Author Archives: Gavin Syme

Now we are Eight my Little Poet

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minion_cake

Minions are cool..but purple minions are way cooler!

Now you are eight my little poet and bright you burn.  A ray of sun in the world that promises much for a future not yet composed.   Your face radiant and your words stronger and surer each day.  Strong in limb and in mind my how you grow.  Not so long ago to me a babe you were and a bundle in constant need of me.   You need me still and you always will but it will be less and less and for that you will make me proud.  My central son, my poet, my Daniel.

Happy Birthday!

GBS

Paper Plissken is Mine!

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escapefromnewyorkebaybook_1000pix

Its been a long search and at times a painful one but at last I own a paperback copy of the Escape from New York novel by Mike McQuay.   A close run thing (much like the Escape story itself!) with many bidders and a final price that might make you sweat but which is still less than buying a copy through a book dealer it has just arrived in the mail.  I will do a review of the book once I read it but you might ask for now..why are you interested in a novel about a film that is thirty years old?

The answer is Snake Plissken (played by Kurt Russell) the character has had a big impact on me for as long as I can remember.  Sure the film is a little ropey and in places it drags but it and its characters have real presence that many newer movies do not.   Snake is an anti-hero living in a nightmare police state future America with a military past hinted at and a fame that he does not want.  The book is meant to expand on Snake’s background and give weight to tag lines in the film.  I sure hope it does.  The novel is significant because it includes scenes that were cut out of the film, such as the Federal Reserve Depository robbery that results in Snake’s incarceration. The novel provides motivation and backstory to Snake and Hauk — both disillusioned war veterans — deepening their relationship that was only hinted at it in the film. The novel explains how Snake lost his eye during the Battle for Leningrad in World War III, how Hauk became warden of New York, and Hauk’s quest to find his crazy son who lives somewhere in the prison. The novel fleshes out the world that these characters exist in, at times presenting a future even bleaker than the one depicted in the film. The book explains that the West Coast is a no-man’s land, and the country’s population is gradually being driven crazy by nerve gas as a result of World War III.  Awesome!

I actually do have a plan beyond the obtaining and reading of the book and that plan is to try and get 15mm.co.uk to back my idea of more HOF codes that are suitable for the EFNY setting.  We already have the SFA which will stand in for the thuggish guards and we have HOF55 (pictured above) which will, with more packs coming this season, stand in for gangers in the prison city.  But we don’t have what I yearn for….a Snake for the nest.  A miniature like that could be put into many projects and wargaming settings.  Perhaps a Maggie and a Cabbie along with a Duke and a Hauk too.  Sometimes I get my way but with 15mm.co.uk’s customer base wanting it too…well perhaps this post will assist in that.  Email me on sales@15mm.co.uk if you are as keen as I am.  Eye Patches are cool!

GBS

A New Website for 15mm.co.uk

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Migration was a success and now 15mm.co.uk has a brand new fully functional website.  As I said back on Tuesday it might take a day or a week or more but it went like a dream in the end.  It was a lot of work to build this site and honestly the messages coming in saying how nice it is makes me feel very happy. If you have an interest in what I do please go and have a look at the website.  Several thousand products and images.  Takes a lot of collate and insert.

On a separate but related note Alien Squad Leader 2.0, Alex Self’s fantastic 15mm science fiction wargame rules system is now back in stock as of this morning and the print run is selling already.  I had the privilege to write the fiction that was inserted into the pages of the manuscript and I had a hand in the layout while the great cover was done by Jim Brittain.   I have lined up quite a few new products for the HOF line that supports ASQL in the coming months and I will be giving details of each army as it develops into a full box code over on the 15mm.co.uk blog.

Now…the Ion Age calls and I can hear a Skylark singing (cryptic eh!).

GBS

15mm.co.uk is Moving to a New Website

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New Logo, New Website!

15mm.co.uk is moving! We are about to move our website and email accounts to a new service provider and system. This will greatly improve what we can show you (we have a LOT of new products ready for release in the run up to Salute 2014) and make us more effective for offering deals, viewing on mobile devices and blogging too. While the process of moving should be painless we do need to tell you all some information. So please read on.

The process will begin on Wednesday 19th February 2014 at 8pm GMT and we estimate it will all be complete within fourty eight hours. However it may take up to a week. We will let you all know once the shiny new site is up and running.

