The Lost and the Damned

As the Orange Man won the election yesterday in the only country that matters, news on the flooding in the València province in Spain are disappearing from the news. Theres almost 300 dead people as I write this words, hundreds missing. I've lost someone in the family, and all my friends have lost their homes and business. We've got no roads, no trains, no buses, no postal service. The tap water isn't safe to drink a week later. Our country is ruined, and will be for months if not years.

And why is this relevant for this blog? It isn't. But it's important for me to leave something here.

If you've read some of my articles before, there's a running joke on My Doom™. Every time I spend a big amount of money on models to start a project, the next thing you know is GW is launching a revamp of that army, or discount boxes appear next month, etc. And that has reached a point where my friends text me "please buy some Chaos Dwarves" so GW releases the AoS ones next month. And it was fun.

The week before the apocalypse (DANA), a couple of weeks after my birthday, I decided to start an old army.

I found some random models that I owned in the early nineties, at a reasonable price, from Italy to The Netherlands, and bought them. I was thrilled, the last week of October was going to be early Christmas. Was.

Yesterday I received a bag of plastic bases from a Chinese seller. And that's it. As far as the courier's and post office tell me, the lead miniatures are lost forever, covered in mud in a dumpster or floating in the mediterranean. I can't even think in the persons driving those trucks on Tuesday's evening without shivering.

So last night the thing that prompted this post happened. I went upstairs to sit on my desk to read some old book or paint for a while just to disconnect from this situation: And then it hit me. Three cardboard boxes, with black plastic square bases on my table. Empty bases that won't hold models, because those hard-to-find 30 year old bits of lead are in the mediterranean, or in a pile of wood and mud on the side of a road.

Yeah, I know, It's stupid. But I can't look at those bases. I don't care about the money or my collection. Fuck it. I'm probably donating a ton of plastic when things settle down. But those base boxes were a haunting image.

How bad is it? I'm not posting pictures of the carnage, nor the mud covered streets or the 2 stories car walls. Just take a look to the satellite images (they've been color edited so you can see the water, but it's mostly brown mud, not that pretty blue in the picture):

I'm also disappointed with some hobbyists I've known from years that haven't reached to me just to check if I was alive. Halloween night is a serious business. There's a little chance that someone, eventually, will see an old envelope that was sent from my town years ago with miniatures or plastic bits and thinks "wait a minute, where's that place?" and realize that something happened. When that happens, don't text me.

I've leant what parasocial relationships are the hard way. The "community" is just a ghost. If you're not on Instagram, no one fucking cares.

Lesson learnt.