A world covered in plastic.

Being into collecting and painting miniatures past your forties looked better than it really is: You finally have the income you never had as a teenager so you can buy and enjoy the little bastards you always fancied, instead of turning the same pages of the same catalogues and magazines over an over again, but your spare time is more limited, your friends have so many children you can't play with them often, and your eyesight is becoming worse by the minute.

Another drawback is that you're aware of all the implications your behavior as a consumer has, and after the hottest year of your life sprinkled with deadly floodings (yeah, plural), the effect of your spending on climate and environment.

Chaos thug dealing with the fact that all #hobby posted here is free advertising for the Games Corporation™. A shiza-da dzonioche.

If you've read any of my bios on social media, I've been worried about this for a long time. And I've talked about this in the past. So this is not exactly flash news.

But this morning I was recovering from a week-long work travel and a mild throat infection laying on my couch and listening to nice podcasts and videos when I got stuck with a Spanish podcast focused on action figures I often listen to it as a kind of sleep inducing mechanism. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary, but at some point the representative of a Japanese company that sells robot kits (guess which one) said that one of their stores has the Guinness Record on selling gashapons (those little random toys inside plastic balls you get in the Japanese machines). And the next phrase gave me the chills: Only one store sold enough plastic balls to surpass the diameter of planet Earth of they placed one next to the others. And she said it like it was a god thing! (please don't mention the economy on the comments).

Yeah, this hobby has (not) always involved these two bad things for our society (large companies and plastic products & waste), that's why used oldhammer metal and independent artists are the ethical alternative nowadays (if you ignore the scalpers hoarding blisters for speculation).

But picturing those amounts of plastic, plus the energy and oil derivatives used for its production (don't get me started with the energy used to send those around the world) is staggering. In a bad way.

Last week we saw GW suing independent model sculptors for copyright infringements (even closing a KS selling orcs sculpted by the one and only Goblin master) while we keep reading ex-employees vital experiences... not being excellent, let's say.

For those reasons I won't be buying the next Warhammer Quest game (the one with the nurgle models I've been waiting for years) nor the new Blood Bowl or the Khemri team. I'm shooting myself on the foot? Probably. Could I sleep if I gave them even more money? Probably not. The last year I spent less than 60€ on GW products (used to spend more than 10 times that), and I'll do my best not to spend a single cent this year.

I will never ask you to do the same, as I consider you to be a very intelligent but small audience. But I'm sure you'll think about it.

From my perspective that won't reduce the mountain of plastic that will kill the world in the end, but at least I won't be the one piling the skulls for the Blood God.