The gentle hammer, or GW and their C&Ds.

So as you know, GW and the community have suddenly hit this crazy perfect storm of conflict. People are suing each other, DCMA notices are flying around, and GW is seriously locking down their intellectual property. I would put links to the Chapterhouse thing, but if you don't know the story by now, consider it a bullet dodged.

Anyway, I understand why GW is hurling out cease and desist letters like Pez out of a cartoon character's trachea, but I was really surprised to find out how far they were going.

40k Meta has gone insane

First, there's the BoLS outage.

Then there's the Faeit212 craziness.

And now there's the Battlefoam/BoK backfire. (It's worth a read).

All of a sudden, we have three insane incidents all just waiting for conspiracy theorists.

It was bound to happen. 40k has reached critical mass. Adepticon is bursting at the seams, there are more and more people getting into manufacturing ancillary products, and suddenly you have a powder keg of supply, demand, competition, and fickle consumers. You have an audience of customers that are very opinionated, web-saavy, and smart, yet they, as a rule, lack certain social restraint (that is my anecdotal observation, and besides, it's all opinion anyway) on one side, and you have a veritable monopoly in terms of brand on the other. While everyone had a common enemy (GW) when this was a niche hobby, the community is now flush with revenue, and we are feeding off of each other, GW included.

So what are some options? Wait until the next post.

The State of the Faeit

Straight from Faeit's mouth to your ears.

YOUTUBE LINK

No reason for me to even comment on this...he just lays it out. Oh, and this is also an ad for BTP's Valhalla thing. But the significant thing is Faeit.

UPDATE: Bell of Lost Souls down and Faeit 212 is gone!

UPDATE: BoLS is back, as are the conspiracy theory trolls. Take a look at their forum. Sheesh.

Loken at Apocalypse 40k has a brief report about several prominent 40k sites that are hosted by Google being down.

Here's the post.

The DCMA is a weird and powerful thing, and its abuses are well documented. It's still too early, in my opinion, to positively blame GW for these sites going down, but it doesn't look good.

I'm not a kneejerk guy, so I won't be immediately selling off all my Warhammer 40k stuff, but then again, what are you really saying about yourself if you support a company that takes such a heavy handed approach to their tiny niche audience?

Again, it's still a bit too early to know what's happening, but it should be an interesting week.

Click on the title of this post and scroll down to comment. All of BoLS' discussion forums are still working fine, as is, of course, their Facebook page.

Multiplying Necron Scarabs

Inspired by Dark Future and From The Warp (and his second attempt), I decided to start on the scarabs for my Necron force. This was an easy and fun project.

I want to state at the onset that I do not believe in counterfeiting or recasting for profit. I am still using at least one (usually two) real GW scarabs per base. [read more]

The Trials of Draigo