28mm Hinterland Princess Viktoria-Luise, Anonymous Book, Dice Shenanigans and........

...........how will you die if you found yourself in a slasher movie!

28mm figure from Hinterland Miniatures of a Princess who is a colonel in a Hussar regiment hence the death's head emblem, nice figure but deserved better, far nicer painted version on the Hinterland site.....

Andras found this picture!

Received this book from Edwin but not..... as when he ran his competition I was interested in this book in the give away but did not win as my luck with most competitions is atrocious, so anyway this arrived in the post with a note......

The note.........and thank you to my anonymous giver......much appreciated, half way through it already........

BigLee and his awful, awful dice rolling..... incredibly awful luck with dice and usually when I'm on his fecking side in a game and the challenge issued by Ray was is he the worst dice roller ever? I tried the challenge and yes he still is!!!!!

This little picture challenge tickled me.........

Seemingly I would end up as"The sinister stranger who is taken hostage at the very start of the film (pre-credits!)".

Compared to some of the outcomes this is not too bad..........

Have a good week if you can and don't forget the Google+ button for sharing and more communication between blogs,,,,,,,,,,,

BLOG-CON draws closer and Sidney Roundwood has asked for some help, BLOGGERS FOR CHARITY has had some good news and PR due to our mate Loki!

Still not started painting but getting there, just found out where I left my Mojo:D

Cavalier 2012 Show and Generation Kill Book.

The Rejects will be at Cavalier 2012 this Sunday and hope to see some fellow gamers and bloggers there, it's the first show we attend every year and it's a small but good show and we will do a few pictures and words next week!

Just finished this book (it only came out in 2004!) and it's a fantastic read of the authors time (rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright) with the US marines First Recon Battalion during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the insight into this elite unit within the marines (the details of their training is amazing), although the marine commander Major General James Mattis called them "cocky, obnoxious bastards".

What you get is a tale from Evan who was mistrusted at the beginning to say the least but gained their respect by riding in the lead humvee and sometimes reluctantly carrying a weapon, it's a tale of aggression, misuse of this unit, poorly supplied, sometimes poorly led but always ready for whatever came their way and looking out for each other but it's also a tale of sadness, no real overall plan, comradeship, lucky escapes, the death of civilians.......

The marines themselves are brutally honest in their opinions (some of them got into trouble later) and as aggressive as their Devil Dogs nickname (supposedly earned in 1918 from the Germans they fought at Bellau Wood during WW1 were they were called hounds from hell in German dispatches), they used to ambush each other at night whilst waiting to be deployed and nick each other with their combat knives on each others ribs.....

A great read and now to find the TV series.....

Playing Favourites or Favorites.........put the bloody kettle on!

This has been going around the wargaming blogs, it shows what gets fellow bloggers ticking and not just about wargaming and our hobby.........

Wargames Period :- The Sengoku Samurai period is my favourite and I have a reasonably large collection of figures, scenery and books and followed closely by WW2 in several scales and several times....

Scale :-  For me it has always been 25/28mm but finances can dictate the hobby now but the injection of quality 28mm plastic figures has helped a lot......

Rules :-  I hate rules especially complicated rules unlike some of the rule addicts I've come across through gaming and blogging but my favourite are Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings rule set. I got into these when the young fellow started collecting the figures and I helped him out by painting the good guys (Saruman and the Urak-Hai) so he had an opponent and loved the easiness of the rules and I have used them for dark age skirmish, pirates, samurai and possibly modern......

Board Game :- Don't get to play boardgames any more but my favourite to this day is Shogun but I do get in the odd game of chess.....

Figure Manufacturer :- I used to be an awful Wargames Foundry whore in the day but they went to hell in a hand basket but I had figures from every range they did at one time or another, I used to decide a range to paint by what they made at one stage...... my favourites now are Perry Miniatures, Peter Pig and CP Models (I buy quality rather than the cheapest and most suitable, I will avoid periods if there are no good figures for the period).

Opponent :- Who else could it be at this time but the lunatic Ray over at his blog (I start a blog and he copies me, most of my ideas have ended up on his blog because you can't tell him anything but he's a good lad and got me into the Rejects all those years ago.... I feel nauseous for some reason). We compete in some way over anything and I mean anything.......

