There are new videos on my YouTube channel most weeks. I’ve not been cross-posting all of them here, but I thought I’d share this one. The Vesperadoes diorama is a step up in terms of quality- both of the subject model and my filming and editing. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, but one of the reasons I’m doing videos about my builds is to get better over time.
The Vesperadoes are from Green Miniatures in Poland.
I got these two Land Rover kits out last week, and did a side by side comparison.
They’re back in the stash now, but I will be building them one day.
After all the shiny cars of Fitted, here’s something more battered and worn. I’ve been meaning to do a Gaslands build for a while, and this ready beaten Matchbox Jeep provided the perfect base for my first one. There will be more.
I have the luxury of not needing to own a car, being within walking, cycling or public transport distance of the places I need to be most often- with car clubs for those occasional delivery runs too big for a pannier. So, if I do buy a car, the urge to have something custom will be strong. Luckily, there are show like Fitted to give me inspiration for what that imaginary ride might look like.
This year’s show was in Manchester Convention centre, so I grabbed my camera and phone, and headed over to shoot some video and take a lot of photos. As well as the video above, there’s a photo gallery on Flickr.
While I put more pennies in the change jar to go toward a full size car (and the electric engine swap that’ll be part of my customisation plan), I can apply some of the inspiration to the contents of the model stash. I’m sure I’ve got at least one Mini waiting to be built….
Ashton-under-Lyne does not present its best face to you if you arrive by tram or bus. The new bus terminal is more attractive than the one it replaced, and it does a good job of hiding the back side of the shopping centre, but you’ve still found your way there past soulless big-box stores and venues. The more interesting part of town is on the other side of the Escher inspired maze of the shopping centre.
The market square and market hall lead you on to a small grid of streets, well stocked with interesting finds.
Of course, when I say interesting, I mean to me- so it’s all old facades, abandoned stuff, and a surprising number of dead nightclubs.
The Hudson Bay is even more exclusive now it’s shut down and no-one at all can get in.
Club Denial can’t accept that it’s now a small supermarket.
The Hippodrome survived a century, but something between 2004 and now has led to its closure.
I’m not sure what Slotworld was before it was Slotworld, but it’s not Slotworld any more, either.
I wandered for a while, and was back a couple of days later to get a couple more pictures. There are more photos in the gallery.
Now, which satellite town should I visit next?
It’s only in the last few years that I have been introduced to the concept of the “estate pub”- basic brick buildings providing booze in newer build areas. Functional, but far from attractive, many of them never got the chance to age into the character you expect of a good boozer, having been demolished already.
The Shalom Christian Church building has the look of estate pub thinking applied to a place of worship.
The “ramparts” at each corner provide more of an architectural flourish than most estate pubs were blessed with. Combined with the barbed wire along the roof line and the brieze blocks on the inside of the windows, it has an air of a fortress about it.
The biggest surprise- to me- was that the building isn’t as abandoned as the barricaded windows made me think. Walking past it yesterday morning, I was surprised to find the door open for the regular Sunday service. I didn’t look inside- that would have felt like prying (and I hadn’t had any breakfast yet, and was in a hurry to find food).
Packing everything for a house move brought home to me the large number of models I have in the stash. It’s unlikely I’m going to stop buying them, but I really do have to build them faster. This video was actually shot before the move, but I’ve just got round to uploading it.
The naked cyclists were out and about in the city centre again yesterday. I wasn’t a participant this year, but managed to get some photos at the roll out and on Canal Street. The album is on Flickr.
Last month, I unpublished one of my books. Solstice is no longer available to buy.
I’ve stopped selling books before, but there’s a bit of a tale to this decision. It needs to start with the story’s inspirations, and what happened in it. I’d put a spoilers warning here, but you can’t buy it any more, so let’s dive straight in.
Inspiration is a wonderful thing. Sometimes stories come from a single idea. More often- for me- a bunch of thoughts combine, and I’ve got something to build from.
Solstice came from three directions.
The first was an urge to create something akin to 24- a fast moving, time limited challenge for my characters. It was going to be a Rain & Bullets story, so the crime needed to have an immediate and further threat related to it.
Next, there was the news that the government wanted to outsource management of youth detention centres to private providers. Given the history of this sort of thing, the inevitability of corruption or incompetence harming children was obvious. For a crime story, it’s the corruption and harm that I would be concentrating on, so what form would that take?
As Solstice started to come together, I was becoming aware of the then starting Operations Yewtree and Midland. The threat of a ring of child abusers with powerful connections was compelling, and very “ripped from the headlines”. If those powerful connections had access to children, then there was the danger and harm for the story.
The story came together quickly from there. As the Rain & Bullets regulars investigated a murder with ties to corruption after the invasion of Iraq, a young woman and her activist friend are trying to rescue her nephew from detention. They have a suspicion that something very wrong is going on, and as they find out what it is, they’re heading for collision with Kay and Irwin’s case.
All good ingredients for an action adventure, and I’m very happy with the structure and pace I managed to give it. So why have I deleted it from the back catalogue?
