Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Heeeeere's Johnny!

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Some peculiar questions this month:

• Having just seen how fast your hobby/passion can drop to a total zero[*]: Is your hobby insured? Will you get some compensation when your hobby room catches fire, is robbed or some form of elemental damage due to natural disaster.

*My* hobby passion? It hasn’t dropped, mate. If anything, it’s gone up. I’m painting more minis, more regularly than I think I have done at any time in the last thirty years or so! My hobby is gear isn’t specifically insured. Sure, I’d be gutted if it got destroyed (moreso than if it got stolen – a few years ago, a few teams of my Blood Bowl minis I’d painted back in the 90s appeared on eBay; I’d long suspected a ex-housemate had stolen them when he left abruptly but then over the years, forgot all about it – until my “pro painted” Zug and Griff Oberwald and a human team and a skaven team appeared for £140 each!)

I used to have a “life purge” every few years – almost like a “self destruct” button, just to see if I still had the ability to start again from nothing, so losing everything (materially) doesn’t – or at least didn’t – hold much fear: I gave away my entire belongings (ok, everything but the bricks and mortar of my house) one time and went to live in France. Gave everything away to move back to the UK. Did it again, to “downsize” to move onto a narrowboat (seriously, if your belongings are more than an acoustic guitar and a couple of books, don’t even consider living on a narrowboat!). Gave the boat away to move back on land.

Hell, I even gave my house away (though it turns out, to my partner of 25 years who is now my wife in all but name). That’s actually quite interesting, legally!

All that said, I think I’d be a little less cavalier these days – but if my home (ok, Nick’s house) survived – and obviously everybody is unhurt – I don’t think losing a little hobby gear would have *that* much of an affect on me. I’d save up, buy a 3d printer and have a starter set of paints pretty much straight away though!

 

• At what point does an “unofficial anything” (like uHH or this thread) get “official”?

When you’re asked by the owners to create it, I guess? I mean, more and more it’s content like this that keeps me coming back to the site – it is actually starting to crack at the edges and is soooo slow at times. It’s a long while since I posted anything in the projects system; and that’s mostly because I got so sick of losing stuff when it failed to save while posting. I’ve sort-of lost interest in the weekender videos, even, so it’s stuff like this and the hobby hangouts that keep me coming back.

 

• And this one is a real spicy one and really just “food for thought”: if BoW/OTT where to transit to a new homepage/forum/project system (for what ever reason) and had to start from scratch, would you join in again or would that be a point in time where you’d reconsider being part of it?

This feels like a bit of a leading question! Seeing how closely you and Gerry work on your “unofficial” stuff, and how much more “in control” Gerry seems to be since the Brothers Johnson took a step back… it feels like someone is testing the waters here, more than a hypothetical question? Cheeky!

I’ve said for a while, I came for the content, and stayed for the community. I have flirted with the idea, in the past, of cancelling my subs and moving on elsewhere. But it seemed awfully petty, for the price of a coffee and a bun (though in recent months, just the coffee – thanks to runaway inflation in the UK, caused by some mysterious event that is in no-way politically related that stops us talking about it). I quite glad I stayed, even if engagement is relatively low at the minute (it’s been waning ever since Discord was introduced, but we’ve been over that one ad inifinitum).

The current forums/projects system really *do* need an overhaul. I’m never a fan of niche sites built on “frameworks” – so much potential functionality is lost because everything is limited by “we don’t have a plugin for that” or “that plugin breaks this one so we had to leave it out” – WordPress was ok for the 2000s but it’s not really a platform for a multi-user, multi-function site. If it were me, I’d build my own site entirely from scratch (but then again, I’ve been messing about with technology and websites for 30 years and currently have a lot of time on my hands!)

I guess the short answer is “I’d probably give it a go”. But – much like when you lose everything in a house fire and re-evaluate what’s important to you – I’m starting to think about what matters to me at the minute, which hobbies really excite me, and which need a purge (this constant feeling of not-enough-hours-in-the-day is quite tiresome!). But it’s always nice to have something comforting to come back to.

A little more engagement from the new site owners would be important – since I don’t “do Discord” it feels a little like Warren has fallen off the face of the earth and the rest of the crew aren’t around on the forums like they used to be. It is a little peculiar that we had the whole “cult of games” idea forced up on us, then the cult leader abdicated!

Here’s your music:

I have three sisters. The youngest discovered this track in my CD collection a few years ago. Now when we all get together (encouraged by my mum and the aforementioned “wife” if it’s a family occasion) she always insists that I have to put “my favourite track on”.