Great Gifts for Geeks: Space Battleship Yamato Model

When I was around ten or so, I stumbled upon a cartoon called Starblazers. It was a Japanese import, and came with all the strange animation quirks for which old school japanimation is famous, but it also had, by far, the coolest space battles to be found on television at the time. In every episode, giant battleships and cruisers opened up on one other with laser batteries and missile pods, while sleek fighters dodged in and out.  I loved it!

For those not in the know, here is a quick summary.  Evil aliens attack the earth, sweeping aside our space defences, and bombard the planet with radiation bombs. The few human survivors are forced underground, to endure their last miserable years before the radiation kills them. But there is a glimmer of hope. A message pod arrives from a distant group of friendly aliens. They claim to have the cure for earth’s radiation; unfortunately, the humans will have to come pick it up. Included in the pod are plans for a super space drive and weapon system that should get the humans across the galaxy to pick up the cure. The problem is, humanity no longer has the construction capacity to build a new space ship – SO (here is the great part) – they retrofit the hull of the Super Battleship Yamato, that was sunk during World War II, with the new drive and weapon system, and blast that sucker into outer space! Booyah!

Using the power of the new ‘Wave Motion Gun’, the Space Battleship Yamato (called the Argo in Starblazers), shoots its way through the evil alien blockade and sets off on a journey to the far side of the Milky Way. But they only have one year to save the earth!

If like me, your favourite geek, remembers the cartoon foundly, you might think about getting them a model of the Space Battleship Yamato this Christmas. Thanks to the wonders of the highly advanced Japanese modelling industry, there are several choices available. However, unless your geek is a highly advanced modeller, might I suggest this one: Space Battleship Yamato from Hobby Link Japan. It costs an incredibly reasonable $7 (although shipping from Japan will nearly double that), and is relatively simple so that even casual modellers shouldn’t have too much trouble with it.

A few weeks ago, I made my first ever order from Hobby Link Japan, but I’ll leave that story for another day.

Miniature Friday - Crypt Shade

I love generic fantasy miniatures, especially evil ones;  they are just so versatile.  Take this guy, for example. I would have no qualms about using him as an adversary to my Greek Heroes, my Warhammer 40K Inquisitors, or my Dwarf adventurers. Heck, he wouldn’t even look too out of place, rising up to threaten my Confederates.

This guy comes from Reaper, and I think I picked him up at the Orc’s Nest in London.  He was exceptionally easy to paint, just a base coat and a whole lot of dry brushing.

It's a real delight when so little work, returns such a nice looking figure.

I believe he’ll be a menace for many years to come.

Hard Times

Confined, both morning and afternoon, to the bus, by my still mending shoulder, I do my best to pass these wearisome rides with a bit of enjoyable literature.  My current book of choice is Hard Times, the shortest, which is not to say short, novel by Charles Dickens.  Previously, my acquaintance with this man of letters has been brief: a couple of readings of A Christmas Carol, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and a force-feed helping of Great Expectations, which I most certainly did not.  After a week of bumpy rides, I am halfway through the book, and, despite its somewhat wandering plot, I am enjoying it.  Dickens had such an uncommon gift with words that it is easy to see why his works have survived, while most of his contemporaries have been forgotten (like so many of the words that Dickens uses!).

There is one sentence in particular that I thought proved a great example for the joys and trials of reading Dickens, which I thought I might share with you all now.

‘In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering and trampling, and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically called ‘the Hands,’ – a race who would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs – lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.’

Wow.  I have no doubt that some literary critics could write an entire essay just on that one sentence.  Personally, I have just a few points to make. The first reaction by most modern readers will almost certainly be to the sentence’s extraordinary length.  Although I’ve seen longer (thank you James Fenimore Cooper), it is still an impressive work, containing, as it does: 17 commas, 4 semi-colons, and 2 dashes.  I have little doubt that any student who tried to turn in such a sentence in an essay or school paper would draw the ire of the red-pen and be told-off for using a ‘run-on sentence’.  Certainly such writing is no longer in vogue, in fact, his use semi-colons is most curious.  I remember a brief note from school that a semi-colon can be used in place of a comma, where the use of a comma might cause confusion, but I only ever saw this applied to lists, and never in fiction.

