Hello once again dear readers and welcome to yet another round of Questions and Answers from you to me, and me to you! This week, we have three questions related to cleaning up, decluttering, and figuring out exactly when and how to cut down and why you should (or shouldn’t) do so. If you’re a new reader here at Mayday, Miss Marcy!, each week I collect questions offered to me by readers such as yourself through e-mail, Discord, or comments below our articles and put out this here advice column for you to peruse.
Last week, we actually only answered one question, but in a lot of detail, discussing three ideas for making your game night dinners less depressing and/or reliant on take-out food. This week, the three questions are themed once again (by design, but actually also just by serendipity). If you’d like to see your questions answered here, please follow the instructions below:
Are you interested in having your questions answered in this column? Well, have I got news for you: You can indeed do that, by following the directions below:
Marcy@goonhammer.com
With the subject “Miss Marcy: ”
You are also able to leave comments on the article, as well as use the Discord bot command if you happen to be a member, meaning you now have THREE ways to give me your questions to answer!
Piling on the Shame
Dear Miss Marcy,How do you know when it’s the right time to say goodbye to a pile of shame? I’ve played 40K on and off (mostly off) since 4th edition. I came back during 8th to 9th and, especially during the pandemic, amassed a pretty big collection of gray plastic, the large majority of which has gone unopened/assembled/painted. I’ve already sold off part of the collection (an AdMech army I very ambitiously thought I would get to) but I’m left deciding what to do with my remaining collection, which is all Space Marines. I haven’t added to it since the release of the most recent edition.My problem has generally been that while I enjoy painting and find it rewarding, I don’t find it relaxing, so it can be difficult to purposefully set aside time to paint when I want to recharge. I really enjoyed the assembly part of the hobby, but I can generate unpainted minis much faster than they get paint on them. I know that the likelihood that I’ll start to actively work on these models in the near term is very low. Selling them (either to players in my area I know or online) would be a hassle but if I did I’d have more money to put back into other hobbies I’m more active in.On the other hand, 40K was my first wargame and Marines were my first army. I’m also a very lore-focused player, so there’s years of personal lore, character, and investment there. Saying goodbye to that would hurt. I’ve also gotten into a smaller-scale, air combat wargame, and painting those minis has been really energizing and exciting! So I could see (or at least imagine) a future where I return to 40K.Space isn’t an issue, so this isn’t an urgent decision, but it is one I’ve grappled with. Do you have any suggestions on how to make this decision – or at least to keep in mind when I do make it?-I’ll get around to those minis, he said delusionally
Boxed In
Miss Marcy, I’m having trouble storing my games. I have a collection of board games and minis, including painted and unpainted models. I know that the general answer is ‘buy a bookshelf from Ikea’ or some other form of display, but i don’t exactly have a ton of room and I’m not sure it would actually improve my situation that much. The pile gives me a bit of anxiety, so i am torn between offloading or organizing. any suggestions?
-Boxed
Dear Boxed,
I am going to be honest and say that you should just buy the bookshelf from IKEA. My reason is that you say the collection gives you anxiety, but as I told the above question, selling/shedding your collection isn’t addressing the issue that you are actually expressing: You aren’t, apparently, lacking for space except perhaps a fear that a solid bookshelf will ‘take up’ space, but whatever system you are using right now sounds like it is not working. If I had to guess, it sounds like you are just stacking things on top of each other by size/weight, and then it makes you nervous because it becomes hard to get to things that you want, and spins a cycle of you just doing nothing but being anxious about piles of stuff.
I should probably start asking people for pictures in these situations, but if that is what is going on, an actual bookshelf will do a world of wonders for you. And, IKEA jokes aside, there are plenty of other options you could use. My suggestion is to take a good measurement of your space and then look for something that would fit and be convenient. The reason IKEA shelving units are so popular for board games and miniatures is usually their depth, because many board game boxes are quite long and square. As for miniatures, I guess it depends on how you are storing them.
I would also suggest, depending on your living situation, splitting the collection. You may find that your anxiety will drop if you put your miniatures in one place and your board games in another, which will help prevent them competing for space in your home and also prevent you from stacking a bunch of things randomly. Having some sort of system and determining how you want that system to go is a very, very helpful tool in organizing, and will go way beyond expensive storage devices will. Just decide how, and where, you want things, and then think of how often you will need them: don’t bury things in places you can’t get to them, and don’t create situations in which you have to reorganize everything every time you want a specific thing.
And, yes, if you find that after doing this there are games or minis you don’t want anymore, rehome them. You’ll still have a better system, and then you also can make space for new things and curate your collection better.
What Are You, a Library?
Hi Miss Marcy,
I’ve been a longtime collector of White Dwarf, and I’m starting to reach critical mass on my collection. I realize I could just recycle them or toss them into a bin, but that feels woefully wasteful. I am not exactly trying to be a hoarder, but there is some difficulty in just getting rid of the magazines as, aside from reading them, I’ve had a lot of great inspiration from them for painting and modeling.
Should I just toss them and get it over with? I don’t exactly plan on handing them down to my children, but at this rate, they may end up being in the will.
White Dwarfed
Dear White Dwarfed,
I actually have an amazing suggestion for you that turns your collection of magazines into a creative and crafty hobby! This is sort of a riff on junk journaling, in which you take scraps of things, stickers, cut outs, and the like, and place them into a journal for a more personal memento and keepsake. What I suggest you do here with your White Dwarfs is to cut out the sections you really, really want to keep. Painting suggestions or How Tos, gallery pieces, or battle reports or similar pieces. Set a rule such as one or two things per issue, and then cut out the pages that you want to keep from those, and place them into a binder. You could use clear binder pages to make them more permanent.
You could also go even further, cutting the pages you cut into smaller pieces and then gluing them into a larger journal. You could even put some notes or written things next to them. Perhaps, for example, if you did paint a scheme from a White Dwarf, maybe cut out the page and take a photo of your model and journal a little bit about what you did and how you feel it came out. Journaling is a great and creative way to recycle things, and then you could simply actually recycle the rest of the magazines.
Obviously, if that’s not something that interests you, I do suggest just recycling them; while you could find people who may want to purchase older issues of White Dwarf, the process of actually shipping them to other people can be a pain (they’re heavy), and you don’t really specify if you are in the US or UK, or elsewhere, meaning that such an endeavor might be far more trouble than it is worth. While the notion of preserving them is noble, that isn’t your job: if you can’t cut them and re-use them, I suggest just ecologically recycling them.
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