umbrella graveyard

wayne is a bandito

2012-02-11T14:05:00.004Z

The past few weeks have involved much hilarity, courtesy of shows from Henry Rollins (described as "a masterclass in controlled contempt" by the Bristol Evening Post), Stewart Lee (described as "smug elitist liberalism. Who is this cunt?" by Tokyofist, youtube) and a family wedding (not hilarious in and of itself, but we did have fun dancing badly to rubbish music and drunkenly reorganising the hotel's DVD collection in order of colour).

But mostly, the past few weeks have involved a lot of Orks.

At the last update, I was running dangerously behind schedule. But thanks to a few late nights and uneventful weekends, I now find myself slightly ahead of schedule; thus affording me the opportunity to babble pointlessly about all the Orks I've painted, and putting myself back behind schedule as a consequence. Which is good, as without the artificially induced panic of being behind schedule I'd have almost no chance of getting finished ahead of schedule. Probably.

Anyway, here are some stormboyz...

...shoota boyz...

...warboss and nobz.

Just 20 more boyz to go.

With the exception of a few bits and pieces scrounged out of the bitz box, all of these toys were supplied by the very excellent Target Gaming, where highly trained experts used their immense physical superiority to take my order, crush it into powder with their bare hands and grind it into my capitalist western eyes.

whump whump whump

2012-01-16T20:00:00.005Z

More orkses. Deffkoptaz.

Given that barely a week has passed since I posted pictures of the mighty zzap gunz that will be busily exploding in the background whilst these flyboys are gloriously exploding in mid-air, one might be forgiven for thinking that I am making fearsome progress in my attempts to paint up a whole new army to get exploded with.

This is of course a complete illusion; and my hopes of getting these jerks finished in time are ever diminishing. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that every time I finish painting a new toy, I feel compelled to take pictures of it and bleat at the internet about it rather than just cracking on and painting more toys.

Ah, the complicated futility of stupidity.

These Deffkopta models are only available as part of some honking big boxed set that I didn't want to fork out for; so I bought them off ebay. But if they were available separately, I would have gone straight to target-gaming.com, where suspiciously blond perfect humans would have dispatched my order with extreme prejudice - and at a low, low price.

no human would stack books like this

2012-01-10T22:22:00.005Z

Bought new mice. For a bit of a change, we went for boys; three of the wee blighters.

Barton...

...Megatron...

...and Dave.

Boy mice are different to girl mice. Partly because they are a little bit smellier and more quarrelsome, but mainly because of their tiny mouse junk.

Sadly, little Dave only lasted a few days. Perhaps because of his predilection for jumping off of tall things, perhaps because he liked to wee in his own food bowl. Who knows.

Meanwhile, in toy soldier land...

A few months ago the RoboJew phoned me to see if I wanted to go to the 40k doubles tournament with him. I figured I'd probably be quite busy with work and things, and wouldn't have time to get an army together; but because I happened to be in the pub at the time (and was subsequently highly suggestible) I agreed in a noisy and obnoxious manner. Now I have six weeks left to turn out a bunch of new Orks.

Here's the first lot; Zzap Gunz.

The standard models are a bit dull, so I cobbled these together out of scraps from the bitz box.

No-one will be expecting Zzap Gunz, because they're rubbish. To make sure that the grot crew don't run away before they have the opportunity to show just how rubbish they can be, they will be accompanied by a burly Ork.

Since these toys are entirely composed of spare parts I had kicking around, I didn't have to buy any of them. But if did have to buy toys, I would have gone straight to Target Gaming where a legion of Aryan superhumans would have cheerfully helped to support my crippling toy soldier addiction.

skwee bop

2011-12-18T16:14:00.004Z

Thanks to my lack of ability as a stress engineer and mind-reader, the last few weeks of work have been somewhat slightly stressful. Thankfully I had the opportunity to have all conscious thoughts smashed out of my tiny skull with some powerful gigs.

Thought-smashing was achieved most ably by the mighty Napalm Death and a trio of support acts with generic death metal names. One of them played a song about working in a fast food restaurant ("this one's called Whopper Slavery"); the next band played a song about TV presenter Noel Edmunds. It looked/sounded like this.

And then old-enough-to-know-better Brummie death-grind behemoths Napalm Death took to the stage.

Everything after that is a bit of a blur, but I woke up the next morning with ringing ears, countless bruises and an overwhelming urge to buy everything they ever did ever.

Nine days later I found myself limping back to the same venue for something far less abrasive. Support came from Mojo Fury, a band I saw supporting And So I Watch You From Afar earlier in the year. They were much as I remember them; which is to say that they were jolly good, but rendered utterly forgettable by the sheer brilliance of the main act. The main act in this case being Amplifier, a band that has been continuing to release superb records for some years in spite of the fact that almost no-one seems to buy them. What they play could be described as prog, but without all the flute solos and songs about hobbits; instead they go for big riffs, cosmic guitar effects and two-disc concept records about a dark matter trading space octopus.

I realise I'm probably not selling them particularly well. Trust me, they're awesome.

Behold.

In between all this awesomeness, I did something that I am not terribly proud of.

I played Dungeons & Dragons.

In my defence, I only did so in order to fulfil a promise to my good friend The Lieutenant Commander (known formerly as The Lieutenant), who will be soon be spending much of his time in a submerged tin can firing missiles at unspecified patches of land.

D20's were rolled. Booze was consumed. Our bold party of adventurers displayed a remarkable talent for rampaging off on wild goose chases and getting beaten up by local small time gangsters. Our monumental ineptitude ensured that the baddies won and the nobility of an entire city were burned to death by religious zealots.

And then I died and got reincarnated as some kind of gittish Mr Tumnus.

ISTJ

2011-12-04T16:05:00.005Z

This week; family shenanigans, interspersed with experiential leadership training through the medium of mental and physical torment in the frozen north.

The latter took the form of a week long course in the Lake District. The Lake District looks a bit like this...

...except in my experience much more dramatic and much, much more bleak. I can only assume that the adverse weather conditions have been photoshopped out (you can tell because of pixels, or something). Or it was taken on 1 of the 145 days that it does not rain in the Lake District. Specifically, not at the end of November. How the hell should I know.

Point is, I spent the time getting to know myself and others much better by jumping off bridges with them, dangling off cliffs attached to ropes tied up by them, and huddling together in blind terror at the top of wobbly poles with them. There was also plenty of time for self reflection at the local pub, where the wild-eyed landlord with unruly hair would stay open as long as the amount of money being spent on booze significantly outweighed the cost of the collateral damage we incurred.

In spite of my deep seated inherent cynicism, it was a good week in which I learned a lot of things that I expect to be forgetting very soon.

Before all that was mum's birthday thing. This involved bimbling to London to see The 39 Steps (which was excellent), and to enjoy a poncy meal* (which was frankly a bit too poncy for me to really enjoy). How poncy? Poncy enough that as we were about to leave, Paul McCartney sat down at the table next to us with whoever he's married to nowadays. So now mum can tell everyone that she had a meal with Paul McCartney on her birthday.

After the whole Lake District outdoor activity death misery was the other family doohicky, a get together for a meal in lieu of grandma having to buy presents for anyone. Which is fair enough, since her failing eyesight, hearing, memory and just about everything else makes it more or less impossible for her to do... well, anything really. To underline her encroaching senility, she spent much of the day calling me by cousin (Simon)'s name. But that's okay, because she's been doing this for about twenty years now; and I like a good running gag.

At some point, I had a birthday too; wherein my splendid friends and a mischievous Pixie showered me with gifts including, but not limited too, an OCD chopping board, a pirate-shaped USB stick with Monkey Island 3 on it, toys and comic books, and some more GARY FUCKING NUMAN.

Thanks gang.

*I couldn't remember the name of the restaurant we went to, so typed "poncy italian restaurant london" into Google. The restaurant we went to, Bocca di Lupo, was the third result returned.

Magneto is gay

2011-11-22T21:01:00.002Z

So I bought a new bike on the Friday afternoon; and by Monday morning it was stolen. At two and a half days, that still only makes it my second shortest period of bicycle ownership.

Sigh.

The sense of impotent blinding rage abated somewhat on the Thursday when we went to see the very excellent Reginald D Hunter; and abated further still when a guy in my office offered me the use of his mountain bike, which he had bought a year ago and used three times since. The rage returned the next day when I found out that his bike weighs more than the moon, and is actually slightly worse than the aids bike (which was also stolen); but was then almost obliterated entirely when I went to see the Melvins that same night. And then the rage came crashing back a few days ago when the chain on the shite bike broke at the top of my road and left itself in a neat line on the road behind me; and I realised that I was going to have to buy a new chain for a bike that I don't own because EVERY BIKE I'VE OWNED IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS HAS BEEN STOLEN.

I have resolved to keep listening to the Melvins until everything feels better.

complicated futility

2011-10-31T21:11:00.001Z

Ben is getting pretty fucking sick of buying new bicycles for total strangers.

...and then we went to mauschwitz

2011-10-23T17:17:00.010+01:00

Oh well.

Either side of getting the mice taken care of were gigs, mighty gigs. The first was YOB. Support came from Dark Castle, who were nice and doomy but somehow lacking something; and then Kongh, who sported some powerful Viking face hair and played a set that sounded like a musical timeline of the first ten years of Electric Wizard (this was, broadly speaking, a good thing).

And then of course, YOB themselves. On record, these doom metal titans sound like they are smashing their guitars together to create the sound of the universe exploding very noisily and in slow motion. Live, they were much the same; except louder, and with more tattoos and hair. Thanks to the hypnotic nature of their psychedelic rumblings (or possibly all the Red Stripe), I don't remember much of what happened; but I'm pretty sure that it was awesome.

And yet somehow still not as awesome as Enablers the following night. The gig took place at the Cube Microplex in Stokes Croft, a curious little tumbledown independent cinema run by beatniks in non-ironic cardigans who found the business of mixing drinks somewhat challenging. Support came courtesy of Beginnings and Finglebone, who were each perfectly lovely in a guitar noodling wall of delay sort of a way. They were rendered completely irrelevant the moment that Enablers took to the stage, and all conscious thought was obliterated by gravel-throated reflection and loathing, swirling tendrils of post-doom guitar, and the creeping realisation that my gin and tonic had been made with lemonade.

Not the gig we went to, but...

Just super.

Shame the mice had to die.

ipso fatso

2011-10-12T21:52:00.006+01:00

Induction week for my shiny new grown-up job was largely a test of endurance in the face of relentless PowerPoint, interspersed with the occasional site tour. These site tours largely involved being led from one large and impressive building to another equally large and impressive building by one of the previous years recruits; and on arrival at each building some other chap would attempt to explain what the heck was going on there. So we were not in the slightest bit perplexed when some fellow outside a particularly large and really very impressive building indicated that we should gather around and pay attention. Levels of perplexedness peaked sharply as soon as words started coming out of his mouth.

He: Can you see me?

We: er... yeah.

He: Do you believe I can travel through time?

We: um... what?

He: Have you heard of CERN? They made a particle travel faster than the speed of light this week. So now time travel is possible.

We: er...

He: Here, take this. (the guy hands a Chinese newspaper and a used cinema ticket to the person standing nearest to him). Read this; high tide is at three. I'll come for you then...

...at which point our actual guide proclaimed that we didn't really have time for all this, and led us on to the next large and impressive building.

That was a few weeks ago; since then things have settled down and become somewhat slightly more normal. It's not awful.

Meanwhile...

Mouses are generally noted for their talents in three distinct fields.

Eatin'.
Poopin'.
Gettin' cancer.