Books :- I read a lot of books (one year at a security gatehouse I went through several hundred, there was a library right next to site and things were quiet.....)

Tom Clancy: Anything with Jack Ryan and Red Storm Rising.......

David Gemmell: Anything the man wrote really but Druss will always be my favourite.....

Antony Beevor: Brilliant and interesing military author...

James Clavell: Shogun and his others are good also.....

Jack Higgins: Quality easy fiction with a lot of Irish shenanigans going on at times....

Robert Jordan: The wheel of time series but it's dragging on a bit....

Terry Pratchett: Anything from Discworld.....the man's a genius!

There are lots more but the quality of a book to me is the ability for it to make me want to read it again....

Movies/TV :- Now I love a good movie or TV show so I'll keep this short if I can...

Band of Brothers: The best and most watched....

Kingdom of Heaven : The directors cut version only....

Lucky Number Slevin: A movie about revenge....

Dead Man's Shoes: A movie about revenge.....

I love old movies like Freebie and the Bean, The Wind and the Lion or popcorn like Taken, Rambo, The Expendables or foreign masterpieces like The Killer, Yojimbo, Ran, Seven Samurai, A Better Tomorrow, anything with Laurel and Hardy, of course a bit of zombie with Dawn of the Dead (original) , Zombieland and 28 days later,  diversity is the name of the game......

 Art :- I love a lot of military prints especially anything by Angus McBride but once while wandering  round an art gallery in Ireland (I was dating...ok) I found a painting by an Irish artist Francis Danby called the Opening of the Sixth Seal, I have a copy at home hanging on a wall but the original is huge and needs to be seen up close.......

PS3 :- I am a PS3 whore and love FPS shooters but I am currently banned from using a mike by SWMBO and the neighbours 3 or 6 doors down usually know when I'm playing as I have been known to let my feelings be known......currently wandering around MW3 causing mayhem!

This is me.......

Miscellaneous :- I love A-10 Warthogs, Pamela Anderson, Tiger tanks, Apache helicopters, the charge of the Scots greys in the movie Waterloo, the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now, SWMBO, good cleavage (women only), sad music, loud music, burgers, Johnny Cash, Ireland, good chips (fries to the US readers), drums and percussion, coca cola (no substitutes or diet), american football (Chicago Bears fan since 1985), decent porn, truth and the smell of napalm in the morning.......

Rant :- I hate liars and hypocrites, the way some figure manufacturers treat us the customer like we're dopey fuckers with the quality of product they send out and expect us to bodge it together and expect holes and excessive flash to be a worth challenge (it's not,it's like McDonalds with their pictures of the burger as in not what you end up with and wonder what the fuck happened), politicians (if you say you want to be one you should be culled), most lawyers, bankers, stock traders.........

....there's a lot more but I'll leave it at that!

The Painting Challenge begins...and a book is launched.

The painting challenge at Analogue Hobbies finally starts today (haven't painted feck all last week) and good luck to everybody (including Ray....)

They need an undercoat and off we go......

Also the boys Brandon and Bryan over at A Beer for the Shower (one of the top 3 blogs out there....) and they have finally gotten their book out there to the world and can be seen and bought here Amazon for £1.47 or $2.00 I believe and you can win a puppy (hold on....breaking news...the puppy is no longer on offer......air holes are being mentioned.....dammit!)

I bought my copy last night and I hope it's a success for the boys...........

On a final note I had my fingers crossed when I spoke about Ray..........

Heaven & Hell: Diary of a German Paratrooper.

Picked it up on the bring and buy at Salute, I always like to read a bit from the other side of the conflicts.

Very good account of a German paratrooper from the second world war from training right up until his surrender to British troops at Rees, Germany in 1945, it's a no bullshit look at the training and tactics of a new type of warfare, he fought in Poland 1939, Narvik 1940,Crete 1941, Russia 1941-2-3, Sicily and Southern Italy 1943, Normandy 1944 and finally Holland and /Lower Rhine 1944-5 and is sent to England as a prisoner of war until 1946.

He starts off with enthusiasm for the war and the Nazi party but as his account goes on this enthusiasm for both dwindles as the war and years progress. His writing is short and to the point with literally dates sometimes following each other as he mentions little if nothing happened or if  their is action or casualties, he cares for his men and their survival, he has some discipline issues in the early days.

