Reading wargames magazines over lunch

I was updating some software on my computer today and while it chuntered away I actually did half an hour's painting, as the sun was out.  I have thirteen boxes of figures under way which I would like to complete and one of those contains some Steve Saleh Lucid Eye figures.  Recently, I finished four Neanderthals so decided to do a bit more on the three remaining ones.  Although it was bright today I was struggling a bit and have realised that what is best for painting is bright overcast and not actual direct sunlight (which is why all artist's studios face north not south).  This weekend will be another lost cause as it is the parents-in-law's extended diamond wedding anniversary celebrations. I have been married to the Old Bat for 23 years now and that feels like an ancient geological time period (the Silurian period springs to mind but maybe that is because I am hopeful Warlord Games will come out with some classic Jon Pertwee period figures - seventies Dr Who, featuring U.N.I.T., being the only incarnation that would really work as a wargame, I feel) ) so more patience than we have must be called for to be together sixty years.  Anyway, I was struggling to get the paint on properly today and can't work out whether the problem is my deteriorating eyesight, the strong light or a bad paintbrush.  Whatever, it really matters to me.  If I can't paint to a "reasonable wargames standard" any more I might as well give up and collect model railways. 

I was thinking about the visual look of wargames while out and about in London this week.  I started out with a meeting at London Metropolitan University, where I am trying to help them set up an overseas course for foreign students.  Arriving at Aldgate East underground station I emerged facing the north end of Leman Street.  Now, of course, this was the home of 'H' Division of Ripper Street fame and about nine months ago I had a look at the south end of the street which still has recognisable features from Victorian times.  Nothing left today at the northern end, although that is as likely to be down to the Luftwaffe, as three high explosive bombs fell on the north end of Leman Street.

These musings are all apposite because the theme of this year's Salute is steampunk and as I had a couple of hours between meetings I decided to stop off in WH Smiths in Oxford Street and pick up the latest Wargames magazines to read at lunchtime.  I buy all three of the main wargames magazines still but these are now the only magazines I buy today. I stopped buying the likes of Empire and SFX several years ago and have now given up on the now tragically neutered Playboy, despite owning, basically, every copy ever published (apart from a few of the fabulously expensive early fifties ones and I have those digitally).  Also, the shop where I used to buy it, the excellent Cinema Store in St Martin's Lane, closed in January due to a doubling of its rent.

Anyway, having picked up Miniature Wargames, Wargames Illustrated and Wargames Soldiers and Strategy, I set off for my West End office, the National Cafe at the National Gallery.  This is a very nice, light, airy place very popular with ladies of a certain age and German tourists.  There is a cheaper, self service cafe adjoining it but I prefer this waitress service one and I go often enough that they usually get me a table at the edge of the room from which you can watch everyone else.  

What is it that brings the Legatus back here again and again?  Surely it can't just be the willowy Eastern European waitresses?  Actually, despite an off-puttingly fish-heavy menu, the food can be very good indeed. Currently, to accompany the Delacroix exhibition at the gallery, they have a special Delacroix menu: a main course and a glass of wine for £15. 

So I settled down with my confit duck leg and Toulose sausage cassoulet and a glass of Vin de Pays D'Oc (regionally appropriately) to have a look at Miniature Wargames and, in particular, their Salute guide.  I don't always read Neil Shuck's Forward Observer, partly because I am vaguely irritated by Mr Shuck's Meeples and Miniatures podcasts (I don't like the name for a start - there is no logic to my bigotry - perhaps I should vote UKIP like the Old Bat.  Actually, no, there are limits).  Now, I have listened to a number of these and the content can be quite good but I just cannot listen to his voice and when I read his prose I hear his flat, bored-sounding tones as I read.  Nevertheless, his look at Kickstarters in this issue was very good.  Another piece I hardly ever read (well, never) is a column called Send Three and Fourpence.  This is because it is such an opaque title and the first page is always just type that I never bother to look at it.  I have it in my mind that maybe it is a column about postal wargames, something that sounds about as enticing as postal sex.  But then, when The Big Issue first came out I wondered how on earth they managed to bring out a magazine every week whose only subject matter was homelessness.  Anyway, this month Send Three and Fourpence has a North West Frontier scenario so I will have to read it.  I wonder what all the others were about?

