I've never had any direct contact with Warhammer, but I run into it a lot. It seems like it's adjacent to just about every nerd thing I do, but we never quite fully cross paths.
I'm a tabletop gamer, so there are often people playing it around me. Although I think I conflate it with Warmachine a lot. I'm not actually sure what the difference is. All I really know about how the tabletop version plays is that it has a bad reputation for getting periodic overhauls that require you to buy expensive new rulebooks and fuck over your army with rules changes a lot. That doesn't seem terribly different from any other tabletop game, but people do complain about it a lot. And personally I don't really care for the measuring-tape-and-template style of miniatures game, having played a little Mage Knight years ago and had a lot of trouble with the lack of precision that comes with measuring everything by hand.
I just got into painting miniatures, so most of the video tutorials and things I use to learn are from Warhammer people and about Warhammer things, although I've been painting Super Dungeon Explore pieces. I have some Warhammer-branded paint I think. I've considered buying one of their paint starter kits, but decided against it because the colors don't really work for the cartoony Soda Pop Miniatures style. Then again even with brightly-colored cartoon character miniatures I can never have enough shades of gray and brown, so I probably could have put most of it to use after all.
I work in used books and stumbled across a big paperback book of Warhammer fiction that was bizarrely valuable six months or so ago, so I skimmed it on my lunch break out of curiosity. I thought it was pretty unreadable, but maybe I just didn't "get" it or I picked bad passages. It seemed hilariously over-the-top grimdark and macho, but I suppose it was probably supposed to be. Not really my thing, but I guess I'm biased.
One of my local game stores had a collection of really nice dioramas that had won contests at some point and had been donated to them that I liked looking at before that store closed. The coolest one was a tall rectangular block of acrylic with miniatures suspended throughout it that was an ocean scene. It had a boat floating on top of the "water" with a claw reaching down to pull up a treasure chest, a bunch of little guys walking on the ocean floor and swimming around, and fish and coral and stuff. I wonder what happened to that diorama when they closed? I know the people I work for bought out a lot of their inventory, so maybe we have it in storage somewhere.
