7th Year Blog Birthday Post (or Pods to Drop and Lands to Raid part 1 redux)

Seven years? In some ways it feels longer!

Unlike last year's birthday I am not doing any give aways for anyone to win this year. (I know, I suck) Although that was a fun thing to do, my hobby time is a lot thinner currently and I just don't have time to make that work out this year. Plus, I hated excluding some of the local people from it. I wanted to avoid an appearance of a bias... but excluding people just feels...mean.

So this year, I think I will do a brief flashback to the first year and an overview of what's going on these days.

First off, if you are on Facebook I invite you to send me a friend request and also request to join our group: Neverness Hobbies. We have discussions about new releases, rumors, etc that I would otherwise not ever post in this blog. 

The Land Raider from earliest posts.

Now for a Neverness Chronicle birthday flashback. The blog started off as a WIP series focusing on my Drop Pods and Land Raider for my Space Wolves. Although the Land Raider would be finished in time, those Drop Pods are still in an unplayable state. (I really should correct that).

The other day while doing some site maintenance on this blog I found that I had the original version of the very first blog post (linked above)  saved as a draft. I am not sure why I did this, but there it was. The verbage was similar to what was posted but the final post was a bit more polished, professional in tone (to the point of being overly verbose) and not as excited and relaxed in tone. Maybe I was nervous and not so comfortable yet with the idea of blog writing? I can not recall, but the difference is there.  So I figured, why waste all that writting? Why not share it here as a retrospective sort of thing? Why not indeed, so here it is raw and unedited:

Pods to Drop and Lands to Raid part 1

Ok, so onto what truly inspired me to start this blog. Last Saturday I played a 40K game and tried out the Space Marine drop pod for the first time and was impressed with the tacticality and functionality of it. So the next day I decided that I needed more! So while rumageing about in my miniature closet (the names doesn't really do it justice, I have more unopened models in there than what Hobbytown currently has in stock! LOL) I have three more unopened drop pods. I knew immediately that I wanted a bunch of these, so I got four  in a sweet deal online. It took me a LONG time to build the first one however. It has to be the most complicated kit GW carries, and if you care about how these things look, you HAVE to paint it before you build it. So I did, and with work, etc, it took me something like 7 months to complete it.
Here it is:

So, I grabbed a box, tore off the shrink wrap, and took the sprues outside and primed them black. This was on Easter Sunday morning. When I came back from my folk's house later that day, I went in was going to grap an additional box when my old Land Raider Cruesader box called out to me.

This was a kit I picked up about 10 years ago now, and started to paint the bits while on the sprue. As i was about to assemble it, i discovered that the blisters in the box were identical meaning that I had doubles of some parts while missing others. I must have moved out my parents house around this time and just never dealt with GW customer service to get the issue corrected.

Last year, I pulled this thing out, only to rediscover my dilema, only now, this kit no longer is made and it has been updated with plastic parts. It was more convenient, and a tad more advantagous, to just order the plastic sprue seperately. Which I did, tossed it in the box, and after driving and flying all over the nation's interior, forgot about it again (I was probably focusing on getting the drop pod done).

So, Sunday, I pulled this out and said: "Oh HELL yeah! I'm doing THIS!" And started goofing around with it. The goofing turned into commitment, and before I knew it, it was really late at night and I had gotten pretty far with it!



...and thus ends the draft post. As you can see, I was very excited about starting this blog and getting some focus back into these modeling projects. One of the things I was glad about was to see how far improved my picture quality has improved! A big difference seven years makes.

I hope you enjoyed this strange flashback, I hope year seven is a memorable one for us all.