The Internet & modeling

First written: November 5th, 2008 | Updated: March 24th, 2010

A blessing or a plague?

Sometimes I really don't know which one the Internet is. We are light years away from what it used to be.

Buying products, getting information, belonging to a certain interest group etc, changed dramatically with the Internet and the easy connection with the rest of the world.

I'm one of it's true believers. Since more than 10 years I started to buy on line because of my hobbies and now I do it for everything else. Groceries, trips, hotel reservations, paying bills and almost everything else I can think of. Being without a connection for a few days is to much for me.

But there are things that I really dislike.

With the easy access to information comes the easy contact with people that I'd rather not meet at all.

Of course I'm talking about the hobby thing. If it wasn't for the easy access to information about models and especially armor models, what I build would be much worse than it is, and like many of us I try to find sites about the subject.

Many of them have forae dedicated to the subject where we can find an incredible amount of information whether it is text or pictures.

But many of these sites have the tendency to slide to the more darker areas of the hobby. It's not rare that they become to specialized and sterile.
The discussions I see in many of them are absolutely incredible and denote substantial personality problems in most of the people that frequent these places.

Imagine someone going there to ask about a certain model and reading endless posts about the way springs are compressed (or not) on a certain vehicle due to the weight. All this because a manufacturer had the nerve to include the two options on a kit, and someone disagrees that they could be compressed at all.

Or a discussion about the way the parts left a factory of tanks. Painted or not? In what color? Was the primer red? Did they have primer at all?

Or a discussion about a model of a tank that never went past the prototype phase and in the modeler's interpretation he decided to go a certain route. A discussion starts about how plausible it is to go that route, based on the speculative opinions of specialists.

One of the best I've seen, is someone asking about a certain tank in a certain place in a certain time and someone replying "yes, there were 10 delivered". When asked about that number (10), the reply was "I had that number going in my mind. I have to check if I saw that in some book that I have around".

It's not rare that the newcomer feels out of context in these places. And tends to leave when he asks a question and someone jumps on him because he didn't use Google before asking. I've seen this many times and I'm always surprised because the people that run these sites don't cut the access to these incredibly rude members, letting them continue to harass some poor innocent that has the nerve to enter their realm.

Much worse than that is when the people that run these sites (and should have a higher sense of responsibility) enter these types of discussions showing an incredible lack of good manners.

A recurrent and very fun discussion (and it happens quite frequently) is the "pissing contest" that takes place when they start comparing web sites.

Not all is lost. There are places where you can find incredible models built by some incredibly skilled people.
And the most surprising thing, is that they are normally very gentle and very modest. And when I talk about amazing models I'm talking of those models that not even the self appointed specialist dare to criticize because of a rivet or a solder line.

I noted another thing – These "specialists" never show what they do. There are two possible reasons for this:

1. They never complete a model (there's nothing good enough for their very demanding standards)
2. They do complete them but they are crap. And it would be a field day for the rest of the community to be able to beat them to death on their poor examples.

But the fact is, that I have to make an effort to remind me of any model that these guys ever displayed. And the few that I remember were exactly that – crap.

Anyway, I leave you with a list of sites that are very helpful in this activity. Beware ! Some of the guys that I talked about are in some of them. If you happen to bump into them, you'll recognize them immediately.

• Armorama
• IDF in scale
• Military Modelling
• Missing-lynx.com
• Perth Military Modelling Site
• planetArmor
  

Of all these sites, only Military Modeling has a RSS feed that works and that's why you can see it on the sidebar. Armorama has a RSS feed but it's eihter malformed or imcompatible with the RSS reader and it shows nothing.
The other sites don't have one unfortunately. It's a very convenient way to have a list of the more recent articles published in them.

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