Not "proper" busy, with meetings and appointments and people to see and things to do and blah blah blah. Mostly just the drinking and frolicking kind of busy. The best kind of busy.
I battled Warhammers for for two solid days at the start of the month, at a local gaming club tournament - the Bristol Vanguard's "Vanquish". I typically turn up to such events with the principal aim of not coming dead last; if I can win just a single game, this is seen as a bonus. But it turns out that since various rulebooks got re-worked and re-printed, my marauding Ork horde is now the very epitome of badassery; and even the hastily cobbled together army that I turned up with was good enough to see me finish 6th out of 55. Here's a photo of me and my boyz inflicting a crippling and permanent sense of humour failure on some guy who just moments later was removing his army from the table with a dustpan and brush.
He should have pulled a Renton; a little known gaming technique, reportedly used by a former Head of UK Retail for GW whilst he was being thoroughly trounced by some smug kid.
You may "pull a Renton" at the start of your game turn.
Observe the futility of your present situation. Desperately seek some way of preventing humiliating defeat at the hands of a pre-pubescent gobshite with a chin full of wispy bumfluff occasionally punctuated by weeping acne.
Seeing no way out, place your left hand under the edge of the table, about a third of the way in from the left.
Place your right hand under the edge of the table, about a third of the way in from the right.
Sharply lift both hands and flip the board up, shouting "WARHAMMER IS CUNT".
Stomp away, leaving the child sobbing amidst a pile of broken toys and trapped beneath 6'x4' of chipboard.
The following weekend was Easter, and mostly involved family visits, Mexican food, delicious cocktails, banger racing, rough cider and mild sunburn. And also an awesome gig at The Croft; Palehorse, Big Naturals and Baroness.
I love Palehorse, and am unable to adequately explain why. Their set began with a barrage of noise, and the drummer yelling incoherently from behind his drumkit like an escaped mental patient. An escaped mental patient that plays the drums. After that it all got a lot more noisy and savage. Here is the wonderfully low budget video to their soon-to-be hit single, "What Community What Scheme".
Big Naturals set up in the front room and cranked out some doomy psychedelic hard rock type stuff. For just two guys they made a lot of noise, and I seem to recall quite liking them; but at this point I was still quite blown away by Palehorse, so it's hard to be sure. They'll be playing again in a few weeks, supporting the ever-amazing Taint, so I'm sure I'll be seeing them again.
And finally, the very splendid Baroness. Their twin-guitar proggy-space-metal comes across as a slightly more easy listening version of Mastodon; it's the same kind of set-up, except the beards are slightly smaller. Apparently, a new record is on its way later this year - looking forward to it.
The next day was mostly spent attempting to recover, though my efforts were hampered largely by the fact that I had to spend my bank holiday working in the Big Gay Department Store; and then go out for birthday drinkums with Dom and my other geek buddies.
Through some devious cheese-eating ploy, Dom managed to make his birthday last an entire week, and so the following weekend involved yet more birthday drinkums - this time at Dom's own house. I spent a considerable portion of the evening wearing my powerful shirt; then it all goes a bit blank; then I woke up on Matt "Ich werde Sie sprechen Mexikaner machen" Smith's sofa feeling like death.
Another week passes, and a double whammy of gig action! Wednesday 22nd April; ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead at The Thekla, supported by So So Glos and Middle Class Rut.
So So Glos weren't really my cup of tea; competent enough, I suppose, but they sounded like if they were a bit more rubbish and had a few more trumpets they would be just another shitty ska band.
Middle Class Rut fared somewhat better, despite there being only two of them. On record, they still sound a bit tame to me, but live they sound massive. I guess when drums are the only other thing in the mix and the guitar is turned up to 11, it can only sound awesome (even if the Jane's Addiction-esque vocals start to grate after a while).
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead have as many band members as both of the other bands put together, so should be at least as good as both of them combined. Well, that's the theory; but how does the maths work out?
