Plastic Skies - Model 5: Su-37 Berkut
After that last, highly-demanding build, I made a conscious decision that my next kit would be something simple. No hyper complex camo schemes, no funky weird tools, just a cheap little palate cleanser. At first I thought about getting another of those baby models, but I was lucky enough to find something that not only checked all the boxes, but was also one of my all-time favorite weirdo planes. This, at last, was going to be just fun, dammit.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure, the Berkut is an experimental plane built around the idea of forward-swept wings and other technologies like thrust vectoring. The project was started in the 80s, but the plane itself first took flight in 1997, and while its test results were pretty impressive, it was eventually scrapped for more conventional airplanes. Still, the sole working prototype remained in use as a test bed for further technologies, and along the way, it gained a pretty strong following. Japan in particular seems to adore the Berkut, and it has appeared in pretty much every Ace Combat game since 3. In fact, an amusingly sizeable bunch of online articles about it just straight-up use game renders of the Berkut, even if they feature markings from Ace Combat’s various fictional countries.
But anyway! Beloved weirdo plane. 95% black fuselage. No missiles because it never saw actual combat. And according to online resources, the model had the simplest landing gear doors I’d seen yet. It was fate. Especially at the price the online reseller I bought it from was asking: less than half the price of the last model. Sure, I could tell it was an old kit, but how bad could it be?
The Berkut’s construction was every bit as easy as I imagined it to be. So easy, in fact, that I built it in literally a single day. Although I did make a few ugly mistakes along the way. The biggest one, which is hard to notice unless you see it very up close and/or with the light right over it, was the paint. Thinking I’d need a lot of black, I went overboard on the paint and ended up with some really ugly brush strokes covering most of the model. The glossy varnish I picked for the finish hid some of it, but it was a lesson I’m trying to keep at the forefront of my mind for next time: chill with the paint.
I did, for once, enjoy doing the landing gears. Not just because they were hilariously easy compared to pretty much every other one I’d built, but because it (and the thrusters) gave me a chance to break out the metallic paint. Seriously, I fucking love that stuff. I’m thinking about building another MiG-21 or a Sabre or even another P-51 Mustang just so I can give them the shiniest coat of metallic paint I can find.
The white details were a bit of a problem, but that’s because white paint in general kinda vexes me. For some reason I end up needing at least twice as many coats as any other paints. Maybe it’s a matter of priming, another thing I’ve yet to try with models. But in any case, before I knew it, the Berkut was complete, moving canards and all. It was time to get my decalling on.
I dunked one of the red stars that are supposed to go on the wings on warm water, took it out, removed the excess water, put it on the fuselage and gently poked at it with a toothpick like I’d done with dozens of other decals before. And then it happened. The star shattered completely inside the paper, its points snapping off like twigs. Grimacing, I tried to hold it together, but that just obliterated it further. Before I could do anything else, the star was just a mangle of red decal on a damp piece of paper.
So that sucked, but I knew I had five more stars to use. At worst, I could just not use one of the bottom ones. But I needed to do some testing. I wanted to check if this was a freak accident or if there was something worse going on. I picked a different decal and tried again. It disintegrated even faster than the star. And I gave up on the decals.
A quick online search confirmed my fear: this model kit was released in 2000. It is old enough to drink. Surely, the protective plastic coat around the decals was a hundred times weaker than the toothpicks I used. And while I did find a few ways to solve it, they all require products that I’m not entirely sure what their local equivalents would be. So while I’m definitely gonna be doing some more research about this to try and find a solution, for now, this poor Berkut is gonna remain un-decalled.
Also, one of its tailfins is a bit curved, but ehhhhh. I got what I paid for. It’s still a nice model, and it’ll probably get a little better once I find some gray panel line/wash to really bring the fuselage out, but as it stands, I’m just happy that a couple of sellers have more modern and bigger kits of this plane available.
Like in real life, this Berkut deserved better.
