A Dream and a Review

I might be spending too much time ogling toy soldiers on the Internet lately, because I dreamed about buying figures last night.  Or rather, I dreamed I was agonizing over which figures to buy while taking advantage of a sale (that isn't actually happening) at Brigade Games.  Is that just the saddest thing ever? That even in my dreams I sit there being indecisive and arguing with myself over whether the French Foreign Legion or the Seleucids will be more fun to paint and/or see more action at the table?

Actually, I think the reason I had this dream is because the yarn shop Gina (my loving and supportive better half) frequents also has an online presence, and is doing a "12 days of Christmas" sale right now and she's torturing herself trawling the deals and trying to decide (as money is tight right now, and she can't just buy 40 lbs of Crazy Zauberball sock yarn) which has the greatest value to her - what I was doing in my dream (the sale was 50% off all infantry figures site-wide) was exactly what she's doing right now as she sits across from me.

In other news...

I finished reading Harry Pearson's Achtung Schweinehund!: A Boy's Own Story of Imaginary Combat, which is something of a memoir of wargaming.  I'd read a review of the book at 28mm Victorian Warfare in which Mr. Awdry spoke very highly of it.  While I enjoyed the book, I think there's an age and continental gap; much of the book was really enjoyable, but there were quite a few points where I found myself rolling my eyes at Pearson's almost-calculated curmudgeonly attitude.  His tirades against fantasy gaming and the smugness that came across in his explanation of how he came to collect only 20mm Napoleonics sculpted before 1968 kind of felt like he was affecting an attitude to try and maintain a sense of superiority.  Of course, I don't know the guy personally and I'd probably really enjoy gaming with him as long as I didn't try to put any orcs on the table.  And again, I think there's an age gap; he was born in 1961 and I was born in 1987; my introduction to wargaming miniatures came via the same fantasy figures he so vigorously decries.  I'm actually planning to pass the book along to my father; while he's not a wargamer, he was a military modeler from around the age of 8 until his late 30s when deteriorating eyesight made it harder for him to assemble kits - and a 1/32nd scale E-100 tank frustrated him so thoroughly by having each link of the tracks a separate piece that he finally stopped.  I think he'll find the book amazing and appreciate a lot of what Pearson has to say as well; given that dad was born in 1959 they're basically the same generation just on opposite sides of the Atlantic.