Seems Like A Long Time In Lockdown

Lockdown seems to have happened three times since I last posted anything on my blog. I remember feeling confident that I was going to be furloughed which would give me time to do some hobby stuff and maybe even start a business. Well that didn't happen. Until relatively recently work has been an absolute monster. Life has been shut down. There have been big chunks of time when I have been away from my family to keep them safe. 

Now I am just getting over a beast of a dose of the illness in question. I'm not dead yet but it was  unpleasant. Well passed the isolation stage but really not over it yet. Still back in work. I'm dog tired and I have brain ache like you wouldn't believe and still coughing up a lung.

I'm now banned from the house until I have my coughing under control. So I am looking for a job so I can keep my family safe. Until I can get rid of the cough I am stuck locked down from my family and friends. 2021 is really hard to tell apart from 2020. 

Actual gaming is usually the driving force behind my figure painting. I mostly paint figures for the game I am playing or about to start playing. Well that isn't happening so I have been a bit directionless. Like most other gamers I have an element of the "shiny" about my purchases but not so much at the moment.

I still have plenty of Star Wars Legion stuff to paint. This was largely for someone else's game so, whilst I like the figures, it's not lighting my fire. Not only this but there are no new toys on the horizon and thanks to internal politics in the manufacturer I don't see a clear way ahead for the game at the moment.

I have intermittently managed to pick up a brush to paint my Nurgle Blood Bowl team. I've got the new edition (they arrive like London buses, you don't see any for ages....). I just can't find it in myself to finish them off. I like Blood Bowl and I guess that I will get around to finishing them off.

What figures that have arrived recently have mostly been fantasy stuff. I am trying to finish off a long standing promise to myself. That is to make sure that I have a figure for every gender, class and every race. So now I think I can do dwarves. There are enough figures to do light and dark elves (I do dark age figures). I've had enough wood elf type figures for some time anyway. With as far as halflings are concerned what has touched down so far, and what should eventually arrive, will have enough to cover enough different types that I can probably do all of what I want with the figures I have although some of the female figures may be a little flat chested. There are a few more human female dark ages figures to do. These are a little less Amazonian that what I currently have so should fit in nicely with the general vibe of my collection.

Somewhere along the way I got a copy of Kingdom Death Monster. This is a game that has sparked my imagination for a few years. There is some stuff on the bench prepped and ready to go. Again, without the prospect of a game I can't see me doing anything major although I really want to get into prepping it.

There are some gnome figure I may buy. This is out of the aforementioned completeness. That said I can only think of two characters gnome characters in over thirty years of gaming.

I think it's fair to say that Covid has sucked the joy out of gaming. For the first time in decades I can actually contemplate a life where gaming could become a tiny part of my life and maybe drop out of it for a while.

The only thing I can see on the horizon is possibly something cyberpunk, post apocalyptic or sci-fi. I got a PS5 with a view to getting Cyberpunk 2077 only to find that the game wasn't coming out on that console and that the game wa one of the buggiest releases in ages. I could see this inspiring a few gamers but no one is talking at the moment. I've just got a copy of Reality's Edge so maybe this is a way to go. Post-apocalyptic is always good.  I've done some figures in the last year and I have a few on the way. The same goes for sci-fi. There isn't that much difference in the figures needed for any of them. Maybe when Stargrave comes out later in the year I will give it a go.

This is my first post in almost a year and I can't believe how negative I am still feeling. Perhaps this is why I haven't been feeling blogging for a while. Still I am hoping things are getting better and that my mood in general will get better in the near future.