Can legal writing principles improve your blog writing?

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a member of one of the lowest classes of life forms on earth - an attorney. As do most other bottom feeders in the profession, I write a lot. Since my dream job as a prosecutor has yet to materialize, and therefore I don't get to hang out in court as much as I'd like and yell out things like "objection!" "hearsay!" or "hang that sumbitch," I do a lot of record reviews and what you call in the business law-and-motion practice. The end result is a written product of some sort.

In the first year of law school (in the States at least) students take a course in legal writing & research. After realizing that the course is generally useless, students get summer jobs and figure out what real legal writing is more or less about, primarily depending on your employer. I decided to ponder on some of the basic principles of legal writing that I picked up in school, internships and roughly a year in practice and see if we can apply some principles to the hobby blog.

a word in your ear or how I learned to stop worrying and love the blog

Several years back White Dwarf ran a series of articles called "A Word in Your Ear." This was a sort of editorial section was supposed to lend "select" hobbyists the opportunity to espouse on some element of the hobby. Of course this lacked all elements of journalistic integrity.* The topics that I recall from this column included rules lawyers (written by a real-life lawyer, and it included some very horrible legal analogies), hating on new hobbyists (it's bad!) and my absolute favorite, the online community. I tried to dig up the WD issue with the latter article, but unfortunately after moving twice in the past 3 years I liquidated part of my WD back catalog and I don't have this issue anymore, so I can't present an accurate citation. So much for journalistic integrity.

This article in question was published sometime around the release of the 4th ed. Tyranid Codex. The crux of the author's point was that the online community was doing a huge disservice to the hobby by its constant gripping about the state of the rules or the quality of new releases, etc, etc. His example on point was the then recent slew of bitching and moaning about the then upcoming re-sculpted Genestealers and how some folks said they looked liked monkeys or something lame. I'm 90% positive he was referring to a thread on Dakka.

First Game of 8th Edition

I ran my lizards in my first 8th edition WFB game last night at the FLGS. I didn't take notes or pictures, so this will be the hi-light reel version of the game. We had to cut the game sort and only go three turns - it was the first game of 8th for both players, so there was a lot of "um, wait, we should look that up..." Anyways, here's what I took:

Slann Mage Priest

Basing upgrade for my Slann

Quick update on my progress to get my Lizards tooled up for 8th Edition.

My Slann has been a work in progress since around 2004. His floating-throne was finished that year and then sometime around 2008 I came back and finished the fat toad himself. I originally wanted to create a scenic base for him, seeing as when he's fully kitted out he comprises about a quarter of 2000 point army and he's going to attract attention - being all magical and floaty-like. As you can see, a few pebbles and a broken Saurus regiment standard is hardly scenic.

Giant lizards riding dinosaurs!

Step 1: Cut a Hole in the Box

I finished up my light box. It's smaller than the one in the tutorial, and I spent a little more on the Bristol board than I expected, but that was the only thing I had to buy - my wife scrounged up the box from her work and the cloth on the side is from an old white t-shirt. I tested it out last night with some Lizardmen and it works great.

Shameless self-promotion & non-shameless promotion of others

Dethtron quoted an e-mail I sent him on his blog (his response was kinda-somewhat-probably the impetus for me to finally start this project).

Real content on this page coming soon. I'm putting together a DYI light-box to take some glamor shots of my cold-one cavalry that I finished recently. If you wanna build your own light box, instructions are here (props to Mr. Black for posting the link originally).