Let's connect on Instagram

I have been unhappy with the Blogger platform for many years, and am always searching for better ways for hobbyists to engage with one another. Instagram is far, far from ideal, but it and FB seem to be where the critical mass of us are, and so I'm giving Instagram an honest effort.

Been sharing a lot last few weeks and lots more where that game from. I'm username warlockofleadmountain. Let's connect!


Plan to keep this blog up and may occasionally post something that can't be said in the short form Instagram format.

Blogroll Adds

I added 30+ blogs to the blogroll, something I've been meaning to do for awhile. Please have a look! And if I missed yours please let me know.

New Year's resolutions

It seems that most resolutions posted on game blogs are about getting more done, driving oneself to bigger and better, etc. While that's admirable, I post my own this year to aid in keeping my many hobby obsessions in check, mainly so I have some room to get other kinds of projects done. The short of it is I've accumulated too many miniatures and started too many projects in recent years. Since it's my leisure time we're talking about I don't intend to go hard on myself to finish more, but rather I want to start at the source and stop any potential new projects in their tracks, and have the little boxes of lead arrive at my door with a bit less alarming frequency. And then work smarter, not harder, on the existing projects in the works.

Here's what I came up with:

• A set figure budget, and it's only for "emergency" purchases—opportunities too good to pass up
• No kickstarters
• No new projects
• Work on a project until it's done. no more than five active at a time, except for sculpting sessions when unused putty can go to whatever's near at hand. Shelve the rest (my project management software, Asana, has easy means to shelve and unshelve).
• Only work on projects I'm excited about. No pressure to work on projects as a obligation.
• Either it's hobby time or not. This is a big one for me, and by way of explanation, I often find myself on a Saturday or after work slip into a kind of ambivalent hobby limbo, chipping away at this or that but not really applying myself and feeling vaguely guilty to boot. I plan to cut this out and either go whole hog or stop and do something else. Hopefully I can be both more productive with the time I do take for it as well as leave more time for other things like reading, outdoors, other creative projects etc.
• Priority projects have priority. I tend to instinctively know which projects are a bigger priority to me, in the sense that finishing them would yield more satisfaction or I'd like to use the figures in a game, etc, but I bet you've experienced how it's often whatever's closest at hand or most visible that gets undue attention.
• Sell off/give away. I have a lot of stuff earmarked for this, but the business of selling stuff and even just finding a good home for things is no fun, plain and simple.
• Try not to research new projects unless there is potential for entrepreneurial venture or fulfilling creative expression outside the gaming realm
• Manage all hobby projects in Asana. I'm already well on my way here.
• Discard projects (pass on to others) I don't want to finish. Projects are hard to give up. You've invested skill and energy and money, and your return on investment is going to be pittance if not nil. But keeping them around often takes a toll in the long term and sometimes its better to cut your losses.

These won't be easy for me to follow, but they're my bid for a more restrained, organized, and in the end, rewarding year of games and miniatures. I'm also curious if you have or plan to make resolutions of the sort aimed to keep a potentially overwhelming hobby in check, and please comment and link to your own resolutions!

Blogroll Additions

A couple great blogs I've just come across, one for the Citadel fans and one for the D&D miniatures and particularly the Grenadier fans.

Life in Miniature is part memoir and part history of the early days of Citadel

Lead Menagerie is an occasional blog from what I can see but one that's been around for awhile. I just stumbled upon it for the first time tonight and think it definitely merits greater exposure. The painter/blogger showcases a nicely painted ecclectic mix of 70s and 80s fantasy figures including some unusual Asgard figures and great picks from the Grenadier catalog.

These are now in the list on the right and you can browse my comments for previous additions via the tag.

Thank you followers and subscribers!

100!

To mark Belched from the Depths reaching 100 followers I'd like to take a moment to thank all my followers and other subscribers for your interest, comments and shared appreciation for the kinds of games and miniatures I cover here.

It's not always an easy road. A blog with a niche interest is one thing if you play to that core interest. In my case I've got several interests, all niche, which means some of you may have arrived for the old school D&D, and others for the Necromunda or Hordes, etc. I fear, for example, that by including so much miniatures content I'm unlikely to gain real traction among the OSR blogs, even though I feel a strong affinity with them. But, since there's no way I'm doing multiple blogs I have to simply trust that what I find cool many of you will too, even if it's not what you came for. And if I haven't posted that stuff you like best in awhile, hopefully it all comes around to cover all the bases in short enough cycles. There's lots more of everything coming down the pipe I'm excited to share, that is I've got over thirty drafts of posts and add more all the time, it's just a matter of how much time I can carve out to keep the posts rolling out.

Thanks again, all, I wouldn't be doing it without your interest and support!

