The Last Piece Syndrome

This is probably not true at all places, but is something I've noticed in my workplace. We have a trolley that sits in the middle of the office which is mainly used as ... well, a trolley of course. However it is frequently used as a communal food table where snacks or other types of food are put on for everyone to share and enjoy. It's one of the office customs we've had that keeps morale up and helps socially- goodness knows we need all the positive things we can get. It's a different matter when it comes to potato chips, but for foods like biscuits, muffins, cupcakes, etc, whenever there's one piece left on the plate it'll remain on the plate for a very long time. It is as if it has become invisible. Why is this I wonder?

So much to do - so little time!

Wow, it's probably due to the global recession that work has been so hectic lately that before I know it a month has gone and past and I have not posted anything new (though I've thought up lots of things I wanted to ramble about). I'm definitely never going to be cut out for this Twitter craze I've been hearing about - most definitely not. During this time I've thought of all things to post - one was a big self-rant about how tired I was and how I never found any time to do anything. Eventually wrote it, but then decided against posting it. Looking back it seemed rather silly, and I've done lots of stuff since then. What you might ask? All sorts of stuff. But the ones I'd like to mention the most would probably be some of the new model kits I've pieced together, which consist of Kotobukiya's new Mechanic series of vehicles that are basically sets containing one tank chassis (tracked or wheeled) and parts to make two different vehicles. Brilliant stuff. Looking forward to their helicopters and their new versions of the robot transport trucks that are also in the pipeline. As an aside, I found the following tucked away in my rough notes, which I appear to have written up to post but forgotten about. So I've touched it up and have include it for your amusement: Ever find yourself having a good dream - only to wake up and realize it was only just a dream? I did. I dreamed that I was walking around the plaza of a mall (rather, a quadrangle complex). Interesting place - I seemed to have an idea where I was going as if the place were familiar. Must've built it up from the various malls and shopping areas I've been to over the years. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a woman and a child walking through a side passage - don't remember if I ever used it before but had a feeling that it was a shortcut. Took it - and was rather surprised to find a public bath house. Well, more like a large hall with jacuzzis and private bathing pools with blinds. The entrance was a showering area. Rather odd that it was on a raised walkway - the whole floor of the bathhouse, where it wasn't a private room or a jacuzzi, was one big warmed pool. There's nothing like relaxing in a tub and letting warm water soak into and soften your stiff limbs. So I got all excited, I decided to rush off back to the hotel room I was staying at to get a towel. My first inclination was to just go in and forgo the towel, but they didn't provide any so drying off later was going to be trouble. Then I woke up to go to the bathroom. Cursed myself and realized I'd just broken what would've been a very pleasant dream. Usually you forget your dreams very quickly after you wake up, but then there are some that you don't. Dreams are interesting things indeed.

The March madness march of maddened marchers

The ides of March is here. Happy new year! Eh? Well, I occasionally wonder about the Gregorian calender that we use to manage our daily life. Often I come to the conclusion that there's a 2 month offset. I know most of the month names are basically Roman names, but when I try to associate them with numbers, that's when the whole 2 month offset comes in place. Look at October. Tenth month of the year, but it has Octo in it. I know it's probably referring to Octavius, but if you think about it from words like Octagon, Octopuss, etc. Octo means 8, but October is the 10th month of the year. Then there's December, the 12 month of the year. However, the Dec, if I'm not mistaken comes from Decimal. 10. To decimate in groups of 10s. Etc. Also ever wondered why February only has 28 or 29 days in the year? That's because it's meant to be the end of the whole yearly cycle, and is basically filled with whatever days were left over in the division of the days in the year. So when and where did we offset the whole year so that it ended on December and begins in January? Well, that was just a fleeting thought.