Another wargaming bête noire of mine is John Treadaway (despite his heroic efforts on Salute over the years), partly because I got into something of an argument with him over some nasty pro-Nazi re-enactors at Salute some years ago and everything he said in defence was, to use a phrase du jour, mealy-mouthed, patent nonsense (something along the lines of "oh we knew they were controversial and just wanted to test people's reactions to them, ho ho").  He is a man whose every utterance on TMP I tend to disagree with so it gave me great delight for him to get things horribly wrong in a review of Antediluvian Miniatures superb nineteenth century dinosaurs, where he said that the Crystal Palace Park dinosaurs were about the "only bit that survived the great fire that brought down the eponymous structure in the 1930s".  Or in fact, maybe they survived because the dinosaurs weren't put into Crystal Palace Park until after the Crystal Palace itself was moved to Sydenham Hill in 1852 and it was on that site that it burned to the ground in 1936.  My mother remembers seeing the glow in the sky as a child from her bedroom.

Anyway, lots of steampunky goodness in this issue and a painting guide to the Salute figure which I will actually enjoy painting.  It was nice to see Big Lee's Miniature Adventures and Ray's Don't Throw a 1 becoming  MW's blogs of the month, too.  Very well deserved!

A telephone call over lunch then informed me that my afternoon meeting had been rescheduled for next week and given I had been working away from 6.00am to prepare for both meetings I reckoned that lunch needed to be extended to enable me to look at the other two wargames magazines and order a carafe of wine.  Next up was Wargames Soldiers and Strategy, which I remember from the times it was an idiosyncratically translated Spanish publication full of "random" quotation marks but is now a very good magazine.  For me the only issue I have with it is that it is bimonthly and I invariably end up buying it twice as I can never remember if I have already bought it or not.  This month's theme is modern warfare and editor Guy Bowers seems mystified why some wargamers (myself included) feel uncomfortable about gaming the period. "Our popular culture of movies, TV and computer games is full of action, adventure and death," he says. "People seem to accept this completely without question..." he continues.  Er, actually, we don't.  I am very uncomfortable with the level of casual violence in (largely) American films, TV and computer games.  I am on slightly dodgy ground here, as I have bought Bowers' Black Ops rules but while I might contemplate some Alias-style spy adventures anything historical and post WW2 is not for me. 

One article in WSS which annoyed me (not hard to do) was a rebuttal (although one that demonstrated a failure of nerve part way through) of a previous piece from the preceding issue suggesting that wargamers need to spend as much time on their scenery as their figures.  This month's article essentially said that it was all about the game and people should not worry if there scenery doesn't match railway layout standards.  Again, this in another case of someone assuming that everyone thinks like them.  I am very interested in the whole visual look of wargames and don't really enjoy playing on green baize cloths with stepped hills.  In fact I hate stepped hills more than anything else on a wargames table. If you want to use stepped hills you might as well use wooden blocks for your armies.  The author of the piece said that the sort of ornate scenic boards you get at shows were often impossible to play on.  Again, a ludicrous generalisation, as you can see from this board we used a few years ago for a Romans vs Britons game at Guildford Wargames Club.  A proper hill here!

The ultimate, looks wonderful but practical, scenery is made of course by Eric the Shed and a game there is always a visual  joy.  I don't care if I win or lose so long as I can move my figures around his amazing boards!

Still, the issue contained a good scenario for a game based on Simon Scarrow's The Eagle's Prey, amongst all the ultra modernism.

Time to pause for some cheese and move on to Wargames Illustrated, which was always my favourite magazine (almost entirely because of the visual impact of the games illustrated inside, compared with the blobby painting of Miniature Wargames). Fortunately, the conscious decoupling from Battlefront Miniatures has removed the dozens of pages of bumper to bumper tank battles from it and it covers a wider scope than it has done.  There was an interesting article on using Lion Rampant for Napoleonic skirmishing (not entirely successfully, I gather) but I still have this vague hankering to do some Peninsula skirmishing at some point in the future and this may be the answer.  This variant does not include artillery but I don't like artillery in games anyway and hate painting guns.

Most interesting for me was a look at the new Congo rules for darkest Africa games.  There is a chance I may have to go to Namibia in the next few months, unless I can get out of it.  I prefer to interact with Africa on the tabletop not deal with African airlines.  The Congo rules appear quite gamey and I got lost reading the description of the rules mechanism (not surprisingly) but at least I won't need to buy any figures (or even paint them) as I have several hundred ready to play,

So, the base colours on the Neanderthals are done now and I have started shading.  Maybe I will even finish them in a couple of weeks!

Next time in my blogs I will be looking at corned beef and, in fact, am just off to cook some!