We learn what he thought, what he felt and what he went through and his transformation from an eager soldier into a war weary veteran wanting mainly to bring his men home safely, his description of the chaos and confusion of war is vivid and grim. Good read and great pictures throughout.

Service Medals:

Iron Cross First Class
Iron Cross Second Class
Luftwaffe Jump Badge
Luftwaffe ground assault badge
Close Combat Clasp in Silver
Wound badge in Silver
Narvik campaign sheild
Kreta Armelband

Who is William Black?

Received an email yesterday from Amazon.com to say William Black had sent me or I had won a Kindle novel of Infected by Scott Sigler, I was delighted as I like free stuff and just wanted to thank him. Now most bloggers use psudenoms and don't use their real names and that's not a problem, so if you're out there William thank you but it's unavailable to customers in the UK. I do have a kindle app and still haven't read a book this way yet but would like to, apologies for not knowing who you are and even greater apologies if I do know you and have had a brain fart.

Thanks for reading or helping and my name is Francis.

In Sigler's riveting horror thriller, alien seeds from outer space infect a number of unlucky humans, who develop some unusual symptoms—itchy, blue triangular growths on their skin—that eventually result in the carriers becoming screaming, homicidal maniacs. CIA agent Dew Phillips must find out why these formerly docile citizens are running amok, aided by Margaret Montoya, a Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist, who reported the first of the strange cases. One of the infected, former football player Perry Dawsey, doesn't take any crap from anybody, not even the aliens residing in his body. Sigler (Ancestor) leads the reader from one startling detail to the next—the creatures learn to speak (feed us we hungry); they grow little black eyes—until even hardened genre fans will find themselves whimpering at each new revelation. This terrifying page-turner could be the author's breakout book, fueled by an extensive online podcast campaign.

NEWS FLASH: Found him over at his blog, just didn't know his name, go over and check him out SciFiMedia

Armageddon by Max Hastings or the book that upset a Reject.

I love military history books and this one by Max Hastings ranks along Antony Beevor's WW2 books (Stalingrad, Berlin etc....., he is very uncompromising in his views of certain military failures like Market Garden, Zhukov's Oder crossing and the Ardennes Offensive, even that the allied soldier was a factor in why the war didn't end in 1944, criticism of Montgomery and Patton and Churchill aswell, the cautiousness of Allied generals viewed against Soviet generals who cared little for their men and had a lot of pressure placed on them from Stalin, there are lots more observations in no real order, the maps are not great either but this is minor compared to the writing and content. I loved the book for it's opinions and would recommend it to anybody with an interest in the last years of the war.

Now a couple of years ago I loaned this book to Ian (a fellow Reject) and I haven't seen it since (even after many enquiries as to it's whereabouts), it upset him that much the criticism of the allied soldier and Churchill especially in the last years of the war in the book, I believe he binned it or burnt it but only Ian knows? I mention this as I ended up buying the book again and love the effect it had on him and I believe some books do bring out the passion in people but he still owes me for the book.

SS-GB by Len Deighton, What If? Operation Sealion Ideas.

Currently painting some more 20mm WW2 British home guard and British dismounted tank crew for the game along with making some plastic Pegasus Hobbies German Pz 38(T) light tanks (one of the easiest kits to put together I've ever come across but still with good detail).

Have just finished reading SS-GB by Len Deighton and I must say it was really an enjoyable read detailing a murder investigation in German occupied Britain during the second world war, most people have probably read this book or heard about it at some stage, it doesn't say much about the invasion itself but there is ongoing fighting in the north and resistance elsewhere but German law prevails with British residents still in their positions especially in the police and a murder investigation sets the ball rolling in a quite intriguing plot involving the SS versus the German army, traitors, resistance, scientists, exhumation of Karl Marx, the king of England, Americans etc........ A more detailed and revealing summary can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-GB but the book is better even than Fatherland by Robert Harris.

Do us a favour and have a read of this bloggers blog http://wwiaviation.blogspot.com/ , a damn good blog with good information and a lot of work goes into it and deserves more readers and followers, maybe not a topic everyone is familiar with but that's what blogging is about.

Good book, well worth a read.

Currently reading this which is supposed to detail actual accounts of the botched invasion of Great Britain, defences put in place etc........