We will be deactivating our payment gateway and current website and email system from that time. Please DO NOT email us on our normal email address during this period as we may lose your email in transit. All orders placed with us will be filled and dispatched as normal and all email already in progress with us will be answered by our proxy. Our sister brand www.theionage.com is going to help us out during the transfer with our email as a proxy. If you want or need to contact 15mm.co.uk during this period please email us on info@theionage.com and they will pass it directly onto us and in turn we will respond by that email address.

Lastly once the new website is up and you can see it please delete all your page links to parts of the current website as they will no longer work and check your computers cache too.

Its an exciting time and you want to ask me something please do it in the comments below as well.

GBS

The Lego Movie – Am I looking too far into it?

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Am I not part of normal society now?  Now before you go thinking I have put on a mask and lurk in dark alleys tackling criminals or I have forgotten its the early 21st century and moved to another time zone I have not. What I mean is ‘am I the kind of guy that mainline movies are made for’.  What made me have this thought, well the LEGO movie did.  I had promised my eldest son that he and his brothers could go see it and that happened this weekend.

This film has had rave reviews.  I mean rave.  Aside from the review above which you can watch the film got a 96% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes which is no mean thing.  But I just don’t buy it and here is why.  Firstly I sat in an audience of three hundred most of whom were children and most of them were at times so bemused and bored that they cried, spoke and wandered around (that did not happen during the excellent Despicable Me 2) and secondly the film just made me sad.  Some have said that it pokes fun at the society that created it, the media obsessed, consumerist driven, you are never a failure despite your mediocrity society of the Western World in 2014.  It does but its a veneer that covers the following.

The main LEGO character called Emmett is a vacuum of a man who just wants to fit in with a generic ‘awesome’ template of being ideal in his environment.   The bad guy is called President Business (telling eh!) who does away with everyone who disagrees with him using a fascist police force.  Literally disassembled by the powers that be.   If you fail you get bailed out or soothed by the government if you are rich and important but if you try to be different and you are normal..you are killed.  Special privileges for those in control in manipulation of the masses.   President Business explains that ‘everything must stay the same’ and that building lego on your own is bad, that the elite must stay in control and society must confirm rigidly.  Those at the top want to freeze everything, nothing must change or fail if its important.   Business wants to literally ‘glue everything in place’.  In the film the creativity of builders is brutally repressed for conformity.   Emmett must believe he is special to become special and so he does and the film pokes fun at this but not enough.  Skills don’t come from simply thinking you have them.  Believe and it happens…leads to the dangerous core of this film.  Emmett is passive and vacant and then someone tells you to be in violent conflict with others, you don’t see your own goals and you do not make your own choices.  Its a bleak and a dangerous message.  ‘Believe you are special but only when we give you the power to attack and destroy’.   It is all troubling.  At the end of the movie there is a cop out of the core drive of the film that brings it to a sudden halt before the appearance of Duplo.

Its a veneer to me because it actually left me feeling cold inside.  This is not the times of my childhood with films like The Goonies, Karate Kid, Short Circuit.  Its a veneer that once pushed through covers the fact that actually we are all like the movie portrays us and perhaps our society now is really rather screwed.  Buy the lego kits, don’t create your own designs but you are awesome and you should create your own designs but don’t since you need to conform.  Some scenes actually put me in mind of adult rated war movies.  No hope in this fantasy world.

Did I look too far into it?  Well maybe but I thought I would put my considerations to virtual paper.

Its a fun movie, its fast and its bright and it pushes buttons.  Go see it.  I don’t want to see it again.

GBS

After a Gap the Ion Age is 28mm once more!

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IB52 Muster Female Squad

Quick posting to link over to the Alternative Armies blog.  Its been near twenty years since the last new ‘greens’ were released for The Ion Age, at that time Firefight.  I have reached another milestone today along with Sam Croes in bringing out new 28mm designs.  Four for now but many more to come.  A little pat on the back for me today I think!  Click on the link if you want to learn more.

GBS

Do I like the Winter Olympics…No!

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Over the past few days I have had dozens of emails and pings personally over the Winter Olympics currently underway in Russia.  I have also had people asking me in the street (despite the wind and water and cold) if I enjoy the Olympics.  The answer is no.  I don’t find sport interesting.  Perhaps its the turn off of football and the absurd money that ball kickers make but really its deeper.  Lots to do in the world that matters more and its never mentioned.  So sport no.  But I was interested enough to do some digging about the current Olympics and what did I find…well nothing nice.  That led me to YouTube and one of my favourite channels, that of Stefan Molyneux the libertarian philosopher.   He has made a video that includes all I turned up and a lot more.

