MAC Attack army

 So, I've finished crafting my 200 points army for MAC Attack:

It's been a pleasure making this. I have the following units in my roster:

Auxiliary ground forces: Four squads of exotrooper infantry and six assault gun battletanks. The tanks are plastic (from food packaging) and beads and tooth picks. The infantry is the same except for the heads which are tiny balls I formed with FIMO air.

Auxiliary air forces: Three attack helicopters and two armored transport helicopters (for getting that infantry to their area of operations. The attack choppers have central bodies made of cardboard, the rest is all plastic from food packaging and some beads for cockpits and rocket pods.

Three class 1 MACs: The ST-7 combat body can be equipped with different weaponry. One is a sniper, one has two plasma pistols and one has jump jets and swords. They are made mostly from plastic packaging and beads and wire.

Three class 2 MACs: The War Stomper in the back is the commander's vehicle of choice. The artillery spider (on the right) offers long range fire support. The Landsword mech is a general purpose combat unit designed to solo through almost any scenario. The spider is mostly plastic packaging and wire and beads, the other two MACs mix in cardboard and there are also some toothpicks involved. Especially proud of the landsword.

My single Class 3 MAC: The Heavy Gatwalker. Can blow away hostile MACs with single shots but only carries limited ammunition. Mostly cardboard and, once again, food packaging and beads.

I plan on doing a league of MAC with some friends and my son. The first games will be 50 points only, so only a fraction of these. But I'm ready now.

Also, for those who wonder what these things look like before painting:

Exploration in weird worlds

 This is a genre. If nobody else has made it into one, I hereby do. I just played some hours of Babbdi. I've had nightmares pretty much exactly like this: Brutalist architecture, hostile to humans within. Deep shadows. You got to find a way out but there may be none. The game populates the place with depressed potatohead-people you can talk to but won't get much out of.

This makes the city look prettier than it is from the inside.

It doesn't look like it but mechanically this is a parcours-game with a bit of metroidvania sprinkled into it. There are well hidden places you can only reach with specific items. Some of them make you feel like you're on the cusp of getting something about the mystery of this place but never quite get there. It's like a book by Jeff Vandermeer. It teases you. It will not reveal its secrets to you.

If you've ever dreamt of exploring brutalist architecture and post-soviet decay, this (free!) game is awesome. The dreary atmosphere has the greyness of the city, its sickly-looking people (even the sewer-rave looks desperate) and the inscrutable world that you can only leave with a train ticket that is no longer being sold. It's all a bit Kafka. I love it.

To prove that this is actually a bit of a niche genre, I will show at least one more game like this soon.

2025 Recap

 What did I watch/read/play? No particular order, as usual. Not a definite list, but whatever comes tom mind because it stuck there over the year. Go time.

TV Shows & Movies

Arcane was good. I re-watched season 1 with my son and then we watched season 2 together. As I've mentioned on this blog, it's a political show but a good one - and the visual style is impeccable (and, appearently, very expensive to make).

Squid Games as a cultural phenomenon has entered the phase where it can't go anywhere without besmirching its legacy. We even watched the reality TV show that Netflix made (in the same sets as the fictional programme?) as a family. My wife remarked that a format like that only works in a place with little to no social security because it heightens the tensions and drama when everyone is all-in. All in all it got me somewhat jaded.

K-Pop Demon Hunters sucked. There, I said it. It's just another Netflix action piece that posits a moral question in the first half and then just forgets about it because fuck it, violence is fun. And only romantic interests deserve an attempt at rescue. Whoever churns out these scripts must have sociopathic tendencies.

Books

It was a good year of reading for me, especially with regards to the output that my book-club had. I can only recommend everyone form a book club with some friends, it's a great thing to do. What really stood out:

Rogue Male may be a staple read for men in the Anglosphere, it's virtually unknown here in Germany. Fucking awesome book though. The hero being a posh Mac Guyver type fighting Nazis and yet being an incredibly decent human being throughout. Loved every page of it.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow was a re-read I dreaded a little because I had previously read it in my early twenties and was afraid I'd dislike it now. That fear was unfounded - it's still one of my favourite books of all time. Main character is amazing and I have a thing for her type of woman I can't fully explain.

