Transcript
We hear it all the time: Pile of Shame. Sometimes we wear it like a badge of honor. And sometimes we feel the actual psychological shame at knowing deep down we’ve over-spent our hard-earned ducats on plastic toys.
I’ve pushed – and I’ll keep pushing – the alternate nomenclature: Pile of Opportunity. And this isn’t some underhanded way to trying to put a positive spin on our little failures of self-control. I say “Pile of Opportunity” with the full acknowledgment that that pile of goodies is perhaps the result of that lack of self control. But it truly is a pile of opportunity and even changing that surface level connotation generates much better psychological vibes – and positive vibes actually help the brain with enacting a little more self-control, a little more discipline. It’s hard to get better or grow when you’re under a constant onslaught of negative vibes. This is just we humans are.
But lurking in most of our mad laboratories, deep in the shadows – or maybe right there in the open, surrounding us like a pack of starving, undead wolves – is an actual Pile of Shame. And today we’re bringing down the sunlight to expose this creeping morass of nurgle-tastic foulness and see if we can smite this self-fulfilling assault on our hobbyist sensibilities and stand tall under the bright light of day!
INTRO
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where your host waxes poetic about mundane topics just because he likes to! And where we sometimes face the skeletons in the closet. And we thank our patrons for their blazing vibes of goodwill and steadfast support! Here’s to you! Much appreciated.
All right, enough theatrics, let’s talk about what I think is the tabletop hobbyist’s – and many others’ – true pile of shame: unfinished projects!
I don’t know a single person who knows a person who doesn’t have unfinished projects. We all tread that boulevard of broken dreams, knowing full well we’re the architect of our own dismay. I think we’ve all heard of some legendary person who finishes every single thing they’ve started, but I think that figure is a myth. Or at the very least, inhuman.
Unfinished projects are, at the very least, marks of learning, of exploration, of some kind of creativity. Failures are always part of any process. You know that as well as I do, despite how much we want it to be otherwise.
But I do feel personally like I get more bummed when I see my unfinished, half painted miniatures. Primed and Ready don’t count – for me. Primed and Ready is just a bonus for the “sit in the damn chair” exercise. <snap> Having a primed and ready batch of miniatures represents, to me, the absence of a significant stumbling block in getting myself to work on something.
Here is my current Pile of Shame. Most of it at least. I have some pieces tucked away that are from twenty five years ago when I was last steeped in the hobby. Like this Necromunda figure from the very first release of that game. I’m pretty sure my pile of shame is the largest it’s ever been, for me. And until I start doing something about it, it only has one potential: to grow. Now this might be a laughably tiny pile of shame to some of you and it might be triggering completion OCD in others. All I know is, it’s mine and I clutch it close to my black heart.
Some of these I got stuck with a growing dislike of how the process was going. Some I’m not even sure why I haven’t finished them. Some, like this undead blood bowl team, were too numerous for me to get my head around finishing and I used my trepidation regarding decals to put ‘em away for a few years.
And here’s a real-time confession of a real-time realization: when I pulled these out of the bottom of the Primed and Ready display case to photograph them for this video, I discovered that I just lied to you, straight to your faces. Which was the result of me lying to myself. Miniatures sitting there in primer – some for more than three years – ARE actually bumming me out a little bit.
But all that said, I do try to plug away at these figures on a weekly basis. I’ve started doing a new thing that’s turned out to be kinda helpful in this regard. This is something a lot of other hobbyists do I think, it’s just taken a long time for me to try it out. Which is typical. Being late to the game, that’s what I do best. I’ve been video chatting with a buddy of mine to hang out while we hobby. He’s coming out of a decade’s worth of WoW fog and finding the joys in the hobby again and so I think we’re both kinda helping each other “git stuff dun” as they say.
And the Pile of Shame is definitely hard to face, hard to knock down, hard to attack. Due to its very nature it represents, mostly, just straight up work and that’s never fun to face alone. Typically we abandon projects because we either lose inspiration or we hit a stumbling block that’s gonna take some effort to overcome, right?
