Let's Do This Thing . . .

Greetings and salutations all! This is Michael, self-proclaimed Captain of the 8th. Jawaballs, in his infinite wisdom, has invited me on as a new contributor for all things Blood Angels.

I began my GW habit back in '03 when my nerd-loving wife bought me some Lord of the Rings models for Christmas. And bless her soul, she even built me a gaming board to boot. If your significant other will go to "Roy's Train World" for you then it has to be true love right? Suffice it to say, I was immediately hooked. I loved the modeling, the painting, and the strategy involved in the game.

Grad school then took me away from home, and the brothers I played plastic toy soldiers with. No one played LotR at the game store so I jumped into 40k. It was the start of 5th ed, and a whole new world to me.


I found an old Blood Angels standard bearer model for 6 bucks at the game store. (here he is painted, and per my usual, unbased)



Another $6 Tycho model soon followed. (this model went into a painting competition, and I got second place, for the record, I was jipped)




And my first army was chosen. The internet inevitably brought me here when I started looking for advice for 40k and Blood Angels specifically. I've been hanging out here ever since. But Blood Angels didn't stay my only army for long. The siren song of the Tau railgun was too much, and made me start a small army for them. It's only about 1500 points soaking wet, and only comes out to play on occasion. I blame Old Shatterhands and his blog for that detour from the Imperium.

I'd consider myself the average 40k player/hobbyist. I like to do it all, but don't do any of it spectacularly well. I love to paint and have won a few local painting competitions, the result of being a little fish in an even littler pond. As a pat on the back I did place fourth in the painting competition Jawaballs put on about a year ago, but I'm no Golden Daemon winner. I like to convert models, but all I do is simple swaps with maybe a little greenstuff. I love the mental exercise of list building and the thrill of competition, but I have only played in one tournament. I enjoy making tough lists and going toe to toe with a like minded person, but real life keeps seizing the initiative and preventing me from playing in tournaments.

I will give painting and modeling advice, for what it is worth. We'll discuss list building and army evolution, along with tactics or deployment strategies. We can take this journey together, improving our painting, modeling, and hopefully our game.

It's going to be a fun ride!

Michael, Captain of the 8th and newest game nerd on the block.

As you can see folks, I put a lot of thought into finding guys who could keep in line with my blog and offer up some great stuff. When I put out the call for contributers, I literally got dozens of guys who submitted stuff. Picking just a few was tough. But I think that Michael is a great example of the Average guy doing above average work.  I think more than any thing else, that is what my blog and videos are about and you all can relate. Can't wait to see more.


Jawaballs

Rediscovering Angels Part 1: What they do best

Hiya folks!  Xaereth here again from Delusions of Grandeur.  Today I'm going to talk about what Blood Angels as an army offer that other armies don't do as well.  It's basically a discussion on points efficiency in a really general sense.  Don't worry, later posts will be much more specific, as I move into analysis on different units.

Dark Eldar Overview

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been summoned by the Jawa master himself to ignore my mostly procrastinated term paper and focus solely on Warhammer 40k. I do not pretend to have many years of experience or a vast amount of wins under my belt. However, I do believe that I can concisely explain my impressions on how certain units work in 40k and how overall effective they will be.

Many of you will disagree which is one of the main reasons I’m doing this, to stimulate your mind with ideas as well as for your responses to stimulate mine. So where do I begin? There seems to be many conflicting opinions about the Dark Eldar codex. I guess I’ll begin with a brief rating system of what the Dark elder codex has to offer in certain aspects of the game. It will be a simple 1-10 rating system with 10 being the most proficient in an area and 1 being the least. Here it is:

Shooting (anti tank): 6

While not guard, or space marine levels, they are able to adequately get by. The number of dark lances that you can take is still impressive, although more reliable anti-tank choices are few in number and shorter ranged. As before, the smaller and more elite your opponent’s army is, the more effective your shooting will be.

Shooting (anti infantry): 10

In the whole codex, nowhere is it more apparent that the dark elder have impressive anti-infantry firepower than in the Kalibite Trueborn and the Venom transport entries. Trueborn if loaded up with max shardcarbines and splinter cannons will unleash 36 poisoned shots if not moving or 32 when moving. Venoms, loaded up with a splinter cannon upgrade and nightshields come out to have a minute cost of 75 points and are still able to move 12 inches and fire 12 poisoned shots at a 36 inch range. In combination with other units in this book, dark eldar will melt their way through infantry.

