Cafe Press does cocktail plates. http://www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/makeadesign2.aspx?clear=true&no=745#designer

You'd have thought so wouldnt you?

I mean we've got some utterly cringeworthy mugs my father in law bought us that have my wife and I's photos all over them.

He meant well giving us personalised mugs but when people come over and you make them a coffee you look like a total ego maniac when your drinking mugs have pics of your self on them!

You'd have thought so wouldnt you?

I mean we've got some utterly cringeworthy mugs my father in law bought us that have my wife and I's photos all over them.

He meant well giving us personalised mugs but when people come over and you make them a coffee you look like a total ego maniac when your drinking mugs have pics of your self on them!

Have nude pictures of yourself on your personalised mugs, that way you just look like a maniac.

I think this is what royalty feels like: the uneasy feeling that people are drinking their tea out of cups with your face on it.

when did THIS happen? lol

You'd have thought so wouldnt you?

I mean we've got some utterly cringeworthy mugs my father in law bought us that have my wife and I's photos all over them.

He meant well giving us personalised mugs but when people come over and you make them a coffee you look like a total ego maniac when your drinking mugs have pics of your self on them!

Have nude pictures of yourself on your personalised mugs, that way you just look like a maniac.

Especially if you photoshop other people's faces over yours.

So when should we start pushing for a repaint/modelling sub-forum? I honestly thought there would have been more of a demand for it than off-topic.

So when should we start pushing for a repaint/modelling sub-forum? I honestly thought there would have been more of a demand for it than off-topic.

There has been. Basically every single thread about sub forums has everyone saying we need a modeling one. And that's beside the half dozen threads dedicated specifically to the need for a modeling sub forum specifically.

So when should we start pushing for a repaint/modelling sub-forum? I honestly thought there would have been more of a demand for it than off-topic.

There has been. Basically every single thread about sub forums has everyone saying we need a modeling one. And that's beside the half dozen threads dedicated specifically to the need for a modeling sub forum specifically.

That's what I mean. We've all read so many threads asking for it, but we got an off-topic sub first. Just a casual read through the topics and you see there's a huge demand there.

After the new year im going to collate the feedback in my 'what subforums do you want' thread

and also list general feelings and suggestions of the player base and feed it back to the mod i was chatting to via pM

They may take no notice, they may appreciate the feedback.

I think the best think we can do really for the modelling thread/sub forum would be to keep the exisiting thread prominant.

If we *really* wanted to get one quick then the 'git' way of doing it would be to spam the main board with constant modelling pics so that game content got pushed out. But that would be utterly awful, annoy a lot of people and be the *wrong* way to go about it

But in honesty i think the OT sub forum most likely came up because about a third of topics on the main board were OT and about 10 per cent of the board were getting annoyed by them. enough to report them which is what will get a mods attention fastest.

I mod for a lot of forums and run the pages for my band and for my magazine.

While i dont read every post every day... if someone reports something i get a PM *and* and email about it so im aware of it so i can go in there and delete the spam for p*** sites, african warlords wanting to help share a $4million fortune and lonely wives in your area dying to chat to you....

So lets keep plugging at the paint thread, keep painting to show its part of the hobby. Hopefully FFG will agree

The trick will be to be reasonable and polite, i know it sounds obvious but the irony of being unpolite (in some peoples eyes) about bacon being a catalyst to this sub forum starting is not lost on me.

The problem with prepaints may be...

its not their business model. They dont make money off paints like GW etc do.

When i was in marketting (community and events dept manager for organised play) i spent *ages* pushing for 'pre paints' of the popular armies (blood angel marines, orks, high elves, orcs, eldar), just basic pre paints.

I'd seen 'dragon' do reasonable prices excellently painted 20mm scale panzers and for me being into WWII i bought loads of these (painted as well as i can paint or better) at £12 then any plastic and metal kits i'd have to paint myself for £8.

I pointed out that a lot of people play with unpainted stuff and just are not interested in assembling and painting toy soldiers, they just want to play 40k of WFB. I put a really strong case for making pre paints out.

A manager about three levels above me (he'd been there since the early 80s) shot it down with one line

'it's not the GW hobby'

By this he meant that *their* way of doing stuff is to get you invested in the building, painting etc

FFG might not want a painting sub forum as it might send out the subconcious message that 'their stock paint jobs are poor' (we all know they are not but the layman might see it as that if a lot of people are repainting) and also it might push people into spending money on paint and brushes rather than plastic ships that are already painted thank you very much!

But that's just the cynical marketing manager in me speaking.

"...its not their business model. They dont make money off paints like GW etc do."