Currently reading this aswell and watching the TV series which is great, I have only quibble which is the amount of nudity (good and bad) in the TV series is not in the book so far!!!!

The Dragon Factory: Jonathan Maberry

This is the follow up book to "Patient Zero" and follows on a couple of months from the first book and involves everybody still left from the previous book.This time the story is built around genetic terrorism and the extinction clock is ready to be turned on,this book is eeven more incredible with its story revolving around, disease, cloning, WW2 nazi experiments and individuals, genetically enhanced soldiers and animals, russian spetnaz and power plays in the white house to name a few but Joe Ledger and the guys from the DMS are around to deal with the threat to the world again..Now this book is great fun to read but in some areas it stretched my areas of belief and at times it annoyed me with the vagueness of it all(mostly with a few characters) but it is still a very good read and if you liked the original you will like this and if you didn't like the original you are definitely not going to like this either but if you have not read either I would recommend them both.They are like modern thrillers written today but with a bit of sci-fi thrown in.

Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry.

Recently finished the sequel to this book"The Dragon Factory" by Jonathan Maberry(will post it tomorrow) and also did a review of his "Zombie CSU" book recently.If you are into zombies at all you have probably read this book already but if not this is a good book about a terrorist plot to introduce a formula into the world that creates flesh eating zombies and the response by Joe Ledger(the hero) and the DMS(department of military sciences).Some of the good/bad guys are a little cliched but it is fast paced,action packed and at the end of the day very entertaining, I have read 3 books by Jonathan now and he is a good author and delivers a good read.
I will review the sequel tomorrow which follows on only a couple of months after the action in this book.

Zombie CSU Book by Jonathan Maberry.

Recently just finished this book by Jonathan Maberry, I have developed an interest in Zombies recently and like any period you want to read up on it, this book though covers not just zombies but how goverment bodies would deal with them from the point of veiw of a crime scene and police, witnesses, forensic teams, coroners, hospitals.....etc and how they respond(procedures) and the science and reality of infection.It covers interviews with real experts in the fields of medicine,science,religion,police and army and what they have to say is informative and very much not the Hollywood version of events, a couple of items stuck with me most.

1.No infection is instantaneous like 28 days later,the body will fight and it would take hours at least for a body to succumb.
2.The police/swat and army response would be far more professional than portrayed in movies and details are given of  the weaponry available to these bodies.A quote from the book.

"Zombies may not feel pain but thay are not indestructible.In the end technology will overcome savagery"

This is really a great book and I found it fascinating not just about zombies but how departments work(especially the science) in a crisis and peoples response to the crisis.It also covers zombie books, movies, comics,art but also the legal argument about killing zombies are they technically dead?(in the book is a quote which sums it up).

"I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six"

Highly recommended.

Zombies: A Hunter's Guide by Osprey Publishing.

Picked this up at SELWG last week and I have been looking forward to its release for a very long time and paid the £10.99 asking price.I have read a lot of books on zombies and watched a lot of movies with zombies in them and the different types of zombies(fast or slow usually) but this book describes a lot of other zombies from necromantic,voodoo and nazi zombies to atomic and viral zombies(there are more described),why some zombies eat flesh and why they do and others that just want to infect.It deals with how to identify the type of zombie you are dealing with and how to dispatch it or them(which with some types described is not easy), and zombie hunters weapons, equipment and tactics.

The book is hugely entertaining with a lot of stuff that will have you hitting the google link on your computer(I know I did) .There are mentions of Gettysburg, the LA Bust Out, Mexican drug battles, Ark of the Covenant and Operation Eklipse,Fight Clubs and numerous others.

The book is 80 pages, a lot of nice artwork and well put together and I have no problem recommending this book even if you only have a slight interest in zombies of any type, it does contradict other things I have read but I like that and this would be perfect for any gamers or to put in your zombie survival kit if the time comes and going by this book it may be sooner than you think.

I hope this brief review helps and that you get this book because  I do not think you will be disappointed

Sniper One

Finished this book a couple of days ago(my toilet book) and I know its been out a while but it was one of the best books I have read in a while and I heartily recommend it as a great read about the conflict in Iraq and the lives of the soldiers in that unit in the thick of combat.Will not bore you with the details but you will not be disappointed if you have any interest in the period.

Will have some pictures up tomorrow of my 28mm Neo Soviet forces.