Five Winners

Liebster Awards / Blogroll Adds

Seven winners, actually, if you include me and John over at Plastic Legions. 8-} John was kind enough to award BftD a Liebster Award (after receiving one himself), a chain-letter-type award going around the miniatures blogosphere at the moment. Cheers, thanks, John!
Here's how the thing works as I understand it:

1. Copy and paste the award on your blog linking it to the blogger who has given it you.
2. Pass the award to your top 5 favorite blogs with less than 200 followers by leaving a comment on one of their posts to notify them that they have won the award and listing them on your own blog.
3. Sit back and bask in the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with knowing you have made someones day!
4. There is no obligation to pass this onto someone else but its nice if you take the time to do so.

I would also like to add a 5th qualification for all my award recipients to keep my motivations pure:

5. Please do not give the award back to the the blog that awarded it to you: pass it on to someone new instead.

Anyway, usually these meme posts pass me by before I can jump onboard, but this one finds me stuck home sick and blogging, and the time is just right! I know it's hard to get noticed in the blogosphere, especially if you're main areas of interest aren't part of the mainstream, and I welcome any concerted effort to jointly spread the word about cool finds. As regular readers may know, I try to do a little more when I add someone to the blogroll by posting a few words and tagging the posts Blogroll Additions so it's easy to to find them all. To my mind, this award is like a glorified blogroll add, and that's not a bad thing! Because there are so many deserving blogs out there, I've decided to only consider blogs I haven't mentioned already.
So, with that in mind that the awards go to:

• Drums in the Deep—I should have added this blog to the blogroll quite some time ago, but no time like the present to make up for it. I'm the first to admit my own blog has a niche aesthetic, straddling several areas of blogging that are themselves fairly niche. So it's awesome to run into a blogger like a Gareth the Grot, someone who seems to be working toward very similar ends. Soon we will be legion! Really cool fantasy figures painted beautifully, adventures underground, etc..
• Old School Miniatures Bulletin—A blog I've been following for quite some time and is overdue for a shout out. If I'm niche, he's nicher, as the focus is Grenadier miniatures. It's not easy for me to pick a favorite miniatures company and harder to go on the record about it, but I will go as far as to say there is no miniatures company I like better than Grenadier and none I feel were as vital to the miniatures hobby as a whole. Dave, the blogger on the Bulletin, keeps the Grenadier flame alive and shares some great takes on these classic figs. Like me, he's also something of an archivist and locates his posts within the particular miniatures range in question.
• Realms of Chaos—Regular readers will be familiar with my long-standing obsession with D&D, but you may not realize that I cut my teeth on Citadel and have all kinds of Citadel projects that have been left to simmer on the back burner. When a blog like this one comes around flaunting incredible projects like his Epic Orks army, especially when I have all the very same lead amongst my hoard, I wish more than ever I could clone myself.
• Diary of a Lapsed Painter—Lately this blog has been an awesome mix of beautifully executed Oldhammer projects and wonderful Citadel ephemera from the golden age. Each post is a rare treat.
• Realms of miniatures—Oldhammer has never looked so good, and to boot here is a guy who attacks problems like a modular gaming table with science squarely on his side.

Also, Plastic Legions has over two hundred followers, so is not in the running, but I've added it to the blogroll and you should definitely check it out, especially if you're interested in LotR gaming or Hirst Arts projects, though really there is a wide range of content. I remember seriously grooving on the Hirst Arts stuff, though, either on LAF or the blog itself.
Finally, whoever started this award thing, despite good intentions, is not so hot at internets and it doesn't appear he or she considered working in a means to aggregate the winners together, which I would argue is essentially the whole point and something that could have been done by harnessing the awesome power of the hashtag for starters. Oh well, such is the internet, all these moments, tears in rain, etc. If you're reading this within a week or two of me posting this, this Google advanced search may help. If this post is staler than that as you read it, try tweaking the search and hope for the best. I may post a pointer or two in a moment on how to help improve the situation for would-be memers moving forward.