An Idle Day On a Summer Weekend

Here in the land of the long white cloud, New Zealand, it's summer. In my town we've had several gorgeous balmy summer days, so I've spent some of it outside ... under that yellow bright ball thingy. One hour under the sun and I'm sunburned. I went with my dad and brother on their usual trip to the swimming pool. I didn't go with them into the swim centre, but instead spent some time wandering around the mall next door to get some odds and ends. Ended up buying a new pair of sandals, some modeler's clay and wire. Odd collection of items. Then it happened. I walked by a booth that was set up strategically in the middle of the hall. "Excuse me, sir, could you spare a minute?" It was a someone trawling for people to commit money to some cause or other. Somehow I managed to buck up the courage this time and shrug them off and run off on my way. Normally though it's not in my nature to be so abrupt and I tend to unwillingly lend them my ear and get sucked in and get all nervous and find ways to get away as quickly as I can. Don't get me wrong: I approve of a lot of these "save the children in (fill in third world country of choice)" campaigns, but I do not approve of the guilt mongering that goes on with these campaigners who try to talk you into committing a donation. Also I don't know how legitimate these folks are despite all the official sounding logos they've got stamped all over their gear. In this mad world today there are so many people out for a quick buck that they'll do anything. It's hard not to get paranoid over any form of cash committals. In my mind a donation is something (or some service) that you'll give willingly - you don't have to have a minimum or set up a long term payment plan. Now I feel bad talking about them. Then there are folks trying to get you to sign up for things, usually credit cards like American Express (or insert credit card of your choice). Sometime I double back and see if I can find a longer way around them, or wait until they're busy trying to get the attention of others (diligently trying to get away) and walk by quickly. Avoiding eye contact. Then there are the cold callers that drop by the house. I think these are worse as you become a captive audience - which is compounded by my amiable nature that lets them suck me in. That just makes it harder to get away. It's just not in me to slam the door on them. I do have to commend the Jehova's witnesses though, as they are fairly diligent. Somehow they managed to track me from when I was living in Malaysia all the way to New Zealand. I'm not religious - I'm not even an atheist. I just don't want others trying to get me to do things I don't want to - and feeling uneasy all the time. Rant off. I later spent the day at my local library. I thought I'd use their new fan dangled book lookup system to find some books I was after. I'm rather interested in Windows MFC programming and am particularly interested in learning DirectX. I have a computer game brewing in my head - I need to get the necessary tools to build it. After half an hour later, I gave up. Are they too specialized a topic that I can't even find them in the library? I guess I'll have to take the plunge and buy the reference manuals off an on-line shop like Amazon.com. Technical manuals are expensive to be buying on a whim! After that I had lunch with my dad and brother by the sea. Lunch consisted of a few tiny chicken wing nibbles and some (un-chilled) Lipton(TM) Peach flavoured Ice Tea. The peach tea is to tea like what bottled water is to ordinary water - but was it oh-so-refreshing and hit the spot! Also had an apple custard strudel for dessert. It only had a hint of apple on the ends, and it was completely empty on the inside. Everyone else had the same thing too, and they were all empty. We'll never buy that again at the bakery. This is where I got sunburned. At least I wore a hat! Later that night, I tore open the modeling clay, used wire and super glue to create a frame and somehow made a start at creating a small sculpture of a perky young lady that exists only in my head, (who, for some odd reason, has an unimaginable wealth of knowledge on the topic of tea, but not much else). I thought "why not add sculpting to my endless number of hobbies?". It could be handy in any number of ways - plus it would be neat see one the many characters I'd created in 3d. The results were not pretty - or rather it's too early to tell my efforts can be finalized. After many attempts at trying to get the basic shape down (and failing miserably - the clay didn't want to stay on the wire frame - probably didn't let it set long enough), I discovered that it was midnight. Off to bed and that was that. It's good days like this that you can look forward to.

