#'Which game?'

[judgeanon]

Plastic Skies - Prologue

Figured I should try to give this old place some new material, and since a friend suggested I start a journal of my latest obsessionhobby, what better place than tumblr? So here’s a needlessly long and overly indulgent history of how I got into model aircrafts, with a record of each project, their individual challenges and the tools I learned to use to overcome them.

Or at least, the prologue to that:

The year is 199X, and I say that not out of privacy but because I can’t remember the exact year I built my first model. My brother and I had gotten into war toys at a young age, ably aided and abetted by our ex-military dad, who made sure we were always well-stocked on little plastic soldiers and tanks and ships and, of course, planes. Our budding fascination with that last one received a big boost thanks to PC games like Jane’s US Navy Fighters ‘97 and F22 Raptor (the Novalogic one), with their digitized English voices we barely understood and their amazing two-dimensional trees dotting the barely textured landscapes. And at some point, model kits entered the scene.

My memory’s pretty hazy on how exactly that happened. It’s possible that we just saw a couple of boxes sitting at the toy aisle next to GI Joe Extreme and Spider-Man TAS toys, and dad or mom indulged us. Another alternative is this models catalogue we ran into at our dad’s one time, a thick full-color volume absolutely brimming with cars and tanks and, yes, planes of every year, model and size. I remember that catalogue fondly. My brother and I divided it up in our imaginations, each one picking and choosing which models were theirs, even if we never actually held them in our hands. Good times, but again, hard to say if that was the catalyst.

What I do remember are the models themselves. My brother built a Saab Draken, an F-16, a big fat F-15 and a few others. I remember building a Concorde, an F-18 (one of those glueless snap-tite models), a Spitfire and a P-51 Mustang. I think there may have been an F-4 Phantom in there as well. Point is, we were fiending. Our fingers glued together so many times, it’s a small miracle that I still have fingerprints. But there was a not small wrinkle in our approach to the hobby: for whatever reason, neither my brother nor I ever actually painted the models.

Memory fails me again on the whys of this decision. It’s possible that we just didn’t know where to buy paints, since we got all our models at toy shops or supermarkets. It’s also possible that we simply figured out paints were too expensive, and were more than willing to settle for just gluing the models and calling it a day instead of bugging mom or dad for a surefire mess-creator. It’s even possible that we were simply intimidated by the herculean task of painting. I know I tried doing decals once and swore to never do it again. But for whatever reason, our room was slowly littered with gray plastic airplanes haphazardly put together with cheap glue, treated more like puzzles than models, toyed with until tailfins snapped and Sidewinder missiles were lost.

Years passed. Interests shifted. We got a PlayStation 1 to replace our venerable Sega Genesis, and since this was at the peak of games piracy in our country, we could buy four or five games with the money of a single plane kit. So after I was done with that P-51 (which I remember was the first time I’d tried doing the landing gears, a massive feat of courage for the time), I quietly hung up my glues and never built a model again for over two decades. I’d still walk past the occasional hobby shop along the way to school and looked at the flawless shiny Sabres on display, but I never felt an urge to jump back in.

And then Ace Combat happened.

My first contact with long-running arcade dogfight series Ace Combat had been watching my brother play AC3 on the PS1 ages ago. Years later, I bought him Ace Combat: Assault Horizon on the PS3 for his birthday. Plane games, I’d decided, were one of His Things, and just like with the models on the shop windows, I never felt the desire to intrude on his territory.

That all changed dramatically in August of this year. I’d been living alone for a good couple of years now and managed to upgrade my PC far beyond anything either of us had ever owned. I was (and still am) living large, buying games on a whim with no fear of system requirements or even price. Having long gotten everything I wanted, now I was happy to just grab things on sale whenever they popped up, curious new gems or old classics I’d never given a chance before. Then, on August 8th, Steam took me to a sale on Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, the latest entry in the series. It’d come out back in 2019 but had recently received a Top Gun-themed DLC pack. And funny enough, I’d just seen Top Gun: Maverick that week and enjoyed it quite a bit, so I figured, sure, why not?

I enjoyed Ace Combat 7 a lot more than Top Gun: Maverick. In fact, I enjoyed it a lot more than pretty much any other game I’d played so far in 2022. Call it a happy surprise, a revelation, a blast, whatever word you can think of, I promise it’s understating how deeply I vibed with this game. Everything from the gameplay to the story to the cool ass missions (Stealth infiltration ON A JET FIGHTER!) to the characters to the music, I was feeling it. I finished that game twice, then a third time to get all the hidden Aces, then a fourth time using a bright red MiG-21 armed only with machineguns because I was having THAT much fun.

And while I was playing through the campaign over and over, gleefully splashing bandits and dog-fighting thirty drones at the same time, something happened. One at a time, I found myself back in the cockpit of all those old planes from our creaky PC games and unpainted model kits. Falcons, Hornets, Raptors, they were all there, like old buddies I’d lost contact with, each one filled with hazy yet warm memories of sticky fingers and clicky keyboards. It felt like a reunion of sorts.

As I machine-gunned my way through giant airships like a time-displaced WWII fighter, a thought reached my head all the way up in the clouds it now lived in. A sudden desire to complete the circle.