But here’s something to consider: the only successful artist, or craftsman, or programer or writer or filmmaker or scientist or explorer – basically any successful ANYONE – is that person who has pushed through whatever block they faced. I think overcoming challenges is actually the only useful metric by which success can be measured. Every single thing produced by humans is essentially just the result of overcoming challenges. Problem-solving. In other words: perseverance. Sometimes in the face of great adversity. In fact the greater the adversity, the greater the achievement. Usually.
We all know what the “ugly phase” is, right? Every miniature – every piece of art – goes through the ugly phase. It’s just one of the many steps in every process. In fact, it’s probably the very inspiration for the phrase: “trust the process”. As in, you gotta trust the process. To get to the “oh, this is turning out okay” phase, we gotta go through the ugly phase, the self-doubt phase. One is the doorway to the other. And if there’s a door, you know we gotta go through it.
Here’s another idea I had, insofar as launching a strategic plan of attack on the Pile of Shame. We could just use some – or all! – of our Pile of Shame to experiment with! Maybe instead of a Pile of Shame we actually have a pile of Testbed Minis. There’s a video on the new found joy of experimentation coming right up, something I stumbled upon that other hobbyists and artists have been doing the whole time.
I told you, I’m a late to the game pro.
But one thing experimentation requires are willing – or unwilling – test subjects. Viola! Ask and ye shall receive, right?
Of course, mostly what I’m dealing with is miniatures. But I’ve got folders of shame? I’ve got way more unfinished writing projects, art files, screenplays, way more of that stuff than I do unfinished minis. So not every pile of shame operates the same way, or provides the same means of access, as far as experimentation goes. Because we’re talking minis and models, there are certain ideas that’ll work with THIS pile that may not work the same with other piles.
But that’s another thing to note, too right? We’ve all got piles of something, piles are a very human thing. Products of imagination really. So, it is what it is. The hobby pile of shame I feel is tied more to the subtle wracking of nerves that financial expenditure can generate. We have to acknowledge that and we have to keep moving. Knowing is half the skirmish, right?
What’s done is done.
So in this hobby, returning to old projects is a pretty doable thing. I mean there’s always Ebay, so there’s that.
This guy here I was always excited to paint, I think the sculpt is so cool. But when I started working on him I didn’t really have anything in mind except yellow wings. And I vaguely thought about trying out some lava rocks on the base. But that’s one of my problems – I often lunge forward on half-baked or vague notions that aren’t fully considered and often I become frustrated by my own ridiculous refusal to think beyond a certain point. But I’m trying to get better at that – at least I’ve identified that issue with myself and that’s a big step right?
Just say yes. “roll eyes”
The last few years I’ve started trying to become more aware of my own thought process. Better late than never? Doesn’t really matter, ‘cause that’s all I got. It’s slow going, surprise, surprise. But it’s going. And that’s something.
So for this guy here I’ve decided to do some experiments and just noddle around with the paint but I’m 100% going to try the lava rocks thing on the base. Hey, he’s part of the Pile of Shame, if I mess it up, well, I’m just doubling down I guess.
I feel pretty good having identified my real “pile of shame”. I kinda don’t like repeating the name all the time, which just sort of plucks those psychic strings and sends out those little bad vibrations that creep up on our consciousness. Words have power and we’d do well to remember that. The important thing is to try to put a stop to yet another frivolous thing that adds unnecessary weight to our psyches. There’s so much of that that comes with just being human that we shouldn’t go out of our way to add more, if possible.
But an intrinsic part of being human is the ability to problem-solve. And finding ways to better ourselves, to drill down and uncover the root causes of things. We create our own reality, no? Probably.
So, go make your reality better! Find a way to deal with your pile of shame. Understand that’s okay that it exists and then have fun with those old, half-finished ideas! Or sell ‘em on Ebay!
See ya!