About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Friday, January 1, 2016

V is for Vinyl Villains

I had a bunch of stuff to publish between Christmas and the New Year, but decided to have a few days off, I hope everyone has had a good holiday, the weather would suggest the [absolutely happening] climate-change models will need tweaking in the new year, my thoughts with those wet souls in the North, along with the victims of fires in Australia and California, unseasonal - in severity - tornadoes in the South-west States (and snow in Mexico!??) along with anyone trying to find the melted North Pole...Happy weird New Year!

Perhaps - with the Paris agreement now dry - 2016 will be the year people finally understand the Hippies were right all those years ago, and big business has got away with another 50 years of unregulated damage-making...still, we buy their shit, and elect their overseers, so we can only blame ourselves! Trump for President of the end of the world!

Spotted in Poundland in the lead-up to Christmas. Dressed in the in-house Funtastic branding, these seem to be re-badged BBi (Blue Box International) Elite Force copies of the Schleich for Revell 'Epix' figures of a few years ago, same poses but cruder castings and much cruder paint!

These appeared about three weeks before Christmas, and I never managed to get the standard bearer before they sold out, whether they will be restocked in the new year remains to be seen, but worth looking-out for over the coming months.

The crudity of the copies is soothed somewhat by the fact that they are a pound each, while both Revell originals and BBi branded copies (which can still be found about the web) are between £5.99 and £7.99 or thereabouts, while a skilled painter can soon enhance these.

One shouldn't condone blatant piracy, but if companies as big as Schliech or Revell don't prosecute a company as established as Blue Box, then it's left to us to exploit the situation! 8 poses at the moment; three knights, four legionaries and a gladiator, I think this may be the same story for the similar large pirate/buccaneer figures issued in the same stores a year or two ago?

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