A day trip for some reference photos

Parola Armour museum

During the summer half of 2023 the Parola tank museum had a special showpiece, a King Tiger that was on loan from the Bovington's museum. I tried to ask a couple of friends in separate cases if any of them were interested in a silly trip but no one had a matching schedule with mine. So I took this day trip all by myself, especially the Project Assistants I nor II, not to mention my partner, were interested in admiring blocks of steel in engine oil -smelling halls.

On an evilly early Saturday morning in August I drove north to Parola and the parking lot was jam-packed already thirty minutes after the opening of the museum. Following that the first hall that was the King Tiger's temporary home was also pretty damn busy. I had dragged our DSLR camera with me, so I took only a few photos with either of my cell phones, because the big one was much better for references?

What happened with my numerous photos was that I moved them on my desktop, but delayed with my actual backups a bit too long and an OS update wiped my data drive along with the OS-dedicated drive. My recovery attempts were futile and I was a bit annoyed with myself and the OS provider. These tank photos were the only ones I hadn't paranoidly copied to many different disks in many places.

Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. B

The rare display piece was the Henschel's second prototype hull, Versuchs-Fahrgestell No. V2, with the older turret. The tank itself had few extra pieces on it, such as side skirts, mud flaps, tools, or most of the exhaust pipe pieces either. Seeing a Königstiger with my own foul eyes was awe-inspiring and it was extra amusing as the tank was positioned just about next to a tiny Vickers-Armstrong -made tankette that was pretty much the size of a wheel barrow.

The only photo of mine that remained of the biggest of kitties:

ô_õ

More important than photos was that I did get to ogle at the tank myself, at weird angles and just be generally baffled by the immense size of the tank. Just the drive sprockets were about the size of my torso and most likely somewhat heavier as well. It was impressive, if I had to choose one word. Now I just needed to find myself next to a live Tiger, and a Panther would be a cool bonus.

T-34/76 "Sotka", Ps 231-1

I was taking these T-34 photos for reference at a pretty fortunate time, as I hadn't started with the mine roller tank yet, but I knew I was going to take it up soon after. I was most excited to check the wear and tear on the tracks and what looked worn-out in which place.

StuG III Ausf. G, Ps 531-45

More than the many Soviet tanks in the museum I knew I was going to need (and want) more random, weird details on the German tanks. Looking at the effects of the road wheels and such was always useful, to begin with. Had I gotten very deep in this stuff, I might have tried to recognize the type of the tracks on this one, but I didn't know enough to say a thing.

In case I ever was going to make another tank with a modeled interior, and especially a StuG, it was a good idea to link to Andreas Lärka's collection here: http://www.andreaslarka.net/ps531045/ps531045.html

One of the most useful details here was the jack's wooden block and go me for taking a photo of it with the phone as well. I recognized being completely wrong with these pieces on models and had painted them so very wrong for years. These days I knew better.

57 ITPSV SU 57-2, Ps 461-nn

This turreted Sergei (the Finnish name for ZU-23-2, the twin-barreled 23mm AA cannon) on a tank chassis mostly offered me some more fun details of the life-lived tracks, the tow cable loops for upcoming chipping sessions, and the general forest-provided debris on different parts of the tank.

Panzer IV Ausf. J, Ps 221-nn

Of the J-model Panzer IV I didn't take many quick photos of, as it was such a rusty individual that I didn't see myself copying all that myself. For the upcoming projects I was most interested in its muzzle brake.

Some Soviet tracks

These photos I took only because these tracks showed so nicely how the contact surfaces of the tracks reflected light and how the bare metal showed at different angles. I think I spent a good fifteen, twenty minutes with the proper camera and my phone, most likely looking a bit silly, trying to capture the effect I saw so plainly with my own two eyes.

All in all the photos from my trip could've been much worse, these quick "easier to check from the phone than from the computer" shots saved a bit at least. The drive overwrite happened months ago now and I was still heavily annoyed by it.

A steaming deckful of systemic shocking

Steam Deck 256 GB

This Spring's Steam Sale had the Steam Deck's different versions slightly discounted. I asked my old friend, who had bought a Deck sometime earlier, what he thought of it and how had it worked for him. It was pretty clear at this point that I was going to order one, maybe I was just confirming my decision somehow.

Device

The postal services delivered my order pretty quickly (or I was so busy I didn't even notice the time between ordering and receiving) right in the early April. I was delighted with the transport case that relieved me of the awful "where the hell could this be stored safely?" process.

