User Content Friday: Tournament Attendance as a Painting Aid

Gmort is back with some more sage advice about tournament play.  Or in this case, preparation for tournament play.  It's part overview of the process of army building, part time management seminar and part ramblings of a crazy person.  Or 'nutters' as they call them in ol' Blighty.  Be prepared to be better informed than you were before you started reading.

I don't paint very often...

Halley's comet appears with greater regularity than my paintbrush does.

"But GMort, you have several fully painted armies I hear you shout"*, "Are you one of those bastards who gets other people** to paint your armies?"

*or that may be the same voice in my head that for some reason want's me to kill clowns...

** Admittedly my girlfriend sometimes helps with the last minute stuff as she's better at doing squad markings than me and can base 20 models in about a fucking minute...

So I obviously need some motivation to paint and that (you've probably already worked out from the post title) comes from going to tournaments.

I'm also not very good with scheduling or time management or chronological resource implementation or whatever the current terminology is. If I have a week to perform a task you can guarantee I'll be doing it on Day 7, Hour 23, Minute 59.....I was that kid doing his homework on the bus on his way to school ;-)

Where in the World is Lantz?- Lantz off Dance off

Not only is Thursday dedicated to the god of Thunder, the new beginning of the weekend, and the day that  Always Sunny in Philadelphia airs, but it's also the day on which we here at the HoP put down our whiskeys and tip our hats to Lantz.  This week we've got a nice shot of the man himself sporting a transformer ski cap and driving.  Wait, Lantz did you seriously take a picture while driving?  If you really want to be a party to vehicular manslaughter next time you should try simultaneously updating your facebook status to something like 'just blew by a cop going 90,' tweeting about your love of knitted haberdashery, texting about how you've got a photo project due this Thursday for some assholes that run a blog, and programming the location of every nearby gentleman's club into your GPS.  Now that would be a way to go out in a blaze of glory.  Digging the hat though.

My Painting Journal and Me

If you're anything like me, you probably have more than one hobby project going on right now.  Personally I've got some Cadians to finish up, 3 vehicles and CCS for my Elysians, most of an Empire army, Tyranid MCs and gants, and an Ogre Kingdom army to get painted.  Depending on how you rock it, your situation may be slightly better or much much worse.  I don't mind having a fairly large backlog and several distinct projects going on simultaneously- it actually motivates me a little in a strange fashion with mildly masochistic undertones.  Having lots to do means that I've always got a new challenge to change things up.  If I'm bored with a color scheme (like I currently am with my Elysians), I'll switch over and paint something different.  When I get tired of painting troops, I can always slap some paint on a tank, warmachine, or monster. 

The Weekly Top X: Marshaling Your Forces

This week's Top X is a bit different... actually, they're all a bit different.  Different themes and gimmicks and what not.  Kinda makes it hard for anyone to notice if anything's only 'a bit' different.  Hmmm.  I need an introductory catch phrase.  I'll have to ask Brent about that...   Crap, I'm typing out my thoughts!

This week the theme is is a fun one for me/us.  We expanded the scope of the time frame we allowed ourselves to work with and decided to not just bring you a handful of posts, but rather BUCKETS of posts.  This week, the them is armies and their development.  So each one of these fine selections are actually a whole string of posts dedicated to getting an army ready for pretend war.

Big Jim's Army Stolen- How You Can Help Out- UPDATED W/ PICS!

Late last night I read the unsettling story of Galaxy in Flames author and HoP member Big Jim's army being stolen out of his van while he was at work.  Many of you probably already read about this.  As soon as I saw the story, I knew HoP needed to do something to help out, but I wasn't sure what.  Then I opened my inbox this morning and saw that Loquacious had had already done the work for us and sent in some links to Magilla Gurilla's drive to replace the stolen miniatures.  We here at the HoP think this is great and hope that anybody with some spare chaos minis can replace what's been taken away.  Links to everything relevant will be at the end of this post.

The Monday Update - October 18th, 2010

Not a lot going on this week in terms of new and unusual things at the House of Paincakes.  Little bit of this, a little bit of that - none of it new, but don't let that fool you into thinking that the the crack admin team isn't feverishly working on the problem of giving more than 100% percent of anything.  I don't want to break the news before our experiments pan out... but it may involve magic.

With that out of the way, its on the news... such as it is.

Article Submissions:  With rare exception, the only time we get articles submissions is the couple of days following us begging for them.  So I guess we have to keep begging asking:  Please send in your articles submissions.  PLEASE! 

The Facebook Page: For those few of you who were aware of our Facebook page, you may have noticed that it never updates.  We have no idea why this is.  We've followed the directions and it never works.  Either Facebook can't find our feed or it just wont import anything.  I've even tried burning the feed.  If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to shout out in the comments or shoot us an email.

New Member Monday:
Check out the newest people to make the best decision ever- joining the House of Paincakes!

Stratford Gaming Union

Rust, Dust and Ceramite

Dark Future Games


Last but not least, here's an extra special announcement from your pal, Dethtron:

I've noticed quite a few people referring to this blog/blog network as IHOP.  It's actually just HOP or HoP.  This was a deliberate move to make sure that we weren't infringing on anybody's copyrights.  Seriously, those Pancake people have been known to sue the shit out of people who steal their IP.  So please cease and desist using IHOP to refer to our site, before we get a Cease and Desist of our own.  Remember, we're the House of Paincakes (HoP).