My mouses, having spent the last year excelling at the first two, recently decided to have a crack at the third. Tetsuo has a pretty lumpy ginger armpit; but Kaneda is very nearly more tumour than mouse, so she wins.

Sort of.

holiday

2011-09-14T13:26:00.006+01:00

We went to Santorini.

Santorini used to be a volcano; then it erupted, and some Minoans built houses on the newly formed rock. Then it erupted again and most of it fell into the sea. Eventually, the ancient Greeks built more houses on the top of a mountain.

Ancient Thera is around 400m above sea level. It gets a bit breezy up there, and the ground underfoot is a mixture of loose stones and big rocks polished smooth by the tread of many weary tourists. Fortunately there are at least a dozen lengths of thin rope at ankle height dotted about at the edges of the most sheer drops, and so the chances of being dashed against the jagged rocks far below are quite minimal.

We also visited more contemporary ruins in the ghost town of Mesa Gonia. It used to be one of the major villages on the island, but was abandoned after a massive earthquake in 1956. It now has a population of around 30 people, living in houses that look somewhat incongruous amongst the remaining ruins.

We did a spot more pottering about, but mostly we stayed around our hotel and beach resort and enjoyed the novelty of having nothing to do but read and get skin cancer.

We also drank a lot of cocktails. Our cocktail bar of choice was the Love Boat; partly because of their questionable taste in music but mainly because they often served up a free shot of something tasty/deadly/on fire as you got close to the end of your drink, like some kind of alcoholic end-of-level boss.

Sadly, my sunglasses (lovingly purchased for the princely sum of £1 from the women's accessories department of Primarch) did not survive the trip; Poseidon claimed them on day five. They were replaced that day with another pair of aviators even more fabulous and mirrored than before, and now I can dress up like Cochese.

So fuck you, Poseidon.

We have decided that we like holidays.

about three quarters of the way up the street actually

2011-08-24T13:54:00.010+01:00

The whole moving house thing wound up being being pretty easy, largely because we seem to have some of the best friends in the world.

The Pixie hadn't seen the house at all until the day we picked up the keys, so it comes as some relief that she doesn't hate it and that we we are all settling in quite nicely. So far the only unforeseen horror has been in the cupboard under the stairs, where we found an old wooden box containing a single child's slipper and a rusty saw.

Which is hardly horrifying at all, actually; and far less disturbing than our pet Frenchman's collection of sinister foreign foodstuffs.

Soupe?! What the hell's that?

Those labels could say anything, and there is literally no way of finding out.

cumulonimbus

2011-08-18T22:04:00.004+01:00

Went to see The Death Of Her Money at The Croft last week. I didn't get to see them straight away, of course; there were the obligatory support acts to wade through first.

First up was Pus, who were loud. Loud and to the point. Loud and to the point and thuggishly sludgy. Thudgy? Sluggish? Probably the second one. For the first thirty seconds it made some sort of terrible brutal sense, but after a minute or so it was starting to get tiresome. Then they played for another twenty minutes.

But then came Winston Egbert, who were charming. Self-proclaimed underdogs of 80s thrash, Winston Egbert are a boy/girl duo where the girl plays drums and the boy plays guitar and they both do a bit of singing. Kind of like The White Stripes. Except that they sound nothing like The White Stripes. Because they play 80s thrash.

Jesse Ventura (not to be confused with Jesse "The Body" Ventura, American wrestler and 38th governor of Minnesota) were apparently playing their first ever show, but looked like they'd been doing this kind of thing for years. It was all very reminiscent of Gay For Johnny Depp's homoerotic hardcore - they even had a song dedicated to "a man that's important and influential in all of our lives, and surely all of yours too; Patrick Fucking Swayze." Ones to watch.

And finally The Death Of Her Money, who were of course spiffing. I first/last saw them almost three and a half years ago, in what used to be The Junction, and dimly recall them sounding a bit like Isis and/or Pelican. On reflection their seismic riff dirge is more comparable to Godflesh without all the mechanical sounding frippery, but in truth they don't sound like they're trying to sound like anyone else; TDOHM have carved out their own doomgaze niche, and are bloody masters of it. Good stuff.

Meanwhile, it was my last day at the Big Gay Department Store last weekend. It is, in every sense of the word, the gayest place that I have ever worked. I think that I shall miss it slightly... but I start my new job at the end of September, and in the meantime I could use a few Saturdays off for things like sitting around in beer gardens, going on holiday and moving house.

We got keys to the new place on Tuesday, but don't have a van until tonight - so there has been very little moving of stuff. Instead we have been playing an odd version of Tetris using bits of squared paper cut out into the shapes of items of furniture.

If only we had spreadsheets and gantt charts to go with it all, Matt would be really proud of us.

rioja

2011-08-03T20:54:00.008+01:00

Of course, it hasn't all been cocking about with toy soldiers. Although it has mostly been cocking about with toy soldiers.

There was also some cocking about with the track slag, which at the last check had a few issues with brakes. The scale of the problem became apparent when we removed the old pads.

For the uninitiated, the shiny bits show where the pad itself has worn away completely and the metal backing plate - which provides almost no stopping power but is very good at ruining brake discs - has ground itself away on the brake disc. As might be expected, the discs themselves were also a bit of a state.

I sure pity the sucker that had to drive that home from the track. (thanks Laura...)

So, new pads and discs all round. We decided after the last jolly that uprating the brakes was probably a smart idea anyway, and so after a day of excessive hammer usage we now have bigger discs and fancy red brake pads. These will make the car go faster, because they are red, and everyone knows that red 'uns go faster.

There was also a lot of cocking about with graduation ceremonies. Because graduating was less interesting to me than essential car maintenance, I took fewer photos. In fact I took only one photograph the whole day, of the bread boat captained by a grapey pirate that Dr Sister constructed using only bits of her ploughman's lunch.

So you'll have to invent pictures in your head using the power of mental thinking to accompany the following bullet point summary of the day.

Apoplectic scheduling anxiety in the morning, despite going through everything the night before using a D20 to determine how punctual/sober/clothed people would be. Miscellaneous toy soldiers were used to represent all the important people, with coasters used to represent key locations and pieces of shortbread used to represent pudding.
The Pixie looked delightful in her summery dress.
I shook some old geezers hand, and now I'm qualified to do stuff.
Lunch, beer, etc.
We went to the aquarium. There were lots of fish, but no oversized pencils in the gift shop.
Big Chinese dinner, beer, etc.

Essentially, the day started stressfully; but got immediately and immeasurably better once the ceremony was done and complimentary booze and cakes was made available .

prophets of FaDoom pt.5

2011-07-31T16:50:00.002+01:00

...and then these guys showed up.

Dümbar forgets exactly when or how the foetid creatures appeared. There was obviously a time when their rotting stench didn't permeate his very consciousness, but it all seems a very long time ago now. He is fairly certain that it is all the bastard skull mace's doing.

He is fairly certain that they want him dead.

In fact, there seems to be almost no end to the variety of ways in which Dümbar might meet his end. He could be horribly maimed by maniacs that believe he has magical powers, or slaughtered by one of the countless other bands of lunatics that seem so curiously obsessed with shards of green rock, he might succumb to one of the hideous plagues or poxes that seem to have blighted so many of his followers of late, he could have his skin eaten by the hideous fly-headed mutant of his own creation, or he could be suddenly transformed into a whiff of green vapour by that shrieking bastard skull mace.

Aekold Fastidious Dümbar, known to his followers as The Great Prophet FaDoom, has finally come to realise that he is in fact utterly doomed.

prophets of FaDoom pt.4

2011-07-13T23:01:00.005+01:00

Whilst the majority of Dümbar's followers are weapon-toting bearded lunatics with such a tenuous grip on reality that meteorite insurance seemed like a wise investment, this is not the case for all of them.

Torvald Blasphemy and Helsinki Abominator are a pair of alarmingly antisocial young men who, prior to the devastation of Mordheim, attempted to make a living as musicians. They were not generally well received by the public. This could have been for any number of reasons; because of their predilection for corpse paint, the way they played their lutes really really fast, that they preferred grunts and shrieks in lieu of any actual singing, all of their songs were about Chaos gods, that they would occasionally burn down the odd temple of Sigmar, or because people had been brainwashed by corporate mainstream bards and just weren't ready for anything as real as them yet.

In any case, when Mordheim got levelled and society collapsed Torvald and Helsinki found the bleak aftermath much more to their liking. Amongst the smouldering ruins countless extremist cults sprung up seemingly overnight, and it seemed as though these two malcontents may at last find something that they could belong to.

Sadly for them, they soon found out that life in a proper Chaos cult involves an awful lot of very tedious ceremony and was not anywhere near as wilfully destructive, anarchic and... well... chaotic as they would have liked. For months they lurched from one cult to the next, never able to stick with any for too long before the ultimate badass leader of said cult would tire of their preposterous cocking about and banish them from his sight. Torvald and Helsinki were slowly coming to the conclusion that all these jerks must have been brainwashed by corporate mainstream cults and just weren't ready for anything as real as them yet, and were on the verge of leaving Mordheim altogether when they encountered some of the Disciples of FaDoom, rummaging through bins behind the burnt ruins of an alehouse. They heard tales of the Great Prophet FaDoom, of how he foresaw the doom of Mordheim, of how he could transform men into hideous beasts with blasts of green fire from his mighty skull mace, of how he sometimes didn't seem to know exactly what was going on...

Dümbar doesn't like Torvald or Helsinki. Their wild and unpredictable nature makes him nervous, but he's too scared of them to ask them to leave. Occasionally he will wave the skull mace at them in the hope that it will sort things out for him; but the damn thing just cackles maniacally and then incinerates something else entirely before getting back to shouting at him in that incomprehensible northern tongue.

Torvald and Helsinki find these vulgar displays of Dümbar's power quite awe inspiring, and on the whole are pleased to have finally found a home where they can cause as much havoc as they like, and play their lutes as fast and as loud as they please all night with no complaints.

Dümbar is fairly certain that Torvald and Helsinki want him dead.

prophets of FaDoom pt.3

2011-07-11T17:11:00.003+01:00

Of course, not everyone was immediately convinced of Dümbar's powers. Amongst the mob of bearded loonies that first sought out Dümbar's shabby hovel was one Helmut Blaueflasche, an especially unhinged militia veteran prone to conspiracy theories and occasional moments of terrifying clarity. Helmut had a few questions for Dümbar; like why, if he had indeed predicted the arrival of a city-flattening meteorite, had he not fled to safety beforehand? And also, where was his goddamn money?

Helmut would never find out. As Dümbar stood before the mob proclaiming himself to be a great prophet and doomseer, Helmut got as far as "Yeah, but hang on a minute..." when he was cut short by the skull mace that Dümbar was waving about above his head. To the surprise of everyone (most especially Dümbar himself), the skull atop the mace began shrieking in some ancient northern tongue. The empty sockets of the skull began to glow with an eerie green fire, and as the shrieking became more agitated bolts of fire shot the eyes of the skull and struck Helmut, consuming him in flame and smoke.

The mob fell silent. The silence gave way to gasps of horror and astonishment as the smoke cleared, revealing that rather than being destroyed by the baleful green fire Helmut had been transformed into a hideous fly-headed mutant. Clearly the Great Prophet FaDoom was also a mighty sorcerer...