Building a Desert

Building a diorama to display your toys in idle scenes or in the midst of battle is both fun and the result can be awesome. Then again, dioramas can take up a lot of space and expensive on materials, so I never thought I'd do more than one. I've done three ... This time I thought I'd build a desert scene. What I had in mind? Just a desert. That's it. A boring dull desert with nothing much on it. Most of my dioramas so far have been fairly busy with lots of trees that take up most of the space, leaving little room to actually display my battle scenes. So the theme of this one is "open space". A desert's good for something like that. At least, that was the start of it. Space is still the theme, but some features need to be in it to make it look good. Many ideas crossed my mind since then. The first one was a simple hill with a mine shaft. Would be easy to make. Just a few sticks to make the door frame and build a hill around it and bam! Instant terrain feature. But that was boring. The idea progressed to having the ends of a space ship sticking out of the ground. My thought process here rather surpised me. I looked at the caps of some old permanent markers. They looked like they could make bell burners for a rocket. At the scale I was working at, three of them screwed to a base would be perfect! All it needed then was to be boxed in to make the space ship fuselage. The idea was to have the end of an old crashed space ship sticking out of the ground - or a hill. Lots of other ideas sprang to mind after this, like blocks sticking out of the side housing gun turrets, or the side lying slightly open - indicating that this was a large transport ship. All sorts. So after spending so much time on the basic idea, I got to work on the core of the diorama - the terrain shell. Using a square board as a base, I taped scrunched up wads of newspaper with masking tape into the rough shape of the terrain I had in mind. In this case, a hill to one side and just slightly lumpy but otherwise mostly flat land on the other side. I have to thank the Woodland Scenics handbook for the basics on terrain building. (It's a very informative manual designed specifically to sell their products - luckily similar substitutes will do) Using a roll of plaster cloth, I created the plaster shell for the terrain by wetting and then overlapping squares of the plaster cloth down. This bit is really messy and I got to get my hands really covered in plaster by the end of it! I unfortunately accidentally deleted the mid-way pictures of the completed shell at this point. Now that I've started the build, things have changed yet again. I've now got this idea for a rather run down looking base of sorts. It started when I was cutting a sheet of styrene to make the base for the rocket burners. I etched the lines in that I wanted. Somehow it turned into a door. I coated it in metallic paint. First in stainless steel, then in aluminum. Then I burnished the paint job (as per the instructions) and it almost became a mirrored surface! It looked almost frosty. I coated it in clear gloss then applied rub-on lettering an called it "Ice Berg 13" (the numbers were from a spare Gundam Seed HCM Pro slide-on decal sheet I had lying around). Actually it was meant to be Ice Berg 09, but I damaged the slide-on letters beyond repair at that point. Now it was a door! Why Ice Berg? I thought it would be funny to have a base in the desert called Ice Berg. I put the door in place and then used modeling clay to create an extension to the hill and fix the door in place. Because the whole terrain was still damp, it shrank as it dried and left cracks in the clay. This was unintentional, but it had the benefit of looking like natural wear and erosion. I rubbed some clay into the flat terrain to make the ground a bit rougher. As I was working, another idea sprang to mind. Soda caps can make reasonable water tanks! I gathered a few and set them aside for later. The next step was to paint the terrain. Normally I dab the terrain with a brush to give it that natural uneven colour, but this time I took a different approach. I airbrushed the whole thing. Thanks to the shape of the terrain, everything turned out really well. It does look a bit redder in these photos. Almost like a Martian landscape. I might mist a coat of white mixed with desert yellow onto the terrain to lighten it a bit. While painting, I didn't mask the door. This resulted in paint being feathered onto it along the edges. This weathered it and made it look dusty. Just the effect I was after, but I lost the mostly frosty mirror look of the door. I then painted the soda bottle caps in aluminum and weathered them a little with brown. Not sure if I want to have them set out side by side or whether to stack them on top of the other to make a tall water tank. I've not attached them to the shell as of yet. When I do, a clay base will be made, they'll be superglued into place and then the clay painted. That's as far as I've reached so far. I'd like to add more features to the hill to make it look like a real structure of some sort. Chimneys, pipes (to the tanks), some windows or building projecting from the side of the hill or maybe even a windmill. Then again it could just be some eccentric's refrigerator or garage. I don't think I can mimic rusty corrugated iron, but that's the image I have in mind with this facility. What next for this diorama? Who knows - I haven't really planned that far ahead. As my goal to have a large plain area has been achieved, the fate of the rest of the diorama is all in the air. I can easily have robots standing pretty, on guard or having a fist fight in the sand. Or any other machines for that matter. The base itself is really just a backdrop. A point of interest in the background that can add colour to the scene, but is not necessarily involved. And what of the rocket ship I had in mind? Well, it'll be kept as an idea for a potential future project. Stay tuned for the completion - when I get round to it.

The years accumulated in the cupboard

I was going though some of my old junk that's accumulated in my cupboard - I need to make some space. Old newspaper clippings, airline magazines, an ancient Archie comic, high school yearbooks and a whole bundle of things from my high school days. Some old blurry photos - I was a hopeless with the camera back then. Much of this stuff dates back an entire lifetime 15 years or more - which is a lifetime when you consider that was the age I was when I gathered much of this stuff. I discovered that I'm a slave to nostalgia. I just cannot bring myself to throw most of it away. Oh, certainly my old test papers with low marks went out without a thought. Even the rest of the stuff may not have any value, now or in the future. In fact it'll probably be of little value to anyone else but me. But, I still want to hold on to them, so that I can remember. To remember back to a time where today would seem so far away. To remember the abundance of friends that I had back then that I can no longer see again now that we've grown up and gone our separate ways - and some of us have migrated to other countries since then. I know one shouldn't be held down by the past but, I think I'll pick out the ones that are most meaningful and hang onto them for a little longer. I'm a sentimental fool.

