gah? buh

A nice policeman phoned me the other day, checking some of the details to do with my stolen bike.

Copper: And you said it was stolen out of your garage?

Me: We have no garage sir, it went from the back garden. We have a pretty sturdy land anchor, but my D-lock wouldn't fit round that and the bike; so I put the lock through the frame and back wheel, and used a cable lock to attach it the land anchor. That just happened to be the night they were doing the rounds with the bolt cutters.

Copper: And no-one saw anything?

Me: Nope. Which is odd, because without removing the D-lock - which I'm certain they didn't - they couldn't have cycled away on it. They would have had to carry it down the road, or throw it in the back of a van...

Copper: ...or they could have just chucked it over the fence of number 98 and left it in their back garden.

Me: ...or they could have... wait, what? 98, like, two doors down, kind-of-abandoned-looking 98? With the writhing sea of brambles in the back garden?

Copper: That's the one. So, have you still got the keys for that lock?

And then a few hours later, the nice policeman turned up at my front door with my bicycle. Nothing missing, nothing broken (apart from the cable lock, obviously), just a splash of oil and it was good to go.

Crikey.

And in even more remarkable news, I got all my Orkses finished.

So they're all set to go for the tournament this weekend. They will of course be useless; but fortunately it's a doubles tournament, so the theory is I'll have a team-mate that can do all the winning whilst I focus on what I'm good at - exploding. Unfortunately my team-mate is the RoboJew, who also has something of a flair for exploding. So we'll probably not bother with the winning, and just focus on the toy soldier themed binge drinking instead.

Completing this mighty horde an entire three days before the event I'll be taking them to is a great victory for this administration; and I owe much of this success to the very splendid and ruthlessly efficient Target Gaming, who even as we speak are developing a range of liquid propellant ballistic missiles which will be used for the rapid dispatch of orders to a variety of prime targets throughout the West.

wayne is a bandito

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

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

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

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.