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Saw in my newsbox that the Hobby Lobby in Sevierville had their Grand Opening today so I went there and got this diecast Corsair, which I'd been hoping to find for quite a while. (They'd sold out at other area locations and I was seriously thinking about going to the one in the Tri-Cities.)

FP
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A couple weeks ago at the Knoxville IPMS meeting, a fellow member was clearing out his closet of old periodicals and some of us got to divvying the pieces among them.  When I saw that he had old issues of War Monthly and True War among them, I shamelessly scooped up as much of those as I could.

Both those magazines were influences on me, and perhaps more than I'd care to admit.

War Monthly was the product of the Marshall Cavendish publishing powerhouse, and (I felt) a good value for the combination of artwork, writing and layout work.  The articles would get repurposed into volumes, and from there sometimes into whole coffee table books.

True War, on the other hand, was the product of the notorious low-budget tabloid schlockmeister and pornographer Myron Fass at Countrywide Publications.  The only color content was on the cover, and the interior was made up mainly of archival or press-release photos and cut-to-the-bone prose.  True to form, their presentation on the Battle of Arnhem (for an example) was slimmer in both page count and journalist prowess as the photo spread of Cornelius Ryan's book A BRIDGE TOO FAR!  I got a replacement copy of an issue of True War I thought I lost in 1978 and now that I think about it, I think one of my parents could have thrown mine out in disgust.

To make a long story short, I couldn't afford as a kid to subscribe to War Monthly, and even if the option were available my folks probably wouldn't have condoned me subscribing to True War.  My main go-to publisher of magazines from then was Challenge Publications (Air Classics, Air Combat, Air Progress, Military Modeler, etc.).

But I'm glad to get back these.  And then I found a bunch of online sources for .pdf versions of War Monthly, so one way or another I have all the content from the get-go through to Issue 49.  The series lasted much longer than that, but the later ones are very hard to find because they were subscription-only and most went to library collections.

FP

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Almost six whole years after I first posted about it here I finally got a copy of Sky Crawlers on DVD.

Yes, it's very much a Mamoru Oshii movie.  It's got characters walking around in existential hazes, realism that makes you wonder why it isn't live-action, and even a basset hound.  While there is action--in deadly earnest--it isn't an action movie.  The setting is both real and unreal, and the themes of his previous movies are taken in a different direction.

Basically, this is ONE scene from CATCH-22 transformed into an entire feature movie.  Where in the Heller work (and the movie that came from it) the scene was played for satirical effect, in this case the concept's tragic meaning is thrown to full relief.

FP (who is wrestling with the existential ramifications himself)

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Roughly 1/72nd scale, the fuselage is just a little over 6"/15 cm long.
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*) Tried to sell my old wireless modems at a second-hand mobile phone store overday, and the store refused to buy them. I wonder if I should just consign them to a friend who has an eBay store.

*) Zvezda in Russia promises that there will be new kits in their Art of Tactic series that will be scale compatible with Wings of Glory WW2...and I'm particularly interested in the Bristol Blenheim bombers. Well, with the politics between Stateside and Moscow being what they are, I shouldn't expect to get these very quickly.

*) REIGN on CW is a mess. It's supposed to be historical but their visual RNA for scenery, props, costuming and casting is jarringly off-the-mark. Or, at least, I THINK it's supposed to be historical.
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With my last of my cash in pocket I bought two starter packs for the old Wizkids "clicky" Crimson Skies game yesterday.  If you've been following my blog, you'd know that I'd been converting the clicky airplane miniatures for use in other games in recent months.  I bought the starters in the mistaken idea that a couple miniatures were included, but they aren't at all.

No wonder this never actually caught on.  It was expensive at launch, and for a collectable game, needlessly complex and lacking in avenues for creativity.
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It took me about fifty days to complete a 1/48th P-40 for the Revell/Gearz National Scale Model Contest.





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In my travels yesterday I saw that the second set of AXIS & ALLIES: AIR FORCE MINIATURES game, BANDITS HIGH, is already out. (The official street date is a few days from now, but some stores have them on the shelves and pegs.)

Nominally, I'd be all over it. Nowadays, with nobody to play against, it's hard to care all that much.
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Over the weekend was the local IPMS club's Swap Meet, and I got several kits for very very cheap. Including a few more Spitfires.

Anybody feel like coming up with a paint scheme or two?

FP
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In one-to-six scale, an Avro Lincoln bomber/transport has a wingspan of twenty feet.
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For the last while I've been attempting to port CRIMSON SKIES planes into AXIS AND ALLIES: AIR FORCE MINIATURES rules for no good reason.
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Coming This Year From OriToy In Hong Kong.

The vehicles will be scale-compatible with the smaller G. I. Joe and World Peacekeepers/Power Team Elite figures (1:18).
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Sagittarius Horoscope for week of January 12, 2012

I suspect you may soon find yourself in a situation similar to the one that 19th-century American President Abraham Lincoln was in when he said the following: "If this is coffee, please bring me some tea. But if this is tea, please bring me some coffee." In other words, Sagittarius, you may not be picky about what you want, but whatever it is, you'll prefer it to be authentic, pure, and distinctly itself. Adulterations and hodgepodges won't satisfy you, and they won't be useful. Hold out for the Real Thing.


