In order to understand my 2023, you really have to start with my 2022. 2022 was the year the wheels kinda-sorta came off my life. I spent months going to various specialists trying to get to the bottom of mystery pains. I left one job for another, and got tossed aside in layoffs six months…
Musings on Creativity
The past week or three have been so full of hot takes about creativity and innovation – or the lack thereof – that it’s feeling like the rhetorical equivalent of a Soviet artillery barrage. And watching the shells rip by, something about the whole whatever this is just hasn’t sat right with me. I couldn’t…
Don’t Buy These Wheels (They Suck)
I’m not a fan of vinyl tires. Never have been. Awful paint adhesion, difficult to remove mold seams, awkward gaps and fit with the wheels, all of it. Generally, if it has vinyl tires, they’re getting replaced by resin. The only exceptions in my display cabinet are when there literally were not wheels available (that’s…
Strange Things Afoot at the NCC…
In most years, the usual post-Nats churning would be settling down by now. But 2023 is simply not most years. We’ve had sub implosions and Hawaii burning and orcas waging asymmetrical warfare against yachters. We’re gonna have a crazy eclipse in about two months. The government was like…”yeah aliens”…and NOBODY GAVE A SHIT. So I…
Theory of the Case
In March and April of this year (2023), things got bad. Life felt unrelenting, work was stressing me out, and I could feel myself bogging down on the Wild Weasels. And the AK FJ43. Every time I’d fire up a build and intend to just kinda plow through it, I’d fall into some kind of…
A Story of Volunteers
Post-Nats takes are almost as much of an event as the Nats itself. And this year things have coalesced around two main points of contention – the perennial back and forth over the shortcomings of IPMS USA’s judging paradigm, and the firestorm of indignation caused by a judge hoisting a tank to the heavens to…
Flip Your Shit ’24: A Proposal
By now, most of us have seen the photo of a judge at IPMS Nats holding a Char 1B aloft like it’s fucking Simba in the Circle of Life. This has generated a lot of heated discussion about the lack of respect for the builder’s work, the absolute unnecessity of looking at the bottom of…
Against Storytelling
NOTE: I know, I know. This is a meandering post. It’s an idea that’s been banging around in my head for months and I’ve been trying to land on a way to articulate it. It’s still choppy. I work in marketing. And like literally everyone who works in marketing, if money were no object, I’d…
Spit Take
So I’ve tried to write this review a few times now. And every time I do, I end up on some weird tangent talking about Kotare’s place in the larger modeling community and how I’m bored with standard reviews and how 2023 has been a motherfucker and basically just keep going in circles. But I…
Thoughts from the 2022 Nats
Well, I’ve made the trek out to Omaha for the 2022 Nats, and I wanted to share some thoughts and impressions while they’re fresh in my mind. The Hype If you follow almost any podcast (and let’s face it…some more than others) or are in any way active in the online community, you’ve been subjected…