The new flickr

I hadn't heard, but flickr hasn't been doing good lately and they are trying to get back in the game. Today they rolled out a new look and huge incentive to be a free member.

If you haven't seen in yet, you can let me know what you think. Here's my photostream, the default view, here are the sets, and the collections, which I would prefer to have front and center, are still shortchanged and hidden, never to be seen by anyone unless you follow a link from here (go on, see if you find the collections starting on the photostream).

I have a flickr account for one because in order to justify my miniatures projects to myself I need to see them organized well all in one public place. For two I want a more robust backend than blogger and Picasa offer. I had a go at hosting my own galleries with Gallery2 and a lesser known one (but far superior feature-wise) called Piwigo, but I found the development and upkeep not worth it, and I found an isolated gallery or one tied only to a blog a real limitation in terms of social networking. Flickr also integrates beautifully with Lightroom, which is what I use to organize and process the pics. More about Lightroom in another post, and you can bet it will be more enthusiastic than this one.

But as for Flickr I've never had much enthusiasm for it. It has some features that make sharing pictures of miniatures difficult, chiefly the inability to control which size image a viewer sees, which means I can't use it to store full size images unless I want the user experience viewing my pics in the native interface to completely suck. Other things like that. However, I never encountered any deal killers, and all the other options had at least one of those. So I've been paying $25 a year for a few years now and I guess it's been worth it.

After that stellar review, though, I still need to ask any miniatures painters without flickr galleries, shouldn't you have one, if not before, now? I see so many awesome blogs where you see the figures roll by, but don't you ever feel the pressing need to see all your work so far summed up in galleries, laid out so fellow painters can get a sense of you? And and more than that, does your collection even exist if it's not collected anywhere?

While I don't love flickr I still think it's the best option we have, and now that it's free I'm hoping that will mean I get some contact adds from some painters and we'll give it another shot. Despite my gripes all the changes they rolled out seem to be for the better. You get 1TB free storage now which should be all your figs from now till you die. Galleries look prettier than ever. See my Redemptionists in a fresh light or the orcs, some adventurers or their foes.

I wont' get into the bugs in the new design, like how the set descriptions are chopped off so I'm not even allowed to communicate those few words I put in the description to people, or how characters like the ampersand and quotes seemed to have got encoded during a data migration to the new platform and are showing up raw, or the metadata I painstakingly research for each and every figure is below the fold, and you wouldn't have seen it unless you read this far and are now going back to check.

At any rate, I won't put faith in the notion that this will make the flickr experience "awesome" as Yahoo is hoping for, but maybe a few of you will be inclined to give it a shot and realize like I have that it's got a lot of potential despite the flaws. Also curious in general about your thoughts on having a gallery experience vs blogger, whether you use or have considered another backend for your pics besides the default, etc.

Further reading:

http://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/05/20/a-better-brighter-flickr/
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2419238,00.asp
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57585276-93/yahoo-wants-to-make-flickr-awesome-again/

The end of Google Reader has me confused

And details of my exit strategy

In case you hadn't heard, Google is closing down Reader July 1st. I just spent the a half-hour exporting my blogs out of Google Reader and into The Old Reader, Reader's "retro-clone," if you will. I tried Feedly first but found it trying to intuit my needs and failing embarrassingly. Anyhow, I'm puzzled by Google's move and wondering, what are you doing about it, if anything?

The source of my confusion is Google's "Follow" blogger feature. I follow a ton of blogs publicly and you can likewise find a sizable majority of my subscribers—perhaps you among them?—in the Follow widget to the right. Whenever I "Follow" the blog automatically gets added to Reader. Having the blogs there made the choice of what reader to use easy; it worked just fine so why go to the trouble of leaving? But now we're being ushered out. Well, when I exported my list of blogs out of Reader and into Old Reader I have all the blogs I'm following there too now, but for any new blogs I start to follow I take it I will have to take the extra step of logging into Old Reader and subscribing there too.

There's the confusion. Did you catch that? I said I'll have to subscribe twice. Won't that create a mess? Won't it mean I'll essentially be counted twice in your subscriber numbers?

Also, if people aren't using reader for reading won't they be less inclined to go ahead and Follow through Google? Will that mean that we'll see the ration of hidden subscribers to public followers slide in the direction of hidden followers? Won't that be bad for both us bloggers and Google?

I take it the "Reading List" feature that appears on the Blogger dashboard will still be there, but obviously it only has blogs I'm "Following" and not those non-Blogger blogs that don't have the "Follow feature." Obviously the value of the "Reading List" is zero (0) if it can't show me 100% of the blogs I subscribe to. I mean, right?!?

