dramatisation, may not have happened

Maybe if we spent more time brushing up on trivia and less time drawing stupid pictures, we'd do better at the quiz.

no human would stack books like this

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.

rioja

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 .

tacoma narrows beard disaster

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.

theme music

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.

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

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.

no blog post for you

I'm busy with schoolwork and shit.

So no blog post for you.

Apart from this one.

So now I'm a liar, as well as a disorganised jerk.

thumper

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago when recounting the gentle beauty of the Sia gig, that some sort of balance would be restored when we went to see Raging Speedhorn.

If ever there was a gig to annihilate all memory of anything nice ever happening ever, this was it.

Through The Abyss had already started playing by the time we got there. Good, but unremarkable; to my ears they sounded a little like defunct UK hardcore types Medulla Nocte, but since almost no-one knows what they sound like either it's probably not that useful as a reference point.

Start Of Nothing appear to be the outcome of a musical therapy group set up for tourettes-afflicted white supremacists. Except that they are almost certainly not white supremacists.

Shaped By Fate were better than the last time we saw them... but only slightly. Their guttural commands that we should all "step the fuck forwards" went unheeded, as during Start Of Nothing's set the hardest-of hardcore kids had started dancing like morons. Specifically, in that sort of shadow-fighting-I'm-going-to-whirl-my-fists-about-and-do-spinning-
kicks-in-the-middle-of-the-dancefloor-and-if-you-get-hit-it's-your-fault kind of way. It was only a matter of time before a dance fail occurred.



Fortunately, the splendidly monikered and spandex-clad Take A Worm For A Walk Week put an end to all that, by playing such abrasively unlistenable spazcore that even the most determined hardcore bibble channeling the spirit of Chuck Norris couldn't find a beat to roundhouse in time to.

And finally, the mighty Raging Speedhorn, the aural equivalent of being hit by a train. My attempts to avoid injury failed almost immediately when I got caught in the mosh, hurled to the floor on the other side of the room, and got my head cut open with a guitar. Good times.

And that's about it, really. I could write more, but the mice need cleanin'.

Update

I'm not dead, I'm just without intraweb at the moment. We moved house without too much hassle, but for some reason I can't get on to the wireless network in the new place...

Not that it really matters, as I'm far too wrapped up in revising for a maths exam that happens on Thursday to be able/bothered to post anything at the moment.

I'll be back.

Assignment-death-misery

I spent a considerable portion of last week chained to a computer, slaving over an assignment that I had stupidly left until the last minute. Part of the problem was that the brief was, well, brief (“Err, like, design a hand drill, or something…”); and so it seemed at first like there wouldn’t be too much work involved. The main problem was that I wasted far too much of my time playing with toy soldiers and going to gigs.

We went to see Jesu and Mono at The Cooler on Monday. There was a support act too, but I didn’t catch the name – probably for the best, as I don’t really have anything nice to say about it. It was just one guy with a guitar, drum machine, and about a million billion effect pedals. He was fairly unremarkable looking – like one of the squares with normal hair cuts in a styling gel commercial – and at first the gradual build of layers of weird guitar noise he created were quite interesting. But then, about seven minutes into his set, he decided to start screaming into the mic. It sounded a bit like foxes fighting. You could see people in the crowd looking around with bewildered expressions on their faces, wondering if anyone else was hearing the same thing as them. We all were, but fortunately it didn’t last too much longer; he buggered off and was soon replaced by the mighty Jesu.

Jesu are quite difficult to define as a band. Their sound is unquestionably heavy, a huge downtuned dense wash of effect-laden guitar backed up by an unrelenting, almost mechanical rhythm section; but unlike the hate-filled bile of frontman JK Broadrick’s previous band Godflesh, there is an underlying feeling of hope and optimism to the music that should seem out of place, but doesn’t. Even the grinding trudge of “Friends Are Evil” ends with an uplifting twinkle.

