What is cool?

[lono]

OK, my first new topic and something I have been wondering about. The name of this site is Cool Mini or Not, but does \'cool\' factor really influence your opinion on a miniature. Do you try and make your submissions cool in some way other than good painting? In fact, what is this darned cool thing anyway?

For me cool is something completely seperate from teqhnique and ability and just because a miniature has a truly spectacular paint job it doesn\'t instantly earn my cool rating. I have given really quite low ratings to a couple of Golden Demon winners before because the pose or theme of it seemed unnatural and they became very uncool in my eyes, despite a solid 9 or 10 paint job.

Likewise, a miniature that is less well painted but cool beyond belief can easily rise in my favour. It\'s down to loads of stuff for me but the big ones on my cool scale seem to be dynamism and ambience. Action poses, athletic leaps, precarious looking balance points, all the stuff that breathes life into a miniature make me smile. As far as ambience, even I have difficulty working that one out, but things like EricJ\'s avatar picture (which is also really well painted and possibly a bad example... damn!) also just get my cool senses tingling!

So anyone else think that an extra level of cool matters in their minis and is something to strive for, or is some smooth blending, nice NMM and a flashy splash of freehand where it is at?

 

[demonherald]

I jsut like to see something different that hasn\'t been done before..Doesn\'t have to be perfect painting just something that catches my eye..

Often I\'ll type in the name of a mini I know in the search description box and just see what jumps out..

Originality becomes rarer and rarer due to the ease in which we all share ideas on this site and many others like it..

 

[mickc22]

this looks pretty cool to me
Tau with lights

 

[Ogrebane]

The usage of cool as a general positive epithet or interjection has been part and parcel of English slang since World War II, and has even been borrowed into other languages, such as French and German. Originally this sense is a development from a Black English usage meaning “excellent, superlative,” first recorded in written English in the early 1930s. Jazz musicians who used the term are responsible for its popularization during the 1940s. As a slang word expressing generally positive sentiment, it has stayed current (and cool) far longer than most such words. One of the main characteristics of slang is the continual renewal of its vocabulary and storehouse of expressions: in order for slang to stay slangy, it has to have a feeling of novelty. Slang expressions meaning the same thing as cool, like bully, capital, hot, groovy, hep, crazy, nervous, far-out, rad, and tubular have for the most part not had the staying power or continued universal appeal of cool. In general there is no intrinsic reason why one word stays alive and others get consigned to the scrapheap of linguistic history; slang terms are like fashion designs, constantly changing and never “in” for long. The jury is still out on how long newer expressions of approval such as def and phat will survive.

I could be said that the use of the word cool as a slang word dates even further back than this. Keep it cool was used in the early 1800s to mean dont get excited.

Anyway you look at it cool is still a cool slang word and has probably been around longer than any other slang word.

btw Mick that is really cool. Id give it an 8 even if it wasnt painted.