So So Glos had twice as many guitars as MCRut, but MCRut's guitar was 50% noisier than all of the So So Glos.
So So Glos had one bass, whilst MCRut had none.
So So Glos had, at times, all four band members contributing vocals; but they all sounded the same, so it was effectively only as good as two sets of vocals - still one more than MCRut.
So So Glos and MCRut each had just a single drummer, but MCRut's drummer had "FOR SALE" written on his chest in red marker pen.
...AYWKUBTTOD had three guitars, a bass, keyboards and drums, with vocals predominantly handled by one of the guitarists, but with others chipping in here and there, and sometimes one of their guitarist/singers would play keyboards and the keyboard player would play drums, and sometimes one of the other guitarists would play drums, and sometimes he would grab a mic and charge into the crowd hardcore-style.
Trust a bunch of artists to ruin maths for everyone. They were bloody brilliant, though.
And then the next day... more gig! Earth, supported by Stebmo.
Stebmo are a jazz duo made up of half of Earth; pianist/trombonist/hip geography teacher Steve Moore, and bassist Don McGreevy on drums. It all started a bit iffy, with an awkward plodding piano line sat on top of a very ordinary beat; it sounded like we were going to have to endure 45 minutes of the emperor's new jazz wank experimentalism coming in our ears. Or go to the bar. They're all good options. But by the end of the first song, they'd started to ease up a bit and things suddenly got very groovy. Like, really groovy. This was great. And for all the face-peeling, bile-fueled, spleen-rendingly angry brutality I often like to pollute my ears with, it's sometimes just great to see people playing music and smiling. It was fun to watch the interplay between the two guys, too, especially at the end of a John Coltrane cover (I didn't get the name of the song) where they were each clearly trying to catch each other out with a fearsome exchange of piano and drum solos.
Earth slowed things down again with their megalithic desolate country drone. Not a band for those with short attention spans, they rumbled through a set consisting mostly of tracks from last year's "The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull". Almost impossibly slow, quiet and heavy all at once, and with so much bass reverb that my innards were almost certainly liquefied. Frankly, it's a miracle that I'm even able to sit here typing this crap out. I love this band, but you'll probably hate them.
And so on Monday Ruth and I took a break from boardgames, online TV and tasty rum-based beverages, and headed into to town to see Mr Reginald D Hunter do his stand-up thang.
He was pretty funny. Reginald D Hunter's stand up is mostly just a lot of standing around and talking about stuff; he rambled through a variety of topics, including Hurricane Katrina ("...when I saw my people looting and stealing, just to survive... hell, I'm an educated man, I've read books... but it seems like I'm just one big thunderstorm away from sucking dick for potatoes..."), politics ("I hope he does good things, but I believe that the system will change the man before the man changes the system"), and a bunch of other stuff. Less telling jokes, more telling stories.
The show was held in the Phoenix, an inevitably somewhat pretentious "arts and media centre". Whilst standing around drinking and waiting for the show to start, Ruth and I spent some time debating whether a room full of scraps of wood nailed to other scraps of wood was a partially constructed art installation, or just a room full of crap. (Turns out it was a fully constructed art installation, which happened to take the form of a room full of crap).
I also found this tucked away in a little nook.
In exchange for a mere twenty pence, one could become the proud owner of an original and completely unique example of The Esoteric Miscellany of Hector & Claude. Because I am a sucker, I put in 20p and got this:
Yes, that's right, it's a small clear plastic egg containing a strip of film. On the film are images of an infant sat in front of a slender pair of legs.
I think I shall hide it away for a few years, and then when Hector & Claude have become world renowned and Nobel prize winning exponents of esoteric miscellany I shall bling it on eBay for a million billion pounds.
Unless anyone wants to give me a tenner for it now...
Right, onto the Beastmans. Or, to be more precise, Warhounds; shown here in all their cheap, disposable glory.
