Imperfect Copy
After unimaginitive card decks and celebrities launching projects to raise money they don’t actually need, the coolest thing on Kickstarter is relaunching a failed project. It happens all the time. Good projects get relaunched and tweaked to bad projects get put back up in the hope they can inch a little closer to the finish line. The record I have seen is a project relaunch three times (and fail to fund 4.)
Intrinsically, there is nothing wrong with this. There are many good reasons why a project might get relaunched. They might have made the rewards too expensive, or had a poor pitch video for an otherwise good project. It happens more often than you think.
Sometimes projects relaunch for the wrong reasons – that is what I would like to discuss this morning.
Monday Miniatures: Labor Day
As it Labor Day, I have out of town company visiting for the weekend, so today’s post is presented with minimum commentary.
Redoubt – laser cut scenery project
Clockwork Tower – Steampunk resin scenery. Probably the most interesting project this week.
Forward Operating Base – yet another laser cut scenery project
Mimic Miniatures – This is round two for this particular project. I’m not necessarily opposed to relaunching, but I would say when you reduce your funding goal by 85% it lacks credibility. Perhaps I will have more to say on this later.
Netflixing: The Final Frontier
We all know how much I like to binge watch shows on Netflix, and lately that has been a certain long running blast from the past. While I haven’t had enough time to paint or read lately, it turns out that making time to watch an episode or two while unpacking a box is easy enough to fit into a busy schedule.
For the last couple months I have been steadily plowing through one of my childhood favorites, and though it is completely different than I remember it, in some ways it has held up exceedingly well for twenty years.
Outsider Heroes: Supers in Prose Fiction
I’m a big fan of super heroics—no question there—but I’ve been ‘over’ the biggies for a long time now. Marvel, DC—they’ve turned out decades of amazing stories, for sure. But frankly I’m just a little tired of the… sameness of it all. Let’s be honest: read a classic Marvel title long enough and its basically Dynasty or Dallas in spandex. That feeling has kept me off of buying my monthlies for quite a while. I’ve become much more selective, and much more likely to buy something off the indie rack, than to buy something with a classic costumed hero in it. That said, I’ve had to scratch my supers craving somehow—and my somehow has been the thriving world of supers prose fiction.
Peek below the fold to find out what’s in my Kindle app…
Monday Miniatures: Worthwhile Projects Edition
There is a widespread when it comes to the quality of miniature projects in the crowdfunding world. Most of the time I feel like I am either complaining about how many bad ones there are, or how professional and unworthy of funding a current project is. The porridge seems to always be too hot or too cold.
Well, both of the projects I found this week look just about right.
Saints Row IV is the Best Supers Game Ever
As both a gamer and a comics fan, to say that I’ve been disappointed that interactions between the two mediums so rarely produce viable offspring would be… well, one of hell of an understatement. I go out of my way to play any supers-themed game I can get my hands on—so long it isn’t something especially cheesy, like a movie tie in (or similar b.s.). I’ve lost hours to all three supers MMO’s (which all disappoint for various reasons). Hell, I’ve even played Superman on the N64, and while I’ve only been able to sample the acclaimed Infamous series, I feel confident in my claim that Saints Row IV is the best supers game (not to mention it’s also the best Matrix game…) ever made.
Peek below the fold to find out why.
Mega-Projects
Indiegogo sends out much better teaser emails than Kickstarter. It’s true! I don’t even open the Kickstarter ones anymore because I find them remarkably self indulgent. Indiegogo on the other hand, for all the things I think they are doing wrong, do this one feature right. They don’t give me a standard blurb for a half dozen different projects with a unified theme that they think is important that week; they tell me about two or three of the most interesting projects or rewards currently being offered. My email box fills up very quickly these days, so brevity and concision are extremely desirable.
Last week Indiegogo reminded me that the Ubuntu Edge project is coming to an end, and declared it that it had raised the most of any project ever. I hate to break it to them, but unless it raises another 20 million in the next few hours it will raise zero dollars, thus just missing the Pebble’s previous high by a decimal place or two.
Still, crowdfunded megaprojects are interesting, and worth exploring.
Miniature Mondays: A Little too Quiet
Well, it had to happen eventually. I’ve been too busy moving to paint for a couple months now, and others could only pick up my slack for so long. This week Jessica was out of town, and Clint was too busy to get me a mini. I will try to remedy the situation in the next week or so as I just unpacked my paints and brushes today. All that’s left is to reassemble my desk and I can get back in the saddle.
Fortunately, there a few interesting projects today to discuss.
The One That Got Away
I’m sure we all have stories about the one that got away. Maybe we went left when we should have gone right. Maybe we said no when we should have said yes. Regardless of how it happened, we let a good thing slip through our fingers, and now we’re living with the regret. This post goes out to the Kickstarters I should’ve backed.
What did you think I was talking about?
Caffeineforge 
It’s a Fate-splosion!
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