Mono are a band that I knew of, but I had never heard anything by them before this night. I had an idea of what to expect – they’re one of those chin-strokingly good instrumental post-rock bands, so all of their songs will be eight minutes long and follow a quiet-loud-quiet-very loud format. Just for the record, I thought that Mono were excellent. However, they did play for just a tiny bit too long; after an hour of delicately/violently strumming our brains out, their two guitarists spent a full ten minutes wrestling feedback from their instruments whilst the tiny girl playing bass stood motionless in front of her amp, Blair Witch-like, and the drummer slumped over his kit like he’d lost consciousness. It seemed like the logical place to finish the set… but no, they went on to play for another half hour after that.

I awoke the next morning with my ears still ringing; and for the next three days slaved away tirelessly (mostly) to get my pesky assignment done. Pretty much as soon as it was finished and handed in, I whizzed of to Surrey to see my parents. Friday was my mum’s 56^th birthday; she wasn’t particularly bothered about becoming a year older, as she’d spent the whole of the previous year thinking she was 56 anyway (this kind of confusion seems to run in the family). We all met up with my sister in London, where we went to see the big crack in the floor of the Tate Modern, and a quite fascinating Terracotta Army exhibition at the British Museum. There was also some Chinese food and Cuban cocktails involved… it was a good day.

My life in (rubbish) pictures

And my elbow still really hurts too.

So anyway, that thing about normal service having been resumed…

What an impeccable sense of timing.

I went onto Radiohead’s website a couple of weeks ago – they’re releasing a new album, entitled “In Rainbows”. Since they are no longer under contract to any record label, the Oxfordshire miserablists have decided to release it themselves. The CD will be available in all good record stores later this year, but in the meantime they have made it available to download from their website. People are free to decide for themselves how much they would like to pay for it, and if they want to pay nothing at all then that’s fine.

So naturally, I was there like a shot – and ended up paying forty quid for a pretentious boxed set that comes with vinyl seven-inches and a CD and a fancy booklet and so on. Plus, I still get to download the album from their website, just as soon as it is made available. Hurrah!

Anyway, about that impeccable sense of timing. I switch on my computer one morning to check my emails, and hey presto there’s one from the good people at Radiohead telling me that I can now download their spiffing new album. Great, except I’m kind of in a hurry to get to school, so I’ll do it later. Two hours of Design Embodiment and Material Selection and one hour of Engineering Mathematics later, I get home, switch on my computer, and have the following conversation (sort of).

Computer: Hey, how’s it going? You know that thing? That window thing?
Me: You mean Windows?
Computer: Yeah, that Windows thing. Well anyway, I can’t make it work. You should, like, I dunno, restart me or something?...
Me: Err… okay.

(---click--- whuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuur…)

Computer: Yeah, no, that kinda didn’t work. Maybe you could restart me in safe mode, or in safe mode with networking, or some other thing.
Me: Nope. Nothing works.
Computer: Well, I’m all out of ideas. I guess you could use me to weigh down paper, or hold a door open, or something. Kinda sucks that you can’t download that Radiohead album now too, huh? Hey! How cool would I look if I was flying out of your window right now?
Me: …………

Stupid machines. It’s tricky to get to a computer at school at the moment, as it’s still only a few weeks into the new semester and the place is full of eager young first years; so I had to resort to using The Boy’s Mac a couple of times.

Good things about Macs:

1. They look like boiled sweets. Well, hers does anyway.
2. Mac users tend to be quite fanatical about Macs, and as such are quite easy to wind up in a classic Amiga vs. Atari sort of way (or SNES vs. Mega Drive, if you don't want to go completely retro).

Bad things about Macs:

1. When your 'proper' computer breaks down and you have to borrow a Mac, you can be sure that the owner won't let you forget about it in a hurry.
2. All the buttons are in the wrong place.
3. The mouse doesn't work very well. Well, hers doesn't anyway.
4. They live in rooms that smell like girls. Well, hers does anyway.
   

Thankfully, I live with Mr Dozer; and whilst he may not know what the dishwasher does, and doesn’t fully understand how all our bins keep magically emptying themselves, he does know how to fix computers.

He successfully diagnosed the problem as Windows being “a bunch of gay” – possibly caused by gay electricity, or interference from a gay weather balloon. The only solution was to completely reinstall Windows.

It’s pretty much all fixed now, apart from the fact that my computer seems to think that it is now American; and as such, disagrees with my keyboard on a number of key issues, such as the location of the @ symbol and the existence of a pound sign.

Nothing a hammer won’t fix.