The Lord of the Rings is still awesome. Re-read it with my son. You still discover new details and things about it. Tolkien was a man whose heart was in the right place, if you pay attention to the real hero of the story (Samwise, of course).

Video Games

Boy did I have something big in the end of the year. Before that it was the usual mix of my comfort foods: Streets of Rogue, FTL, Into the Breach. Got back into Crossout for a bit, killing Russian bots and being killed by Russian players with premium paid-rigs.

Then I went and installed Blue Prince. It might be the best video game I've ever played. I now understand why our fathers played Myst and this might be a hyper-evolved version of that type of game. It's got the replayability of a roguelike with the emphasis on exactly the aspect of that genre I love: Exploration. It has old-world cozy-wealth environments of the kind I love and mechanical riddles that feel haptical and all sorts of clues that make you feel so clever when you figured them out (especially when there are multiple ways of solving something). And then there is the ever-deepening lore behind it. I'm now in hour 50 of playing it and the end isn't close. If there is one.

Board Games

Played mostly family games with my family. Classics. Goose Game. Ladders. Chess (won our family-internal tournament, to my own surprise).

Crafting

Did a lot of tabletop-crafting this year. Made a rat-ogre-cyborg for One Page Rules. Made mechs and monstrosities for MAC Attack. It's fun and I'm happy to be able to make entire fighting forces from scratch without spending more than a few Euros for FIMO and glue.

Podcasts and Music

I still listen to Role Playing Public Radio and Bad Books for Bad People. I also discovered Librivox as a source of free audiobooks. When it comes to music I heard a lot of Lost Souls and saw Nanowar of Steel live.

The Rest

No Idea what else to review here. The year kind of blasted past me. Here's to 2026, I guess.

MAC Attack

 People who know me know that I like to do hobby stuff on the cheap and that I like to craft things. When my friend Niels gifted me MAC Attack for my birthday, it hit that very sweet spot only a low-mini-count tabletop game made for making your own miniatures can hit. And mechs (MACs) are easier to make than soldiers or even wheeled vehicles (in my opinion). So as my final post for 2025 I shall show to you the force I'm working on:

You're looking at 55 points of horrible alien monsters. As it stands, this is not a legal force to play. There are only two MACs finished (the big creatures) and the game requires at least three. Also, there is currently three formations of auxiliary units (regular army-stuff that isn't a huge MAC) and you can only have as many of these as you have MACs. I will make two or three more MACs in order to make it a 100 points force and then we shall see what it can do.

In the back row to the left you have the Hatchetbug. It's a class 1 MAC that is optimized for jumping at the enemy and attacking with scythes. The phases of the game turn mean that it will often have no chance of actually attacking an enemy as they may move away before the attack phase - but the trick is in the other MAC in the back, the Range Spitter. That one is an artillery unit, supported by younger versions of itself which are auxiliary units which are also artillery. The Hatchetbug will provide target coordinates and these guys will rain hell from afar.

The two beetles in the front right are Carrier Beetles, heavily armored auxiliary units that can transport infantry. That comes in the shape of four squads of Leeches, which have close combat weaponry and hooks. I believe that once these hook onto an enemy MAC, they will deal damage every turn and they could also fight enemy infantry if they get in range.

The other MACs will need to be more focused on the medium range. Maybe some kind of armored slug that sprays fire and armour piercing spines or something keeping with the theme.

Not painted: My first MACs, my growing human force:

Much more mecha-conventional. I will show more of those once they're all made up to look as good as my aliens.

With that I shall be back in January with some yearly reviews.

Have a good or even great new year.

Antifascism in fantasy Media

 No, this isn't about the political situation in the USA because, let's face it, I have other problems. I just finished watching the excellent Arcane with my older son. And besides all the themes on family, love, loyalty and all that jazz I noticed that the second season towards the end pivots into three sides battling for the future of Piltover and mankind (including all those other races shown on screen, I assume) in general. You have the scrappy alliance of Piltover and Zhaun representing freedom (more or less). You have Viktor and his posthumanism. And then you have the fascist menace: Might makes right, strength is all that matters, also our goons wear masks to you don't see them as people but as a highly trained and unified fighting force. Which is probably what they see themselves as, the way they act.