A counter to this is to point to al the people who have bought 6+ falcons just to do conversions and custom paint jobs.

Oh yeah, i totally agree tons of people *do* do it.

In the same way that as OP manager for GW i saw *thousands* of people play warhammer without even gluing the arms onto their metal marines let alone paint them.*

But some companies have a view of what 'their hobby' is.

With GW it was clearly that painting and modelling is as much a part of the 'hobby' as gaming (actually in the recent chapter house law suit with GW one senior manager went on record as saying the GW hobby was ' *buying* (my emphasis) GW miniatures' and didnt say anything about painting or playing

I don't disagree with you at all. I was playing devils advocate in that if you for example produce what you consider to be 'finely painted gaming pieces, ready out the box'... you might be shooting your own advertising in the foot by admitting that they might look better with some acrylic splashed over them

* to the point we had to put in rules to say that models at organised play events had to be 'painted' and even specify that 'painted' was at least three different colours on the model (not including undercoat) and with a base in a different colour or textured with flock. I almost sent a Warhammer World staff member home once for turning up at a Grand Tournament with a marine army he had spray painted bright pink, splashed black paint on the weapons and flat green on the bases. While a *customer* would have got away with it he was supposed to be a 'hobby specialist' in the gaming venues store and it looked *really* bad for us as a company.

Don't spam the board with model pics. Just post a few OT models of other games, like star trek, horrorclix or dropzone comander. Or 40k space marines painted to resemble MLP characters.

so the admins will take all the crazy model threads and put them on a subforum.

* to the point we had to put in rules to say that models at organised play events had to be 'painted' and even specify that 'painted' was at least three different colours on the model (not including undercoat) and with a base in a different colour or textured with flock. I almost sent a Warhammer World staff member home once for turning up at a Grand Tournament with a marine army he had spray painted bright pink, splashed black paint on the weapons and flat green on the bases. While a *customer* would have got away with it he was supposed to be a 'hobby specialist' in the gaming venues store and it looked *really* bad for us as a company.

It is interesting that you pointed this out, years ago I was interested in making my hobby a career, we had a GW store locally. I sent in my resume; at the time, twenty year veteran of tabletop RPG GM/DM/player, miniature war gaming, writing, model painting, retail sales, commission sales and customer service. Just before the interview a regional manager contacted me by phone and asked to see my painting portfolio. After three days of gathering, photographing my collection and the work I had done for others, I met with the manager. I had a case of completed work and my portfolio, the guy spent ten minutes looking over the material then excused himself for a phone call. Maybe forty-five minutes later; I am hanging out in their store with all my stuff, he brought me back in the office to offer me a job, different from what I was expecting. Sort of floating hobby specialist for salary; which pretty much went above what I was expecting, except that my car at the time was garbage and that I had to work some things out before I could commit.

Two days later I took a higher paying position in a completely different industry, when I called the manager and told him, he had offered me a slight increase and a possible opportunity for assistance with my transportation. I turned him down, in hindsight though, I am glad I did. Two years later, several of the GW stores in my region had shut down and most of those guys had to find jobs elsewhere.

The whole forced painting of minis idea is not lost on me; I just look back at that and wonder, would that have wrecked my passion for the hobby or bolstered it?

It killed mine.

I mean you do 40k day in day out for five years, you're epected to have 'up to date' armies if you play in public (to a degree) i lost all entusiasm, a lot of us did. As i said in another thread a lot of us were all into 'rapid fire' (a WWII game) and most people in trade sales and uk studio had a 20mm wwii army, guys in group studio and legal played it too!

(one of the old group studio managers went off to set up flames of war... basically applying the GW marketing and army approach to WWII so you see it worked and was popular)

I liked painting up new stuff when it came in. Some of my imperial guard are in the old 'collectors guide', ive a few tanks in 'imperial armour' books, some stuff in WD and my faveis that my inquisitor character is in the games rulebook but whole armies depressed me.

I had a fully painted cadian 3000 point army in metal and a similar sized dark elf one.

Sold them both to rebuild with the new plastics (hey they were free so it was no expense) but only painted a platoon of plastic cadians up before i got bored of doing guardsmen and i didnt even stick my dark elves together or undercoat them.

Nearest i got to finishing a new army (other than my LOTR easterling one that i did) in 28mm was a big bright pink and electric blue tzeencth army. I'd done all the base coats on that and it was on my desk (we painted during lunch quite a bit) but i had my sorceror lords 'familiar' as one of the unreleased 'nude' chained slavegirls from the dark eldar sail barge kit.