Leaving length and punctuation aside, it is a tremendous sentence.  In the first half, he paints a portrait of a horrible mill town in such imaginative strokes, that I almost felt myself choking on the smoke pouring out of the mill chimneys, while the ugly brick walls closed around me.  In fact, I got so caught up in this description, that when halfway through the sentence, he makes a grim joke about the population, I was momentarily lost.  Upon further reading, I believe the whole sentence is really one grim joke.  He goes on for line after line, clause after clause, about the town, before, finally, introducing an important character, with only a single, semi-useful fact.  Stephen Blackpool is forty. He might have well have said that Stephen Blackpool is grist in the mill, except that he's writing about woolen mills.

Well, that’s thirteen sentences I just spent, talking about one by Charles Dickens.  I suppose that says something pretty important right there.

Miniature Friday: The Warriors of Athena

The Warriors of Athena

Over the last few months, I have been reading a lot of Ancient Greek Myth, so it is not terribly surprising that I got a hankering to paint up some Greek heroes.  I spent several weeks researching the various miniatures available and deciding exactly what I wanted.  Since my love of Greek myth mostly comes from the old Hollywood flicks, Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, I am more interested in recreating the look of these films than I am in historical accuracy.  Thus, I decided I would base my heroes on Greek hoplites, even though these warriors actually date to many hundreds of years after the Heroic Age of Greece.

Phassos the cunning

After much searching, I finally decided to go with the Greek hoplites put out by Wargames Factory.  I have had my differences with WF in the past, but these figures ticked a lot of boxes.  They have nice details, most of which are pretty crisp.  Since the arms, heads, and weapons are all separate, there is room for a lot of variation among the figures.  Also, unlike hoplite figures from most other companies, these figures are easy to assemble in heroic action poses.

My only real complaint about the set is the lack of head variation.  There are only three different head types in the box, and all of them have helmets.  Then again, I want most of my figures to be wearing helmets and I found some suitable no-helmeted head replacements in my bits box, so I guess it wasn’t that big a deal.

Cepheus

As I was painting the figures, I thought about their story.  What brought these guys together, and for what do they fight?  I like my heroes to be just that – the good guys, but I needed a higher purpose, something that could hold them together and give them direction.  Well, in Greek Myth pretty much everything revolves around the will of the gods, and of these immortals, there is only one that strikes me as generally being good: Athena.  As the goddess of wisdom and war, Athena is the perfect patron for a group of wandering heroes.  Thus I named my heroes ‘The Warriors of Athena’ because they travel the world at her prompting, fighting monsters, defending the weak, and generally doing all of that A-Team/Magnificent Seven type stuff.

I’m not sure if this is the final team line-up.  I suspect it may change over time as I paint up new figures and retire old ones.  I’d like to add a centaur to the mix and maybe a warrior woman.  I also plan to get an Athena figure at some point for those times where the goddess decides to directly intervene.

 Now that I’ve got my team together, all I need is some baddies for them to fight!

Special shout out to Little Big Man Studios whose shield transfers add so much to the figures.

Hyrieus, son of Hermes, a lucky man

Tigasis

Barthas

Palaimon, grandson of Poseidon

Dryas 'The Boar Hunter'

Strike a Match

Before I became the proud owner of a stove with a non-functioning ignition switch, I never gave a lot of thought to the topic of matches.  However, over the last year of cooking, I’ve discovered that not all matches are created equal.

When I first started using matches, I bought long-stemmed cooking matches, because that is what was on the shelf at the grocery store.  However, it soon occurred to me that I might be way over paying for these ‘fancy’ matches.  Instead, I started buying matches from my local shop and newsagents, who stock them mainly for smokers.  These little boxes cost about 1/6 to 1/8 of the price of cooking matches.  True, they are much shorter stems, but they are still long enough to light several eyes on the stove.

There are two brands of matches that seemed to be carried in the shops around here: England’s Glory and Ship.  For several months, I used England’s Glory, but after picking up my first box of Ship, I think I’m a convert.  Ship matches are about £0.10 more per box, for an equivalent number of matches.  What makes them so much better is how much easier they ignite.  With England’s Glory, I often had to strike the box a couple of times to ignite the match, and occasionally broke off the match head.  Also, by the time I was down to the last couple of matches in the box, I’d pretty much worn out the rough strip on the side of the box.  Ship matches on the other hand, ignite with only the gentlest pressure.  Also the box has strips running on both sides, encase one wears out.