I wanted to build models again. But this time, I wanted to do it right.

[eridan-ampora]

baby animals move like theyre playing a new video game & havent figured out the controls yet

[ryuuna]

can persephone please catch a break cuz that’s twice now she hasn’t been able to raise her kids due to divine fuckery 🫠

[hoshizoralone]

useless lesbian and her beloved children

[siffrin-enthusiast]

which mutual am i? ask game

[kobrakids]

i'm legit curious pls reblog this and put in the tags what your first band t shirt or merch was

[shiftythrifting]

[heritageposts]

large zionist blocklist below

i've compiled a list of all the blogs positively interacting with the @/israel-palestine-bingo blog

there's more info about how the names were complied under the read more, but just to get an idea of how vile the blog is, i just want to quickly mention that the first prize offered in their pinned post, "eight hours of memi mamtera," is the song used in the viral israeli tiktok trend of kidnapping, humiliating, and torturing palestinians in the west bank.

and the "grand prize," which needs no explanation, is "all of palestine! for free!"

some quick info: all the names here have either approvingly replied to, reblogged from, or liked one or more of @/israel-palestine-bingo's posts. for likes, i've only gathered names that appear under their original posts; mostly ones that have not been reblogged, and some with 2-3 reblogs that have not left the immediate sphere of zionists. i've also made sure that these are blogs who have either liked more than one posts from them, or who frequently reblogs from other zionists.

you can also quickly look through the blog yourself (it doesn't have that many posts), or check out any of the names on the list with a quick 'israel' or 'palestine' in the search bar or their blogs.

there are more screenshots at the end of the posts, including ones showing who made the blog (ani-lo-daredevil / katenotbishop), and the bingo board itself (ashenpumpkin).

blocking tip: fastest way to mass block users (on desktop) is to go to settings -> the blog your blocking them from -> scroll all the way down to 'blocked tumblrs,' and then copy-paste the name your blocking

names listed below in alphabetical order reminder again, block don't engage

2peachy acleverforgery ani-lo-daredevil apollo-enthusiast ashenpumpkin <- credited for making the bingo board, reblogged/liked almost all of their posts. aureatecorvid avi-on-jumblr (main @/clear-what-i-was-seeing) awstheticshit bambahalva bleepiesheepie bluenorther blueredfetch bones-and-crows britneysmeanshirt cannibalism-is-my-love-language captain-navii casavanse celepito chubbybubba ciitrus--fruitz coffeelovinggayidiot da-socks davos-is-the-one-true-king dchan87 disregardenedgnostic elder-millennial-of-zion faggotry-enjoyer fdelopera flowercrownsandfairylights fluffel677 fluffy-art-moss george-lucas-is-god got-chavi icereader12 illegitimatetenenbaum inklingm8 its-hila jewishlivesmatter just-illegal karinhasdacookie

katenotbishop <- the main account of the person running the blog. her sideblog is @/ani-lo-daredevil

kelluinox kingofslush letaot-ze-magniv lingonberryjamistakenwhat lovelyhairedpianist magic-coffee marrymepadfoot marvel-ous-posts masters-puddle <- pornblog mixmangosmangoverse morganas-simp mossadspydolphin multifandermissesanakin nameless370 namiko026 nevleg32 notcrazyiswear oakstar519 perfectlynormalperson psychologeek queerius randomname3 redvodyanoi rhysaka sally006 sbinklebooper scp-1296 shinekocreator <- commented, 'but is this the 8 hour version?' on a post where someone ''won'' the song used in the tiktok torture videos. snakelung sort-of-a-demon soxiyy stuffandatherstuff tearsandice tedious-waffle thebejeweledwatercat the-library-alcove thirdmagic thisgingerhasnosoul timegirl tolaat-bli-toelet <- the person running the bingo blog. mainblog is @/katenotbishop transmascpetewentz tribulation-of-somnolence unexistencerpg viktorrotkiv wanderingmadscientist whiterose-blackrose whitesunlars why5x5

note: @/tolaat-bli-toelet changed her username to @/ani-lo-daredevil (her main is still @/katenotbishop)

and from the same post,

the last post was also reblogged by the creator of the israel-palestine-bingo blog

[chloesimaginationthings]

Who do you want FNAF to collab with?..

[carrionpwace]

happy pride

edit: here is the original post. queer history

[sashthesloth]

[✔️] Use custom world state

[koyuxim]

i drew lion boy,, i think im obsessed

[kittennature]

nicole class of 09 with a death note. is this too niche

[madsraa]

I keep forgetting to post this painting here!

[prokopetz]

Concept: RPG party member whose sexual orientation and aesthetic preferences dynamically respond to the player's character creation choices specifically to make them not attracted to you. Like, not just gender-wise: did you make your character buff? They like 'em skinny. Made yourself skinny? Now they like 'em buff. Just maximally contrary along every conceivable axis of attraction. This even affects how they relate to other NPCs in your party, to the extent that if you're trying to play matchmaker, the optimal strategy is to make your character as dissimilar as possible to whomever want to pair them up with.

[dyke-in-crisis]

I have noticed a pattern & I’m guilty of all of these