Easter wishes...

Hopes of a long weekend of painting have faded; with demolishing my sister's shed being the order of the day today.  Anyway, from 99 years ago is this rather bizarre card showing the Easter Bunny being being accompanied on  his delivery  round by a German and an Austrian soldier. 

Blood Eagle

Very excited about these new rules.  More on my Dark Ages blog.

Neanderthals!

So, at last I have finished my first four Lucid Eye Neanderthals, which are destined more for Lost World pulp gaming rather than anything prehistoric.  Steve Saleh indicated that he was working on a set of rules, Savage Core, to cover the different Lost World type figures in this range but I haven't heard anything about it lately. These are very good figures and are easily the nicest 28mm Neanderthals I have seen.  They are also some of the heaviest 28 mm figures.  I have three more underway, who are wearing even more fur and are almost Neanderthals in cold weather gear.

Neanderthal illustrated in 1909

Over the last century the representation of Neanderthals has changed from the early more ape-like reconstructions to ones which look much more human as scientists discover that they are more like us than previously thought. 

As illustrated in 1915 by Charles Knight

Likewise, from being shown as naked figures wielding sticks at the beginning of the twentieth century there is an acknowledgement today that they were much more sophisticated tool users than originally thought, even building boats and dwellings.

"I say, young lady, do you fancy a bit of inter-species miscegenation?"

"It'll cost you a bear's tooth necklace and a pair of boots!"

Now, Neanderthals were bigger and had larger brains than our immediate ancestors, leading novelists like Jean Auel to posit that they had certain mental abilities, like primitive telepathy, that we have lost.  There are people, therefore who argue that Neanderthals were actually superior to Cro Magnon man and that them becoming extinct rather than us was rather like the victory of VHS over Betamax.  The idea that Neanderthal is a synonym for primitive brutishness is now well out of favour. I like the idea of the superior Neanderthals interacting snootily with our more basic but also more numerous ancestors.  The biggest change in our views of Neanderthals over the last five years or so has been the discovery that they interbred with humans. As recently as 2006 scientists said this was very unlikely. 

Or perhaps it was this way around

Now, however, it has been shown that Europeans and Asians have significant amounts of Neanderthal DNA.  In the past, some scientists said that this came from, perhaps, just one incident of Neanderthal/human interbreeding.  That there was one Neanderthal man, perhaps, who had an inexplicable  fancy for protruding-chinned, flat forehead females; like a man today who fancies Reese Witherspoon. Only last week, however, a new study indicates that interbreeding was more extensive than previously thought. So, perhaps Neanderthals didn't so much die out as were assimilated into the people that would become modern humans.

Paint Table Saturday March 12th 2016

 Prehistoric beauties!

Good grief, two Paint Table Saturdays in a row!  The Old Bat and Guy have gone to a classic car show at Brooklands but given we have had some sun I thought I might splodge some paint on a few figures.  Splodge being the operative word as I have just had the first of four laser eye procedures to fix some leaking capillaries in my eyes.  The doctor said I might lose some vision but I was still able to paint to an OK standard  as long as the weather is bright. 

Anyway, an hour or so on the beautiful Lucid Eye Neanderthals and I now have three which should be completed tomorrow!  I wish there were some Neanderthal women to go with them.  Some lady friends have commissioned me to write an erotic version of The Lost World and. currently. Lord James Hoxton, Edmund Molloy, Professor Challenor and Professor Somersby are surrendering to the muscular charms of some Neanderthal ladies on a lost plateau, when not fighting off shockingly feathered dinosaurs.

Paint Table Saturday, March 5th 2016

My first proper paint Table Saturday post since last August and while the bright whether of the last couple of days did not continue, it was still light enough for me to get some base colours down on my 1864 Danes.  I had painted some colours on one figure previously but realised that the greatcoats needed to be more blue-black than navy blue so have mixed a much darker shade, similar to the one I used for my Victorian policemen.  The officer is the only one displaying his jacket, which was the lighter shade of dark blue and you can just see the difference between the two colours. Unusually, I used a brand new Windsor & Newton Series 7 size one brush to get these colours on, rather than my usual 00 or 000. It sped up the whole process without losing much of the accuracy, which isn't so important at this stage anyway.  Having lost all of my 1864 reference pictures in the great disc crash I spent half an hour searching again for them, although I am still a few short but I think they might be on the Schleswig-Holstein Wars Yahoo group.

