WRG Illustration Index

Introduction

One of my best wargaming "investments" was a collection of hardback reference books released by the Wargames Research Group (WRG) in the early 1980s: the famous "Armies & Enemies" series.

In the intervening decades they have been used again and again; not least because so many 15 mm figure manufacturers use them as sculpting guides. I'm glad I bought the hard back editions as they have stood the test of time with few signs of wear and tear.

Birth of a project

The books' greatest strength is the sheer volume of illustrations. The books' greatest weakness is the sheer volume of illustrations. Thus a project was born.

My Fifth Bisley!

Today I collected & refurbished a 15 drawer Bisley cabinet. I have four already. They house my 15 mm wargames figures. Here are the main three:

The 10 & 15 drawer cabinets are ideal for everything except certain pike models and elephants hence the six-drawer cabinet on the left. They are very space efficient.

They currently hold a collection that has taken decades to acquire and I still have three empty drawers and one just started. I am not going to need another for years. Which is precisely why I bought another!

Social Media Posts From The Archive

Background

Whilst checking my Bluesky feed I noticed someone posting links to, and images from, their blog. Not new posts, but posts from years ago. It struck me this was good use of a blog archive. However, I didn't want to do this manually: even daily posts would soon pall.

In January I removed over one hundred low‑value posts, improved the underlying HTML code, and brought the layout of all the remaining posts up to my current standard. Today there are 464 posts on this blog, which is more than enough for a lengthy series of recycled posts. I just needed a suitable script I could automate.

Thanks to the perplexity.ai, I now have working python scripts, for both bluesky and the fediverse, that produce posts like this:

Read on if you are running Linux (Xubuntu 24.04) and you'd like to try them (at your own risk of course).