X tips for blender I thought everyone knew

I have been using blender for like 9 years now (although I only count the last 3 being any good) and have never really gotten involved with any blender-specific communities. I have been somewhat of a silent learner, watching tutorials and googling for tips rather than getting involved in the community. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.

The thing is, I just finished a blender-related-forums web surf and I was surprised to see how many things people don't know about blender. So I'm going to do one of those "6 things you can do to lose fat RIGHT NOW" lists for blender features. I have no idea how many of these I'll do, hence the X. Rather than being a cunt, I'll start with the best first.

ModelsForTheMasses post mortem

As some may know, I ran my own little freelance operation for the source community for almost two years. The goal starting out on this was to see if anyone thought my models were good enough to pay for, but that changed over the course of the project. I ended up using the service to get news about as many mods as I could, to get my art out amongst the community, to build a portfolio and mostly to provide fresh content to the stale source modding scene.

I consider this my first scrape with monetizing my hobby, and I learned a bit about freelancing and dealing with people over models in general. So I'll chat about it a bit here.