Shortly after publication, it started to become clear that the claims of a VIP paedophile ring all originated from the testimony of one supposed witness. His stories fell apart one by one, until he ended up on trial for the damage they had caused.
Still, Solstice was a solid story. I figured I’d still leave it out there, though. What harm could it do?
Then, along came QAnon, and its bizarre British mirror image – the SRA hunters.
SRA stands for Satanic Ritual Abuse. It isn’t a new fantasy, the Satanic Panic of the eighties and nineties damaged countless lives because of unfounded tales of mass abuse. The professionals who deal with children have learnt a lot from it, thankfully, and now know how not to lead children into creating tales that confirm the interviewer’s beliefs. There are, however, far too many amateurs unwilling to learn anything, who happily fall for fantasies that align with their prejudices.
As an indicator of how far-fetched SRA is, not-friend of Spinneyhead, long-time fantasist, petty bigot, and, now, convicted harasser of the judiciary, Richard Carvath has staked his non-existent reputation on pushing it. It definitely made me uneasy about the premise of Solstice, that it could be getting too close to the beliefs of folks like him.
The final nail in Solstice’s coffin was an event last year, when Carvath’s latest bigot-crush travelled to Wales to kidnap a child at knife point, only being caught several hundred miles away. The child, of course, was allegedly a victim of SRA. A different reason, but so close to the plot of Solstice that it made me uncomfortable.
Luckily, no-one was hurt during the kidnap. But it’s too short a step from rescuing children from Satanists (or lizards, or whatever) to deciding they’re so corrupted that the only way to save their souls is to kill them. As the details came out about the event, I decided I no longer wanted to have a book out there that could, even slightly, feed into the SRA fantasy. I don’t want to have accidentally written a Turner Diaries for kidnappers.
So, Solstice is gone from the Rain & Bullets series, and is no longer available. You can, however, still buy my other books, and those of Garth Owen.
Another unboxing video, this time, AMT’s 1:25 Subaru Brat pickup.
Yesterday was the first of my Covid vaccinations. As I’ve worn a groove between the flat and work over the last few months, and barely deviated from it, this was something of an expedition. So I took a few photos, and visited some spots that weren’t directly on the route*.
Today, I have a few aches as the vaccine teaches my body how to fight off the real thing, but none of the fever-y and flu-like symptoms others have reported. I’m working from home tomorrow, just in case.
Hopefully, the Flickr album is embedded above. If you can’t move between photos, click through to see them all.
*Don’t worry, I didn’t go mad. A mask was worn in shops and on public transport, and I maintained a safe distance. And, as the photos will show, a lot of the wander was through practically deserted parts of town anyway.
The ChuanYu range of 1:200 remote control ready ships have been popular on the Spinneyworld store, but this is the first time I’ve had a chance to look at one properly. So I did an unboxing video.
A build series will follow when I have enough space to work on it.
As the Trump presidency tumbles down in its final days, I thought you’d like a trip back to a more innocent time, when I wrote this piece of silliness in anticipation of the orange one’s inauguration.
Hopefully, the Biden inauguration will go off without a hitch. But Trump is going to be furious if it gets higher ratings than his. Which is likely, given his efforts to turn it into a racist version of White House Down.
January 20th 2017
It happened just as President elect Donald J Trump went off script whilst swearing his oath of office. A figure appeared from nowhere, gun hand outstretched toward The Donald, finger already pulling the trigger.
She had come from the future, her mission- to kill the President before, on January 25th, he nuked Latvia to prove the country’s Prime Minister wrong and show that his fingers were long enough to press the atomic button.
Even before the bullet had left, she was joined by dozens, maybe hundreds of other assassins. With everything from lasers all the way down to clubs, each of them had come back with a specific mission- eliminate Trump before he could carry out the action that blighted their particular future.
It was one of the lasers, by an almost immeasurable fraction of a second, that got the job done. Which triggered the second wave of temporal assassins. These were dedicated to cutting down Mike Pence before he could institute his plans for homosexual re-education camps and sexuality snooping.
Into the middle of this already confused mess came a pair of twenty-second century Men’s Rights Activists. Angry at the unfair advantages equal wages gave females and the sissification inherent in paternity leave, they had decided to travel back and kill the first female President. Incompetence had shunted them sideways as well as backwards, but they never found that out, as they were burnt to a crisp by one of the many flamethrowers present.
With so many bodies and temporal anomalies overlapping, a critical mass was formed. A gore explosion was followed by collapses in the fourth dimension. Time went crazy.
Washington is now the flickering city, to look at it is to watch a jump cut time-lapse of the city’s past and possible futures. Buildings and people appear and flash away randomly, as the time-line tries to knit itself back together.
The inauguration was ground zero, but the effects have radiated out, and there are pockets of temporal instability all over the world. There are pockets where you can step into the past and pull people and things back. The USA is currently being run by the dream team of Kennedy and Lincoln, snatched up just before their assassinations.
It’s a crazy world, ripe for adventures and wacky hijinks. Annoyingly, I can’t think of any silly stories to tell in it right now.
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