As a physical device it was a bit larger and heavier than a Nintendo Switch. The photos here didn't show that there were two pairs of formula 1 gearshift -triggers in addition to the normal double R/L corner triggers, just like in Steam Controller (I liked it as a controller, I just haven't played many games that were nicer with SC instead of keyboard+mouse combo).

Testing

During these couple of months I haven't used that much time with the new toy, but I've played a bit. I think I completed episodes 2-4 of Secret Agent HD on the deck while I only completed the first one on the desktop. In Noita aiming the magic wand with the thumb controller was a bit odd but despite that I did get halfway reliably to the Snowy Depths. Or as reliably as with the desktop...

My aforementioned desktop was at least 8 years old at this point, and only recently I had ended up in this situation where it didn't run the newer games that I was actually interested in playing. I guess there were a million things that it wasn't good enough for anymore, hadn't been in years, but none of that had crossed my table. Now I could ogle at the modern games if they behaved well with this sort of a console controller or not. The touchscreen, what little I tinkered with it, worked just nicely. I also hadn't yet taken the time to reboot to the GNU/Linux side of things and start fooling around. No rush.

System Shock remake

The early June email flow woke me up to the fact that the Kickstarter project I just backed in summer 2016, System Shock remake, had its final product released to the wild. Interestingly the project team's original and mildly optimistic release goal was 2017, which has obviously caused some keyboard-smashing rages in the well-known type of internauts. I was just content with the thing being done and that I could try out the game I paid 30 USD for. As anyone reading my nonsense here may have noticed, I hadn't been able to run out of things to do over the years.

I almost forgot that this KS project also included System Shock: Enhanced Edition that I found in my Steam library some years ago and that I hobbled through to compensate for the fact that I didn't get a grasp of the game in 1994, 1995 despite spending my allowance on the SVGA cd-rom version and all. Maybe it was too different from Doom for my liking at that point in life? I couldn't remember such details anymore. Another pretty likely explanation was that the family computer, a 486/SX66/4 (later /8 and even /16) just didn't run the shocker well enough.

No matter, I practically didn't play the original System Shock at all and the Enhanced Edition on the slightly more modern hardware mostly gave me a headache. The places I could somehow remember and recognize and the story was known, but I didn't think that was going to be a problem for my experience. Most likely my old colleague Matti – who I suspected having memorized each of the pixels – might have been even more excited than myself.

 

So far I've been adventuring in the bottommost levels of the Citadel Station over the evenings of a couple of weeks. I've gotten beaten up or otherwise seriously injured often enough to make me limp back to the Medical Suite to cheese the autodoc and the recharging station. Despite my cautious approach I've managed to murder everyone from almost two and half floors now, having proceeded from the Medical level to the Research and Reactor levels. Some of the irradiated corridors I've avoided like the plague because just opening the door has made the hacker gag his guts out and the radiation damage has taken ages to fade away. Maybe I didn't need to be that paranoid, as getting the Isotope from the pretty hot room in Research wasn't that hurtful (I went in with full health and ran back to the autodoc straight after, of course).

The poor folks turned into cyborgs have been awful and they've lost heads and/or limbs in fights, just like in the good old Soldier of Fortune. Whenever I have managed to take it easy, the normal and few elite cyborgs have been pretty chatty so they've rarely been able to take me by surprise.

A few of the commenters I've seen have said that "this is how it looked in your memories" which wasn't quite correct as my memories came pretty freshly from SS:EE instead of polished by almost 30 years. It was very descriptive, I just found places much more recognizeable now, it was easier to get lost in the original.

Another work queue update

A surprise souvenir

To protect the innocent I've left out some details from this description 😅

A few weeks ago a colleague of mine encountered a model that caught their attention, and thought that I'd been pretty excited and talkative about tank models. Confusingly they brought a model kit and a matching set of paints as a souvenir.

I've always found the various mine-clearing addons on tanks pretty unusual-looking, so I was pretty curious to see how this one would turn out. Funny thing: I noticed that I had started thinking of how to paint and weather the mine rollers the best way, while looking at the box art.

First I needed to get the Jagdpanzer IV finished first, then do something quick for variety, before taking on this Soviet tank. I was told that these Zvezda paints were also water-soluble, so I could airbrush them on the model.

Miniproject III/20

A bicycle

I'd been pondering over the Spring, if it made any sense to buy the season ticket to the HSL city bikes this summer, as the need and especially my ability to use them were going to be many months worth of partial work commuting fewer. As a quick recap, last April-October I drove the city bikes to the nearest metro station and back, whenever there were any bikes available. Hadn't the nearest bike station to my home been always completely empty between eight in the morning and eight in the evening, I could've used those for random shopping trips and whatnot. But there rarely were bikes in any of the nearest six stations.