Dümbar found this more than a little alarming, but figured it was best to play along if he was to convince the rest of the lunatics of his arcane credentials. He has subsequently attempted, on numerous occasions, to rid himself of the terrifying skull mace; but somehow it always seems to find its way back to his side. He can't understand any of the skull's demented shrieking, but it frequently seems quite irate; and the only solution seems to be to point it towards someone or something, at which point something terrible involving green fire happens and the shrieking turns to more of an insane cackling. Dümbar is fairly certain that the skull mace wants him dead.

As for Helmut, he is able to understand the skull's ranting perfectly well; but since his mouth has been transformed into a hideous proboscis he is unable to share this knowledge with anyone else. Therefore it is for reasons known only to Helmut himself that he sticks around. Dümbar is fairly certain that Helmut wants him dead.

prophets of FaDoom pt.2

2011-07-08T14:52:00.004+01:00

On reflection, it is quite easy to see how the kind of people that would spend money on meteorite insurance would also be so willing to believe that Dümbar had arcane powers of foresight; and when his prophetic vision of meteoric annihilation was realised they soon sought him out, eager to learn of new and more improbable ways that they might all be meeting their terrible doom in the near future.

Like all good con artists, Dümbar tended to prey upon the more mentally infirm; and so it is no coincidence that the majority of the "Brethren of FaDoom" are somewhat elderly and, more often than not, raving mad. Most are former militia, veterans of countless grisly wars against the greenskins and beasts of Chaos in the vast, dense forests of the Empire. For some the war never ended, and many kept a few weapons after they were retired from frontline service just in case society crumbled.

Which is quite convenient.

prophets of FaDoom pt.1

2011-07-05T10:11:00.004+01:00

This is the Great Prophet FaDoom.

In the days before the great devastation of Mordheim he was known as Aekold Fastidious Dümbar, a notorious con artist that made his living by selling meteorite insurance to the more cautious/paranoid/gullible of his fellow townsfolk. Most of his profits were either gambled away or lost in poor investments (such as the ill-fated Forest of Loren bypass); this was of little concern to Dümbar, who had never had much of knack for retaining wealth. Besides, he was never going to have to pay out on any of those insurance policies.

And then of course, Mordheim was famously levelled by a meteorite.

Dümbar found this alarming for a variety of reasons. Alarm became sheer terror when an angry mob turned up at his door brandishing a variety of weapons and slightly soiled meteorite insurance policies, demanding that he step outside for some words. With his only routes of escape blocked by the baying horde, Dümbar armed himself with the first thing that came to hand - a rune-encrusted skull mace that he had fished out of the bins along with a load of collectable plates that he had intended to sell on as valuable antiques - and went out to meet his fate.

But fate had something else in store for him. Far from seeking violent retribution, or worse still big cash pay outs on their meteorite insurance, the mob were there to swear fealty to the great prophet that had foretold of their impending doom. Dümbar knew a good grift when he saw it, and raising his skull wand to the heavens he humbly accepted their praise and commanded his disciples to go out and loot the city, smite any unbelievers that might expect some kind of payment off the back of his prophecy, and construct a temple - the Temple of FaDoom.

bei einnahme sofort arzt aufsuchen

2011-06-28T14:15:00.008+01:00

So we found a new place to live.

It is not in Westbury-on-Trym, where the three leading causes of death are 1. boredom, 2. old age and 3. nothing else; and it is a three bedroom house, which hopefully means there shall be no wrangling with tin-pot dictators in flat committees that prohibit all movement, conversation and roller-discos after 7pm because it's a bit noisy and people are trying to die of boredom and old age in peace.

We don't get to move until mid-August; and almost didn't get to move at all, thanks to the credit check agency that vets potential tenants on behalf of our future letting agency. Because I don't start grown-up work until September, there was some question as to whether I would be good for the rent; and the offer letter from my future employer (for which I have studied for five years, completed an essay-style application form, participated in online written, numerical and logical reasoning tests, and attended a two-day assessment centre evaluating my abilities as an individual and a team member) was "only a conditional offer, and anyone can get one of those."

I forget how hard I laughed at this.

Fortunately it is possible to work around their bullshit system, by simply owning up to being a penniless chump and making Dom and the Pixie pay all the rent instead. Awesome.

The whole debacle only lasted for an afternoon, but was somewhat slightly stressful all the same; and so some form of cathartic recreational activity was called for. This was conveniently served up a few days later in the form of a track day at Castle Combe, run by the splendid folks at BHP. Matt, Laura and I took the track slag out for its first outing since we added lightness by, erm, ripping out all the innards and throwing them away. It was an open pitlane, which meant that there was a good mix of exotica, oddities and track hacks in attendance.

We've always found the other folks at these events to be a friendly bunch, and this particular day was no exception. Everyone displayed a remarkable tolerance for our ceaseless questions about their cars, the other guys with BMWs (ours was one of five E36s in attendance) were eager to share their ideas on various performance upgrades, and we even had one old boy offer us a few passenger laps in his Lotus 7-alike. What a tip-top geezer.

There were only a few slight hiccups, the first being a rear wheel that attempted to detach itself from the rest of the car whilst I was tearing around. It probably would have hung on for a few more laps, but I'd promised the Pixie that I wouldn't die and so pulled in to reattach the wheelnuts. The second problem was the brakes, which we worked so hard that the new pads which we had fitted five days ago were reduced to little more than powder by the end of the day.

All of which made for a somewhat cautious drive home. Still, we had an amazing day, met some nice people, and can now legitimately claim to have driven the wheels off of our car.

scud panther

2011-06-13T23:00:00.007+01:00

Well, that was nearly it for university. On Friday I was suckered into attending the faculty degree show, a chance for students to show off work that they had little remaining enthusiasm for to other academics and a smattering of industry professionals, who would feign interest but were really only there for the free food and drink. The engineering bit looked like this.

Pretty wild. For a while I killed time by watching the F1 practice on my laptop; but then the wireless connection inexplicably dropped out, and I was forced to focus my attention on other stuff. Mostly I concentrated on not talking to people, by scampering off as soon as it looked like someone might want to talk to me about my project. This meant I got plenty of opportunity to wander around all the other project displays for the creative product design and architecture programmes, and discover that for all the years I'd spent cocking about with rubbish brackets and complex equations they'd been having fun making awesome models out of bits of card and stuff.

Bastards. I would have attempted to drink my way through the rest of the event but for the fact that I had elected to drive there. This turned out to be something of a mixed blessing, partly because of the torrential rain that, had I elected to cycle, would have necessitated the use of spear fishing goggles and possibly one of those rubber rings with a duck's head on the front; but mainly because of the offensive quality of mojito on offer. When I am king of the world, I will have people sent to the gulags for using chopped mint to make mojitos.

I eventually returned to the engineering project room to collect the prize for Best MEng Mechanical Engineering Project, which was awarded to me largely because I was the only MEng mech student there. Whilst final marks and the quality of the project display were all important factors, it had already been made quite clear that attendance was also a key requirement. Which is good, because I have always considered winning on a technicality to be the sweetest of victories, and couldn't bear the thought that I might have won purely on merit. And they only slightly misspelled my name on the certificate and cheque, so really the whole event couldn't have been much more perfect.

The very best way to round the evening off would have been to go home and have a few drinks whilst my Chaos team cruised to a long overdue first win against Matt, who seems to think that his borrowed human team keeps losing because Blood Bowl is rubbish, and not because he is rubbish at Blood Bowl.

What happened instead was that my Chaos team slumped to a humiliating 3-1 defeat against Matt, who believes now more than ever that Blood Bowl is not some kind of Jewish conspiracy against him.

And so I find myself increasing looking ahead towards the next gaming shenanigan, which most of us have agreed should be Mordheim.

I plan to run with a Possessed warband, but haven't really worked out what I want to have in it yet; so I've just concentrated on painting a random assortment of bearded lunatics and gribbly mutants instead.

Like my Chaos team, the Possessed have a lot of muscle but little discernible talent and so are sure to do well.

2011-06-06T21:33:00.005+01:00

And so that is, pretty much, it.

Assuming of course that I haven't utterly fucked up one, some or all of the exams/bits of coursework that have yet to have marks published. Which I probably haven't, but optimism was never one of my most defining characteristics.

In the meantime, my days are now largely filled with cups of tea, miscellaneous toy soldier tinkering and playing games of Blood Bowl against an artificial intelligence that only lives up to 50% of its job title.

And now: bullet points. You love 'em as much as I do. Don't even try to pretend otherwise.

Gigs 'n' that: went to rather a lot of very splendid electronic music recitals whilst I should have been too busy with other more important things. Amongst others I saw Keelhaul, Knut, Zonderhoof, And So I Watch You From Afar, Shapes, earthtone9 and Humanfly. All of which were awesome, even if at the ASIWYFA gig I got kicked in the jaw so hard that I couldn't eat properly for two days.
Moved house. The mice and I are now lurking about in the Nerd Tower with the Pixie and Dom. Which is great, except that this particular bit of Bristol (Westbury-on-Trym) is like one gigantic assisted living community. I am literally too loud for this place; so as soon as we can find somewhere else that we can all agree on, I shall be moving again. This may take some time.
Much to the surprise of everyone - not least the mechanics who tested it - the track slag passed its MOT, needing only a replacement pump for the windscreen washers. Coolest advisory ever: "Interior stripped out, no rear seats or seat belts fitted." Like we might not have noticed... Looking forward to another full year of near-death motoring.

We finally won the pub quiz again last night. For over a year the Luncheon Club has been dedicated to the destruction of noble gases (apart from a single week, in which we attempted to make reparations with noble gases). Now we can pick something even more inexplicable/pretentious/nerdy to destroy.
Finished painting my Chaos Blood Bowl team in between endless/pointless finite element analysis simulations of suspension wishbones. I'd always wished that Matt liked Blood Bowl as much as I do; and now my wish has come true. I hate Blood Bowl. My Chaos team has so far proven itself to be awful at every aspect of the game, and is firmly planted at the bottom of our league table behind teams run by war criminals, sex pests and Victorian moustache wax connoisseurs. Friday games nights are now characterised by despairing sighs, the urge to drink heavily, and frequent use of the phrase BLOOD BOWL IS CUNT. Despite this, I still secretly love Blood Bowl; and I'm quite happy with how my new toys look.

Got turned on to an epic dubstep re-working of Jeff Wayne's musical based on H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. AWESOME.

tacoma narrows beard disaster

2011-04-11T09:34:00.005+01:00

A couple of months ago, my boss at the big gay department store summoned me to the office to discuss lieu time and holiday. Turns out that as well as my five weeks holiday, I'd somehow managed to accrue 27 hours of lieu time. Which was a bit of a problem, as I currently only slave my arse out to them for about 9 hours a week.

The direct result of this is that over period of two months, I only had to be presentable for about two and a half days; and subsequently stopped bothering to shave because a) shaving is boring, and b) I am fundamentally quite lazy.

Whilst one or two people commented that the fuzziness suited me, I'm pretty sure that they were just being polite because absolutely everyone else asked me why I looked like a hobo - apart from the Pixie, who asked me why I looked like the wild man of Borneo.

It was enough to convince me that a beard is not the sort of thing that I can or should have, not least because I kept trying to absent-mindedly eat bits of it in public. Not a good look. But since it had to go before I returned to work, where a general state of dishevelment and face-chewing is frowned upon, I took the opportunity to try out a few different iterations of hairy facedness.

Tidied up a bit. What I like least about this is that the fact that it's trimmed indicates that I'm actually trying to rock a beard, and therefore definitively failing.

The Pixie: "I love you. But I also want to punch you in your stupid face right now. You douche."

But Homer, the steel industry's been gay for years...

Made famous by Chaplin.