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i've been ruminating a lot on it because i think i'm bad at putting my thoughts into words but i need y'all to understand that while there are absolutely a lot of Not Good Things about the finals being held in saudi arabia for three years...the way people seem to treat is as morally black and white is shortsighted and unhelpful.
realistically the players traveling there will be protected. it may be uncomfortable, it's certainly not ideal, but they will travel there for a few weeks, play their tennis, then leave. there are a lot of women, a lot of queer people who actually live in saudi arabia who cannot just leave, who are actually subjected to laws and social climates...and to me it just seems very disrespectful to that actual lived experience, for everybody to sort of turn their noses up and get on their high horses. of course, if the players wish to opt out, that is their choice, but that is their choice to make. that's their judgement. not ours.
and then, what about a tournament like miami? florida is literally experiencing one of the worst active regressions that i've seen in the us (granted i'm young). things like critical race theory and lgbtq+ ed are being removed from curriculums, rights for trans youth, trans healthcare, etc. are going backwards. abortion rights? gun violence? and yes i know that the laws and climate in saudi arabia are different gravy, i understand that, but my point is, no one would ever DREAM of arguing against hosting a tournament in miami despite all of these issues. and we can extend this to a lot of other tournaments! i mean, all the outrage about fifa hosting a world cup in qatar, but we don't have any of these sentiments about doha? i've seen other people bring up that the finals were hosted in singapore when gay marriage was still illegal there. we've already talked about italy's fascist prime minister. and i could go on and on and on about the war crimes of countries like the us or the uk - is the us not participating actively in genocide right now? where is the standard? if you argue against hosting the finals in saudi arabia for the reason of human rights, to me it seems you have to uphold that standard for the location you do land on. and i can guarantee, you will not find a single country in the world with clean hands.
i want to be clear i am not arguing that hosting the finals in saudi arabia is a good thing, especially for three years, especially because it's definitely going there because of money, and not for any of the "good" reasons i think some people want us to believe about "improving the region" (which is very weirdly white savior-esque anyway). i don't really have an official "conclusion" to this discussion.
what i am arguing is that i think a lot of the protests against saudi arabiahosting the finals are more an example of implicit anti-arab bias and islamophobia, rather than genuine discussion. key word implicit: i don't think most people are purposefully trying to be anti-arab/islamophobic. or at least, i'd like to believe nobody is. but i also think, particularly in the west, there is already so much of this xenophobic sentiment ingrained. and this is why i think it's really really REALLY important to check ourselves when we talk about it instead of just jumping straight to the human rights conversation without a second thought.
i'll say it plainly: i don't think the finals should be held in saudi arabia. but for me, it has more to do with sportswashing, with the dangers of the way money is thrown around in sports, and because i think it's more evidence that the wta doesn't care about player welfare but rather about making a profit (what else is new). human rights are absolutely a concern of mine, but how is it fair to hold saudi arabia to a standard that we don't seem to care about for literally anybody else?
literally look at the us's ugly ugly history, past and present, and tell me why we deserve to host a tennis tournament.
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Hi! I just wanted to jump in and say thank you, because your blog has actually helped me a lot recently. I read your post from a while back (like a WHILE, 4ish years ago) about the aro/ace future and what that looks like as we get older. I’ve been coming to terms on and off in the past few years about how averse I am to relationships and dating, and with the fact that really don’t care if I’m single for the rest of my life. But you very nearly articulated the main concern: what happens when everyone else is wrapped up in their marriages and their families I am truly alone? I’m still not sure that the aromantic identity is accurate for me, but it feels pretty close and so thank you, again, for opening this world up to me and putting words to my feelings. :)
Aww thank you for telling me!! 💚
I still feel the way I did when I wrote that post, although it occupies less of my brainspace than it used to. However, I will take this opportunity to talk about the big thing in my social life that changed since 2020: I dove hard into my local community. Any local community will do I think, but the main one for me was my local trans community. I was also in a community music ensemble, I spent a couple years in a survivor support group, and I went to local queer events. I valued those communities highly enough that they were the main reason I was upset to be moving to a new city.
Community made a huge difference for me. I wasn’t really friends with any of them exactly (like I rarely hung out with any of them outside of whatever thing we had together), and community definitely doesn’t occupy the same niche of social requirements as friends or a partner. But it HELPS. It helps with social support, feeling connected to other people, having regular social interaction, and (crucially imo) meeting people who are older than you in a peer environment instead of one where they are of higher status than you.
I know so many trans people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, even 70s, from my local trans community - variously single, married, divorced, multiply divorced, dating, polyamorous, nonamorous, etc. It really broadened my view of what people older than me are actually doing in real life, not just what the twenty-somethings around me anticipate they will be doing when they are that age. People who are like me too, queer transgender people who will never fit the conventional narrative. It enriched my life in a way I wasn’t expecting.
I still don’t know what an aroace future looks like and it’s still scary but at least now I know that mine will include local communities and that I can get a fair amount of the social fulfillment I’m seeking from them.
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