One morning i came in to find someone (had to be a staff member, it was a card swipe entry into uk studio) had stolen my rare familiar model. I could probably have repainted it (i had a spare) but the fact that someone i had drinks and gamed with had stolen my mini depressed me so i shelved the whole army and didnt play any games for a while.

Over reaction now in retrospect but i was highly annoyed knowing one of my colleagues was a thief at the time.

I once had a job in UK retail when i was a student for TWO DAYS.

I used to be a regular 'hanger out' in the store, i'd paint their new releases for them (they were always swamped with stuff to paint) and i'd get discount or free models on the side.

When one of the regular staff members left Rob the manager said 'Gadge do you want a job', we had an 'interview' which was him basically telling me where the coffee was kept etc. I was on his team, had been unnoficially for ages almost.

Anyway after the second day he said 'oh the new area manager needs to approve my staff'

So i went to leeds with a case load of figures but didnt get on that well with the Leeds manager (i thought he was a bit of a prat, it must have showed). I had to do a demo game of 'epic 40k' for some guys who walked in and were about 40.

I know how to run demo games, i do great ones for kids and teens but theses were adults and the first thing they said was 'we've played space marine and titanicus for years, how is the new version different'. So i ran them a game and told them the subtle and not so subtle changes, made it fun and engaging.

I was sacked the next day as the area manager thought i wasnt 'frothy' enough. Basically i was expected to go waaaargh and make flamer and bolter noises and patronise two veteran gamers as in the AM's head all intro games had to be ran like you were presenting a TV show for toddlers.

My local store manager couldnt apologise enough

Revenge is good served cold though and at a later point in GW I was running a dept in Lenton HQ so if i rang up the leeds area manager and said jump, he said how high (cant say i ever was that petty though).

Yeah, that's gotta suck. Nothing worse than a thief in the workplace. It's a shame they can't be hung, drawn and quartered anymore.

I've been working on various projects, all associated with gaming in one aspect or another for the last few years and I'm finding it rather hard to stay enthused with one project for very long. I keep swapping around just to keep mixing things up. Some days I can work for around 12 hours straight on a project, and other days I find I'll work on half a dozen different projects during the day. It does seem you can have too much of a good thing.

I once had a job in UK retail when i was a student for TWO DAYS.

I used to be a regular 'hanger out' in the store, i'd paint their new releases for them (they were always swamped with stuff to paint) and i'd get discount or free models on the side.

When one of the regular staff members left Rob the manager said 'Gadge do you want a job', we had an 'interview' which was him basically telling me where the coffee was kept etc. I was on his team, had been unnoficially for ages almost.

Anyway after the second day he said 'oh the new area manager needs to approve my staff'

So i went to leeds with a case load of figures but didnt get on that well with the Leeds manager (i thought he was a bit of a prat, it must have showed). I had to do a demo game of 'epic 40k' for some guys who walked in and were about 40.

I know how to run demo games, i do great ones for kids and teens but theses were adults and the first thing they said was 'we've played space marine and titanicus for years, how is the new version different'. So i ran them a game and told them the subtle and not so subtle changes, made it fun and engaging.

I was sacked the next day as the area manager thought i wasnt 'frothy' enough. Basically i was expected to go waaaargh and make flamer and bolter noises and patronise two veteran gamers as in the AM's head all intro games had to be ran like you were presenting a TV show for toddlers.

My local store manager couldnt apologise enough

Revenge is good served cold though and at a later point in GW I was running a dept in Lenton HQ so if i rang up the leeds area manager and said jump, he said how high (cant say i ever was that petty though).

I would have sacked the guy for not making bolter noises when he answered the phone.

Same here, too many hobbies, not enough time.

In between having a band that has to work on record releases and playing a fair few gigs a year i have two LARP groups, two table top RPG groups, I run two living history groups and occasionally get obsessed with an xbox game

Since i got into xwing i've barely painted a mini (apart from ship repaints) as any 'tabeltop' time i have i'd rather be playing than painting.

Right i submitted the user considerations early and 'hey' we got new sub forums!

Right i submitted the user considerations early and 'hey' we got new sub forums!

I think we should put your name forward for something in the New Year's Honours list.

" For services to gaming above and beyond the call, I dub thee, Sir Gadge "

Can we rename the x-wing off topic subforum to "Gadge's corner"?

Can we rename the x-wing off topic subforum to "Gadge's corner"?

nope... if we are naming things, the thing should be named Bacon - Bacon: Related Bacon or Off-Bacon

Gadge: The bringer of bacon.

Gadge: The bringer of bacon.

Part one of the Baconator Chronicles

Presented in High Def Smell-O Vision

Starring Kevin Bacon, as He who brings the bacon.