New Year's Resolutions - 2026 Edition

[Primarch]

So, with 2025 diminishing in the rear view mirror, it is time to look ahead to 2026 and the year to come.

My 2025 was, in all honesty, the worst year of my life so far for a number of reasons. Due to personal issues, I took a long hiatus from the hobby, and even when I did get back into it, I spent most of my time on building minis rather than painting. It has only been the past couple of weeks that I have spent any real time painting. In that period, nearly all forum traffic migrated over to Discord.

While I feel that Discord has its uses (I use it with my RPG groups and follow several other hobby related channels), I do find it incredibly temporary. Not every discussion needs a dedicated permanent thread, but some do. In addition, (and this is a sin I am guilty of), the ability to stick a 'Thumbs Up' icon on a post rather than writing an actual comment leads to less overall interaction between members of the community. It is something I resisted allowing on NH since the early days (at one point implementing a minimum word count on posts), and I still dislike the social media aspect of 'Likes'. If you think something is worth responding to, then respond to it with some thought and a message, not just a click. Sorry, bit of a rant there.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is, I am planning to put more of my own attention and effort into rebuilding this website as a place for the gaming community. Of course, I don't expect Discord to become less popular than it is, but for NagoyaHammer to run in parallel with it, providing a more stable, long-term platform to compliment Discord's onrushing torrent of new, new, new.

To that end, for my own New Year's Resolutions, I am going for the following:
1. Post on NagoyaHammer regularly. Whether in the What Did You Do Today thread, or in my own hobby blogs, I want to make sure I am adding to the site.
2. Comment more on others' work. No more thumbs up icons.
3. Encourage other people's hobby efforts.
4. Make NagoyaHammer a site where people want to spend time browsing, chatting and posting.
#edit#
5. And of course, the continuing effort to actually finish off some armies.
#edit#

I realise that some of those might be impossible and that I could be flogging a dead horse at this point, but I'm going to give it a try regardless.

[Jye Nicolson]

Sounds good to me - while I'm a heavy Discord user I've never really stopped being a forum user in general (particularly rpg.net where I first ran into Dave), so I'm happy to use both and see both flourish.

The thing that's actually hurt me for posting here was annoyances with Imgur, so I haven't been putting up my completed model photos. Does anyone have tips on better/convenient hosting?

As for actual resolutions - I managed 405 models in 2025 so I'd like to get to 500 in 2026. I did briefly reflect that this would require me to *buy* those models and I don't really want to start a new army for the purpose, but 11th ed 40K will dump a pile in my lap in July-ish so probably not that hard. Worst comes to worst I could paint one or three of my AOS armies

[The Other Dave]

Agreeing that the main reason I dropped off on sharing to the WDYDT thread here was wrestling with imgur. Two-click image sharing over on Discord is very nice for that, and TBH the dopamine hit from a couple of likes and maybe a comment if I'm lucky is plenty haha. I tend to interact with online spaces from a "why would anyone care what I have to say" position, so passive lurking and thumbs-upping is actually pretty much my speed.

I don't know about resolutions this year! My painting dropped off in 2025, but only because I mostly only bought and painted things I was really interested in painting and playing with - I have actually got my pile of shame down to basically zero, which seems like a good place to be. I got a lot of good gaming in, the local Underworlds community is going strong, and I even got a couple people to bite on Titanicus. My resolutions for 2026 would probably focus on those two systems - if I can get another one or two NH crossovers to show up to the Underworlds meetups at the Osu store, and get another one or two people to collect a little maniple of titans, I'd be a happy camper. My one big shoot-for-the-moon resolution would probably be to try and build that kitbashed Ork force for Titanicus I've been talking about for the past month or two, but we'll see on that.

[me_in_japan]

Well, I'm still here too

I check the discord about as often as I checked here (pre-discord) and comment about as often. It is definitely easier to post photos to discord, though. Eh, I'll stick my head in both places from time to time.

Goals for 2026 in no particular order:
paint the remaining zombicide minis.
Paint another Trench Crusade faction
Paint the few remaining Malifaux minis I need for Jacob's crew
Print and build one, hopefully two Adeptus Titanicus forces. Just small, for now.

[Auxryn]

I'm glad to have the forum as well as the discord. Call me old fashioned. I also agree that 'thumbs up' reacts can be intensely frustrating. There is nothing like trying to reach out and connect with a distant family member and getting a thumbs up in response.

My first hobby goal for 2026 is to paint the Gundam. This is a big job and will likely need to be done in stages.