About sad little men.
Why would anybody launch a blog in 2026?
I like a blog. I still read them when I can, although there are a lot less than there were. I like the short/medium/long-form snapshots of what people were working on and thinking about, sometimes uncovered years later when I was working on or thinking about something similar. And I like having something relatively permanent (as far as anything on the www can be, and certainly compared to the whims of social media and the increasingly deranged billionaires who own them). And after several years documenting my shaky progress getting back into building and painting miniatures (and all the things that go with that) in various pre-built silos around the internet, it feels like time to build a proper home.
Haven’t Space Marines got big, etc.
I got back into the miniatures hobby sometime in late 2023, after my child suddenly decided he needed to own the Leviathan 40k starter set. Originally it was just helping him to glue together a bunch of larger-than-I-recalled Astartes and pointy intergalactic bugs, followed by mainlining a series of painting videos when he asked me to show him how to paint. This lead to us quickly discovering neither of us had the patience to paint even a small army for that game, which in turn got us playing Kill Team. Small enough to paint a team and fit the game on our dining room table, this was much more our speed.
From there it got, as it so often does, a bit out of hand.
Small teams of minis mean kitbashing is a natural next step; kitbashing without two decades’ worth of plastic kits lead me to investigate resin printing; kitbashed models built out of assorted printed pieces (and a deep-held feeling, clinging on since the 90s, that box-art style painting didn’t really fit the setting) lead me to #blanchitsu and #inq28 hashtags and finally to 28 Magazine.
This was stuff I would have killed for during my first stint in the hobby, cutting the heads off my Hero Quest skeletons to inexpertly glue them onto soft metal Chaos Terminators, or lashing a corpsey-looking Warhammer Fantasy ghost to the back of a Space Crusade dreadnought with stripped wires.
Turnips and Trenches
Finding a community that loved the same aspects of the hobby as I did was blissful (if not a little intimidating). Discovering that I had blithely stumbled into a new golden age of kitbash-friendly skirmish games was a delightful bonus. Turnip28 felt like a love-letter to the muddy, dejected-looking, and resolutely doomed beaky grunts that I remembered Space Marines being in the 40k of my childhood. Trench Crusade’s playtest rules meant a whole new set of sad little men (and women, and walking chapels) to build from parts I had spent the previous year hoarding, as well as introducing me to the joys of my Friendly Local Game Shop. Forbidden Psalm (et al.) bought tabletop access to the setting (and exquisite vibes) of Mörk Borg, which was a firm RPG favourite of mine already. And this list is a fraction of what is available (and crucially, being actively played) right now.
So: sad little men.
When I was a kid, I built a pile of Space Marines from that plastic beaky kit. I loved how there were infinite ways to pose them, but none of them ever came out looking heroic – depending on the pitch of the head they would be looking up at some towering monstrosity, or looking at their weapon like it had jammed at the worst possible time. It made sense – the artwork of space marines from that era was always them dying, horribly and almost certainly for nothing. As a starting point for returning to the hobby, Space Marines were bittersweet: the sculpts were beautiful, but now they were bigger, more competent, handling the situation. They had traded in that sadness for compartmentalised fury. Also you couldn’t pose them any more..?
But then I found the downcast, faceless fodder of Turnip28, and the Lobsterpot witch hunters who got what they wanted and now have to live with the consequences. And a creative, generous community of people making gorgeous wonderful grotesque miniatures, and stories about them, and games to play with them. There is an abundance of joy to be found in those sad little men.