Have a look and listen if you have a spare half hour.  But be warned you will not like the Olympics once you do.

GBS

Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos (Kindle) Review

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Lines of Departure (Marko Kloos)

Vicious interstellar conflict with an indestructible alien species. Bloody civil war over the last habitable zones of the cosmos. Political unrest, militaristic police forces, dire threats to the Solar System…  Humanity is on the ropes, and after years of fighting a two-front war with losing odds, so is North American Defense Corps officer Andrew Grayson. He dreams of dropping out of the service one day, alongside his pilot girlfriend, but as warfare consumes entire planets and conditions on Earth deteriorate, he wonders if there will be anywhere left for them to go. After surviving a disastrous space-borne assault, Grayson is reassigned to a ship bound for a distant colony—and packed with malcontents and troublemakers. His most dangerous battle has just begun. In this sequel to the best selling Terms of Enlistment, a weary soldier must fight to prevent the downfall of his species…or bear witness to humanity’s last, fleeting breaths.

Back in late December the first book I read with my new Kindle was Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos.  You can read my review of it on this blog here.   I enjoyed it so much that I signed up for the pre-order option to get the sequel and it downloaded into my device on cue two weeks ago.  Now I have been so busy that I have only just now got around to reading it and I did so in two halves over some three hours.  I had been looking forward to learning what had become of the NAC, of Andrew Grayson and the Lankies.  Was it worth the wait?

linesofdeparture_kloos_090214

As is normal for me with my lack of free time the short answer is YES.  I enjoyed this sequel a lot.  I read it fast and with joy.  I would say you need to read the first book for it to make total sense, but you could wing it.  I will not give the plot away but there is action a plenty and though the plot is not as novel as the first book its tighter and Mr Kloos seems to have more fun with it too.  Go and seek it out if you like military sci-fi like what I do (see that professional grammer eh!).  It alternates doom laden depression with souring optimism on the part of the characters and this gives them more depth.  The Lankies are very scary if impersonal foes.   Get it from Amazon here.

I think that the author will craft a third book in the series and after the way ‘Lines of Departure’ ended I have some thoughts as to what will feature in it.  A doomed humanity, back against the wall, confined to half a solar system with an unstoppable enemy.  Seems to me that a miracle weapon will appear to deal with the seed ships and that freedom will come with a realisation of the nature of man.  After all you can’t argue with brute physics.  I am loving this hopefully now series of books.

GBS

Duxis be Done!

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Work, work, work.  Twelve hour days, long time.  But there are moments of utter joy among the hours of trudge and one of those came around noon today.  Sam Croes design the Duxis Battlesuit went live today on the Ion Age website in the form of two early supporter bundles.  The bundles were my idea, after all, I know how much I love freebies and a saving.  At noon the offers went live and within mere minutes the orders started coming in as I sat and watched.  Lovely comments too, lots of adoration of this latest miniature in all its variants.  Its not about the money in the job I do, it never is, but after a project has been in the works for some time the moment it is public can be nerve racking.

You can read the full blog posting about this over on the Ion Age Blog.

The offers run for two weeks and I have some blog posts planned that will give hints of more new products to come on the heels of the battlesuit and before Salute 2014 in April at Excel in London.  What are these products…I will not say so there!

Now back work.

GBS

Scotland passes same sex marriage bill today

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A bill which allows same-sex weddings to take place in Scotland has been passed by MSPs in the Scottish Parliament. MSPs voted by 105 to 18 in favour of the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Bill. The Scottish government said the move was the right thing to do but Scotland’s two main churches were opposed to it. The first gay and lesbian weddings could take place this autumn. Religious and belief bodies can “opt in” to perform same-sex marriages. Ministers said no part of the religious community would be forced to hold such ceremonies in churches.

That is the first paragraph from a BBC News post online HERE.  Its a good day to be Scottish.  My country just got a bit more liberal and bright.  Another piece of medieval darkness removed.

As for me I am all for love be it of any Human kind and I hope to get some more blog posts up soon.  Its been a mad hectic week for me but the reasons will come clear soon enough.

GBS