Geeking Out

As you may have guessed, I am a nerd. (Or geek - is there a difference?)

I am a video game fanatic, and I enjoy table top wargaming (really!).

After Christmas my daughter and I spent ten (10!) straight hours playing the new Skylanders video game (we have more than a dozen of the characters).  Plus four hours each day off and on over the time period between (until DW put a moratorium on the game yesterday - boo!).  She has learned some new words, as I have mentioned previously, like "little ba$tard$" and "little fu__ers".  She has also learned to negotiate, as in - "maybe mommy will let us play Skylanders now that I have done a s-h-i-t-load of reading today".  And yes, she did actually spell it out.  Again - parents of the year we are not.

I also like to get my geek on about once a month playing Warhammer 40k (if you don't know it, don't bother, just trust me, it's for nerds).  It occurred to me over the course of tonight's discussion that I despite spending a great many hours painting the models for this game (yes, they're unpainted, numerous, and highly detailed) I play very, very rarely, and I suck very, very much.  I am in it for the painting. My armies are very nicely done (or so I am told) and my "centerpiece" models (you know, the big flashy ones that get blown to pieces first when the first bullets fly) look very nice indeed (again, so I'm told, and I've also won a couple of contents, which I take advantage of to obtain even more pieces of metal and plastic to paint).

I've been painting and playing (with a 10% overall win ratio) since - get this, 1996. That's 15 years, people.  As I spoke these words tonight I almost fell over.  That's just shy of 50% of my life.  I guess that's what a hobby is.  I guess I'll be doing this for a much longer time, too.  I know people who have been playing since the game first came out in the 1980's - holy $hit!

In that time I have spent literally hundreds of hours (possibly thousands, but that seems high) painting these models, hunched over a desk with a fine scale paint brush in my hand, all with the express purpose of playing a game I may play for four hours, about once a month.  I have models I have painted (and in one instance re-painted) but NEVER used.  I'll likely never sell many of them, even the ones I haven't played.  When I die I'll leave them to someone in my will (I'm still deciding who).

My latest hobby is playing with my daughter.  She is just picking up the "fun" board games (as opposed to the watered-down kiddy version of games), which is much more appealing than playing Barbies or stuffed animals.  She plays LEGO (mostly my old LEGO, of which there is no small quantity).  She plays videogames (as I have mentioned above).  For a little while I even had her playing Warhammer 40k.  I was quite excited about this, but once I started trying to teach her the "real" rules, her enthusiasm flagged, and her interest in painting the models has diminished (but not entirely extinguished).  I think getting her to play 40k is ultimately a lost cause.  :(

Why am I telling you all this? Perhaps because you are bored enough to be reading it until the very end.  And maybe I just like talking to myself (typing to myself?) because that's just the sort of thing I do.  I'll post more on that very, very soon.