...and finally back to the gawking infantile moon face that ensures I can't buy a hammer from the supermarket without being asked for ID.

True facts.

Despite my assurances that I would not stab anyone with it, the checkout woman was only placated when I produced my drivers license - thereby proving that I am old enough and responsible enough to drive a car and wield a hammer.

zippin' it up

2011-03-24T11:48:00.009Z

The first race of the 2011 Formula One season is only a few days away. I am excited by this.

Sadly, very few people I know can bear to listen to me droning on about how the teams and cars are shaping up; so I'm going to drone on here instead. If you find this tiresome, you can always fuck off and look at captioned pictures of cats instead.

Red Bull

Great car, great drivers. What more is there to say? They've been quick in testing, and are widely regarded as the team to beat this year. Expect the press to continue to try and play up the tension between Webber and Vettel, and more than a few disparaging comments along the lines of "drinks can on wheels."

Renault

In the last few years Renault have turned up at the start of the season with a distinctly average car, which they then develop into what seems to be a genuine contender by the final races, before drifting back to mediocrity the following year and doing the same thing all over again. It's like they just don't do any work over the winter. This year though, things are different; the R31 has been quick in testing, and sports a very fruity exhaust concept in which the exit point for the exhaust gases is at the front edge of the sidepods. I think they're in with a shout for third place and maybe even a win or two this year.

They've faced a fair few challenges over the winter break too; lead driver Kubica managed to impale his car and himself on a crash barrier during a rally a few months ago, and nearly lost his right hand, arm, leg and life. He won't be racing this year, but the hugely talented Nick Heidfeld is standing in for him. They've retained the services of Vitaly Petrov, who last year revealed his prodigious talents as a screaming liability.

Renault also got involved in the second most ludicrous naming row over the break, when they sold a considerable stake of the team to Group Lotus. They declared that they would be changing the name of the team to Lotus Renault, and would be running in the classic black and gold John Player Special livery made famous in the eighties. Which kind of upset Team Lotus, who are supplied engines by Renault but are funded by a Malaysian consortium including Proton, who own Lotus Cars, and (allegedly) own the rights to use the Team Lotus name, and had announced a month or so previously that they would be sporting the classic black and gold John Player Special livery made famous in the eighties.

Yes.

Lotus

See above for all the winter break gossip.

Car-wise, they look to be a good deal more sorted than last year, and have adopted Mercedes' split intake design from last year (which Mercedes themselves have abandoned this year). Trulli and Kovalainen should be able to start bothering the midfield a bit more, and may even pick up the odd point if enough other cars explode.

McLaren

McLaren have turned up with the fruitiest looking car of any of the teams this year, with funny sidepods, secondary intakes and another weird exhaust layout. Mostly none of it seems to work particularly well, so they'll be running a more basic set-up at the start of the season and scrapping for points in the midfield. They're very good at finding extra pace during a season though, so expect them to be serious challengers by the end of the year.

There have been some suggestions that the new crumble-tastic Pirelli tyres will favour Button's driving style this year; but I reckon that there's no substitute for raw speed, so expect Hamilton to come out on top.

Ferrari

Nothing particularly remarkable about the design of this year's Ferrari, but it is undeniably quick and looks to be the most significant challenger to Red Bull. There have been some suggestions that the new crumble-tastic Pirelli tyres will favour Massa (who struggled to get heat into his Bridgestones last year); but I reckon that there's no substitute for infantile whinging and monolithic eyebrows, so expect Alonso to come out on top.

Ferrari were involved in the most ludicrous naming row over the winter break, by giving their car the name F150th Italia as a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification. The Ford motor company attempted to sue them, claiming that Ferrari had misappropriated the F-150 trademark of their best selling truck in order to capitalise and profit from their good reputation.

Ferrari responded by saying that it was hard to see what their point was, since the Ford F-150 is a truck and the Ferrari F150th Italia is a single seater race car that will never be sold to the public.

Mercedes

Team Germany were looking a bit ropey in early testing; apparently they were just checking reliability and making sure that the wheels went round properly, and only brought their full car to the final test.

Which all seems a bit unlikely to me, since testing time is very limited and there is little to gain from not running using your actual car if you can. Still, they were proper quick in the last test and have a good pair of drivers in Schumacher and Rosberg, so they should be near the front of the grid for the first few races at least.

Williams

Williams traditionally do the opposite of Renault, in so far as they start the season with a pretty nifty car which they then completely fail to develop throughout the season.

And it seems to be business as usual, except that their car might be extra nifty this year thanks to a redesigned gearbox and back end that is so low it's practically subterranean. It makes for a quick car, and is so fundamental to the overall design of the car that other teams will find it near impossible to duplicate. Barrichello is a safe pair of hands that should be able to rack some decent points for the team; not so sure about his rookie team mate, the Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado... he's shown good pace in testing, but that doesn't always translate into race results. Still, he brings a lot of personal sponsorship with him; which should help to pay for all the cars he writes off as he tries to work out what all the buttons on the steering wheel do.

Sauber

They've looked pretty good in testing; but then again they looked pretty good in testing last year, and were still struggling at the back of the midfield. Should be exciting to watch though, what with Kobayashi's banzai approach to overtaking and new boy Sergio Perez having never driven in an F1 race before. Expect a lot of exploding cars.

Toro Rosso

Remarkably unremarkable last year, and probably the same again this year - though their pace in testing suggests that they might be able to pick up a few points here and there if the Saubers can take a few other cars out with them.

They need to as well. Buemi and Algueruarsi have each completed a full season for the team, and can't really use the rookie excuse anymore. I'd put fairly good money on one of them being booted out in favour of Red Bull reserve driver Danny Ricciardo if they don't start delivering results, because that boy is the tits.

Force India

Hmm. The car looks a bit... well... fat.

And slow. They got a few good results in 2009, but this was largely down to the fact that the Mercedes engine they were using was considerably more powerful than all the rest. Things have evened out a bit since then, and I don't see them achieving much this year. Which is a shame, because it means that their drivers Sutil and Di Resta (a Scottish rookie, previously very successful in DTM) are pretty much doomed to languish in back-of-the-grid obscurity, despite their considerable talents.

Virgin

Running with one of the lowest budgets in modern F1, only undercut by Hispania (whose entire operation is funded by the loose change they find down the back of sofas in other teams' hospitality suites). Kind of shows too, as their pace in testing plants them firmly at the back end of the grid. Star driver Timo Glock had to miss the last rounds of testing thanks to appendicitis, and new boy Jerome D'Ambrosio looks to be struggling with... well, everything really.

I'd really like to see them do well, as I like their all-digital approach to design and general entrepreneurial spirit; but I can see them struggling this year.

Hispania

At first glance their car seems to be quite well sponsored; but closer inspection reveals that all of that writing actually says stuff like "your company name here." They haven't been able to test the new car because they didn't have it built in time for any of the test sessions, and their drivers Karthikeyan and Liuzzi have largely made names for themselves by driving slow cars slowly. Still, they might not finish dead last if the Virgins fall to bits as consistently as they did last year.

we've got another clog in the torso chute

2011-03-14T23:38:00.003Z

Still very much mired in coursework. But it's infinitely better than being struck by earthquakes, tidal waves and nuclear meltdowns; so I'm keeping some sort of perspective about it.

Found the time to attend a couple of electronic music recitals in the past few weeks. First up was yoav at the good ship Thekla. A curious proposition, in as far as the band consists of one guy (yoav), an acoustic guitar, and so many loop stations and effects pedals that he had at his feet more computing power than was used to send the first dog into space (probably). The resultant folktronica made for quite pleasant listening, even if every song had to be started with a bizarre sequence of slapping, tapping, strumming and occasionally murmuring into the guitar as he set up his pick 'n' mix selection of noises. The only real fault with yoav was that he wasn't Electric Wizard.

Later that week I went to see Electric Wizard. Not straight away, of course; first there was the obligatory support act to endure. I wasn't feeling especially enthused by the prospect of seeing a Norwegian band called Devil - the whole thing had more than a whiff of corpse paint and burning churches. My hopes were lifted slightly when I noticed that they were selling cassettes at the merch table; and then dashed completely when they took to the stage and revealed themselves to be little more than a Scandinavian pub metal band with a vocabulary gleaned entirely from Black Sabbath records. Ludicrous black metal would have been preferable, as it turns out.

Thankfully they were reduced to little more than a bad memory by Electric Wizard's first bowel-loosening riff. Electric Wizard play doom metal; like normal metal, only slower, thicker and heavier. Take the doomiest thing you can think of, drown it in the centre of a planet made of tar, and then hurl that planet into the centre of the sun. In slow motion. Hooked up to Orange amplifiers. They sound kind of like that, and smell a bit like weed.

I have also been out and about meeting new people. Like on Wednesday, I met some guy when he reversed his Chelsea tractor into the front of my car when we were queuing at some traffic lights.

I hardly laughed at all, actually. Still, it's infinitely better than being struck by earthquakes, tidal waves and nuclear meltdowns; so I'm keeping some sort of perspective about it.

The rage was further nullified by a housewarming shenanigan hosted by the most talkative and confident of the Pixie's chums, which left me far too hungover the following day to concentrate on schoolwork; so I indulged in some toy soldier based procrastination instead.

These guys are my new Chaos team for Blood Bowl, a spiffing boardgame based around the faintly ridiculous concept of American football in the world of Warhammer. Matt has always been firmly opposed to such rampant diversity, but Dom and I are determined to try to change his mind anyway. Our efforts will almost certainly yield results; but those results are likely to include a lot of shouting at dice, and each other, and everyone hating Blood Bowl.

catch up

2011-02-21T22:24:00.005Z

Had a splendid Christmas with family 'n' that, during which we taught the Pixie how to play/cheat at such games as Sorry (ludo for bastards) and Uno (snap for bastards).

Whilst there I pilfered my sister's old bicycle, so I could harvest it for parts in an attempt to make the rusty blue aids bike functional; but in the end all it needed was some new brake pads, cables, derailleur, pedal, gear levers, mudguard, saddle and rear wheel. I suppose I could have just used my sister's old bicycle, but... well... it's a bit girly.

It also needs some new brake pads, cables, derailleur, pedal, gear levers, mudguard, saddle and rear wheel. No bother, I now have a mostly functioning rusty blue aids bike that I keep safely locked up with a £3.29 Tesco Value bicycle lock that would take even the most determined thief several minutes to gnaw through.

------------------------------

Made and wore this mask for Matt and Laura's new year's eve masquerade cocktail apocalypse.

Subsequent issues with peripheral vision and depth perception ensured I spent much of the evening trying (and on many occasions failing) to dock Long Island ice teas with my face, with almost - but not quite - hilarious consequences.

------------------------------

I started the new year fretting about exams and coursework, but after a few weeks that gave way to fretting about assessment centres. The good old fashioned interview is apparently no longer deemed stressful enough by many big employers, and so I got to endure a day and a half of group exercises, drive & motivation essay writing, business scenario presentations, written exams, technical and competency interviews, attempting to undermine the confidence of other candidates by the unusual method of being very nice to all of them, and panicking about whether the cling film covering the plate of biscuits is part of the assessment.

Thankfully, it looks like I never have to do any of that crap again - I successfully blundered my way through it all, and have been offered a place on the graduate scheme starting in September. All I have to do is graduate... I figure it's probably best not to actually name the company I'll be working for; suffice to say that if you happen to be flying somewhere and the wings drop off, it will almost certainly have nothing to do with me.

