one year of one inch warriors!

Well loyal readers, my little blog has managed to make it past the one year mark.  I have no super spectacular clip-show style post planned as a celebration, so I'll leave you with a picture of something random I pulled out of the good old storage cabinet in the garage.  Enjoy yourself.

Consumer or Fan - How Does GW See You?

Rough times for Mr. McCourt

Major League Baseball's All-Star Game has passed, the second half of the season is underway and I've had baseball on my mind.  For residents of the greater Los Angeles area, including myself, this season has been full of off-the-field drama up in Dodger-town.  At this point, Dodger owner Frank McCourt is persona non grata to most Blue-Crew faithful.  When he first arrived on the scene in 2004 many viewed him as a carpetbagger from Boston and after the details came out of how he the missus milked the team to fund a lifestyle of excess his reputation sank further.  The Bryan Stow assault has not helped Frank's rep and now the MLB is in the process of wrenching ownership of the team away from him.

So what the heck does any of this have to do with warhams?  In the aftermath of the annual round of GW price hiking, coupled with subsequent gripping and threats to quit the hobby, I though it would be good time to bring up a topic I've touched on twice before - the idea that wargamers are not so much fans as they are consumers.  You'll see where this analogy is going when we take a look at the other MLB team in the Los Angeles area - my beloved Angels.

FoW Tropic Lightning: Personal Reactions

I was considering writing a post about the upcoming Storm of Magic WFB supplement after pictures from July's White Dwarf have were leaked last week and no one really seems to have given much thought to it.  Instead, I feel more compelled to talk about Battlefront's (somewhat) new Vietnam supplement "Tropic Lightning" - a preview of which you can see at Bell of Lost Souls.  It's not really that new, it came with April's Wargames Illustrated, so BoLS and myself are bit behind the curve here, but moving on...

My father-in-law was drafted during the Vietnam War and was in the Army's 25th Infantry Division, aka the Tropic Lightning.  I've known him for nearly ten years and he rarely speaks about his military service.  Most of the stories he has told about his time in the Army are not about his combat experiences.  Mostly they're about how he learned to fly in Hawaii during his leave time and the bizarre food he ate in Vietnam.  I can only recall one instance of when he talked about actual fighting, which was very brief and conveyed more to me about what it was like to be there than any war film injected with narrative from a member of the Sheen family can.  I know from other family members how much the war affected him for years after he came back.

Salamanders and Stuff

... the kind that spit fire, for Lizardmen, not the green-armored space-dudes.  I had to explain this to several GW staffers when I was trying to find these models.  No, I'm not looking for Forge World Rhino doors, dammit.  Anyways...

These were a fairly straightforward paint job.  The tough part was that there is not much space between the Salamanders' underside and the base, making it difficult to get a brush in there to paint the undercarriage.  I'll base them up later when I paint the Skink handlers.

Painting Plastic Palm Trees

Long time no post, but sometimes life gives you lemons and you waste a bunch time jerking around trying to make lemonade instead of painting silly plastic men and blogging about it.  Anyways, a few weeks back I painted up one of those nifty plastic palm trees I found at a craft store, but I just got around to snapping some pictures.  The whole process was rather simple, since the palm fronds don't come glued to the tree trunk, making the tree easy to disassemble for painting.  So, I took one of the trees apart, primed it black and then dry brushed with the appropriate colors.  The fronds have these little coconuts, which I was thinking about removing, but they look decent when they're giving some color to make them stand out.

Before & After