The view from my Paint Table earlier this week.  Sadly, not so much light this morning

My reawakening of interest in the period has been due to the fact that North Star are promising to add to their range (lets hope they re-release some of the 1866 Prussians (such as the ones in feldmütze) which are currently our of production).  I actually haven't watched the last two episodes of the TV series yet as I had lost interest in the period but now I need to as my tivo box is filling up because I am not keeping up with my TV watching.  In fact I have just bought the DVD of the series on eBay so I can use it for reference, although the curious colour grading of the show makes it a doubtful source for colour accuracy.

While up to date on  Agent Carter (which I am having to save for Charlotte for when she comes home at  Easter) and Beowulf (it has improved a bit but basically I like the set and Joanne Whalley being assertive) I am way behind on Dickensian, Gotham, Agents of Shield, Jericho and Mr Selfridge.  Having wondered when Indian Summers was returning the question was answered by a poster at Oxshott station this week.

Why does the Legatus prefer fellow Brasenose graduate Olivia Grant to Julie Walters?

Hopefully, it will still feature Brasenose alumna Olivia Grant in slinky thirties dresses (and less) and not so much of Mrs Overall, Julie Walters, an actress whose appeal is lost on me. So that is another series I have to keep up with and The Musketeers must be due back soon, too (I'm very much thinking of picking up En Garde)..

I should really have been listening to Carl Nielsen while painting these figures and writing this post but haven't recovered his symphonies yet in my rebuilding my iTunes library task.  So instead I listened to random Scandianavian symphonies by Alfvén, Stenhammer and Svendsen   The Swedish composers Stenhammer and Alfvén were born too late to be appropriate to the period.  Svendsen, however,while Norwegian, lived for much of his life in Copenhagen and his first symphony dates from 1867. He was not in Copenhagen during the Second Schleswig War, however as he was studying in Leipzig.  Svendsen wrote two (rather good) symphonies but reputedly his wife burned the manuscript of his third in 1883 in a fit of anger (they separated the following year).  Ibsen used a modified version of this incident in his play Hedda Gabler.  Although Svendson didn't have the melodic gifts of his countryman, Grieg, the latter was so impressed with Svendsen's first symphony he withdrew his own symphony, C minor, written two years earlier.

What's going on...

It's worse than that, he's dead, Jim

Well, it's been over a month since I last posted and even longer since I painted, due to a concatenation of events, as Thomas Hardy would have observed.  

Firstly, my hard drive in the computer packed up.  Fortunately, I had manually backed up nearly everything (the automatic back up had failed) but I then had to repopulate the new drive which took ages.  Of course you can't back up programmes (or if you can I didn't know how) so I had to reinstall things like Adobe, iTunes etc while trying to remember all the various passwords to access my account. Many tedious hours followed.  The other thing is that I had Windows Vista before but the computer people have installed Windows 7 (which I use at work) and I have, shockingly, realised it is actually better than Vista.  In the interim I attempted o use my laptop which has Windows 8 on it and I soon realised that it is actually unusable.  The computer firm I used to put in a new drive said they could take it back to Windows 7 which would be great.

My biggest issue was that Microsoft no longer provides Picture Manager, which I use all the time so thanks to my friend Sophie for helping me locate this.  Worst of all is the process of transferring my music back into iTunes.  Apple don't like you moving stuff from device to device so they stop, for example, you being able to move all your tunes (all 18,000 tracks) and playlists from your iPod back to the PC.  To get the tracks back you have to manually click on each individual music file in the folder so it reappears in iTunes on the PC as a recently added track then you have to drag it to the playlist.  Beyond tedious!  I am nowhere near finishing this process yet, although it has had the benefit of making me listen to music I haven't listened too much before (if at all) as that is sometimes the only stuff in a particular playlist at any time. So, no Sibelius symphonies back yet but yesterday I listened to Swanwhite for the first time.

Secondly, it is year end at work.  Having not had a year end there before I had no idea of the mind numbing amounts of paperwork (electronic, on a terrible database) that needed to be done.  In addition I had a presentation to give and my first webinar to present.  The latter was really odd because although I am used to giving presentations (I have given over 300) it is really difficult when you can't see the audience. I use slides as an aide memoire, not a text and focus on each slide more or less depending on the reaction of the audience.  No immediate feedback made it very odd.  It seemed to go down well and has generated a lot of follow up, which I am having to squeeze into my already over-crowded schedule.

