About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Saturday, June 3, 2017

K is for Kickabout

From yesterdays sublime to today's frankly faintly ridiculous, but they all have a place in the small scale world!



First seen in the spring, the new in-house branding of Funworkz or Fun Workz as it is here has now featured three times in these pages I think? Aimed at kids it's really an executive 'desk toy' and as such; just the sort of thing we can give ourselves permission to buy - especially at a quid a pop! Mr Trump seems determined to end the world early, so enjoy what you can while you can . . .

. . . with a little kickabout on the desk or coffee table! The four traffic cones supplied with the set allow for a penalty shoot-out with a mate, offspring or partner, while a bit of chicanery is the solo opption. A bit of practice might allow for keepie-uppie using the player as a bat?

Having only recently qualified in CAD myself, I can tell you that this is all the money in the bag as far as development costs go, and it's a beautiful solution to the problem posed; wanting the black hexagons and white pentagons to be made out of the different two colours rather than painted on or hinted-at in the moulding (like old gum-ball or Subbuteo balls), it's basically an 'Iwako eraser' married to a jig-toy/puzzle!

While complicated to CAD-up, it's a simple exercise in geometry, but it would take a day or two (like that bloody Dalek's head!) to get right as you have to build it out of polygonal-cones, then work out which ones will be white, which black, the subtract or union the two groups into the main five final-sections, then deal with the unseen interior, cutting-up and awarding that space to the different sections and then work out how to hold them all together with the two plugs - I would have loved to watch this going through its development!

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