------------------------------

Went to see the very splendid Mogwai last weekend. Although saying that, the gig itself was mildly disappointing... It wasn't bad, by any stretch of the imagination, it just wasn't quite the all consuming and life-affirming wash of despairing euphoria that I expected. It didn't help that the venue was The o2 Academy, which somehow manages to combine the muddy sound and impersonal nature of a large venue with all the claustrophobia and poor views of a small venue. Here was our view for the majority of the gig.

The muddy sound wasn't much of a problem, partly because Mogwai are old hands at getting their levels right, but mainly because the crowd consisted of a lot of rude bastards that would chatter loudly through the quiet bits. Occasionally the crowd would shift, and our view would be improved slightly.

All this, plus they charge £3.90 for a pint of medium strength domestic lager beer. Jerks. Every time I see a band at the Academy I swear that I'll never go back again...

No, a far better venue is the far more modestly sized Croft, where we found ourselves two weeks earlier watching frenetic Brummie post-hardcore oiks Shapes. And they were bloody brilliant, as were Hymns and Idles... in fact the whole evening was great, it played out like a mini festival with six bands playing across two rooms and a wicked DJ in the front bar. The Boy turned up halfway through to show off some of her new grapple/throw techniques, and the evening was rounded off nicely standing on chairs and shouting along to Edwin Starr records.

------------------------------

And finally, some top notch tinkering with the replacement of my rear brake pads. The extent to which I got my money's worth out of the old set of pads is illustrated below.

Plenty of life left in 'em. Thanks to the Pixie for cups of tea, Rich for some quality bodging, Matt for turning up with three types of lubricant, and Laura for doing most of the actual work.

i'm not dead

2011-02-04T14:52:00.003Z

Probably busy with schoolwork or something, I don't know.

Watch this, it's funny.

twinkle twinkle

2010-12-29T19:40:00.004Z

blah blah blah christmas lights blah blah.

Fifth place:

Bonus points:

+1pt Remembered to turn lights on

Penalties:

-100pts They're shit

Total: -99pts

Fourth place:

Bonus points:

+10pts Trying to be tasteful

Penalties:

-50pts Trying and failing to be tasteful, because you still have lights on the front of your house. Pricks.

Total: -40pts

Third place:

Bonus points:

+25pts Almost painfully garish

Penalties:

-25pts Continuity error (more than one Santa)

-25pts Santa on see-saw with snowman (too much frolicking, implies poor work ethic)

Total: -25pts

Second place:

Bonus points:

+30pts Petty next door neighbour one-upmanship

+25pts Bazillion gigawatt planet-killer bonus

Penalties:

-60pts House on left looks a bit like a Ukrainian gay bar

Total: -5pts

First place:

Bonus points:

+1,000,000pts Visible from space

Penalties:

-1pt Insufficient epilepsy warning stickers

Total: +999,999pts

Merry Christmas, happy new year, etc.

because crime never takes a holiday, kids

2010-12-22T14:12:00.007Z

My bicycle has been giving me some trouble of late. The chain would occasionally skip off the back gears and get wedged between the frame and cassette; this problem was solved with the careful application of a chunk of metal and some cable ties. I fixed a wobbly pedal crank with chopped up bits of beercan, replaced a pedal with knackered bearings by scavenging a replacement from another abandoned bike, and hadn't quite got around to looking at the front gears which were so worn that the chain would slip every 10 revolutions or so.

It has been suggested that what I really need is a new bicycle; but I've always maintained that it makes more sense to wait until this one gets stolen, and then get a new one.

Well guess what I found when I went to cycle in to school this morning?

That's right; a bike. But - crucially - not my bike. My bike is silver and red. The bike it seems to have been replaced with is (forgive me if this gets a bit technical) a Rusty Blue Piece of Shit with Non Functioning Brakes.

On the plus side, I do now appear to have become the owner of a bike so shitty that even a bike thief doesn't want it. Although I can't shake the feeling that I might catch some kind of virulent disease from it...

reasons why the pixie is awesome

2010-12-14T08:09:00.006Z

#104:

Toys are cool.

theme music

2010-11-15T15:49:00.003Z

You can't have the theme music from Paddington Bear, because that's already Paddington Bear's theme music. He has dibs on it.

Paddington's special power is that he is 3D in a world that is otherwise entirely 2D. Being 3D might not sound that cool to you, but it seems to make people think shit films are great; and if you met someone who existed in four dimensions and was perpetually rotating onto their own mirror image, as well as producing marmalade sandwiches from their hat, you'd be pretty damn impressed.

So you can pick anything that isn't already someone else's theme music; like God Hates Us All by Slayer, for example. Of course you don't want that, it's just an example. Pick your theme music and the rest will follow.

I'm going to go for Rock 'n' Roll Pumpkin by Green Jellÿ.

I figure my special power is going to be something along the lines of driving around real fast, leaning out of the window with my head on fire.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

...and then I went to a party at Casa del RoboJew where we did maths for two hours and everyone else got drunk and mocked us. It's good to have him back.

futility room

2010-11-09T00:25:00.002Z

Went to gay man's house dressed as Captain Scarlet. Everything that has happened previous to this is little more than a footnote.
Fire, and lots of it.
Saw Dillinger Escape Plan (awesome) supported by Rolo Tomassi (also awesome) and The Ocean (derivative German metalcore wankery).
Churchill and Chu proposed the following correlation for laminar free convection (where Ra is less than 10 to the power of 9);

Mouses are alright.

coursework coursework coursework

2010-10-18T10:45:00.002+01:00

I'M TAKING THE HYDRAPLANE TO BELLINGHAM

burn baby burn

2010-10-10T16:45:00.003+01:00

A week or so ago, I received this text message from my good friend and private brain care specialist Tim.

To anyone that has met Tim, this will not seem an unusual request in the slightest.

I did attempt to extract more information, but all I could get from him was that it would be in west Wales, and there would be someone dressed as a policeman in the cock. It is still unclear whether this is some kind of art thing (when not busy falling of motorbikes and breaking his legs, Tim studies photography), or merely a leisure pursuit.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

life-work-school-procrastination balance

2010-10-04T20:37:00.007+01:00

So what's happening is this.

I finished my fuel-saving aerodynamics research/playing minesweeper job a couple of weeks ago. The boss was very happy with the work that I did, primarily because he doesn't know how much time I spent playing minesweeper. He's going to go over the stuff I did and present it to the university, with a view to conjuring up some kind of engineering get-rich-quick scheme. If he's successful, and if the funding is available, I'm straight back in there with some kind of part-time job; which would be cool, because his various motorsport contacts make him a very useful guy to know... but for now at least, it's done, and I no longer have fevered dreams about gleaming white DAF XFs.

Mmmm... articulated...

Pretty much as soon as that ended, school started. Now, I always knew that the final year of an MEng would be hard work; but there's knowing, and there's KNOWING. And now I fucking KNOW how much work I have to do this year, and it's more than a little overwhelming and, frankly, terrifying. Almost ninety percent of the mark this year comes from coursework, and to get it all done to a decent standard I will need more time.

So I've decided to try to drop one of the two days a week that I spend slaving away at The Big Gay Department Store; and if they don't go for that, I guess I'll be dropping both days. I don't really want to quit outright, as I need money for shiny things (and food, I suppose); but at the same time, I need to be able to find some sort of balance between attempting to master engineering, being a slightly camp sales assistant, and indulging in other social activities. Like checking out painfully contemporary jazz and drinking fancy beer on a boat, for example.

Which, by an astonishing coincidence, is exactly what happened on Friday when Sam invited us to The Grain Barge to check out his workmate's band. The band in question was Eyebrow, a thoroughly decent modern jazz two-piece consisting of drums, trumpet and a lot of reverb. They were cool.

The second band were called Busnoys, and they sounded like this.

Possibly the band that the phrase "Spiralling vibraphone wankery" was made for. But the important thing is, Eyebrow were cool and the beer was fancy.

lobster shanty

2010-09-27T20:50:00.016+01:00

This has turned out to be a summer of big dumb action movies.

It started out with Predators; which in the grand tradition of sequels, was nowhere near as good as the first one. It ticked most of the alien laser death romp boxes, but was a tad too predictable; and crucially, it didn't feature a chaingun-toting Jesse "The Body" Ventura. To be fair, this is a flaw shared by many films.

Next up was The A-Team. My only real expectation of this film was that it should be so ludicrously over the top, it would make Die Hard look like a documentary about modern policing and hostage negotiation. On this front at least, it did not disappoint. A great way to get hammered is to play a drinking game whereby you watch The A-Team, and every time something stupid and/or impossible happens, you take a drink. By the time they're flying the tank, you'll be paralytic. In fact, the only major failings (apart from the aforementioned lack of Jesse Ventura) was the absence of the white and red Corvette, and the fact that when Face managed to rustle up a speedboat halfway through the film, he didn't impregnate anyone in the process.

The Pixie and I rounded off our summer of big dumb action movies last week, when we went to see The Expendables. Slightly reminiscent of eighties classic Commando, this film was set in some kind of fantasy universe where men were real men, women were real women, and absolutely everything else was exploding. Like, all the time. It was so ludicrously over the top that it made The A-Team look like a documentary about military corruption and international crime networks.

Meanwhile...

The Renault World Series rolled into Silverstone a couple of weeks ago, and since it was free we (Matt, Laura, Dom, The Pixie and I) decided to bimble along. The day featured the same selection of races, static car displays and bacon sandwiches as last year...

...but sadly lacked the glorious sunshine of the previous year. It also lacked a chaingun-toting Jesse "The Body" Ventura; but he wasn't there last year either, so this was less of a disappointment. Ultimately, it was a fun - if just a little chilly - day out that got us thinking about our vile track slag again.

It's probably fair to say that the track slag has been somewhat neglected of late. The last time we took it out (a quick spin around some local roads to make sure that the wheels still go round), we noticed that the handbrake warning light was staying on... Matt and I decided to get to the bottom of the problem.

We started by eliminating all of the most complicated, unlikely and time-consuming possibilities first; a process that involved removing wheels, sucking air through teeth and shouting at wheel hubs. Then we noticed that the switch for the handbrake light was slightly bent out.

Bastard switch.

Still, we got to finish stripping out some of the superfluous bits of electrical system and gaffer-taped up the rest.

With next to no interior, the slag is now noisy, raw and unsophisticated, and feels like a proper deathtrap.

This pleases me.

linky linky

2010-09-16T16:22:00.008+01:00

Ahh, links and lists and lists of links. The last refuge of those to busy/lazy/boring to write about anything else.

The following is an assorted bunch of crap that has most recently been rocking my world. Rocking it. Behold!

Girl fronted indie/alternative bands from the 90s.

27b/6.

Boxes of cheap red wine.

[adult swim] games.

Rat style cars.

just because i'm paranoid, doesn't mean my hair gel isn't out to get me

2010-09-02T13:55:00.004+01:00

I've started to read the label on my hair junk as a motivational message for some guy called Matt Clay; a man I have never met, and who isn't me.

So now the stuff that lives in my bathroom cabinet is actively conspiring against me, lending its full support to a faceless and unknown adversary.

Fuck you, hair care products.

workin' nine to five... ish

2010-08-30T21:54:00.004+01:00

So, I turned up on Tuesday last week to talk to this guy at university about work 'n' stuff. We spent about an hour trying to thrash out just what I ought to be doing, and then another hour talking about motorsport. Turns out that we've been in the same place at the same time before; the pit lane at Brands Hatch for the 1984 British grand prix. He was working for the Williams team as an engineer of some description; I was a little further down the pit lane in the Brabham garage, wearing a bad sweater and hanging out with my new pal Riccardo Patrese.