As a total Sunday cyclist and as someone who jumped on a bike for the first time in about fifteen years last April I didn't really need any kind of a Sci-Fi thing or any other high-end junk. I ordered a normal bike, which were nowadays called city bikes.

This sizeable box got dropped behind the door on a Wednesday afternoon and stood waiting at the entrance until Sunday mid-morning, when I finally had time to even think about the damn thing. Luckily the weather had sucked and I was, as said before, very busy with everything else, so this didn't get to bug me.

Before starting anything I leafed through the pdf manual so I'd have a clue what tools I should prepare to assemble my newest acquisition. Obviously this was no Ikea shelf, so there was no handy list of tools, but I boldly assumed that I'd need allen keys, wrenches and an assortment of screwdriver bits.

Working

Judging by the look of it and using some (hopefully) common sense it seemed that tools were not going to become an issue, which had been maybe my most noticeable worry. Assembling this was very straightforward and I could not really stretch that out to cover even a paragraph: attach the front wheel; attach the steering bar; attach the pedals and then drop in the seat; tighten up and call it a day.

A completed vehicle

This took about an hour of time. The only headscratcher was the filling of the tires, as I now learned that there were at least different valve types and this, obviously, wasn't the thing I considered normal. Luckily I had bought a multifunctional pump a few years ago that had outputs for at least two of these valve types, including this one they also used in car wheels (Schrader). Thanks to this I avoided walking my bike to the nearest fuel station to get started.

My brand new bicycle (or myself) wasn't up to the latest legistlation, as either of us needed front and rear lights if driving in anything but the bright daylight. While waiting for the Autumn I would have to invest to some sort of lights.

Hm, so what next?

Queue status, Q1/'20

Right. It was, according to the calendar, the first day of 2020, the workbench was empty, the 'mumblings TODO pile was a mess and the maker on vacation somewhere else. Last year's project saldo was an appalling two finished models from start to finish and some other badly documented themes.

I was thinking very hard what I wanted to do next, when I got back to the table. My two last models had been fliers, so a ground-based model would be good for my mind. Also the stencils I bought a bit over three years ago were still screaming for their first utilization. The stash had at least three Panzers, especially the Königstiger w/ interior was really, really interesting.

Of course there was the Atomic Annie with her movers, the sheer amusement factor of it was really cool. My main issue was that the Revell's matchbox-sized Tiger with infantry -kit was the only one that didn't look like a long project. Right now I felt like something quick and with a potentially funny, even playful paintjob.

Adam Savage - Every Tool's a Hammer

I've always been a reader. Well, obviously not always, but for the last 23+ years at least, with a bit of seasonal fluctuation. My readings and thoughts about the books I've read I've kept in Goodreads, as I haven't felt that Project Mumblings was a natural home for that sort of stuff.

But. As anyone who's ever studied German, the language of love itself, knew well, there were always exceptions and even the exceptions had their own exceptions. Now it was time to throw a new ProjectSubjectException("There's a hammer hiding inside any tool") and log that event on the info level.

Life's what you make of it

For a good bunch of years I've maintained a habit of reading on the way to work/home. This book I attacked on a late May morning with the assumption of reading something that was 100% concentrated on the Making that Adam has been well-known for.

I hadn't gotten further than halfway through the introduction when the urge to jump out on the next station and take the first metro back home so I could continue working on the Lambda-class shuttle was almost unbearably strong. Spoiler: I went to work like a good boy.

The intro already had many very quotable and relatable phrases, one of which struck home immediately and that has been tried and true, proved for example this silly blog right here. "Give a maker the chance to tell you about the thing they're putting their time into, and good luck getting them to stop!"

Also a lot later Adam was talking for a chapterful about sharing, that on my own part was pretty well aligned via the 'Mumblings, even though my ramblings could always be heavily improved on. But the thought counts, right?

The second very essential line in the intro was related to some dude who meekly had said that he wasn't a maker for "nah, I just write code, man" - because programming is Making. Just a very different kind of Making, but still.

Not an autobio

For some reason I had read that the general, initial idea was that this was some sort of an autobiography. I was and still am in disagreement: it was about Making, developing and growing was an essential part of the learning process, so naturally there were scattered examples of "this sort of stupidities I did when I was young" and a long story on "this is how my own workshop has evolved over the course of decades".