The other day I looked through a pile of old periodicals for sale and found three of the Ducimus Camouflage & Markings pamphlets. I can't believe that I'd never seen any before, and suddenly I want to get both the compiled volumes. So what if they're innaccurate, dated and low tech...they're worth having.
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I decided to go the route of invented factions with my wargame armies partly because of a general disgust with the purely historical paradigm (partly boredom and partly hatred for the horrors of the politics involved) and my ongoing need to do something creative and self-authentic. Besides, if I have pieces in, say, Nde Nation markings, they are far less likely to be stolen from a big convention as, for example, ones with Wehrmacht Afrika Korps colors.

Who Is What:
Balance Corps. Colors: Woodland/Temperate Brown. The "hero" faction of the Hackett Continuum, their insignia is intentionally based on the compass rose sigils of NATO and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Nde Nation. Colors: Grassland/Zebra-Tiger Stripes. This is a tongue-in-cheek concept from Hollywood and anime given a serious twist. The return of the Apache tribal nation as a modern militant force, with contemporary weapons and technology.

Royal Sealand Guards. Colors: Nocturnal Gray/Black/Deep Purple; Stealth. The shield is the same as in the actual micronation's coat-of-arms. The Royal Guards is a real organization; in the Hackett Continuum they are one of the main military forces backing Balance Corps.

Misfit Brigade. Colors: Arctic Gray/White. Based on the movie of the same name and the Weird War Two game concept that followed, these are renegade Germans in a WW2 or Cold War setting.

Trigon Federation. Colors: Forest/Jungle Green. The Aggressors from the Cold War U.S. Army exercizes.

Freikorps. Colors: Desert Tan. Real history given some steroids. The Nazis attempted to turn Allied P.O.W.'s to their cause, but never got enough of them to send them into combat. And worse, the Freikorps was easily penetrated with Allied double agents! See also Kurt Vonnegut's novels Slaughterhouse Five and Mother Night.

Metal Victory Army. Colors: Bare Metal and Black/Iron. Invented for the comic books I was writing in the 1990s, they would evolve into one of the antagonist forces in the Hackett Continuum.

Cuerpo Sangre. Colors: Marine/Blue. The other main antagonist force, they are co-belligerant competitors of the MVA.

White Army. Colors: Urban/Ghost Gray. Like the Misfit Brigade, only renegade Russians and Eastern Europeans rather than Germans.
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Factional Insignia for some of my wargame armies in the making:



I reserve the right to return to this entry and explain these and add context. Needless to say, this doesn't reflect real-world politics or my personal philosophies.
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This week: All the 1/200 HBM WW2 airplane miniatures that I could either find on my list, or failing that, proxy.

I don't know if HBM is even still in business; their website hasn't been updated since 2007 and the e-mail I sent the webmaster bounced. I sent him a snail mail postcard on Monday, so I suppose either I'll hear from him or I won't.

Meanwhile, one of the main stores that sells Wings of War around here, HobbyTown USA, is clearing out their Nexus-boxed stuff for 50% off or better. And here I am with no cash to spend. Granted their selection was down to Vals and Dewoitines (which I have no prejudice against as such, but...).
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The addition to my Amazon Wishlist for today is a set of LITKO flight bases for Wings of Glory (nee Wings of War) miniature aircraft. And so I am trying to set a limit on which miniatures to acquire and how many. This is a real balancing act, as it's great to have a good diversity of subjects, in good numbers, but not so great to have too much of something either because it's a waste of effort and resources.

Back in March I did a likeable plan--a Doomsday Roster--to see what I could justify and what I couldn't. Wings of Glory uses 1/200 scale miniature pieces. There isn't exactly one-stop shopping for these; Ares (ex Nexus) sells some of these but there are still a great many that are possible choices in the game that aren't available from them yet. Other manufacturers have some, but not all. Still, I looked over Wishlists of years past and came up with the following plan:

TWELVE EACH of: P-51 Mustang (various versions), Yakovlev YAK-1/YAK-3/YAK-9, P-47 Thunderbolt (various versions), Lavochkin Lagg-3/La-5/La-7, F4U Corsair, F6F Hellcat, F8F Bearcat, Spitfire IX (to use as Seafire).
EIGHT EACH of: P-40 Warhawk (various versions), P-36 Hawk 75, P-38 Lightning, Hawker Typhoon, Hawker Tempest, Boulton Paul Defiant, Spitfire (early version), Hawker Hurricane, A-20 Havoc, P-61 Black Widow, DeHavilland Mosquito, Brewster Buffalo, F4F Wildcat, Gloster Gladiator.
SIX EACH of: P-39 Airacobra, P-63 Kingcobra, Polikarpov I-15, Polikarpov I-16, Messerschmitt Bf110, Messerschmitt Me410, Junkers Ju87 Stuka, A6M Zerosen.
FOUR EACH of: Nakajima Ki-43, Fiat CR42, FockeWulf Fw190A, FockeWulf Fw190D, Dornier Do335, Junkers Ju88, Messerchmitt Bf109, Macchi MC202, Kawasaki Ki-61, Reggiane Re2000, Reggiane Re2001, Kawanishi N1K2-J.

Again, this is one of those "if I somehow come into a boatload of money to blow" pipe dreams. I probably won't even get a small fraction of these. But I've at least got a plan in my mind and on paper.

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Stephen R Bierce

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