Reply To: [unofficial weekender] He did what?

[blinky465 17028xp 2]

Straight to questions of the week:

• What is your current favourite thing you do while painting/building in the hobby?
• If I’m in my workshop, I tend to queue up a load of Youtube videos and let them play in the background. I tend to drift in and out of them. If it’s something I like, I’ll down brushes and watch intently. If it’s music or a guitar tutorial or something, I’ll let it play and carry on painting/making/laser-cutting/printing or whatever. If I’m at home in the back room, it’s either silence or the radio playing on Alexa. Mrs Blinky hates silence. I rarely even notice it.

 

• Headset, speakers or full on hifi stereo: what is your main hardware to get audio into your head in context of our hobby? (While playing, building or painting)
• Speakers. Most of my audio comes from a computer of some sort. Sometimes I’ll wear headphones if it’s late at night and Mrs Blinky is watching/listening to something on the tellybox or the radio, but where possible, speakers.

 

• If you watch other people to hobby stuff live (like @brennon and @laughingboy streaming their painting) do you just watch and chat or are you doing hobby at the same time?
• I’ve never really watched a live stream of hobby stuff. I tuned into a couple of Hobby Hangouts and it was nice to join in and drop comments in the chatbox, but I’m so disorganised, I never know what day it is, let alone what time of day it is in order to tune in regularly!

 

• BONUS: Build, paint, play. What is your favourite aspect of this hobby?
• It’s hard to put it down to one thing. I’m really enjoying my hobby these days. I love the 3d printing – designing on the screen and seeing it come to life a few hours later. I’m finding painting to be less of a chore (I used to dread painting faces and edge highlighting, but I’m quietly confident with it now) and it’s actually quite enjoyable. I like making mini dioramas (I used to only ever paint single figures for use in games) but I think most of all, it’s been the community. A while ago, I stopped pretending I wasn’t a massive nerd, stopped giving a shite whether other people thought painting tiny plastic men was naff, and embraced the hobby. Chatting with likeminded people, being inspired/challenged to make cool stuff, sharing ideas and showing off progress – it keeps me inspired and I think that’s the best bit.

 

Pledges: Mrs Blinky is slowly becoming more mobile after her accident, so we’re getting out and about (even just going for a coffee) a bit more, which is taking up time. I’ve been dragged off-course with last weeks’ pledges – Earthworm Jim is complete, I just haven’t posted photos to the online project and marked as finished yet. Knight Rider is still in the early stages, because I got sidelined, making tiny little traffic lights after @avernos (or was it @sundancer?) said Marvel Crisis Protocol traffic lights needed some LEDs in them.

So I guess this week’s pledge is to finish Knight Rider and get my traffic lights painted up.

Here’s some music. I quite like the ska-punk trumpets and sax version of Reel Big Fish, but there’s just something about this stripped-down, angst-ridden noise that I really like: