The Good Stuff- Part two.

  Now the Internet is not ,as some would have it ,the greatest thing since sliced bread. It does-  have its down side. For a start there is the sheer amount of information available- not all of it by any means reliable- look at Wikipedia- or rather don't, as some of it is just twaddle.
 Also when searching you have to know what you are searching for- computer search engines being literal beasts so you have to know before you can KNOW- if you know what I mean(!!!!).
 But  even within our quiet little hobby  "dangers abound"  for the unwary- not to mention inconvenience if you get it wrong... an American friend of mine once went looking for boots and saddles- he collects Western artifacts - what he found on a couple of the sites ..... well the boots had high heels and went all the way up .... He never did buy the Charo saddle he was after ...
Yet on the whole the Internet has been a very useful  tool and  resource for our hobby despite the anonymous small minded nastiness on so many of the forums carried out by whiny  tossers  who wouldn't say Boo!  to a goose in the real world (because in the real world they'd get a slap!) the overall effect has been  beneficial.
 It is now possible to exchange opinions and Info with chaps on the other side of the planet without too much effort  but I do wonder if some of the humanity has gone with the endless typing.There are- for instance no voice inflexions in email and emoticons  can just make you look like a tosser ! 
 But all that being said- it still overall comes under the heading of The Good Stuff. 

28mm- 25mm when they were painted- Old Glory Napoleonic British. Surely well painted models are part of the Good Stuff.

Boney and his immediate entourage. Surely the historical personages you meet along the way are also part of the Good stuff.

The History Bit Its use and abuse  ....

Now for me without the History the whole of wargaming would be almost completely pointless. After all Killed one plastic Dwarf- killed 'em all  and despite what the Game Designer Dudes tell us   the various bits of the Sci-fant genres arose out of the historically based games of Featherstone et al . Dwarf- Fiddling and its variations are offspring of  "Wargaming proper" . Without the historical background this simply becomes too thin a hobby  for me to maintain any long term interest. Which is possibly why my own Sci - Fi collection doesn't see the light of day very often at all -you can't do bad jokes ALL the time and I simply can't take SCI-FANT even remotely seriously .
 So what most of us do- at varying levels- is to play with history- this of course included the Fictional Countries aficionados (and if they'd admit it a good section of the Sci-Fant lobby too). So without History of one form or another we'd be as a slightly "overwrought" chap once said to me "Up Pad Creed without a Shittle" (Might take a while to work that one out- it did me, the first time- though the single malts I'd consumed may have slowed the cognitive process!).
 So the history must be part of the "Good Stuff" even for blokes whose main gaming concern is denying its existance.