Anyway, it turns out that the nature of my work is such that I can pretty much do it all from home; and so I spend half my day researching fuel saving aerodynamics, and the other half playing minesweeper.

However, I do take my minesweeping commitments quite seriously; and so there has been no time for toy soldiers, my busy work schedule allowing for only the most essential booze-soaked engagements such as The Boy's birthday (many happy returns 'n' that), and banger racing in the picturesque Mendip hills followed by a delicious roast lamb dinner (thank you Charlie Cat).

swivel-eyed

2010-08-23T22:11:00.004+01:00

I recently served a mad woman in the Big Gay Department Store. The conversation went something like this.

"Hello darling. Does this come in a box?" She's brandishing a frying pan.

"I'm afraid not madam, it comes as is. I could wrap it in some bubble wrap for you...?"

"That would be wonderful darling, thank you." I set to expertly smothering her shiny new cookware in bubble wrap.

"You're doing a marvellous job..." she looks at my name badge "...Ben."

"Thank you. You're very kind." And possibly quite mad.

"You don't have spiky hair like him." She gestures to my colleague Tim, a quite exceptionally gay man with whom I hardly flirt at all.

"No madam, he's a wild anarchist. I'm more of a mild-mannered hippy."

"I see. How old are you Ben?"

"I'm thirty-two."

"You must call me mummy."

"Errr..."

Cue shrieks of laughter from Tim.

In an entirely unrelated story, the Pixie and I bimbled over to see my parents last week. We spent a pleasant few days battling giant spiders, smashing furniture with axes and devouring delicious Thai food. The day after our return I inadvertently found a cure to my near crippling Forza/toy soldier painting addiction, by getting some sort of job or something. It's a temporary full-time position, working at the university for some guy that's researching fuel saving aerodynamics. Essentially, it's Pimp My Heavy Goods Vehicle. I start tomorrow, when we'll have a bit of a brainstorm in which we'll try to work out exactly what my job will be.

All of which means that today was pretty much my last chance to get any painting done; and here it is.

Yup, I finally managed to get some actual boyz painted for my super retro old skool rogue trader ork army. The photo is a bit blurry, because a) it's late, and I've had a few glasses of delightfully cheap red wine; and b) this conveniently covers up what a rushed job I've done on them.

no stories, just toys

2010-08-12T16:57:00.003+01:00

It's not that I haven't been doing stuff; although I must confess that now that I am solidly entrenched in my summer break, my days are mostly filled with toy soldiers, endless repeats of Top Gear, and bold voyages of 90's indie rediscovery.

But there's also been weddings, and barbecues, and day trips to medieval cities. Problem is, it's all been great; and no-one wants to hear about that.

I should probably start getting back into some project work in preparation for my fourth and final year. That'll give me plenty to complain about. Meanwhile, here's more toy soldiers.

This hideous creature is the warcaster for my Cryx force, which means it's her job to make sure that all my exploding steam-powered zombies shuffle in the right direction and explode at the right time. Apparently her name is Master Necrotech Mortenebra; but I like to call her Clicky Woman, as that's the noise I imagine she makes as she scuttles along on her ghastly robot spider legs. She is accompanied by a goon called Deryliss, who helps to cast spells and makes the tea.

These chaps are Defilers, although "the community" tends to refer to them as Death Chickens. As far as I can tell, their job is to rampage about and blast things with sticky corrosive goo before being smashed by bigger stuff.

And finally, Mechanithralls. Their special moves include punching stuff with their big fists, catching fire and dying (thanks Matt).

it is indeed the loveliest of days

2010-08-04T17:56:00.004+01:00

I let The Boy trick me into going to a bar gig at The Croft this week. A good thing too, as I actually got to see a couple of very cool local bands for less than the cost of a pint, and drink pints of imported lager for slightly more than the cost of a pint.

First of the two were the splendid Mustard Allegro. As it turns out, it was guitarist Alex's birthday; which meant that all of the handful of people in attendance had to sign a card for him. It also meant that he had down a shot at the very start of their set, and then another after every three songs played. Unfortunately for him, Mustard Allegro songs tend to be frantic blasts of surf guitar seldom lasting more than a minute, and they played a lot of them. On the plus side, the music all has a somewhat room-spinning quality to it anyway, so nothing seemed particularly out of place.

Merch was available from the Asda bag that the drummer kept with him. My only complaint about the otherwise very excellent mini album Dwarf Shortage that I purchased is the title; if they had only called it Shortage of Dwarves, there might be a possibility of 'shortage' becoming the collective noun for dwarves.

The other band were Narco Lounge Combo, a groovy/sleazy drum 'n' guitar two piece. They mostly did lounge covers of songs by dead people, along with a few original numbers. "This one's about a far off and exotic place; it's called Aztec West." Mostly it all had a very cool Tiki space-lounge vibe to it, helped in no small part by the pair of electronic gizmos that made haunted jungle noise and flashing lights happen. "These are powered by very small nuclear devices, no bigger than a cigarette packet. They're perfectly safe, of course; but please don't look directly at them during the xylophone solo."

Wizard.

Meanwhile, in toy soldier land...

This thuggish brute is Borukk Mukmasha. So right now, my army resembles that of a twelve year old kid; consisting as it does of one warboss, four dreadnoughts and no troops.

slow news day

2010-07-29T08:15:00.008+01:00

I spotted this on the way to the Nerd Tower the other week.

That's right, the bonnet of this unassuming 1997 Rover 414 is held shut with a cunning latch and padlock arrangement. I'm pretty sure that I know what lurks under the bonnet of a 1997 Rover 414, and I am of the opinion that it does not warrant such security measures.

Meanwhile, in the land of toy soldiers; Bile Thralls!

Zombified meatsacks dispensing gastric horror from cannons plugged directly into their digestive tract. Every so often, one of them will explode. What more could you want?

false metal = destroyed

2010-07-19T22:54:00.004+01:00

And so on Sunday, our Luncheon Club destroyed False Metal; helped in no small part by my knowing the title of Enrique Inglesias' new single.

I'm not proud.

In other minor achievements, I also seem to have passed all of my exams. Nice.

gigs and zoos and mice and deadly deadly robots

2010-07-14T16:06:00.006+01:00

All of these things.

Went to the second worst live music venue in Bristol to see The Black Keys with the Pixie last week. Only one support band, The Features; who sounded like The Kings of Leon might if they had pursued a different kind of MOR mediocrity. Nothing against the Kings, it's just that I prefer the older stuff.

Which is also true of The Black Keys, though because I'm not exactly a lifelong fan I feel like even more of a prick for saying it. Fortunately they didn't rely too much on newer material, and topped and tailed their set with hefty chunks of thick freaky scuzzy foot-stomping drum 'n' blues rock goodness. Splendid.

The next day we went to Bristol Zoo, since I've lived here for eight years without ever seeing it and it kind of seemed like the right time to finally do it. The first animal we saw was a wild rat attempting to drag an empty Ben & Jerry's tub into the undergrowth by the lion cage. After that we saw locusts fornicating, a bunch of lizards, and monkeys doing wicked monkey stuff.

We also purchased two shiny new mice. They are small, and scared of everything. The shortlist of potential names included Scorponok, Behemoth, Miss Alissa and Jenny Truant; but I eventually settled on Tetsuo...

...and Kaneda.

Because they are fun names to shriek at tiny mice.

Meanwhile, in the world of toy soldiers...

Things have ground to a halt somewhat on the orky front, whilst I agonise over which shade of green to use for their flesh. I have not been idle, however; I have been painting toys for a different game entirely...

This is a Slayer Helljack for Warmachine. Warmachine is a game set in a universe where technology and magic and heroes and blah blah blah.

The important thing is, my army will be filled with deadly robots and exploding steam powered zombies.

BLAMMO.

ham ham ham

2010-07-07T15:15:00.011+01:00

A few days after the last feverish bout of slag-poking, I tried to start the thing up again only to discover that the ignition system didn't want to play. A brief discussion with the rest of the gang drew us to the conclusion that the after-market alarm and immobiliser was probably to blame. Reasoning that the track slag was (for a variety of reasons) a far less appealing prospect for potential car thieves since we had taken over ownership, we agreed that the alarm was infinitely more trouble than it was worth and it had to go.

Trouble is, of all the things on the car that we know nothing about, the electrical system is the thing that we know the most nothing about. Or the least. In any case, removing the glove box to find this...

...didn't exactly fill us with enthusiasm.

Still, we'd made our minds up by this point. To take on this Herculean task we had me (not a great start), two different sets of wiring diagrams (which seldom agreed with each other, and frequently didn't seem to have anything to do with the car at all) and a RoboJew, who turned up with a toolkit full of all sorts of exciting electrical jiggery-pokery. For a while we attempted to make sense of what was what and formulate some kind of plan; but eventually we got bored and just started to make educated guesses as to which wires should be cut and reconnected.

Distinguished careers in the field of bomb disposal await neither of us.

Matt turned up just as we were tidying up the last bit of wiring, the hideous tangle of alarm-death-misery having been removed and unceremoniously dumped on the ground next to the car.

Seemingly satisfied with our efforts, he declared the whole shenanigan to be a rousing success before graciously taking all the credit when the slag fired up first time. What a great guy.

Since then, the battery has drained itself all over again. *sigh*

Meanwhile, Mahmond the Iranian has seemingly disappeared; which has given me more time for toy soldiers. Behold!

This ye olde dreadmob may look to some like a ramshackle bunch of metallic eggs on legs with silly claws; and in fairness, that's because that is exactly what they are. But they'll sure settle Smithy's hash...

Mata Hari: August 2007 - July 2010

2010-07-05T15:11:00.002+01:00

I probably shouldn't have fed you so many chocolate coins last Christmas.

it still functions

2010-06-20T00:32:00.007+01:00

Plan A was to disconnect the battery for a while, and then re-connect it (the classic switch-it-off-and-switch-it-on-again manoeuvre). The problem with this was that the slag's alarm had drained the battery, so reconnection achieved nothing.

Plan B was to hook up another battery entirely - the one from my car, for example. This worked a treat, and after little more than twenty minutes of buggering about our beloved(ish) track slag was burbling away quite happily. Our escapades should have ended there with victory tea and Jambalaya, our mission having been successfully accomplished with ruthless military efficiency.

Unfortunately, whilst I was returning my battery to its rightful place (ie. my car) and musing on how nice it was that everything had gone so smoothly for a change, I managed to drop the spanner I was using; and instead of falling straight through the engine bay and landing on the floor, it landed on the splash guard and slid away far, far from reach...

So an hour and a half later we were still out there, with the front of my car jacked up whilst we debated which of us had the smallest and girliest hands and forearms (it was pretty much a tie between me and the RoboJew, as it happens).

When we finally retrieved the elusive tool, I further underlined my stupidity by forgetting to take away Matt's chocks from behind the rear wheels and reversing straight over them. Matt wasn't angry, as such; but he did use the kind of voice that he might use to oppress an entire race of people that he considered somehow inferior, if he ever felt so inclined.

Which I'm sure he doesn't.

Meanwhile, I seem to be tutoring English to an Iranian man. Mahmond is 45 years old, and has only recently moved to the UK from his home in Tehran. I feel like a bit of a fraud, on account of the fact that I am in no way formally qualified for teaching English, and generally don't know what I'm doing; but he seems happy enough to pay me for my time, and I have so far resisted the urge to press him for information on what it was like to live through the Iran-Iraq war of the early to mid 80's, so I guess it's going okay.

And finally... Toy soldiers have been absent from this piece-of-shit blog for a while now. Time to make amends. Here's what has been cluttering up my painting area most recently...

