving forward. Thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you can engage in the hobbies that bring you the most joy, be they new or old, expensive or cheap.
Rosalia Rambles 