Photoblog Thing- October 2015

  Up until a few months ago, everything seemed normal. Well, at least as "normal" as things ever get anymore. When the shit hit the fan, there was chaos; slow at first then just totally crazy. I was called back to my unit but I never made it. I met up with other guys in the military who said the same thing. Some of us banded together- didn't matter anymore if we'd been Army, Air Force, Navy or a Marine like me. We were in this to survive now, to protect our families, and God willing, maybe rebuild a life again. Hopefully, we'll learn from our mistakes. Hopefully, we'll do better and future generations won't have to suffer for decades or even centuries. But people are people and human nature never really changes, no matter how we try to believe otherwise.

But enough talk, there's work to do and lives to protect. So lemme get back to it!

This month's downer scenario stars BBI's Tony Bishop, a US Marine MEU figure that was released about a decade ago. I kept tinkering with him because I couldn't settle on a look I wanted for him. I finally said "to hell with it", took off most of his stock gear and redressed him in a hodgepodge of stuff. Tony still wears his USMC desert MARPAT pants, USMC boots and t-shirt but with and older pattern boonie hat, aftermarket chest rig and civilian wind jacket. His weapon of choice is an AKM, the more common version of the AK47, and he also carries a couple of knives. I should have added a pistol but I didn't realize that until after I had uploaded the photos. I came up with a SHTF scenario that implies some sort of wide-spread collapse of order and government but leaves you to fill in the blanks.

Anyway, here he is, so I hope you like him.

I tried to get a bit artsy with this last photo.

T.O.M.B. Raiding

Way back in the day, a group of action figure collectors started a group called T.O.M.B. Raiders. Obviously named after the wildly popular game, T.O.M.B. was also an acronym for Take Out (of) Mint Boxes. The point was that when you buy a figure (or any other toy) you should remove it from the box and play with it, display it or basically just enjoy it rather than leave it boxed and stashed away as a collectible. I like the idea and have certainly done my fair share of it over the years (usually with the stuff that ended up being "valuable" later on) but I still have a lot of figures in unopened boxes. Recently, I have opened a few older figures to provide material for future blog entries but I'm starting to wonder if I should just go for broke and open them all.

Here's the deal…. I'm not getting any younger and I've been in this hobby for close to 20 years. I'm not taking anything with me when I check out and I kind of doubt that most of this stuff will be of any real value in decades to come. I could sell a lot of the unopened stuff on eBay or offer it up at the few forums I still involve myself with. I could probably make a modest amount of money, which is certainly attractive at the moment. With my wife and I both looking for work, a few hundred dollars in hand is better than no money and bunch of old toys wasting away in storage somewhere. But maybe I should just open everything up, toss out the boxes and go from there. If my kids want any of it when they're older, so be it. Although I'm reluctant to suggest another regular feature here, maybe unboxing old figures and doing something with them could become a regular feature here. Or not….

I'm going to think this over for a while but I would love to hear from my readers. What would you do in my situation? Perhaps like the Year of Frugal Hobbying I've mentioned before, my motto should be "use it, sell it or trade it" with an eye towards minimal, really NO expenditure for the foreseeable future. I don't know yet but I think I would like to do things differently than I have been and maybe this is how I should proceed.

Blogging and Job Hunting (a Labor Day rant)

So, Mrs G and I are both in the job market (aka outta work) and I'm spending much of my limited computer time filling out applications. To be honest, I've been out of the game for a while, I've spent the last few years as a stay-at-home dad and I'm getting closer to 50 than I care to admit! Mrs G is a hard working, highly motivated and loyal employee who recently got unceremoniously sh** canned after over a decade at her job. We are both feeling pretty discouraged right now but driven by the need to sustain our family. The sad thing is, we know a number of other people in our age group who are in similar or worse situations; some barely hanging on to careers they have while others can't get work at all. One friend was recently told by a long-time professional colleague that he was now essentially black-listed from an industry he'd worked in for 20+ years. I might add, an industry well-known for its deep financial commitments to "social justice causes" and "sustainable, green initiatives" but infamous for treating employees and even executives like total crap. Not to mention the obvious disdain for their pissant proletariat slaves uh, customers. If you are reading this, you are familiar with that industry.

