Well I don’t think I can stack up to these hilarious stories but here’s an old tidbit that turned into a wargaming adjacent inside joke.
My childhood friend that got me into Warhammer lived on a street with quite a substantial hill. Being just a quick walk from the elementary school where both of our mothers taught, we spent many after school hours pouring over miniatures, painting our LotR SBG armies. Most days we’d look out the window and see his dad and neighbor conversing from either side of the fence, in a classic “Dad leaning over the fence” sort of way. Both of them were huge vintage car buffs.
On some days, with a good view looking down the hill, we’d watch his neighbor pull a car out of the garage, 68 Chevy Nova if memory serves, then grab a lawn chair and set it up near the car. He’d sit there facing the car with the sun beating down for hours. No newspaper, no cellphone (wasn’t a thing back then), no book, nothing at all, and definitely not sleeping either judging by mannerisms and intermittent repositioning. This phenomenon was pretty baffling to us kids that when kicked outside would typically be seen running around screaming at 64 miles per hour, or chucking pine cones (and sometimes rocks, whoops) at each other while holding sticks like lightsabers. We wrote this off as just one of those ol’ folks oddities. Surely with our pile of hobbies we’d never find ourselves in such a state.
Fast forward from childhood to mid 20s. School and careers have taken us wargaming buddies in different ways. But whenever we visit each other we have endless Warhammer catch up to do. Our parents would always gripe to us that we never discuss real life, just Warhammer. To which our resounding response is consistently, “well yeah of course, he’s the only person I’ll never feel bad subjecting to endless ranting on plastic spacemen and heroic fantasy”. We’re on the clock and need to spit it out while we can. All that talking leaves one pretty gassed, sure we’d spend some of it painting together, and by the end there would be newly painted minis to soak in. Pull up a chair, stay a while. Time passes fast when ogling at beloved possessions. Sound familiar?
Ogling isn’t quite the correct word though. Has lecherous implications.
Staring? yeah that’s part of it but not fully evocative.
Relishing, basking, luxuriating, savoring… nothing quite seemed to capture it fully
We needed some word to casually slip into conversation to refer to these moments of “yeah, dam straight I’m just gonna sit here enjoying this thing I’ve poured hours of my soul into, get off my metaphorical lawn with your judgement”. Enter the neighbor, Mr. Fosche. The original foscher and creator of the fosche effect.
Any of you find yourselves sitting there fosching your painted minis?