It is a good story, with an immense amount of details and emotional depth. It doesn't hammer its points home. And that is probably what makes it effective. It never mentions fascism. It just shows thing being done. Has characters explain what they do. And you feel it's wrong.

I believe that is where antifascist media that don't come from _the left_ succeed. Of course, in a polarized society, there are those who will call anyone left of them radical and anyone right of them fascists. I'm not talking about online-shouty-people. I'm talking about the silent majority, the actual mid of society.

Coming from a farely left-leaning family I always felt that authors from the very left make for very bad storytellers, at least when and if they try to push an agenda. China Mieville may be the exception to the rule – although he doesn't really push an agenda so I don't know if he counts.

Good antifascism comes from the middle of society. Why? Because that's who you need in order to defeat fascism. You can have your crew of scrappy activists but if you speak that language of discourse, you're already losing the middle. What is good antifascist literature? One that respects what the middle has to loose. Three examples:

Krabat by Ottfried Preußler - a book taking place sometime in the 17th century, long before fascism was even invented. But it was written by that author as a way to deal with his own youth in Nazi-Germany. It's about the temptation of the easy way to power by evil means. And that love can and will conquer hate if given the chance. Excellent YA book.

Harry Potter - Rowling is by now a hated figure among a lot of people and I won't go into that debate here. The Harry Potter series is, however, starkly anti-fascist. The evil wizards always want to rule over those they deem inferior. You have bureaucrats who will gleefully support their cause once they gain power. It's these people who made fascism in Germany possible. Umbridge is the small public servant who uses a new system for evil and is probably more despicable than Voldemort ever was.

Lord of the Rings - while a lot of nerds kind of misread the text (yeah, the author has some racist ideas. Doesn't mean he was one of your kind), this epic has exactly three important messages to tell: Fascism is bad. Environmental destruction is bad. Friendship is the best damn thing we have to face horrible circumstances that fate and the times we live in may drop us in.

I would put Arcane in that list. Yeah you can go all-realistic, show the horrors of, say, Nazi-Germany. But that makes it very concrete and easy to mentally avoid. "That's Germany. In the 1930s. Not my place and time." If it's about teaching values that go beyond specific locales, I think fairytales and fantasy stories may be the better choice. And don't hammer the point home. Subtext is, after all, not just for cowards.

NordCon 2025

 So, I went, this time with my books and my standup banner and all that jazz. Took my place in a row of actual authors and really enjoyed these two days. My kids went about, playing table top strategy games against whoever and I told people about my book series and sold all ten collections of stories I had brought. Could probably have sold twice that but I hadn't had a clue how much would have been realistic and also I was above budget for this whole thing anyways. So I can say that it went great.

It's interesting to see how other authors do things. All of us had "real" jobs. Conventions are the place to sell books. Online is dead unless you really like playing the social media game. Community was really nice. Christian Günther borrowed me a table cloth right when I showed up and without it, my table would have looked like crap. Laurence Horn (and his son) and Finja Stoldt (with her brother) were my direct neighbours – and rather nice as such. I was in good company. Even did a little reading session in a literature jam. Five minutes is a really tight timeframe and I was somewhat nervous and a little too fast but I think people liked what they heard.

I'll be hitting more conventions like this in the future. Let's at least make this hobby pay for itself.

Once more at NordCon

 So, this year I'm in an exhibiting role at NordCon again. I've ran BrikWars-battles in the past. I've presented my board game. This time it's a bit more serious: I'll be promoting my series of pulp novelettes. And, yesterday, I was asked to be on stage for the literature jam in the evening as well. Which is today.

It would be an understatement to say that I'm a bit nervous. I originally didn't intend to publish Jon Danger. Then I had an interstitial phase where I expected to do so unter a pseudonym. You know because of how much of yourself you lay bare when writing. And the sex stuff. Oh well. Too late for that and the German law makes it hard to legally self-publish under what isn't your own name. At least the website has to have my actual name (and adress) on it, after all.

Wish me luck, whoever you are reading this. I've never read anything of my own stuff on an actual stage. I shall talk about it all in a later post (and also about what my kids were up to at the convention).