Assault: 9

Dark eldar are absolutely deadly in the assault. Wyches are not nearly as beastly in the assault as the last codex however they have been replaced by improved hellions, beast units, wracks, and cost reduced incubi. There are a great deal of special characters that are also deadly. The one thing that all of these units lack (with the exception of beasts) is durability. While this problem can be slightly reduced with the proper use of pain tokens, it still becomes a problem when facing assault oriented armies such as orks and blood angels. These units have a lot of synergy. The best example is that of wyches and incubi. Lets say you are playing marines and you have an incubi squad and a wyche squad. Those incubi want to be going after normal power armor units such as tactical marines, sternguard, and assault marines. Those wyches want to respond to any assault from terminators or assault terminators due to the wyches invulnerable save. This army will be deadly in close combat as long as you assault on your own terms.

Flexibility: 4

Each squad has a particular purpose. Use them the right way and you will win. Use them the wrong way and you won’t. While you can dilute the effectiveness of a unit by giving them mixed weapon choices (trueborn with shard carbines and blasters) these choices will be point inefficient due to the likelihood that these units may only fire once.

Durability: 5

There is no doubt about it, a mech dark eldar list is really fragile. Av 10 open-topped will not last long against anyone. This would be slightly nullified if dark eldar could control their reserves at all, then they’d be able to reserve everything and not have to risk coming in piece-meal. Their real durability lies in the fact that, with the right list, you can have feel no pain on all of your infantry units. Some units are very durable, such as beast units. These units can take a pounding and still demolish in the assault.

Overall:

I believe that Dark Eldar will be a very interesting army to play. In this day and age where crazy rocket-vomiting, counter-charging, tin-can hiding, power armored Space Yetis are the normal occurrence on the battlefield, Dark Eldar seem very refreshing. They also seem that they will be relatively competitive in most aspects of the game.

Well that’s it! Leave your comments and criticisms as normal. Especially give me feedback on how I could be better. Next time I will be moving onto unit reviews, so leave your opinion one which one I should cover first. I think it’s time to get started on my term paper. Good night and good luck.

-OldChiZOne

Woah, OldChiZOne opens up on my blog with guns blazing and offers up some nice gritty grizzle to be grized. Welcome him in as I invited him to help make you guys think a bit rather than just absorb blog info while you stare blankly at your monitor counting the minutes until quitting time.  Looking forward to seeing where this one goes!  Be looking for a couple more guest writers soon, including every one's favorite blogger whore Brent!  


Jawaballs

Space Hulk commissions?

Forgive the crappy picture. Methinks it is time to upgrade my pocket cam.  Here is a Space Hulk terminator that I am painting up for my own personal army. I hate my T-hammer termy and want to upgrade the model.  This guy has been sitting primed on my shelf for six months and I decided it was time to make it happen.  The shield needs more work, and I think I am going to push the recessed areas back further with more red gore and I will add some of my yellow lightning to the hammer.  

The other reason why I am showing this is that I have 3 factory sealed Space Hulk sets sitting in my closet waiting to be painted.  I know I missed the big wave of guys scrambling to scoop up Space Hulk sets, but if you are looking for a commissioned set, I'm open to negotiations.  Food for thought!

Jawaballs

And so it begins...

Hey there folks, what's up!  My (internets) name is Xaereth, and it appears that I'll be posting here from time to time.  Figured I'd introduce myself in this post, and leave the 'real' content for later.

BOLS article covering my Mechanicon reprinted here.

For those of you who do not read Bell of Lost Souls, I am copying the Mechanicon Review I posted up last week here. Enjoy!  You can find the original article with the comments HERE on BOLS.

Hey Folks, Jawaballs here!

Mechanicon was this past weekend. It is one of the biggest East coast tournaments, however tournament organizer Tony Spino and the boys take a slightly different approach to running it. Lets take a look.

Reader submitted pictures. Nice stuff!

I'm always happy to give back to the community and show off some great work from the readers. This time Steven Field submitted these pictures of some Blood Angels Sergeants he painted in part using my painting advice.  Nice job man!

If you would like to have your work featured on my blog feel free to send in some nice pictures!  

Jawaballs

As requested, my Mechanicon GT winning army list!

Hey folks. I did a writeup on BOLS about my recent win at The Mechanicon GT and I have gotten emails asking for a detailed army list, so here you go!

