Category: Miniature Philosophy
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Hobby Money – Part Four – Pea Soup

Paying out for the goods, services, and experiences of a hobby is a natural process. You plays your money and you takes your pleasure. If your pleasure slackens or ceases you stops paying and goes onto something else. As long as you does not leave a string of corpses in the street, no-one is unhappy.…
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Hobby Money – Part One – The Price Of The Hobby Versus…

Versus the value of the hobby – an eternal debate in many fields. Whenever we engage in an activity that does not immediately yield food, shelter, or sex, there has to be some calculation as to the worth of the time and money spent. In most cases the good stuff takes a considerable amount of…
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The Junkman Cometh

And is damned proud of it, at his age. Now back to the Little Workshop. All junk is not junk. Some junk is junque – witness the sort of things that twee secondhand shops import from Pakistan and sell as genuine. Junque indeed. Some junk is material that is just resting between engagements. The box…
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How Much Movement Do You Need To Be Alive?

If you are lichen…not a lot. Then again, you’ll never get to see much of the world on your holidays. You’ll end up being jealous of the toadstools and mushrooms…because they are such fungis…* The question is how much action do you need to have in your Little World to make it come alive –…
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No Business Like Show Business

Somewhere this afternoon a modeller is putting yet another coat of paint on their show model for the 2019 exhibition. In three days they will buff this off with the skin of an unborn albino ocelot and start to spray the next coat. Then the whole process will be repeated – it is going to…
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Every Dinner Is A New Dinner – Every Model Is A New Model

Every dinner does you good – if you eat it in pleasant company. Keep this analogy in mind when you sit down and think of doing some scale modelling. Every dinner needs preparation – oh, you might go to some restaurant and have it placed in front of you, but you will pay heavily for…
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Lockheed Lodestar – Part Three – But Wait, There’s More…

I am starting to get smarter when I open the box of a new kit – I dive for the instruction sheet. The thing I want to see straight away is the diagram of the sprues with the ID numbers on the bits that I will use and the greyed-out portions that indicate things that…
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Shall I Break It Now Or Wait Until Later?

The people in the plastic kit companies who write out the instructions and draw the diagrams are to be admired. I would accord them all honour as I tied them to the stake and bid the firing squad take aim. Because they are very talented and artistic criminals. Their chief crime, past the price they…
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Squeeze Me, Baby…

I am constantly amazed at the sort of things that I can do with 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. I mean past the business of slashing car tyres and robbing poor boxes – I mean in the Little Workshop when the time comes to glue something. Because nothing ever cements to anything else without being…
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If You Know You Cannot Do It, Don’t Do It.

No sense jumping off the roof with cardboard wings. But if you don’t know you can’t do it…go ahead and try. I use this principle all the time in scale model building. I have built kits that were unbuildable, finished buildings that were improbable, and built dioramas with no knowledge whatsoever of what I was…