And no, I don't expect government and politicians of any party to fix this or make it better. Neither do I expect that corporate or institutional leaders will change much. I expect to hear a lot about what they intend to do and how it'll all get better and how wonderful they are for doing it but I write most of that off as self-serving propaganda. OK, I'll try to spare you the socio-political opinion stuff since that's not what you're here to read.

Anyway, this has at least given me a little bit of extra time to catch up on blogging and photography. You'll probably see an increase in activity here, at least through the end of the year. I'm building up a small reserve of material to post the next few months and I may even post twice monthly photo blogs through December. I have more figures in the queue and it's really just a matter of getting them ready and outside to photograph.

Meanwhile, if you know anyone looking to hire a pudgy, lazy guy in his late 40s with no special skills, two small kids to raise and enough toys to populate a small town, then I'm the guy! Or as I used to say, if you need an employee bad, I'm the bad employee you need!

Photoblog/Let's Joe! -September 2015

This month, Let's Joe! is back. Our subject is Sergeant First Class Ian Campbell rockin' out with his…uh, dressed for a bit of desert recon. Ian is a GI Joe Super Articulated body from the early-mid-2000s with uniform and weapons being a mix of mostly BBI and Dragon stuff from the same era. The body armor and chest rig are a set produced by ACE again in the mid 2000s. His weapons include an M4 rifle with ACOG scope, a SIG P226 9mm pistol with tactical light, and both a Mk 3 fighting knife and a KaBar knife. Although I wasn't thinking of a specific campaign or time period here, the combination of desert and woodland camo would not have been uncommon in the early days of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. You'll also note my usual set up of boonie hat, chest rig and lighter weight body armor that has been featured on several of my figures this year. I did try a "3 day" pack on him but I didn't like the over all effect and he seemed to be drowning in straps and belts. So, like a lot of my other guys, he's going "high speed, low drag". Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the photos and check back for more soon!

Photoblog Thing- August 2015

OK, you are all being warned in advance that this month's entry is full-on ball scratching, cursing, farting, gun totin' shear damn manliness. Those of you with delicate constitutions may wish to avert your eyes, lest you find your sense of offense burned to its very core. The rest of you will need to retire to your fainting chaise lounge with a bottle of Fernet Branca and your favorite mobile device to post anguished, drunken missives on Twitter, Tumblr, et.al.

Let me repeat…. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Seriously!



Damn, so you're all of bunch of masochists are you? Well fine! Don't blame me when you're rolling around in the yard rending hair and clothes, feeling like your brain is on fire and screaming incoherently. I tried to tell you not to look but you didn't listen!

Well, OK, so maybe she's kind of a bad ass sometimes…. Anyway, it's Azone's Pure Neemo Azuha from the Pink and Black series.

While it's hard for me to identify a specific favorite Pure Neemo girl, Azuha has to come pretty close. I've always regretted missing out on "Rocker Girl", the first version of her but I'm really happy with this version. In fact, I keep playing around with the idea of some kind of regular feature involving her adventures in coming to terms with leaving Japan and ending up here in Podunk, USA. The idea was inspired by some photos Spicanio LINK posted recently. I started thinking about how dolls must feel when they "wake up" in their new homes and are they ever disappointed. Who knows if, when or how such a feature will ever happen but the idea at least seems interesting.

So, I hope you all enjoy the photos and check back for another "exciting" (AHEM) entry next month!

July's uh, pictures of some figure or the other.

OK, so I haven't exactly decided what I'll call the regular photo blog entry(ies) but here goes. Our subject for July is named Lam and he's a sniper in the Hong Kong Police Special Duties Unit. I'm guessing he's probably based on an SDU officer in the days before HK reverted to Chinese control but I don't know.

Lam is an early Dragon figure that was released as part of a "team" of four or five SDU officers. Unlike the other guys in this series, he has a complete, early style British DPM uniform and his rifle appears to be some variant of the Heckler and Koch G3; possibly an MSG 90. Although he's pretty light on gear, I've always liked this guy and found his uniform and weapons useful for other projects. In one of those odd measures of the 1/6 scale figure market, the complete figure himself often sells for $20-$25 USD these days while individual parts like the uniform and rifle often sell for around $10 each. Anyway, on with the boring photos!