Am I the only one stressing out about this or can anyone offer a link to good info about the issue or a good discussion of it? I seem to be missing something.

D&D Doodle Rises

Unearthed Internets/Blogroll Add combo

There is no better blog-time surprise than to see a favorite blog you consider archive-only rise up and shake off the dust. And he's going off in a new direction with some fantastic Cthulhu stuff. He was due for a shout out here anyway but now I can add him to the blogroll as well. If you're not familiar, you owe yourself carving out at least the next twenty minutes before you head over to D&D Doodle.

Look at the way this guy renders the environment of the game, including a certain keep you may recognize:

And someone who shares respect for the owlbear too:

And in case you're worried my own blog was down for the count, I should be back in action shortly. Got a new computer and haven't got around to getting Photoshop back up. Expect to sort that out in the next week or so.

BftD One Year Anniversary

BftD turns one today! Thanks everyone who has followed along or dropped in to leave a comment. I knew when I started my initial focus on vintage D&D figs would make it a challenge finding an audience as compared with some of my previous ventures in the Warmachine/Hordes world or even as compared with Necromunda, which is, itself, a fairly niche thing judging from how many people come up to me at a con with something to effect of, "that still exists?"

And I wasn't wrong. It was a struggle getting some momentum behind the blog. I feel as though I'm straddling two communities with the D&D project without the benefit of being able to stand firmly planted in either. And I'm not even talking about the D&D community vs the miniatures community, but rather I'm still on the fringe of even the niche OSR community within the D&D community and likewise on the fringe of the niche skirmish miniatures and old school miniatures communities. It's funny to think that when fantasy miniatures got their start the idea of fantasy miniatures was synonymous with D&D and how nowadays beyond prepaints there is little interaction between what are now two hobbies rather than one.

But I feel like BftD is starting to build up speed now and I'm really glad I've found common ground with many of you and many of you have found a reason to stick around. At the outset of BftD year two my obsession with D&D shows no signs of slackening and I've got a lot coming down the pipe, or I guess that should be up the throat. I'm fairly determined to make what you find here the finest, most comprehensive and most-functional collection of D&D miniatures on the Web. And I also have a bunch of terrain projects to share as well as big backlog pics of Necromunda, Hordes, Warmaster and old school Warhammer fantasy to throw at you among other things. The D&D is actually a latecomer to my list of pet projects if you can believe it. Cheers to another year!

In the Shadow of Lead Mountain: Too Many Projects!

Blah, that was an unintended break I took from the blog that grew and grew. It wasn't because I didn't have anything to post or the will to do it but just the opposite. I have way to much. Too many projects, too many pictures to sort and crop, too many miniatures to catalog, too many lists of post ideas and partial drafts. Too many little things to obsess about. I have some of my best work from five years ago I've never posted anywhere and most of the stuff so far has been done at least two years ago.

And that's just the blog stuff, saying nothing of how crazy the idea of painting all the miniatures I have in front me, finishing all the terrain projects I have going, and running all the adventures I have lined up. If this is the first time I'll say it it won't be the last, that the blogosphere is a hobby within a hobby, and painting figures another hobby, and making maps one, and writing adventures, etc. ad infinitum. When I have a window of hobby time in front of me just the idea of which hobby today can slow me down all by itself.

This just to say it can be too much. It's highly likely this is a familiar story, especially if you're a blogger yourself. I know I'm in good company and I'm sure there are many who are biting off more than I am. Balancing spending time with friends and loved ones, doing professional development, other creative and intellectual pursuits, etc, comes with the territory, I know. Rather than complain let me take a moment to acknowledge the hard work of the bloggers of the blogs I follow do and how easy you all make it look.

What am I doing about it. Well, one of the main reasons I started the blog was to help me organize my projects for myself. Another was to make my collection meaningful. An uncatalogued collection is something of a liability while a cataloged one is an asset. Anything you don't where and what it is and what state it's in is useless. With that in mind I've spent this Independence Day morning sorting through pics and post ideas and I now have over forty posts lined up with pictures already taken, etc that shouldn't be too hard to bang out. In the past few weeks I've also been tackling physical organization of the stuff and am making some inroads.

I also think I'll make a few posts on this topic itself, about workflow, organization and project management, and maybe we can share some ideas and help each other out. Despite the occasional creeping chaos I've made some recent strides that are worth putting down in the blog.

And for now, if you're up to your neck in projects or conversely you've done some things to get organized lately sign off below.

New Regular Feature - New to the Blogroll

Like most of us I follow a good many game blogs (which you can see on my Blogger profile page), but rather than dump them all in the widget all at once I'd like to give each a little context and limelight. To that end I'll add them one by one and mention each in a post—simple!