Blog List and the Appreciation of Art

I'm not sure what caused the change - maybe it was just some chemical process that is part and parcel of getting older - but sometime here in my 30's, I have developed a mounting OCD-like need to keep things as orderly as possible. Having a child over the past year has only exacerbated the issue, because there's nothing like having a tiny chaos-machine running around the house to make you crave some sort of order in your day to day life.

This mindset carried over here to the new blog, where I had originally decided to go as minimal as possible, keeping the front page neat, orderly, and as clutter-free as I could with no extraneous "gadgets" in the sidebars.

Well...I guess some old habits die harder than others, because I've added a "What I'm Reading" list of blogs I'm following.

Clutter aside, I'm actually okay with this addition. I always liked this feature on my other blogs, and it serves a few important purposes:

First, it gives me a one-stop source for tracking down new posts of blogs I want to read. Convenient.

Second, it provides additional content for you, the reader, to enjoy, and helps build a stronger community between blogs and bloggers.

Third, and this reason is a little more esoteric than the first two, but even though we all blog about certain topics, we don't live in a vacuum. We have other interests that inform how we think, why we live like we do, and how we approach the everyday task of living.

This blog is about painting and customizing board game miniatures, sure, but even within that narrow subject matter, there are countless choices that have brought me to this point of this blog, and the decisions made herein. The third purpose to the Blog List then, is to give the reader a little insight into what is driving me at the moment to do what I do.

As I find them, I'll be adding blogs to the list dealing specifically with miniatures-based board games and the painting thereof, but I'll also be adding blogs whose work I can appreciate from a creative level that aren't strictly board game related.

Realm of Chaos 80s is a fun little blog I found that is pure nostalgia of growing up playing Realm of Chaos in the late 80's with my friends. The gut-feeling artistry of that time period in Citadel and Games Workshop history is something that every modern GW player should be made aware of.

Laughing Ferret has been one of my favorite painters and modelers to watch, and always turns out stunning work - his Blood Bowl teams are amazing.

Legion of Plastic is doing some amazing work - real inspirational stuff - creating his own interpretation of the WH40K universe. Using a fascinating palette, and some amazing conversion work, he's creating pieces of art that speak to his own soul as a gamer, and the results are just stunning.

The Thunder Guard is a fellow Praetorian Guard blog that I followed from my previous days of 40K blogging. Col. Ackland took his army to a level that I had always wanted to get to with my own forces, and pulled off some really inventive themes and conversions, that I always felt had deeper artistic merit than a lot of the other army blogs I followed. His fluff and background write-ups are also a joy to read.

Lastly, The Daily Fischer is a fiction blog of a fellow writer and good friend of mine, who is pulling off a clever writing experiment that I don't think I would have it in me to try myself - it's 365 days of short stories. That's a new story, every day, for a year! Artistic, inventive, daring. Very cool.

I'll have another post that will actually be on the topic of board game painting coming soon, but I wanted to share just a taste of the method of my madness, and give some blogs their well-deserved dues.