Librarian: Preferred Enemy and STR 10
Elite Chaplain: Melta Pistol
Elite Sang Priest: Terminator Armor

RAS 1:
Razor back
Las/Plas
PW

RAS 2:
Razor back
Las/plas
PW
Melta Gun

Ras 3:
Razorback
Las/Plas
PW

Ras 4:
Razorback
Heavy Flamer
PW
Meltagun

Terminator squad
4x lightning claws
1x hammer/ss

Land Raider Crusader dedicated transport
extra armor
multi melta
(chap, lib and priest hitch a ride)
3x auto cannon/las can sponson predators

There it is!  This is a shooty, defensive BA list.  What I mean is that I don't have the overpowering assault strength to cram my land raider down my opponent's throat.  I am better served keeping it back, using it to give cover or block LOS to my tanks, and shooting.  The idea is to use my las and auto cannons to get the jump on my opponent on Kill Points early, thus forcing him to come to me. Once he gets close I assault with my termies and rapid fire plasma with my razors.  This strategy worked well at Mechanicon.  When my termies do assault, they usually wipe out whatever they hit. So keeping them unexposed to the counter assault is key.

When this army does need to assault though, they can be overwhelming.  With some lucky rolls on the red thirst, or if I am able to use my RAS in tandem with my priest, they can be truly frightening.  But I am definitely not optimized for assault.  My RAS squads really cant survive against any but the weakest of squads.  Any truly dedicated assault squad will take them down.  So they stay in their razors. But having two melta guns is a boon. I run the flamer back up behind my raider if needed, then it can 12" move from behind, disembark and shoot the melta for an extra shot at cracking a transport giving the termies a squad to assault.  Ideally I disembark them within 6" of the priest so they have a chance to survive the following shooting turn.  The question, how do I adapt? What do I change? I was on the verge of scrapping this list completely, but then I up and win a GT.  What to do???

Jawaballs

Painting Dark Eldar: Jawaballs first attempt at a warrior!

Hey folks, so here is my first attempt at painting a Dark Eldar model.  I was playing around with color schemes and trying to decide on which I would go with first, and settled on a green.  I was going to try purple, but I imagine there will be a lot of failed attempts at it, so I went with something I have a little more experience with first.  I used the same technique of blending I have been using on my Blood Angels. 

I started by spraying him black.  Then I faded Catachan Green from the edges towards the recessed areas

Then I used a catachan green shaded with black, fading from the recesses towards the edges, meeting the first fade in the middle. This creates a blend, which I then carry out to the edge. I then reapply the catachan green from the edge, then back and forth.  

Then I do a fade from the edge using Snot Green, and another using Goblin green.  Then I used Valejo Livery green as an extreme highlight.  That covers the armor plates.

For the eyes I used Iyanden Darksun then Valejo Lemon Yellow.  I then highlighted them with white. I used the lemon yellow and a bit of white on the visor areas that edge around the eyes to create a glowing effect.  I repeated this same technique down the insides of the rifle.  I also added a bit of orange on the inside of the rifle too.  Thats about it!

I left the boots and pec armor black, highlighted with catachan and snot green.  

What do you think? Have I found my Dark Eldar recipe on the first try?  It certainly takes a while to paint these guys.  But unlike my Blood Angels, where I paint an entirely new army every few months, I don't plan on painting all that many Dark Eldar. I will do 40 warriors to create my base, along with 20 wichs and 10 incubi.  I will also do up 6 Raiders and 3 Ravagers.  I will finally do some Mandrakes and other support forces, as well as 10 Harlies.  Then Im done!  

EDIT: I forgot to say that I went back into the recessed areas with Badab Black wash to darken them up.

Feel free to leave constructive criticism.  By the way, that means that in addition to pointing out things that could be improved, you suggest how you would do it... :)  Lets get this rolling as a teaching post for every one!  Feel free to send in pics of your well done models, I will post them up.

Jawaballs

Let the Dark Eldar scheming begin!

Hey folks, Jawaballs here!

Ok, I've had the DE codex for a few days and yes I am making an army.  I love the new models and cant wait to get painting.  I think that the DE are going to be a painters army.  The models are simply way too detailed for guys to half heartedly have a stab at, and with the current evolution of the tournament scene, painting/army points are becoming much more important.

But being a DE noobie, I have no idea where to begin.  Most of the wargear names may as well be written in Italian. It is a journey of complete exploration for me, much like when I first opened up Codex: Space Marines.  Again, where to begin...