The Colouful and Wide World of Paints

Over the last year, I've been experimenting with airbrushing since acquiring a cheap second hand Tamiya Sprayworks air compressor and spray gun set that had only been used once before. It's a wonderful device but requires that you constantly clean the spray gun after using it lest the paint dries and clogs up in it. Still, the even coats with the excellent finish are well worth all the effort to keep the sophisticated device clean. Now we come to the core of my ramble: Paint. Ah, paint! A modeler's bread and butter for customising or making their models and other toys look more accurate. To weather or make their model look fresh off the assembly line. But it's also not necessarily the easiest aspect of building your toy. The type of paint you use is important. There are many types, and the two most common are enamel and acrylic. Oil and water based paints respectively. To be honest with you, I absolutely enjoy using acrylic. They're easy to work with and cleaning up so easy. Fixing errors, which usually involve stripping all the paint off, is also a breeze. Acrylic thinner and the bulk methylated spirits I use to clean my brushes and the spray gun are less pungent than the enamel thinner and turpentine that enamel paints need. However, enamel paints are well established and I must admit that they can look very good when done right. They are unfortunately (or should I say fortunately?) hard to strip off if you need to redo a coat. I've been experimenting with them lately and I've found that they work differently from acrylics. In fact, you are absolutely required to start with light colours and work down to the darks. This also means you have to prime your model in a light base colour before you start, and once you do start working with the paint, you'll need several coats to get an even opaque colour. It is possible I might be using too much thinner! I try to keep it 50%/50%, or sometimes 55% paint and 45% thinner if the coats look too watery. In addition to the two types of paint, paints can be further divided into gloss, metallic and flat. Gloss paint has a higher resin content in the paint that results in a shiny reflective surface that you can almost see your face in. Glossy paint almost doesn't need a clear coat to seal it in, but one would certainly be recommended. Glossy surfaces are also the best surface for applying decals on. Metallic paint is very similar to gloss but have metallic flakes in it that render the metalic finish. Metals differ a little and I often find they rub off very easily - which is probably why some paints recommend that you burnish the finish with a cloth when you are done to get rid of the excess. I feel they almost definitely need a clear coat to seal the paint in. Good old chrome silver, gold or copper are great base coats if you are planing to use a semi clear colour coat. Flat paints are just flat basic colours that aren't reflective once the paint has dried. Flats are probably the easiest to work with as you can tell when they are dry by the dull finish. If you recoat the paint, it will go down glossy so you can tell which parts you have or have not gone over. But that's not the end of it, if later decide that you wanted it to be glossy, all you need to do is coat it with a clear gloss coat spray. Not only will that protect the coat, it'll make it glossy. In addition to the types of paint you are working with, I've learned that the make of paint is just as important. Paint from different manufacturers will behave differently - particularly with their drying times. I've tried Humbrol and Tamiya enamel paints. Both are well fairly well established and widely used brands worldwide (at least that's the impression I get after reading some recent modeler magazines). There are most certainly other brands out there, but these are the two most accessible to me. Humbrol has a decent range of pre-mixed colours. I mean, I needed metallic pink for a particular robot model, and they had it. Fantastic! However, Humbrol paint take a very long time to dry and cure. It almost requires that I wait overnight before I can start working again. Even then, the heat off my fingers tend to leave marks in the finish - though I suspect I may have put on too heavy a coat. For someone as impatient as me, this does not gel very well. I won't knock it off as a bad brand. Far from it! Modelers have used it successfully for years. And I suppose if I was working on something that doesn't need a lot of attention, such as the shell of a vehicle, then perhaps it's not a bad choice. I do however find the paint to be really sticky if they get on the fingers. The stickiness however is quite handy. See, I normally mount the subjects I wanted painted on a piece of cardboard or a stick with some sticky tack or a roll of tape. This makes handling them while painting rather a simple process. Over-spray will definitely get on these. While I'm waiting for the paint to dry, I can touch the over-spray to check whether the paint is dry or otherwise. It'll feel sticky until it is dry. I started with Humbrol, but found that they were harder to work with than acrylic. Then I discovered Tamiya enamels and found them very easy to use and suited my needs better with their faster drying times. I can start with the next coat or start putting on different colours in almost half an hour to an hour after painting. While you can get all sorts of mixes with Humbrol, Tamiya on the other hand have a very limited selection of pre-mixed enamel paint (not counting their spray paints). Due to my impatience, my preference is currently leaning heavily towards Tamiya enamels. Part of the reason for my impatience is that I'm working with an airbrush. I can empty the paint into a jar and store it while waiting for my work to dry. But then I'd have to completely clean the spray gun so that any paint inside it won't clog the mechanism. This is a tedious process - and having been a bit lax at one time, I ended up clogging it. But that's just me. No matter what type of paint I use or the manufacturer, a paint job will always look stunning if it's done right. A good dose of patience helps too. I certainly need to learn that! The post I made with the Char's Custom Zaku II ver 2.0 painted Santa colours was one of my better recent efforts with enamels.