Possibly my favorite iteration of the UK DPM uniform.

Browning 9mm pistol in the holster. Didn't get another pic of it, I just realized.

US M7 bayonet. It really fits any Dragon M16/M4 family rifle with an attachment lug.

MSG 90 in "drag bag" carrying case.

Lam in one of the worst sniper poses I've ever done!

Lam also came with a larger, British style gas mask bag but I decided not to attach it to his belt. It seemed a bit unnecessary for a sniper but maybe I'm wrong about that.

The MAGNUM OPUS!!! or Dancing In Dystopia part 2.

So, in my last post, I mentioned THE MAGNUM OPUS!!! which was my plan to produce a regular photo story featuring my 1/6 scale doll/figure collection. Although I already knew several people who'd done this sort of thing, I was probably most influenced by Mark Hogencamp's Marwencol saga. Keep in mind that much of this was laid out in 2005-2006 and that I had not (and still haven't) read any of the Young Adult post apocalypse/ crapsack utopia/ 20 minutes in the future stuff that's been popular in recent years. Anyway, the story features examples of….

Wait, is that an expy?
One major background character ended up looking like a thinly veiled swipe at a present day US politician but that guy was just starting to get traction when I created my character. So, the person in question really made no impact on my fictional character and only later did I start to go "Wow, that's kind of prescient! I hope the real guy doesn't turn out like my character."

Have I read this book?
One thing that I really kick myself over now is not presenting my concept of a lavish "capital district" surrounded by less desirable "outlier districts". Yep, at least two years before Suzanne Collins published Hunger Games. Of course, mine was different in that there were also neighboring regions who are strong enough socially, economically and militarily to resist and even defeat the supposed "big bad". Only a faltering "global peace keeping force" keeps things in check and prevents a full scale war from breaking out. However, there's also a degree of what I call the Korean Paradox where winning a war against such a foe means you suddenly have millions of people who have been subjects of a very structured command society as refugees on your doorstep. East Germany would another good, although far milder example

The broken cutie with a grudge.
 You've probably seen Meg, my red headed Obitsu girl, if you've been a reader here for a while. Well, she was going to be that character. A small military mission spirals out of control and brings Meg face to face with a prominent "Justice Commissioner". Said commissioner had killed Meg's grandfather years earlier in a botched "citizen's arrest" that Meg witnessed. Years later, Meg faces down her foe in a gun fight and guess who has more ammo and is a better trained shooter? I'll let you guess what happens.

Pyrrhic victory/downer ending.
 The military mission that is the focus of the story is compromised, the "big bad"government has their brave martyr to avenge (and also, they got rid of a loose cannon who might've upset the balance of power) and the Global Peacekeepers just said "screw you guys, we're going home!" There's probably going to be a war, it's probably going to be brutal in a Germany invades the Soviet Union kind of way. Nobody holds out much hope that things will get better. And if push comes to shove, the "small good" side has nukes. Get in to a Stalingrad situation? Pull back and call in the stealth drone bombers.

Gray or grey morality.
While I use the term "big bad" here, I was playing to an audience that was pretty socially/politically diverse. Some of these folks would find the actions of the main antagonist country to be justifiable, if harsh. I wanted to really work to give them a positive spin, even if I didn't agree with them. In contrast, the side our "heroes" are on can be pretty brutal. Old grudges over political oppression in the earlier regime and a civil war that morphs in to a long period of low-intesity guerrilla warfare have hardened them. The Geneva Convention is treated with a certain "wink and a nudge" indifference as long as the wrong people aren't victimized in the process.

Ultimately, the whole thing was just too damn dark for me to move forward with. As I said before, life got in the way and halted the momentum, which was probably just as well. The story later morphed quite a bit in to one of two fictional nations in a more or less current world. Some of that version can be found in early entries on this blog and it was initially the main focus of the blog I had just before this one. Will I ever try a MAGNUM OPUS!!! story line again? Honestly, probably not, although I can never say that I definitely won't.