Well the starting point is easy for me. I will begin with what I love. And I love Harlequins.  In a painter's army, Harlequins are the top of the top.  I have a full squad of them sitting on my shelf that have been waiting 3 years for a reason to be painted.  I can't wait to finally get to paint all those different colors and play some true death dealing, dancing clowns.

What else?  At first glance I like the Warriors, Mandrakes and Incubi.  I dislike the Wychs.  Why and why?  I well there is a lot more that I like than dislike so I will get the dislike out of the way first. I hate top-knots.  I don't like 9 of the 10 heads in the Wych box set and won't use them.  That goes for all of the cornrows, and Latrell Spreewell braids too.  (hellions) If any one wants to trade, I am offering any DE top-knot or cornrow head for helmeted Dark Elf or Dark Eldar heads.

First of all, put on a damn helmet. You are at war!  The last thing you need is a stupid shard of ceremite splitting open your silly top-knot head you dopes.  If your hair gets in the way when you fight... shave it off. Don't pull it all up into a convenient pumpkin stem that your opponents can grasp onto to wield you like a cricket bat. Or braid it into rows that your opponent can palm like the ridges of a Basketball and dunk you through the hatch of a burned out tank.  Some of the other wychs have ridiculous anime looking cutsie pig tails and what not, all held in place by bones.  Blah.  I want all of my troops wearing malicious and evil looking visored helms.

Enough of that, you get the point.  My models will all be wearing helms.  Except the Mandrakes of course. I think those dudes look sorta cool like Emo Eddy Vedder from the Jeremy Video.  Every thing else about the Mandrakes is also cool. Their ink, their poses, their weapons... They look silent, brooding and deadly. Like the fart I surprised my wife with last night.

The Incubi look awesome. Enough said. I want a squad of 10 malignant goatboy looking eldar.  I love the visored masks.  Too cool.

The Warriors look exactlly how they should. Like evil, nasty guardians.

That gets me started!  Here is my first 2k list:

Archon
Lelith (hate her topknot but she is bad ass in combat)

Incubi x10 with Raider
Mandrake x10 with Raider
Harlies x10 with kiss', shadowseer and troupe master

 4 squads of Warriors x10 with upgrades in raiders
1 squadd of wychs x10 in raider

Competitive? Probably not. I have no idea what is.  But this is a great core for me to get started with, and paint.  7 raiders, 70 dark eldar, 10 harlies and a couple characters, all painted up to jawaquality is nothing to scoff at.  But it will give me everything I need to run just about any army I want as I figure things out.

Future lists will include a venom or two converted out of Vypers.  The fighter skimmers once they release models, an archon mutant squad just for the painting fun, and jetbikes and hellions cause they are pretty cool too.  The question here is, what is competitive?  If you are an experienced, competitive DE player and already drooling at the possibilities I am more than interested in having you write some articles for my blog.  Send me an email, jawaballs at hotmail, and lets get your point of view! Teach me!

More to come..

Jawaballs

Black Templars Commission.

I don't get very many commissions, mostly because I charge quite a bit of money. It's not that I'm all that great a painter, I can think of a dozen guys off the top of my head who are better than me and it is not that I am fast, because I am slow as molasses.  I charge a lot for two reasons. One, it takes me a lot of time to do them and time is one thing I have very little of.  My time is worth a lot of money to me. And two, every commission I do is done to a standard that I myself would be proud to put on the table.  Every model gets tender Jawalove and a piece of me, sometimes literally, goes into each unit I paint.  I only do one quality level, high. There are plenty of guys out there who do economy level work for the customer on a budget. Black Matt, Goatboy and Blue Table Painting to name three. They are all great and I have sent business to them all.  But every once in a while I get a guy who wants to splurge and asks me to do a job that I want to do. (I don't accept just any job.)

So here is my newest commission!  We will call him Frank. Frank wants a Black Templar army. He asked me to design him a competitive list, build it and paint it.  He asked me to make them stand out, be unique and look great.  I quoted him my standard high prices including some options and he didn't bat an eyelash! My kind of man.  :)

I will be painting:
3 speeders
10 termies
15 crusader marines
3 razorbacks
1 Land Raider Crusader
1 emps champ
1 marshal

He sent me some demon bits to add to the bases of some of the models, gave me some guidelines for what he wanted, then opened up the rest to my creative whim.

I decided to start with the terminators and painted up a test model to serve as the basis for the rest of the army.  This is still a work in progress but very close to finished.