Yup, like a sucker I've been trawling eBay for classic/old/malformed/crappy models from when I were a lad, and now have a fairly sizeable collection of ye oldy space orks to scatter across the living room. This dreadnought is the first of the bunch to be completed; but I seem to have found a fairly quick way of painting them, so expect more photos of dated nerdy crap to be filling this space in lieu of any kind of meaningful narrative soon.

i learn it from a book

2010-06-09T16:20:00.007+01:00

Hmm. I seem to be getting rather slack at this blogging malarkey... now where was I?

Ah yes, the wedding of Dr Sister and Mr Dr Sister. Essentially, it was a splendidly drunken shenanigan. There was lots of free booze and sweets, no-one had to get nailed to anything, and I discovered that I have loads of ghastly second cousins who are all anonymous to me, but all seem to know my name.

Pockets bulging with liberated sherbet and hangovers slowly fading, the Pixie and I fled to the New Forest for a few days. There we stayed in a delightfully tumbledown thatched cottage full of expensive tat...

...checked out some motorised roller skates from the 50's...

...and poked around a coastal fortress full of massive guns and dank rooms that reeked of unspeakable horror. The ice creams were nice, though.

Upon our return, there was car-poking galore as Matt, Laura and I (with the kind assistance of Sam, who fetched tea and hammers) set about further devaluing our track slag by taking everything out of it that wasn't bolted down, and a great many other things that were.

The net result of our collective efforts is that we now have a big pile of crap and a slightly lighter track slag that doesn't work any more. It doesn't work because an individual (who shall remain nameless) accidentally shorted out the car's electrics, possibly in an attempt to gain superhuman abilities that would make them so powerful that they could take over the world. All the people of the world would be united in their fear of their terrifying new tyrant-deity, and skies will blacken with the dense smoke of heavy industry as Mexico is destroyed to make way for colossal rockets that will propel our very planet into the void in search of new civilisations to enslave and devour.

This all just idle speculation, of course. We might have just cut through a wire somewhere. On the plus side, we found 31p in loose change whilst we were pulling bits out; so the slag is already starting to make some money back for us.

And finally, I had the viva for my individual project this week. I'm not sure how well it went; but it has somehow led to me helping an Iranian man improve his written and spoken English.

Indeed.

space hoppers full of chip fat

2010-05-27T15:24:00.006+01:00

It's been a while. But despite my lengthy(ish) absence from the internets, there is little to report on aside from school, gigs and Pixies.

-----------------------------------------

School

I had to finish and hand in my individual project, an undertaking ever bit as breathtakingly exhilarating as its title "The Evaluation and Optimisation of a Master Side Stay Bracket" might lead you to believe.

Once my pulse had stopped racing from the excitement of all that, it was time to revise for three exams. One of them turned out to be fairly easy, on account of the fact that the questions we had been provided with to practice on were pretty much the questions in the exam. The other two exams were altogether more horrifying affairs, in which we were not provided with answers and were instead seemingly expected to work everything out for ourselves.

They didn't go so well. I'm trying not to think about it.

-----------------------------------------

Gigs

There have been lots of these.

8/5/10 - 65daysofstatic. Euphoric post-rock electronica, splendid as always. But for me, the band of the night were the first support act Nedry, who cranked out a bizarre hybrid of dubstep, jazz guitar and Bjorkisms that was nowhere near as awful as I make it sound. There was a second support act, whose name I forget; but the more I think about it, the more it puts me in mind of this cartoon...

(from www.picturesforsadchildren.com - thanks to The Boy for flinging it my way)

11/5/10 - Mouth of the Architect sound like Neurosis playing Explosions In The Sky covers; but since nobody knows who they are either, that's probably not such a good reference point. For some sense of the sheer beautality these guys serve up, listen to Baobab (fast-forward to around the 8 minute mark if you're impatient/have little tolerance for shouting). Support came from screaming-brutal-sludgecore-types The Mire, who played in complete darkness punctuated by complex sequences of stark white flashing lights. It was all quite atmospheric and impressive, until you realised that the lights were being controlled by a guy frantically plugging and unplugging them all at the side of the stage. We also got Merrick, a local mob of fat shouty men that seemed quite good at the time; though this could be because the band that preceded them (whose name I have chosen to forget, for reasons of tact and drunkenness) were so bloody awful.

14/5/10 - Enablers. I've been desperate to see these guys for years, and they did not disappoint. Doom-laden beat poetry backed by post-rock-esque guitar and drum meanderings, one moment softly introspective, thunderously apocalyptic the next. Need to see them again. I also need to see the second support act The Wailingest Cats again. It was like being violently assaulted in a dark alley by a jazz quintet. The other support acts included a bunch of people that I didn't get there in time to see (though I'm assured that I missed precisely nothing), and an unnervingly tall/skinny/half-naked "performance artist" that was hopefully just taking the piss.

-----------------------------------------

Pixies

Sweet, sweet Pixie.

-----------------------------------------

And in other news; my sister gets married on Saturday.

mouse eats cheeseball in a week that otherwise passed by without incident

2010-04-22T16:04:00.003+01:00

OMNOMNOMNOM

Alternative title: I'm busy with schoolwork. Come back in, I dunno, like, June or something.

brain flush

2010-04-14T16:45:00.006+01:00

Gigs 'n' that happened.

Thursday 8th April 2010; Russian Circles at The Thekla (previously known as the Old Profanity Showboat).

Only one support act, a trio of guys called Earthless; who sounded like an electric guitar with wild staring eyes and a beard soaked with cheap whiskey and crystal meth, hooked up to a wall of amplifiers powered by flaming motorcycles, being fired into the sun. They were awesome, and essentially just spent a solid half hour jamming out psychedelic stoner blues grooves, making most of it up as they went along.

Russian Circles were an altogether more sober and chin-stroking proposition, trading in the free-form space rock explosion of their tour buddies for more carefully composed post-rock soundscapes. Despite there being only three of them, Russian Circles are capable of making the most apocalyptic noise; but this is tempered by moments of calm and intricate beauty, as songs unfurl and become entwined with melody... and then the world ends.

Spellbinding.

Friday 9th April 2010; And So I Watch You From Afar at The Cooler.

Again, just a single support act; and the only band of the four seen this week to feature actual vocals. Lafaro were something of a revelation; a really nice bunch of guys that did nothing more complicated than play really good rock songs really well, prompting delirious hooting and questionable dancing from all in attendance. Well, okay; from just me, Charlie and The Boy. They're playing Bristol again in a couple of months, and it seems very likely that we shall go see them again.

The last time I saw And So I Watch You From Afar was about ten months ago, when they played their hearts out to one man and his dog at legendary Bristol toilet The Junction. They were great then, and this time around they were nothing short of life-affirming. ASIWYFA make music that is often labelled as post-rock, and that's kind of understandable as they tick a lot of the post-rock boxes; grand sweeping sounds, wall of noise guitars, complex song structures, no vocals... The thing is, ASIWYFA do it all without the pomp, pretence and tedium of most post-rock bands; and their shows are amongst the most intense, passionate and energetic that I've ever seen.

I think they may be one of the best bands in the UK right now, and almost no-one knows or cares.

Oh well.

all bets are off

2010-04-07T17:12:00.013+01:00

We took the slag to it's first trackday at Castle Combe last week.

Most remarkably, and despite our best efforts, we brought it back in mostly one piece, too (I think we may have left a bit of rear mudflap somewhere on one of the grassy bits).

On the whole we had a good time, and learned a lot. Mostly we learned that it's really easy to spin rear-wheel drive cars on wet and greasy tracks when you have more enthusiasm than talent.

Still, the important thing is we didn't hit anyone else whilst we did immaculate pirouettes around tiny imaginary tracks of our own devising, and having returned with a still functioning slag we now intend to make it lighter and more imbalanced by taking out every single non-essential item. This does not include the stereo, which is of course essential.

I returned from our satisfying day of near-death experiences to find that Charlie Cat had taken delivery of one of her more recent eBay purchases.

We have decided to name him Mr BIMBLE; although certain less charitable South Africans have since dubbed him Mr Binnable.

We love Mr BIMBLE, with his orange fur and creeping horror and hat at a jaunty angle. But we're apparently the only ones.

And what else? Well, it was a bank holiday weekend, so we had to go to the Mendips to watch the bangers. To cut a long story short, there were limos...

...hearses...

...and Reliant Robins held together with bits of string...

...but mostly there was a lot of huddling together like penguins as we tried (and mostly failed) to shelter ourselves from the freezing bloody wind.

Schoolwork now. Get lost.

k-epsilon is the industry standard two-equation turbulence model

2010-03-25T23:35:00.005Z

There has been drinking and Tapas.

There have been heroically manly exploits in the field of car poking.

There has been an oddly confessional road trip with a manager from the Big Gay Department Store, delivering what later transpires to be completely the wrong thing to a customer.

There has been brightness.

But mostly, there has been a bastarding fuck of a computational fluid dynamics assignment, which up until the hand-in date (today) has utterly consumed me somewhat. Even sleep offered no respite; each morning my alarm would go off and awaken me from a dream in which I was resolving the pressure drop of a continuous fully turbulent flow through a rough walled pipe of known dimensions... and I would hit the snooze button, so I could fall back to sleep and carry on writing the report.

Thankfully, this CFD beast has now been slain - after days of wrestling with incomprehensible theory and even more incomprehensible software, I resolved to just blag the rest of it and hand the fucker in. So I am now free to dedicate myself to working on the other two neglected projects, and preparing for three exams on subjects that make no sense.

work rant

2010-03-17T00:00:00.003Z

If you are one of these people;

Instead of treating escalators like the moving staircases they are, you like to just stand in the middle of the damn thing. And then, when you eventually reach the top/bottom, you just stop and look around gormlessly trying to work out where you are whilst a colossal human pile-up forms behind your dithering fat arse.
You talk on your mobile phone the entire time that I am serving you.
You just stare at the message on the screen of the PIN terminal that says "PLEASE ENTER PIN" until the system times out; then tell me that it's telling you to remove your card.
When it's time to pay, you look a bit surprised; and then have to rummage through your bag to find your purse, and then have to rummage through your purse to find your card, and then have to rummage through your bag again to find your diary, and then have to flick through your diary to find your PIN... You must have known that this would happen? You surely realised that at some point you would have to pay for your shopping? WHAT IS THE FUCKING PROBLEM HERE?!
You can't understand why none of the 10,000 or so customers we serve in a day are allowed to just leave their shopping behind the till whilst they do something else.
When I ask "would you like your receipt in the bag, or with you?" you respond with "yes."
When the till cannot read the barcode of a particular item, you say "well, it must be free then!" And you think that's really fucking funny.
You expect me to know where you parked your car.

...I hate you.

engineers have minds made of cold hard metal logic. that's why we make such informed and sensible decisions

2010-03-08T00:14:00.010Z

Y'know how you always have the best ideas when you're drunk?

I am now part owner of the above BMW E36 328Ci.

Telling my mother that I had become a BMW driver was a little bit like revealing that I had been caught looking at child pornography at work. I would imagine.