I'm sure it's very nice in the summer

Thirdly, I seem to spend most of my spare time driving Guy around.  The other weekend we had to drive down to Plymouth (204 miles) for a university open day. It was so far that we had to stay overnight but at least we got time to look around the city on what was a really wet and windy day.  I had to drag around a load of tedious engineering labs when what I really wanted to do was go to the adjacent Plymouth Museum and Art Galley which had an exhibition on war games (in their broadest sense).  However, subsequently reading the blurb about this it sounded like a load of pinko, politically correct nonsense (like the Imperial War museum these days) so it would probably have just put my blood pressure up.

We had trouble booking anywhere to stay, given Guy had left it until the last minute to tell us he wanted to go but I was unexpectedly impressed with the Jury's Inn in Plymouth, which was five minutes walk from the university, the town centre and the harbour.  It also did an excellent breakfast ,which is a bonus.  Guy has now been offered an unconditional place to do a Maritime Business and law degree there and as Plymouth has an excellent reputation for maritime subjects I wouldn't mind him going there at all.  It does mean that he and his sister would be about 500 miles apart but he seems to think that this is a good thing.  We looked at the student accommodation which was the best I had seen at the many universities we have been around over the last few years.  Some of the rooms even have a sea view.  Oddly, they have two sorts of room which are split between flats of six people and flats of ten based on how outgoing you are; an unusual criteria they discover via a student questionnaire.  Interestingly, the girl's room we saw in the "outgoing" flat had a double bed, presumably based on them being more friendly than their introverted fellows (mathematicians, probably) who had single beds.

On the painting front I have been stymied by the truly terrible, dark weather and, due to some work being done in my study, the fact that I haven't been able to access my paints.  So although I have a number of figures close to completion the paint I need to do so is buried under a terrible pile of stuff.  This has now (sort of) been dealt with and as the Old Bat is working on Saturday I hope for bright light and some painting. 

On the wargaming front I have not been able to get over to the Shed at all so have missed some games of Frostgrave, which I wanted to try.  That said, I think Eric is running it as a tournament so I have missed out on the beginning of the campaign and, anyway, I don't like the thought of tournament play or, indeed anything really competitive.  Most (all) of the other Shedizens are proper wargamers and I would feel uncomfortable playing one to one against them, given my inability to understand rules.  My attempt to paint a female force for Frostgrave has stalled, of course, but I might resume it in due course.

Looking forward to having a go at these!

As regards figures, I withdrew from the latest West Wind ancients Kickstarter as 18mm is really too small for me to paint with my deteriorating eyesight (I have four procedures at the eye hospital over the nest month).  However, I did sign up for Unfeasibly Miniatures Empire in Peril Kickstarter which has three days to go.  Principally I did this for the late nineteenth century Germans which I can use in IHMN but although I am usually resistant to imaginary wars I am very taken with the idea of two armies with pointy helmets.  The period the figures represent has drifted a little and now seems to be early twentieth century rather than late nineteenth century but I have ordered a force of Germans and may add some British at the last minute.

More good news on the pointy helmet front, in that North Star have announced some further figures for the 1864 range.  I had given up on this range due to them just producing Danish Infantry but now they have promised to add some Danish,artillery, cavalry and Prussian hussars.  I still haven't solved the problem of representing leafless winter trees, though.  Anyway, now I can get at my dark blue paint once more I might do a little on them this weekend.  Although I did lose all my reference pictures in the great crash so will have to search for them again.

My 18mm Copplestone Barbarians need someone to fight!

Today North Star have announced that they are taking over the distribution of Copplestone Castings which is very good news.  Mr Copplestone has said that it will free him up "to sculpt new packs for existing ranges and maybe work on a couple of new projects".  I actually thought he had retired and lately all he has produced are a few figures for Frostgrave but he is my favourite sculptor so dare we hope for the long promised 18mm sub-Roman fantasy figures?

Goodbye to all that

Not such good news from Grand Manner who are withdrawing a lot of sculpts in some of the ranges I collect: particularly Dark Ages and also Trojan wars.  I wanted more of the Trojan buildings for Jason and the Argonauts but I really don't have space for any more resin at present. The houses are simple enough that maybe I could have a go at making some but the walls of Troy are a loss.  Sadly, the discount of 15% is not enough to encourage me to pick anything up. He has a lot of new stuff but it is mostly Russian and not of interest to me.

So, let's hope it is a nice bright day on Saturday and I can actually do some painting and don't have to spend all day taking Guy to and from rowing!