🕯️ MISCHA’S MUSINGS: Entry Two — Of Logos and Lost Souls: A Rebranding Ritual Gone Awry

or, “How to Summon the Spirit of 1996 and Still Get It Wrong”

There once was a sigil.

It wasn’t perfect—too jagged, a bit retro, a tad too “heavy metal dungeon zine left on a radiator”—but it was ours. It belonged in the tangled realms of Warhammer: grimdark, clunky, rich with lore and illegible runes. It whispered of lore-keepers, citadel towers, and spray-painted basements.

Then came the new brand. The clean lines. The bold sans serif. The soulless spiral into flat design nothingness.

Somewhere in a sterile boardroom, a marketing daemon rose and declared:

"What if we took the fire out of the forge, and replaced it with Helvetica?"

And lo, the change was made.

🍟 A Taste of 1996, Microwaved in 2020

The whole thing reeks of that particular brand of aesthetic decay you only find in “updated” fast food chains—like when you walk into a McDonald’s in 2020 and wonder where all the fun went. No play areas. No garish colours. Just screens, grey tiles, and the emotional resonance of a DMV line.

The Great Shittification, as some call it.
Once golden arches—now silent tombstones.

Now Warhammer’s fallen into the same trap. What once looked like a chaotic psalm of war and myth now resembles a PowerPoint template for dystopian tax advisors.

🛸 The Irony of the Imitators

Let’s not forget—Games Workshop, originators of the Grimdark gospel, didn’t exactly knit their universe from whole cloth.

Their God-Emperor?
More worm-shaped than they'd like to admit.

Their Imperium?
A buffet of Dune’s leftovers: the psychic conditioning, the guilds of interstellar travel, the throne-bound despot, and humanity’s techno-fall via thinking machines. Swap the Butlerian Jihad for the Horus Heresy, sprinkle in a few cloned soldier-priests, and you’ve got a familiar stew.

"Imitation is the sincerest form of empire-building," whispered no one, ever, at a licensing meeting.

And the Tau?
Let’s just say some anime mech franchises would like their colour palette and idealistic communism back, thank you.

🧦 All That for a Crappy T-Shirt

After all that brand erosion and borrowed myth, you’d hope for something grand. A campaign. A resurgence. A ritual worthy of their plastic pantheon.

Instead?

We got a derivative logo and a T-shirt that looks like it fell out of the clearance bin of a sad mall store.

No thunder. No narrative. Just another cold rebrand in an age where warmth has been replaced with market-tested mediocrity. A sigil that says:

"Please invest in our IP before someone else buys the soul we already mortgaged."

🐾 At the Bazaar, We Still Remember

Here at Mischa’s Miniature Bazaar, the candles flicker in rebellion. Our logo may be etched in ink and whimsy rather than brandbook consistency, but it still feels like home. It tells a story. It isn’t afraid of shadows or strange curves.

So if you miss the old runes, the chaotic soul, the charm that wasn’t designed by algorithm—come sit a while. We’re painting stories, not products.

Brush steady, soul louder,
From the edge of the Bazaar
🐾