I have entered into this very dark period of my life as part of a joint venture with a very Welsh girl that likes orangutans but hates toasters, and her chap Matt "why are you melting my toaster, is it because I am so superior?" Smith, after we spent an enjoyable morning trying to find out what it would take to break a Honda Prelude. Despite our best efforts, we never found out; but since the 'lude in question was mine, we decided that the next time we embarked on such a venture, it should be in something more expendable. And so we spent a booze fuelled evening scouring autotrader.co.uk for cheap yet fruity motors, and came up with a fairly decent shortlist of Toyota Celicas, a Honda Civic VTi and the BMW. Naturally, all of the mighty Japanese cars had been sold by the time that Matt and Laura got to see any of them (I was busy perfecting my fake smile at the Big Gay Department Store at the time), and so we plumped for the hideous triumph of form and function that is the BMW. It pains me to admit it, but apart from a startling amount of surface rust and a moderately disturbing coolant leak, it is a pretty fucking good car.

We have our first trackday booked for a few weeks from now, and speculation as to how we will kill our Bavarian track slag is rife. The current list of doomy predictions, helpfully compiled by a lovely Pixie, looks like this:

Head gasket failure
Clutch and/or gearbox failure
Chassis damage
Rear axle damage
Death by Armco (driver failure)
Death by Armco (brake failure)
Fireball
Crash on the way to/from track
Rust
Brake failure (sabotage)

PLACE BETS NOW!!!

Personally, I think it's highly optimistic to suggest that the car might rot into a festering pile of orange dust before we annihilate it ourselves; but thanks anyway for the vote of confidence, Sam.

And as for the possibility of brake failure... we're watching you, you sneaky RoboJew...

school rant

2010-02-25T22:29:00.007Z

It's a common misconception that the British love to queue up for stuff. And on the face of it, there is a great deal of empirical evidence that would support this hypothesis.

This idea is, of course, bunk.

The act of queuing is merely a means to an end. We like to queue because we like to complain. Queuing in supermarkets is the best. We can look at all the other queues moving quicker than ours and complain about that; we can complain about the person in front of us that has filled their basket exclusively with items that don't scan; we can complain about the fact that they only ever open up a new till after we've been queuing for a million years and it's finally our turn to be served; or we can complain about the old boy at the head of the queue that wants to pay for his shopping with a mixture of coupons, buttons and bits of fluff. We don't like queuing; we like grumbling.

Grumbling is our national pastime.

So please bear with me while I indulge in our national pastime and get my grump on. Here's a blow-by-blow/module-by-module account of how school has been giving me The Rage of late.

Dynamics, Noise & Vibration.

Dr VC cannot teach. Fact. There's no doubt that he knows his stuff, and I'm sure that in his head it all makes perfect sense, but he is completely incapable of communicating it to anyone else. For most other subjects this isn't a problem; I can just go by the notes instead. But unfortunately Dr VC's notes are just the same deranged stream of consciousness... dig this;

"As indicated above, if the methods of theoretical modal analysis are applied to linear systems, all the methods used for 1-DOF systems can be applied, vis: (complex) algebraic or phasor (Argand) diagrams to obtain the Particular Integral (steady behaviour) for sinusoidal excitation, the foregoing (for sinusoidal) or "common sense" algebraic methods (for non-sinusoidal excitation) plus superposition of complementary function ("transient") and application of initial conditions can be used to obtain the complete the solution; alternatively the Duhamel integral (called the "convolution integral" by many American authors)."

Fuck you, Dr VC.

Thermofluid Systems.

Okay, so there's three hours of Thermo each week. The first hour and a half is with Dr TM, teaching one topic. The next hour and a half is with RLF, teaching something else entirely. Then the following week, there's an hour and a half of computational fluid dynamics theory with CT, followed by an hour and a half of actual computation fluid dynamics. And then the next week it's back to the start again, and we all have to try and remember whatever it was Dr TM was banging on about a fortnight ago before our heads were filled with a bazillion different kinds of Thermo. WHY, IF YOU WANT TO TEACH PEOPLE ABOUT THERMOFLUID SYSTEMS, WOULD YOU CHOOSE TO DO IT LIKE THIS?!

Operations and Quality Management.

This module is essentially one big group project.

(from www.toothpastefordinner.com - thanks Charlie Cat)

Group projects suck balls.

Group Design.

Way back at the start of the year, a bundle of us came back from a year on industrial placements to discover that one of the bastard modules from the second year had been re-named and moved to the third year; which was a problem, since university rules prevent students from earning credits on the same module twice. So the module is cancelled, and the Group Design module is the half-arsed attempt to fill the gap.

And yes, it's another group project.

Individual Project.

As the title suggests, this is an Individual Project. As such, everything that's going wrong with it is entirely my own doing. This does not make me feel any better at all, as it happens.

Mechanics of Materials.

Seems to be going okay. I can only assume that some dreadful calamity will occur later in the year.

And yet despite all this, I find myself feeling somewhat slightly chipper of late. There must be something very wrong with me...

All is brown exploding into grey infinity

2010-02-19T00:22:00.006Z

Reason notwithstanding, the universe continues unabated.

My life continues to barrel along at breakneck speed, a dizzying blur of procrastineering, putting receipts in bags and passing out drunk. The Luncheon Club Dedicated To The Destruction Of Stuff has been victorious two weeks running now, a glorious accomplishment that I feel I would celebrate more, had I actually been involved in the slightest way at all. I was still on my way back from the GT when No-Face choked on luncheon-shaped justice; and I missed out on the smiting of Skeletor and his Minions last weekend due to the realisation of a plan that had been some 18 months in the making...

Not that it was a particularly intricate plan. At my grandad's funeral back in 2008, Doctor Sister suggested that it might be nice if all the Brooks cousins could get together for a reason that didn't involve death or marriage for a change, and noisily proclaimed that she would play host. We all decided this was a super idea, and so agreed to get ourselves organised and make it happen. The next time we all met, it would not involve death or marriage.

The next time we all met was at cousin Anita's wedding last year. It was broadly agreed that we'd made a bit of a hash of the whole thing, and that we should definitely get together for a reason that didn't involve death or marriage.

And much to our collective surprise, it actually happened last weekend when everyone turned up on my sister's doorstep at lunchtime - apart from me. I rocked up about an hour and a half after everyone else, owing to the fact that there are better things to be doing at 9am than driving 100 miles down the M4. Snoozing, for example.

In any case, a good time was had by all. There was much drinking and merriment, delicious little duck-filled spring rolls, and no grown-ups. Not proper ones, anyway. The day ended with Doctor Sister attempting to orchestrate the reconstruction of an old photo of all of us, that I think was taken about eighteen years ago at grandad's house.

And here's the 2010 version...

Close enough, I reckon.

this is how i roll

2010-02-10T11:59:00.012Z

So with schoolwork piling up and deadlines looming, naturally the only course of action this weekend was to go to Nottingham for a weekend of drunken warhammers at the GT final.

Beautiful Steve and I decided to head up on the Friday night, finally arriving at our destination some time after midnight to find that Rich (whose floor we would be sleeping on) and his chums were still out preying upon women; and so we had no choice but to go out and join them. We picked our way through the streets crowded with screeching harridans and boys in designer shirts attempting to assert their alpha-male status by beating the fuck out of each other, and eventually arrived at the horrifying assault on the senses that is Gatecrasher.

A lot of fuss is made in the British press about how cheap booze and drinks promotions actively encourage the binge drinking culture that apparently blights our society; but I don’t think you can rule out the effect of being trapped in a place so abhorrent that sobriety is simply not an option. So I gritted my teeth, got drunk and spent the next few hours filling my hate-hump and attempting to set fire to people with the power of my mind. Eventually everyone was ready to leave (because the place was closing), and by four o’ clock I was on Rich’s sofa, falling asleep in front of children’s cartoons from the eighties and hoping that Gary (a lunatic Scot that was also staying at Rich’s) wouldn’t try and stick anything in me.

The next day actually involved some toy soldiers.

There is a theory that when it comes to Grand Tournaments, it is the heats that are the most competitive since players must finish in the top 45 in order to qualify and get their free ticket for the finals. In the finals themselves, with the exception of the highly competitive few, everyone is just there to have a bit of fun.

This theory would later be proved to be complete bunk, but in any case I’ve always regarded the first day of any tournament as one that I just have to get through, tumbling down the ranks until I start getting drawn against people with armies at least half as rubbish as mine, or some other crippling affliction that prevents them from winning games; like a fear of rolling dice, a tendency to black out for extended periods of time, or an Ogre army. Which is more or less how it panned out.

Game 1: Daemons

This guy had won every single game in his heat bar the last one, which he lost to a mate that was using exactly the same army as him. I killed a handful of angry devil hounds and a couple of wibbly beasts covered in nipples and claws; and he killed my entire army. On the plus side, the game was over in less than an hour; so I went to the bar for a nap.

Game 2: Dark Elves

Much like the Dark Elf army I got rinsed by in the heats, this was a travelling circus of ravenous beasts and transsexuals with machine guns. I wounded a hydra, and killed his sorceress when a load of rocks fell on her as part of the special rules for this particular game; and he killed my entire army. On the plus side, the game was over in less than an hour; so I went to the bar for a nap.

Game 3: High Elves

This was a nice old-fashioned kind of bent army; the kind where you go through your army book, work out what all the best stuff is and then just take lots of that. I killed two guys on horses and smudged his dragon-riding noble’s make up; and he killed my entire army. On the plus side, the game was over in less than an hour; so I went to the bar for a nap.

So I finished the day in second to last place; which was surprising, as it meant that despite me killing less than ten models and having my army wiped out to a goatman three times, there was still someone doing worse than me.

We almost didn't make the start of the first round on day two, largely thanks to an extended evening program of spilling drinks and dancing like pricks at the infamous Rock City that once again saw us not getting in until four...

Game 4: High Elves

Turns out this was the same guy that smashed me to bits in game five of the heats when I forgot, like, the only special rule his army has. I sure as hell wasn't going to repeat the same mistake, and this time around concentrated on charging with lots of chariots that are able to turn his guys into cocktail dresses full of red goo before they would have a chance to stick pointy things in me. As an added bonus, the game was over in less than an hour; so I went to the bar for a nap.

Game 5: Daemons

Normal service was resumed at this point. The thundering lard monster that led his army wielded a Sword of Killing Fucking Everything that went through my beasts like a cat through hot butter. His task was made easier by the fact that my goatmen were particularly ill-behaved, and insisted on charging towards him at every available opportunity. The final insult came (and please forgive me for getting quite specific in my geekiness here) when my Dragon Ogres charged into a unit of ten Pink Horrors, lost the combat and fled off the board. Through a unit of Minotaurs. Who failed their panic test and fled of the board. I killed one gibbering pink tentacled lunatic and a couple of fire-breathing mushrooms; and he killed my entire army. On the plus side, the game was over in less than an hour; so I went to the bar for a nap.

Game 6: Wood Elves

Unusually for a game against Wood Elves, this was one where I felt like I got to play too. I still lost, but I reckon I could have pulled off a draw if I was less of a numpty.

And so that was it for another year. It's difficult to be sure of my final position in the tournament, as all the numbers were cut off from the side of the results sheet we got given; but I was pretty damn near last. I was, however, the most successful Beastmans player at the tournament; helped largely by the fact that there were only two other people stupid enough to take Beastmans teams, and they only managed to win one game between them. I got nominated for Best Army again, and the High Elf guy that beat me in the third round won the award for Biggest Victory in a Single Game (although they didn't say which game, it could've been any of them... ahem...).

the brightening

2010-02-01T22:56:00.002Z

New words learned this week:

Procrastineering: the act of needlessly postponing the completion of important engineering stuff, by doing something far more interesting, but less worthwhile, instead.

Procrasturbating: as above, but slightly more specific. Also not limited to the field of engineering.

So to summarise: no post for you. I've got other less interesting, but allegedly more worthwhile, things to be doing.