According to the boxes, both matches are manufactured  in Sweden, though England’s Glory gives a UK address in High Wycombe (pronounced ‘whickem’) , just down the road in Buckinghamshire. 

While England’s Glory is slightly cheaper, and comes in a more attractive little box, it is not enough to make up for the much better quality of Ship.

Livingstone Quarry

The old man sat on the dusty ground, a pile of broken stones between his outstretched legs. All around him, tall piles of gravel cast stunted shadows from the noon day sun, silently waiting for a buyer with a wheelbarrow to come and haul them away.  My wife crouched down, and asked the man his name and how long he had worked at the quarry.  In his slow, heavily-accented English, he said that his name was Joseph, the same as mine, and he’d worked here for the last nine years, breaking apart rocks with a small hammer.  He was sixty-five, an age at which many of us hope to retire, and he looked as tired and worn out as the frayed clothes he wore.  Still, he spoke with a smile, and his eyes gleamed as he passed his hammer to my wife, so she could have a try at breaking the stones.

           

This was Livingstone Quarry, on the outskirts of Livingstone, Zambia, a town best known in the Western world for its proximity to Victoria Falls.  Few tourists came here though, just poor Zambians, hoping to make enough money to survive by tearing rocks from the ground, breaking them into gravel, and selling the gravel to builders for $1 per wheelbarrow load.  I gazed around the shattered landscape, marvelling at a world I had never seen before, never really imagined. Down below, a man with a sledge hammer pounded against a rock wall, breaking stones free.  Then he grabbed the large stones and hurled them twenty feet above his head, up onto the lip of the quarry pit.  Nearby, a group of children carried a larger cooler amongst the workers, selling individual ice-cubes as a source of refreshment.

My wife thanked Joseph for his time, and we walked on.  The workers glanced at us with little curiosity, a pair of ‘rich’ tourists, invading their place of work.  In the distance we could see the tractors and machines of the newly opened private quarry that threatened to steal what little money these people could earn.  Close by, two teenage boys, possibly brothers, banged away at their own pile of rocks. Perhaps they were helping their families, trying to earn money during the school holidays, maybe they needed the money to pay for school, or maybe school was just a dream for them, and this was the beginning of their working life. I didn’t have the courage to ask.

As we turned to leave the quarry, we passed a middle-aged woman in a flower-printed dress, sitting on the ground, singing happily to herself as she smashed stones with a heavy, iron weight. 

‘That’s a lovely song,’ my wife said.

 The woman smiled up at us, as she pulverized another rock.  ‘I love my job’, she said.

Doctor Who: Creatures of Beauty

For over a dozen years, Big Finish Productions has been producing Doctor Who audio plays. Engaging the help of all of the living actors to play the Doctor from the original series, they have created over two hundred new adventures for the Doctor and his companions.  In my opinion, these plays have been the highest quality Doctor Who ever produced.  With their complicated, adult plots, unbound by the need for expensive visual effects, these stories have taken the Doctor on some truly fantastic adventures.  I really can’t recommend Big Finish highly enough.

Unfortunately, the latest title I’ve added to my collection doesn’t merit the same level of praise.  Doctor Who 44: Creatures of Beauty stars Peter Davidson and Sarah Sutton, a team that has produced good work in the past, and there is nothing to fault their performances here.  Instead, it is the script that lets everyone down. 

The story dives right into the action.  Or, perhaps more accurately, the action dives right into the story.  For the first ten or fifteen minutes, I really had no idea what was going on.  I even wondered if I had perhaps put in the wrong CD by accident.  Eventually, I realized that the story wasn’t being told in chronological order, instead the narrative was skipping around in time.

This is not the first time I’ve encountered such a narrative device, and I’ve got to admit, it always makes me sceptical.  There are (perhaps) legitimate reasons to tell a story in this fashion, but they are few and far between.  Instead, I find that such a technique is usually employed to cover up a lack of plot, and that, I fear, is the case with Creatures of Beauty.  If you actually laid out the plot of this play chronologically, it would quickly becomes apparent how little actually occurs.  Even more damning, it would also become obvious that neither the Doctor, nor his companion, do anything of significance within the story. This is actually pointed out by the Doctor himself towards the end of the play, right before a meaningless and rather obvious twist, fails to save the story.

While I will happily add this CD to my ever growing collection of Doctor Who audios, I highly doubt I will ever listen to it again.