These guys are pretty much destined to be annihilated in every battle. Bad dogs.
The Warhounds are useful to have around, but not all that interesting. A Wargor Battle Standard Bearer, on the other hand...
This guy's vigorous flag waving ensures that there is a greater chance of my Warhounds passing their break tests, so allowing them to remain trapped in unwinnable combats against terrible foes that they have no chance of defeating.
And so this week, I have mostly been playing about with a drainpipe filled with charcoal.
Allow me to explain.
We use a special fluorescent dye to check castings for minute surface defects; tiny cracks which, when subjected to repeated cyclic loading, will propagate and eventually result in the failure of the part. Apparently the days of just giving things a cursory glance and declaring that it'll probably do are long gone (unless you are a French car manufacturer).
The parts are dipped into a gigantic vat of dayglo goop, left to drain for a bit, and then the excess goop is washed off with a water gun. And then all the goop and all the water trickles off down the drain, where it goes on to make fish glow in the dark/die, and gets us in trouble with the environment agency. Clearly something must be done. Fortunately, there are a number of companies that can supply and install specially designed activated carbon filtration systems. So no problem, job done, right?
Wrong.
It's too expensive, they say. Explore other options, they say. And it's at this point that the project gets dumped on me.Looking for a different way around the problem, I notice that the dye has a lower density than water - it floats, and can be skimmed off. Brilliant! So I start researching such exciting innovations as parallel plate separators, draw up a few rough designs, think of ways to regulate the way that the dye is removed, and look up a few mojito recipes on the internets (I'll be needing victory cocktails when my genius plans come to fruition).
But when I present my ideas to the guys from our environmental department, they don't like it. They can't see how it can possibly work, even when I demonstrate using a bottle containing a mix of the dye and water. They want a filter, but they don't want to pay £40,000 for it. Can't we just put the water through a bucket filled with charcoal? That's got to be simple to do, right?
Sigh. Of course it isn't, for reasons too multitudinous and tediously boring to go into here. But they want a trial of our homemade filter to be up and running by the end of the week; and so on Friday I find myself standing in the finishing department with a three foot long piece of drainpipe filled with activated carbon granules, wondering how the hell they can expect this piece of crap to replicate the effects of a £40,000 filtration system.
For the trial, we pour 2 litres of dye and water mix into the top of the "filter". It's about 10% dye; you can tell, because the dye is floating on the surface of the water (grr). At first, it looks like all my cynicism is misplaced as 2 litres of water with little more than a few bits of charcoal in it drains out from the other end of the pipe. I'm feeling a little bit upset by this.
But wait! Another two litres go in, and the water coming out of the other end has just the tiniest hint of green to it.
Another two litres, and this time there's no hint - it's just fucking green. With a fat slice of dye on top. Yum.
Another two litres, and then another two, and the water coming out doesn't look any different to the water that's going in. This means we'll need to change the filter roughly every ten litres; or, to put it another way, fifty times every day. Turns out that the reason why £40,000 activated carbon filtration systems cost £40,000, is that THEY FUCKING WORK. Unlike our Blue Peter piece of shit drainpipe.
CYNICISM 1 OPTIMISM 0
Meanwhile... Beastmans.
This week, you get a double whammy of beastmans action; minotaurs PLUS chariots. This is because as attractive as they are on paper, neither is really that much to look at. Minotaurs first.
I run two units of these suckers (in addition to the lesser badasses that hang out with the Black Maul wielding Doombull). Smaller units of great weapon armed death monsters seem to be popular on the tournament circuit, and I can see why; but because I suck, I've never quite managed to get them to work for me.
The chariots, meanwhile, are just a complete no-brainer (until the Beasts book gets re-written and they become special choices, like what they should be).
I recycled the chariots from an old beastmans team for this army.The Ungor drivers were converted from the original (and fortuitously diminutive) Gor crewman, with just a simple head and weapon swap and a minor bit of green-stuffing.
