TITM is for Toys in the Media - Preiserlike Persons

I've been saving these up for a while now, and had so many they'll need breaking down into separate posts, and this one deals with the popular trope of using model railway figures to help sell us stuff. We've seen plenty of artists using these figures to great effect, but here it's all about promoting other things, although some are simply illustrating articles with a view to gabbing our attention with an eye-catching image.

IFLScience (formerly 'I fucking Love Science' . . . the conformist cowards!) start us with their group of people hanging around illustrating the header for a hot-linked article on Faceplant about a psychological disorder involving seeing little people who aren't there.

Me? I see idiots, everywhere, selfish, stupid, climate-change denying, nationalistic idiots but I don't believe I'm imagining them as part of a delusional condition, I just see selfish, stupid, climate-change denying, nationalistic idiots everywhere!

IFLScience is behind the upper image here too, while The Conversation also carried it, so not only is it clearly a stock image, it's one of the ones which comes-up first in search results for such things! Neither credits the agency/library, so I don't know who's behind it.

Both stories deal with ageing AND the negative benefits of doing so, one more generally, the other specific to those who have had a severe dose of Covid-18 (SARS-Cov2), or who are suffering from Long-Covid.

A British policeman surveys a keyboard, I imagine a story about computer crime or on-line fraud? I didn't take a note on this one and there not much of a clue in the title, also; the figure seems to have a squared-off base, so not sure of the origin of this one, but about 1:72nd scale?

The uniform is somewhat archaic now, officers on the beat haven't dressed like this since the 1980's, but I believe it remains their academy/parade/disciplinary appointment uniform, and is the one still popularised in tourist trinkets and post-cards, while some strategically placed officers in tourist hot-spots may dress like this to feed the need of the tourists to see a 'British Bobby' on the beat!

Very skinny looking, I think the image has been pulled on the North/South axis? The note with this one (which we may have seen before in a past 'News, Views Etc'?) says "Organisational Structures and Resourcing Hero Image" which I'm sure has you riveted to the point of searching for what must be a world-changing article! I'll move swiftly on . . . (whispers . . . I must have read it to have found it!)

Another common trope with these (we have seen several here in the past) is money and/or financial articles, some have the figures, some have small change, the ones we're most interested in have both!

Upper shot seems to be showing Euros and Euro-cents and was from an article entitled "As part of the Unequal Democracies project", the lower image has pounds and pence Stirling, and is an Ian Johnston shot for Shutterstock, used here for research purposes

This was an article on weight-loss drugs, I don't tend to read such money-grubbing/emotional garbage, so it must have been an add' in my feed? The purple ones might be the Wonka Works Blueberry Pie meal-in-a-pill-deal!

This one's a bit sad! I think he may be Merit, although Preiser did do some chunky sculpts in the 1970's, all those track-gang and construction worker sets were heavier sculpting? Anyway, I suspect one of the artists who set these out in the environment (we've seen a few here already and there's more to come) didn't look after his and it got painted over. Indeed the paint may be partly the cause of the heaviness?

Because a freshly painted wall is to graffiti artists what a fresh dog-shit is to flies, it's since attracted a half-dozen or so re-paintings (original caption says seven layers), in a  rather bland pink (inner-city pub?) and will soon be no more than a blob or pimple on the wall!