I had forgotten how deceptively hard templars are to paint.  Im using the tried and true Codex-Fortress grey highlights. But man, they are unforgiving. The slightest lapse in concentration and boom a botched line. The black contrast makes every imperfection glaringly obvious.  I need to go back into this guy and clean up his edges.  I went with red helmets and shoulder pads, highlighted up to orange.  I am using the same dark base I use for my Blood Angels but am bringing the highlight up to a Fiery Orange, then toned down with Baal Red.  The bases of these models are my line of Jawabases called Industrial Ruin.  I'm not sold on how I painted it though, I'm open to suggestion here guys.  The claws are just blue for now. I had to balance out the bright orange highlights.

Here is a pic of 5 termies in progress.

Here are some more pics.

So there you go!  I will post more pics as I get more progress.  I will also see if he wants me to paint him a banner like this one.

More to come...

Jawaballs

The Mechanicon! This weekend.

The Death Company was represented.

My "Death From Above: Stomp Stomp" list got me 3rd at last years

Mechanicon. I came a 3+ armor save away from winning

the whole thing! I also got 2nd at The Conflict a couple months later

with those Venerable Furioso Dreads.  

Imagine all of these raiders and Dark Eldar troops in flame 

and you will have a more accurate picture of what is going on here.

Here is is! This weekend is the second year of The Mechanicon!  Last year Tony and the boys ran an outstanding tournament and this year promises to be more of the same and better. But the Mechanicon is not just a tournament. Of all the gaming events I have been to, this is the most complete.  Mechanicon has a little bit of everything. You can peruse the website for the details, but throughout the tournament there will be combat squad tournaments, blood bowl tournaments, special issue games, and a charity auction.  While the 40k GT is the big draw, you are paying for much much more.  Last year, I was there alone because Fritz caught the flu and had to bail, but I was able to hang with cool dudes the entire time. The Mechanicon boys made me feel right at home, and I met some guys in the open gaming rooms that I still speak to now where ever I go. Necron Brad and Ted, who took best army with his gorgeous space wolves top the list.  

They open up the huge gaming room for all night games on Friday, and there is a bar in there. How cool is that?  Last year Ted Nagle and I were buying each other drinks all night and the challenge is to be the last man to buy a drink. It was not long before I lost track resulting in a very rough morning for me. 

So what is my list? That is a closely guarded secret and if I told you I would have to kill Brother Captain James. Actually my list is just an 1850 version of my 2k Nova list. I didn't have time to do yet another complete army.  However, this will probably be the last time I play a tournament with the Blood Angels in my current form.  Big changes for my list are in the works and I hope to drop that hammer at the next tournament. Maybe The Conflict!   I have been bouncing around all of the feed back people have been  sending my way, and trying to put together a truly dreadful list. 

Any way, I hope to see some of you at The Mechanicon. There may be still time to register and make the trip. I assure you, you will enjoy the weekend.  

Jawaballs

Charge!

+++ Transmission Begins +++
Greetings, Battle Brothers. As you have read recently, JB is moving away from small Assault squads in lascannon Razorbacks in response to what he feels was a knee-jerk reaction to the cool new toys in the BA Codex. While I don't agree, I see his point. I also agree that it is probably time to go to infantry-based lists due to the massed Dark Lance-spam we are already seeing from DE players. I think people will get back into their rolling boxes eventually, but in the meantime, what sort of infantry-based lists seem useful from our Codex?
I was considering a few lists, and of course they're just theory at the moment. They'll be tested at some point (likely a 2K tournament in November), but in the meantime they are just Theoryhammering.

The core of what I wanted to run were full-sized Assault squads, with a melta and a power fist each. Each squad would also have a jump-packing Sanguinary Priest attached. Of course there's the option to add in a second melta, but I didn't want to jigger the list's points so much. In either 1850 or 2000 points I can run 4 or 5 of these units with plenty of points left over.

So, for 1850 points, I can run:
5 x Assault Squads
a Whirlwind with a storm bolter
2 x jump-packer Librarians
or take one Assault squad away and add:
2 x Baal Predators with heavy bolter sponsons and a storm bolter

In 2000 points, a list could be:
5 Assault squads
a Whirlwind with a storm bolter
Dante
a Librarian Dreadnought (or a jump-packer Librarian with 2 powers a turn)
This would be mostly against DE to have some vague chance to fight at the same time in close combat.

I could drop Dante for a las-las Predator and an autocannon-las Predator, both with extra armor. Again an Assault squad could go in favor of 2 dakka-Baals.