I wasn't surely the only one who's seen and heard in their mind mr Savage excitedly explaining, waving hands and showing his doings while reading the book. His general attitude and clear passion to all this shined clearly through the book. Funnily enough many things I've somehow implemented myself has apparently been done similarly by many other folks. Maybe that just proved that all my good ideas had all been invented before.

About the content

Lists

At home we've been always doing todo- and other lists for just about everything, because they've worked well and they do minimize the forgetting something essential in a rush. A good deal of the lists have also been nested lists, because that's natural, I think: few work queues end up being one-dimentional lists, but typically have one more layer for clarity.

The 'Mumblings lists have not ended shared in the blog, for example, but have been opened up as text instead, and rarely more than to describe the next step or two. I also haven't written them anywhere to be shared, because my lists would typically be just slightly modified versions of the basic template.

Checkboxes

These were a neat improvement to the lists that I hadn't thought of, for the fun of it I took these into use at work and over the last six months I've liked the approach. In the book Savage tells the checkbox process he learned from a colleague at ILM:

[_] If the task wasn't started or it hadn't progerssed noticeably, the box was left empty
[/_] When the task was about halfway done or so, the box was filled diagonally halfway
[_] When the task was finished, the box was filled up

The same of course could be applied to nested lists. What was the most fantastic thing in this approach was that one could tell with a quick glace what was the state of everything. In a typical "strike through the done things" approach it could be very difficult to read later what had actually been accomplished earlier.

More coolant

Patience has not been a huge issue in my projects, because something like a 24-hour wait has not bothered me - usually. Of course sometimes I've just wanted to get something finished in order to move on and that has made me get sloppy, with a pretty predictable set of results: fixing up my stupidities has eaten more time than what calmness would've originally cost.

While reading I noticed that Adam's been much worse (not to mention immensely more experienced and active) than me in this sense, but still: some of his comments woke up some "ooops..." recollections from my older doings.

Deadlines

This chapter had been a big issue for me, especially in the hobby mindset. Because I've always been working on these just for my own amusement and entertainment, there has simply never been any real schedule pressure. With the Lambda-class shuttle I had been near-delirious about getting it "done this month" a few times but every single time the real life had  had other plans and the model was always the one to end up waiting.

Then again, what was the hurry if I was building for myself only? It'd been very different had I ever done something for someone else or a specific event. There was practically zero risk of the first ever happening and the latter I had done twice.

Drawing

Explaining or clarifying something by the way of drawing has been something I've tried to do at work (as well) with varying degrees of success. I mean, I couldn't draw to save my life, but luckily I've been long working on a field where abstract descriptions and "that box has an arrow going to that cloud and..." has been the way to document things, so my lack of drawing ability has not been a hindrance. But whoo-boy, if I ever tried to actually draw a part of a model or a part of one I've been working on to someone...

Increasing tolerances

This chapter started by a  declaration of how whenever you tinker around you'll make constant mistakes. True. I guess this was one of the reasons I've preferred earthbound vehicles over flying ones, for (at least in my opinion) the fliers require a much higher degree of perfection than the mudslingers. Over time I've learned to accept to both accept and even enjoy the imperfections in the end results - as long as it made sense in the universe of the object, of course. I would not have accepted just anything vomited together rapidly.

Sharing

One very supportable chapter in Adam's book and in his vids for example has been "share what you know and/or come up with". At least I've learned a bunch of handy tricks and whatnot jsut by listening to the One Day Builds series with half an ear or with the full sensor array of mine. In some twisted way I've implemented this sharing theme with this bloglike thing, but in all honesty without a grand plan or benevolent idea.

Sweep up after yourself every day

Perhaps luckily I've had to follow this guideline for years, for practical reasons, as I haven't had a dedicated space to leave everything lying around. So after each assembling or painting session I've set my doings into one place and cleaned up the mess I've made. Always I haven't put things out of the way completely, but into one stack to facilitate rapid relocating when needed.

The point of this was that if and when you had cleaned up after the working session you'd begin the next time from where you wanted to or felt like, instead of being forced by your past self to clean up first.

Feelings

This exceptional post to the Project Mumblings was to be finished with a quote from the book. Again, that one was a fitting one.

"I have a prediction: you are going to mess up a lot. I mean A LOT. [...] There will be moments when, if you are not losing interest in a project, you are losing your mind about it. It will be confusing, dispiriting, and infuriating.

About this prediction, I have three words for you: WELCOME TO MAKING!"