A T34/76 Russian Tank model kit

Over the month of December, I spent a few weekends putting together this smart kit from Tamiya: T34/86 Russian Tank Model 1941(Cast Turret) 1:48 Scale I'll never say a bad word about military modellers ever again! Not that I've ever said anything bad about them in the first place, but... Building these and building robot kits like Gundams are like two different worlds. Both are challenging but for different reasons. Tank kits are relatively simpler than a robot kit. Less moving parts for one, and almost no polycaps. A polycap is a soft PVC part used to simulate joints and are often used in a ball joint setups. No, the wheels and tracks do not move. The turret can swing and aim the gun up and down though! A tank will generally consist of the chassis, the top, the turret and the wheels/tracks. That's simple enough. That builds the core of the tank. Then there's the detailing like spades, jerry cans, fuel tanks, ammo boxes, chains, lights, handrails, other details and so on and so forth. These require tweezers and good eyesight. I chose a 1:48 scale model because it's one of the larger models you can build (there are larger and more expensive kits like 1:35 scale), but alas even then the detail elements are so small that even tweezers weren't much help. One thing I like about a lot of these elements is that a number of them like the spades, pickaxes, tent rolls, and various liquid cans are optional details that you can heap onto the kit any in way you like. You can use as much or as little as you want. There are two other things that set these sort of military kits apart:

1. They are usually not coloured Even then, most robot model kits don't come with all the parts moulded in the right colours, and will require some paint to achieve accuracy (unless you're going for a custom build.
2. Glue/Cement MUST be used to fix everything together Most modern robot or sci-fi kits have been built for snap-together construction and the use of cement is often optional. (Though lately I find myself using it even with snap-together kits - it makes them hold together so much better)

I don't think I'll really be getting into scale military models, but it was a good learning experience after all. Modellers are modellers regardless of what they build. Bridging the gap between the two types and using what you learn from both sides can result in something even more beautiful. As for the T34/76 kit itself, why did I pick it? I suppose I could've gone with a flashy modern tank like the A1 Abrams or maybe any number of the German Panzerwagens that are in abundance in model shops that stock military model kits. But I thought I'd give this kit a go. Partly because it's rather a neat looking machine, and partly due to a reference from an Anime I watched earlier this year called Those Who Hunt Elves. One of the supporting casts members is a T34/76 that's possessed by the soul of a cat. One other indirect reason for wanting to buy a tank kit was to see how the tank body would do as legs for one of my Armored Core sets: Kotobukiya haven't released any Armored Cores with tank legs as of yet (nor the reverse joints or hover legs), so I just had to give it a go. Works okay, but a tad on the small side. May have to try it again with a much larger kit, and with a more centralized turret. An Abrams might work.

Christmas Eve Eve

'twas the eve before Christmas Eve, and things are just as mad as ever. Shopping centres are packed with people shopping. Shopping. Shopping! It appears to have been this way for the last week or so. It's greed. It's necessity. It's just us doing what we do best: trying to do everything at the last minute. In a way it's fun. Fun to an observer, though probably not to those that are in the thick of things. There are a variety of reasons for the congregation of people at the malls, I'm sure. But yes, that's just how things are in the consumer world at this time of the year. Tomorrow, the 24th day of December, I still have two thirds of a day's worth of work left to go at the office. Shopping's all done and I'm all set for the break. But as I sit here typing all this, I'm thinking: "It's a Tuesday, but feels like a Friday" That's fairly general and can cover any day preceding a day off or holiday. Maybe it's the effects of my expectation of the day off ahead? Who knows. Well, time to rest up and get ready for another day.

Holiday madness

Christmas is just a week away, and the office went mad. Work's piling up, there's no end in sight. Luckily we're soldiering on thanks to all the sweets and bottles of wine our various stakeholders have bought in as thanks for another year of hard work. But it's funny how we (that's the general blanket/all-encompassing form of we) tend to kick up a fuss over very little and appear to think that we must rush and get things done before Christmas. Then, at the end of Boxing day, we think, "what was that all about?". Then we repeat everything over again for another year. What to do? Just soldier on I guess. Coincidentally, check out this custom Gundam Zaku 2.0 (Char's Custom) figure I did up in a holiday theme. He's been chilling on my office desk next to a really cheap fiber optic two-colour tree for the past week or so. I didn't name it, but Zaku Claus was a very apt suggestion. Yep, comes with wired beard and a hand sewn bag. It's simply amazing what the mind can do with a super robot coated in red paint and the addition of a white stripe. A preconceived notion of the jolly man himself does the most of the work. Why? Why did I do it? Heck if I know.