It is almost a year since I began this website and the year has seen profound changes as well as tiny ones. Time is about change. Time adds or takes away but nothing remains untouched.

That is part of the magic of collecting. If we can hold onto the things, collections increase, skills develop, knowledge expands. What do we want? After 5 years, we will have more, after 10, more still.

So that is how miniature wargaming works. No matter what you do, time is the necessary expenditure. You must spend time to create the materials you need and then wargaming becomes a rough approximation of what happens across time.

I started this website with no clear conception of what would go in it but time has shown it to increase. If I do not renew my site, it will cease to exist. Time allows creation and destruction. There are millions of new people in the world. One of them is my daughter. And the old man is older still.

Do collections give one the feeling of clinging to time? Do they provide a sense of growth? I can revisit and revise the information I have presented to date. What does the future hold? After so many years, where would we like to be? What would we want to accompany us?

Baby time is over and it is back to work. My wife saw a small box of Charles Stadden figures in the bathroom and asked me when I would stop buying figures. I suppose the real answer would be when I lose my memory of what has made my life a pleasure. I think we wait for big pleasures that often elude us and ignore the small ones that seem not to matter. Toy soldiers are not a talent like playing the piano or trading successfully on the stock market or like having a beautiful spouse or a large home or climbing the Matterhorn. My value in the eyes of others does not increase because I have a collection of Charles Stadden figures or Archive miniatures.

But I enjoy seeing them and though they are certainly not the only pleasure in my life, they are one that has never disappointed as my demands on them were so limited to begin with. So, no, I will not be giving up toy soldiers any time soon. I have given things up or lost them through the indifference of others over the years. The soldiers are staying.

More to the point, I fly back to work on Sunday. I wonder if anything I own in that small apartment is still there. If so, I will have much more to add to these pages. But I will be back at work.

More and more stuff is coming out of boxes. And the pieces that have still not been found have taken on an aura of mystery. Where is the Archive Miniatures lower orcan and goblin army. Where are the odd Heritage orcs? Where are the remaining Napoleonette cavalry pieces? And what happened to the Dragontooth miniatures?

When I was younger, just out of college and still living at home, my father had an odd habit of taking things of mine and keeping them as his own. It was not until after his death that I discovered such oddities as an issue of Amazing Spiderman no. 33, a melodic banjo instruction book, and an old issue of Warren Publications’ Creepy magazine in his room as well as several other items. I was able to get back most of these but not all before my mother gave away all my father’s things to some religious cultists living down the street. I suspect some of the miniatures disappeared this way.

I once checked and found that I had changed location about once every two years since the day I was born. Under those circumstances, life ends up in cardboard boxes roughly stacked somewhere waiting for the day when all the hidden treasures are revealed. Which is to say that there is a long way to go before my project started with this website reaches any level of completion of even its first stage. Where for example are the original Tony Bath ancient rules? At this point, I would be happy to consolidate all this stuff in one place but even that seems difficult. Still, I remain on the case.

MPC space men, the so-called ringhand figures. That is as far back as I can recall. These figures seemed to be everywhere for years molded in different colored plastic with different accessories to cover everything from the American Civil War to missions into space.

Toys were violent at that time. Most small boys not addicted to sports could be counted on to wield a small arsenal of toy weaponry. My most benign piece was a hunting rifle with scope made of plastic which my parents purchased for me when I was 4. All these weapons and soldiers and competitive games led me to believe that aggressive leadership amongst toddlers was the way to go but as a gawky, thin child with glasses, I just came off as annoying and finally a bit marginalized.

Of course, at that point, toy soldiers are just the ticket for solidifying one’s fantasy worlds complete with maps and histories and then carrying those worlds on into adulthood.

But in the beginning, there were MPC ringhand spacemen. When we moved to a new house when I was 5, I recall setting them up on patrol among the labyrinth of packed boxes. Where the spacemen went is not hard to guess. My father thought of toys the way one things of old lottery tickets and was quick to discard them. He taught me a lesson I still have not fully learned. But that was a beginning.

Happy New Year!

The website has been active now for several months selling nothing, promoting nothing, getting few visitors, and otherwise settling into a distant backwater of the Internet. Which is all well and good. An original expectation was that I would work on the design of a larger corporate website, something that did not materialize. Instead, I have had a lower level of input into a less noticeable site with limited rights and permissions. And this is where the Little Men came to the rescue.

I have been able to mimic much of the activity on the larger website including the use of mechanisms I would not normally have access to because on this website, I can do whatever I want. Sadly (or not), the content has been more limited than I had hoped. It is not so much a question of material as time. There is so blessed little of it. Even now, I spend much of the week traveling by plane or car and getting very little done. Even so, having this website available has been great at every level.

Of course, there is still more to come, perhaps as inconsequential as what has already been served up. This was meant to be a learning experience and it has been one. It was meant as an exploration and the exploration continues. I can find dozens of websites covering the same ground better presented and better informed. But this is where I learn and so far, it has been great.

The Houston Quilt Festival just passed. It is an enormous festival dedicated to quilts and quilt making. It fills an monstrous convention center in the heart of downtown Houston. I visited in 2009 and the crowds were overwhelming. I have never been to a gathering of hobbyists as large.

Miniatures wargaming will never achieve that level of support and acceptance. HMGS conventions may seem big but they do not come close to the quilt festival. My own sense is that quilting affords a level of respectability and relevancy that miniature soldiers lack. A finely made quilt is a work of art or at the least a display of quality craftsmanship. It affords its users a facility for expression whether it be through abstractions or sad eyed cats. Quilting is a form of communication.

Miniatures wargaming is a rather bizarre form of conflict clinging to the most violent forms of physical interaction while summarily distancing itself as much as possible. Supposedly, there was a club that once tried to simulate war by smashing any figure that became a casualty. The experiment ended quickly. Violence, real violence has no place in wargaming. Miniatures wargaming is about play. One can admire the brightly painted armies, the historical accuracy, the flights of pure fantasy or simply the madness of being in a room with thousands of toys. But violence is viewed from a very safe distance and the casualties swept up from the table are lovingly packed back in their boxes to await the next conflict.

There is one odd thing about the quilt festival. Almost all the people visiting were women. By contrast, if one strips away the RPGs, wargame conventions are mostly visited by men. Perhaps this is a holdover of sexual stereotypes imposed by a culture that places too much stock in them. Hard to say. I cannot recall a time when I was not attracted to toy soldiers but even now could not sit through a football game. I do not feel myself bound by any cultural constraints on my behavior. It is also unlikely that I will start a quilt anytime soon.

It is peculiar that even for a misanthrope like myself, wargaming does pull me out of my hovel into the daylight. When I have been able, I have routinely attended conventions, darting between booths, picking up whatever I could find for miniatures gaming. Once, out of desperation I attended a toy soldier convention and ended up with a fine group of Thoroughbred Miniatures ACW ships.

Which is to say that gaming is ultimately a social experience. Sadly, this has too often involved board games since relatively few people collect miniatures but ultimately, I end up at a convention somewhere. Even so, I have fond memories of playing board games as when an over enthusiastic player in a 3-player game got into some strange death match with another player and left me virtually the only player on the board by game turn 3. Easy win.

At the moment, I live on the edge of nowhere so everything has changed but I look forward to a return to HMGS or any other convention. In the meantime, I continue to paint and paint and paint.