On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me….

Come on now, sing along !

“An armored car and a Hotchkiss MMG…”

Just about works I reckon, lol.

An Austin armoured car for my non fascist forces. Just look at all them lovely rivets. You can keep yer King Tigers chum, Multiple turrets and tissue paper armour are where it’s at. 

I made a right old balls up of my Footsore Vickers MG so this is an Empress SCW Hotchkiss team which’ll work fine for the BUF, with some head swaps if necessary. 

Anywhoo, the sprouts are nearly ready (they’ve been boiling away since June) so I’ll keep this post short. 

2025 saw me move away from smaller scales and effectively start from scratch in 28mm. I’ve unexpectedly enjoyed painting in this scale and as a result I’ve now created opposing armies for the Indian Mutiny, The 100 Years War, and the alt history British Civil War. 

I suspect that 2026 will see me adding units to all three, though at a less frenetic (and bloody expensive) pace. I’ve still not entirely settled on rules for any of these periods but I’m resolved not to go about writing my own for them, since this is a rabbit hole I’ve fallen down too many times in the past, with largely unsatisfactory results. 

Talking of rabbit holes, I’ve now been 62 days without purchasing anything “shiny” or random, so, go me! Seems like the hypnotherapy tapes and counselling are beginning to work.

Right enough with the waffle! Here’s hoping you have a great Christmas and that all your battles in 2026 are toy soldier ones.

Mrs Broom’s been at it again with the deckies!

Toodleooh. 

See you on the flip side, if the God’s spare us!

I for one welcome our new AI overlords

Just thought I’d get that blog title on record as a sort of insurance policy for the future. Truth be told, despite Keith’s impressive and creative use of AI (over at his Bydand blog) my own output has so far been less than stellar. 

My upcoming VBCW project has a fair amount of background fluff, so I thought that rather than writing  a wall of text to boggle the reader I’d present the backstory in a couple of neat faux newspaper front pages from the period. 

Being me, nothing ever goes to plan of course, so I thought I’d share my “creative experience” in the hopes that more compétant people can point out what I’m doing wrong,

First off I was trying to create a copy of the Daily Mail, infamous for its real world headline “hurrah for the blackshirts”. Given that it looked like I was trying to create something promoting fascism with prompts like… 

“Generate front page of Daily Mail May 3rd 1937. Headline «GOOD RIDDANCE » Picture of worried 1930s women and children under guard. Text around the picture Northampton has now been cleansed of communist agitators. Oxford, Cambridge and Leicester have also seen the back of these troublesome malcontents. New paragraph, WE BACK THE BOYS IN BLACK. Insert text in a border at the bottom of the page in the style of a period advert Farrington’s Bile Beans. The Perfect Restorative 2d.” 

…I got a lot of “this image generation request did not follow our content policy” responses, which was actually quite heartening to be honest. 

Being sly, and a lot less specific I pressed on and gradually worked my way through dozens of iterations where either the text was okay but the pictures were ridiculous or the pictures were okay and the text utter nonsense.

Unable to get the bugger to do what I really wanted I made a collage of the bits that were okay and created a Frankenstein version of the Daily Mail using cut and paste. 

The problem with the cut and paste was that it looked like…well… a cut and paste. Uploading my image to the AI I asked it to make it look more homogenous (ie make the background a uniform colour) which as you can see it did. The trouble is that in the process of doing that it corrupted the text, turning it into utter garbage and rendering my attempt at story telling useless. 

As you can see from the original cut and paste variant (below), it covered the deportation of communist agitators from Coventry (obviously just women and children) and Prime Minister Mosley visiting King Edward the VIII who’d been injured in a bomb attack at his coronation. 

I guess it’s reassuring to know that if AI ever becomes sentient and takes over the world it’ll probably make as big a balls up of it as we’ve done. 

Okay, frustrated semi rant over. 

Here’s a picture of a train and the new Brompton Carpets warehouse to placate those hoping for some proper wargaming content. lol.  

My new choo choo. Not bad for cardboard and mdf. Just gotta sort out the rails now.

Brompton Carpets three story factory / warehouse, where I’m told you can pick up some excellent end of roll bargains.

I’m pretty sure I’ll sneak another post in pre new year, but if not I hope you all manage to kick back and have a good one. 

Toodleooh

Gosh it’s a bit big isn’t it!

Sadly these were not the words uttered by my wife on our wedding night but it’s broadly what she said when she saw the fully assembled engine shed she’d bought me for my birthday. And she’s not wrong. It’s going to form part of the terrain for my VBCW lads to fight over but the size of this and the warehouse (which is taller and bigger) has forced a bit of a rethink. The individual terrain tiles I’d purchased are not going to cut the mustard (individually too small) so after Xmas I’m going to the Brico for a metre square piece of insulation board that I’ll cut into bigger chunks. The engine shed and the associated track can sit on one section while everything else remains movable on smaller pieces.

Oooh ‘eck it’s big. 28mm chap included for scale. Top comes off and doors open so you can fight inside it too. 

T’other end.

Also in the same vein we have 10 new combatants from the Albertine faction (he became George VI in our world) who I’ve begun to disparagingly refer to as the Rotary Club Rifles. The name might not stick. 

A poor quality picture, soz. I particularly like the crouching figure on the right with the Brompton FC scarf and the German Maxim 08. 

Here’s a better picture. Odd how you sometimes get a favourite figure isn’t it?

Finally to go with the engine shed you need an engine. Here’s mine, very much under construction. Although this is a civilian loco there are a decent selection of armored ones (eastern front?) in the same Sarissa range. 

Should look okay when it’s got the coal wagon thingy on the back. 

What else is there to show you. Ahh yes..

A nice bit of barbed wire

Fuel drums courtesy of my mates at TEMU I think.

Homemade rubble pile number 1. A good use of all the MDF off cuts and sprue.

Lots and lots of wall to duck behind.

A big old water tower with a ladder on the far side o gain access to the top. Nice kits with a decent bit of heft to them. Assembling them like the plastic 100YW infantry is a bit of a ball ache, but you can’t have the halfpenny and the bun now can you?

It’s entirely possible that I’m getting more fun out of making all this than I will playing with it, but we’ll see. Found myself looking at Battletech Alpha Strike on the internet yesterday. No Broom. Bad Broom. Broom must stay focussed. 

Toodleooh for now mes amis.