Why the Whirlwind? It will be good for killing massed DEs, and it can ignore cover saves. I realize most people don't like it, but I have always had good success with them pre-new Codex. They also force the enemy to kill them... while they're not the most effective weapon system, often players just have to kill them for some reason, much like they had to always kill my PDF-Codex Death Company even when there were only 2-3 of them in front of a Furioso. Of course, you may find a better use for 100 points. (2 attack bikes with multi-meltas?)

I appreciate the most recent list JB has put up on BoLS with the Vanguard squads' ability to assault after Deepstriking, but I am still unfortunately stuck on trying to put as many scoring units and models on the table. That is probably a big weakness, but I have no illusions about being a great general.

So, you all did a great job with the Wolves' list I was playing with (and I'll test a revised one very soon), so let's discuss these.

+++ Tranmission Ends +++

Ghost Hunters... Corporate sell outs!

A few years ago on Halloween, I think it was 2006, I was sitting at home and came across a show called Ghost Hunters. I had heard of the show before but never watched it. That Halloween they were doing a live ghost investigation though.  I got sucked in.  Not so much because I believe in ghosts but more because the show just appealed to me. I think it was the huge amounts of just quiet time. A couple of guys hanging out in a deathly quiet , dark building, asking ghosts questions, chasing shadows.  There was a little bit of comedy relief with the younger guys busting on each other.  I ended up watching this live broadcast for a good 4 or 5 hours, then began watching the series on a weekly basis.  Great stuff.  It was simple and mindless entertainment. But of course corporate greed had to set in.

Not long after Sci-Fi became Syfy.  Some CEO decided it was time to mix things up.  Enter the in-programing commercials. Sci-fi started airing WWE. (I suppose it is not a far stretch from science fiction.)  But the Ghost Hunters were still there doing their thing...  Two years ago I looked forward to being able to watch the Halloween live broadcast again.  But this time it was different. There was actually production being attempted.  It had become commercial.  I did not really mind though... until I noticed the "Guest host" some silly wrestler from WWE. This tool box ruined the show.  Making rude comments to the female staff... talking through the quiet moments... spoiling every thing that appealed to me about the show.  But I didn't tune out until one staged conversation between one of the regular cast members and the wrestler happened. The cast member was asking leading questions to get the wrestler to talk about some match coming up. It just annoyed me. I stopped watching.

Last night I turned it on again, now out of a sense of nostalgia more than any thing else.  Oh what a waste.  Instead of watching the opening sequence of Dawn of the Dead on AMC I got treated to a 10 minute in programing ad for a car company.  The cast members were driving towards the destination in a couple of SUVs, and pointing out all the great features... "now I will use the in dash GPS to find our destination." "Now I will use the built in phone feature to call Steve."  "Oh and look, while we are driving to the investigation, we can watch DVDs from last years show on the..." The logo for the car prominently adorning every possible surface. Channel changed.  Enough.  But wait, I wanted to give it another chance! During a commercial of Dawn of the Dead I switched back to Syfy... whats on screen? A huge splash animation of the WWE and some corn rowed wrestler talking about a match... For the love of god.

For the record, Sci-Fi spawned some of my favorite programing of all time.  Taken, Battlestar Galactica, and Eureka to name a few... but give me a break!  It's not like Ghost Hunters is a shining example of ground breaking programing, but the execs need to figure out where to draw a line... some where... For every hour long episode, we see 35-40 minutes of program and 20-25 minutes of commercials.  Now we have to suffer through commercials while we are actually watching the program? It's bad enough sports have sold out. Every team plays in a corporate stadium. Every half time show is brought to you by some credit card company. You can't watch a baseball game without a third of the screen being taken up by ads.  Now we have to suffer through it during our TV shows. Heroes, the new Hawaii Five-O, and Ghost Hunters to name a few are all guilty.

I don't know if there is a cure. Corporations will continue to plague our programs with ads and we will continue to watch. And please don't say that we get to watch free stuff.  I pay a lot of money for TV and feel that we have the right to demand better. Can't we? But will we still watch? I can say that if enough people change the channel, and let them know that you did, maybe we can make a change. So email them!  Here is the email address. feedback@syfy.com  


Give them a piece of your mind!  I will.


Jawaballs


EDIT:  I want to add to this that the Sci-fi needs to make money. They need to have ads during programing. It is the ad money that allows them to make the shows. I don't begrudge them from making profit. I make some money, a very small amount of money, off ads myself. I can even deal with product placement. But that does not mean that they have to gutt punch us with the cast advertising products during the show.  Know what I mean?