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Allswell, USA. A small town from a time that seems simpler through the soft-filtered yellow lens of nostalgia. The sort of town where kids bike around after school and well-meaning but foolish teenagers get into minor but non-serious predicaments over the weekend. Neighbors greet each other if they don't have a grudge; a single income can support a family, whether it's blue-collar work down at the [regional industry] or an office job at the recently-opened Institute. Law enforcement is competent to deal with rowdy teens, speeders, and town drunks and that's about it. Weirder problems may require some meddling kids to solve. If you've seen a Stephen Spielberg movie OR a Stephen King movie, or any of their imitators (Stranger Things, The Iron Giant, Super 8, etc.) you know the place. Maybury, Ray Bradbury country. It's a generic backdrop, a place that never was but that we wish had been. The name comes from Chris van Allsburg and Norman Rockwell, plus the nice overtones of optimism and echoes of Roswell. For of course, weird stuff goes down in Roswell. Your average wage-earner or housewife won't notice it or doesn't have time to pay attention; they have their own problems and in any case they can only see changes to the norm through the lens of the Cold War. But there's weirdness all right. Weird stuff down in the mine, or out in the woods at night. Strangers visiting the Institute on strange errands, very strange strangers indeed. Children can see it. They have an unerring instinct for finding differences and exceptions to rules. (Pictured: two Perfectly Normal Citizens, according to a grown-up, and one meddling kid.) Teenagers too can see weirdness; their developing minds and natural antiestablishment rebelliousness are good for dealing with radical, out-there theories and their absolutely terrible judgement allows them to take ludicrous risks to investigate. So can some adults--not influential or respectable ones, but ones at the margins of society. Crackpots, drunks, hoboes, busybodies, cranks and recluses. Not the sort of people authority figures listen to. Pictured here are a handmade quonset hut, a Christmas decoration I found at a thrift store (the ice cream scoop and planters were separate dollhouse furnishings or pewter charms found on the same trip), and two Walther's HO railroad terrain kits, one the newsstands (one converted to a noodle stand) and Vic's Barber Shop. Too small to be accurate for 28mm scale, let alone 32mm, but good for backdrops and terrain. Click for more views. More to come, I hope!