Change and Stuff

I've been thinking a lot about change lately, as I've considered blog post topic possibilities.

If you follow this blog at all (hey, there, friend!), you might have picked up it's been a time of great upheaval at the Enormous-Noise hacienda.

In fact, the hacienda moved.  Well, I did, anyway, even if the hobby-oriented pile is still waiting to really find its place.

As anyone who's moved can attest, putting all of your stuff in a truck and hauling it to a new set of walls is a tremendous effort. I wasn't surprised I had two carloads of hobby junk to move, or a carload of comic books to schlep (my favorite Yiddish word!), but the rest of the mounting piles of life-detritus caught me unawares. Moving isn't just a physical test, but an emotional one, as well. Moving lays bare many of the little choices we make that, put together, create our environment. The material of our world. The stuff.

I've been interested in "stuff" for a while.  My fascination for the "stuff of rhetoric" inspired my dissertation (though the final result was far-removed from that "stuff" stuff), and my academic interests post-defense include what we in the Rhet/Comp game call "material rhetorics." So I think about stuff (in an abstract way we don't usually use) a lot.

I've been thinking about the stuff of our hobby lately, too. I won't buy the new 40K rules until they appear in a boxed set of some sort with more "stuff" than just a couple of books of art and fluff. I don't have plans to play for a bit, so I can be patient. The new ork codex, on the other hand, is more appealing as a quicker buy. I am lukewarm at this point as far as the new mini-Titan ork model is concerned. I've never been a fan of the traffic-cone-with-gubbins look of the Stompa, and the new models are too much in the same design vein to excite me too much.

Besides, I have enough ork stuff, I think, maybe.

I am curious about the changes to both the main rules set and my beloved greenskins specifically, but I am jaded enough to believe that most of the changes are motivated by a business's desire to encourage--or force--the purchase of more stuff. If internet'ers are to be believed, the new rules for 40K are revolutionary and smooth many of the game's rough edges. Or the changes are awful and will kill the game for good.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. But really, the only thing that stays the same is change. Evolution waits for no one. The boxes are always being packed, unpacked, thrown down the stairs.

Stuff happens.