Blogtober fail

Woopsy daisys, first failure so far!
Completely forgot yesterday, was quite busy and found out my nan has gone into hospital, had a bit of a fall and busted her hip and thumb, and smacked her noggin but she is a tough old sort and I’ll be seeing her later in the week.
I had to go sign on yesterday which is always fun. Hardly any interest at all these days, they just look at your book, sign it and let you go. Although last time I signed on, after 6 months it gets very annoying as you are signing on weekly and it feels as if you are forced to look for jobs you don’t want. I get that they think some people aren’t looking for jobs, which you can kind of tell with some people that is true, but when you are honestly trying to find work but not something that will set back your experience, its very frustrating.

In other news, Aliens – Infestation for the DS. If you are a fan of Aliens, and a fan of Metroid or Shadow Complex, I say go and get this game!
Its failing point is it is kind of short, but it is also great fun. I am about 50% through right now, and it is great exploring around the Sulaco and LV-426, trying to find the door welder upgrade, or the flame thrower.

One of my favourite aspects is the team. You can have up to 4 marines in your overall team, and at set safe rooms you can switch between them. If one dies, and you encounter another marine then the new marine will take their place. If your team is full however the marine will just stay there. Each character is also well designed, with anime style icons depicting them and their own personality when talking to other characters. It is only simple characterisation but it makes you try and keep them alive. The best aspect, or worst depending on your point of view, of this is face huggers. If one of your marine has low health and gets face hugged, they will be registered missing but you can find them again in an alien nest and have them rejoin the team. You can then continue playing as them, but at any time this could happen! To Jon Hurt!

Joking aside, it is pretty grim as you change to another marine and see the character you’ve been playing as have a chest burster come out of his chest, and you machine gun that zenomorph-baby-freak to hell.
So yeah if you want a nice little shooter/RPG/horror game for the DS, give it a go. You could do far worse, and it will get you in the mood for its sister game, Aliens – Colonial Marines which I am dying to play.

Virtually no sense of direction

I read an interesting list of someone’s top 10 games earlier, but unfortunately I have forgotten to make a note of the link. The writer of the list had Grand Theft Auto 4 as his number 1 game of the last few years, and fair play I can see why. The game is well written, well presented, plays beautifully and looks stunning.
That is not why I am writing this though. The writer mentioned something and I realised it is true of me as well, and I think it may be the sign of a person who games may be a little too much.

To start, I will begin with this little anecdote. On Friday, I had to take a job application to a school over the other side of the valley. I knew the general route but my dad offered to drive me over there, as he had some errands to run too. On the way back, we went along a road I have travelled hundreds of time going back and forth to a previous job. My dad, fancying a change, took a side road I had never taken, over the top of one of the hills that I have never taken before, and it came out relatively close to my house. Now, as I driver I think it is my responsibility to know the local area like the back of my hand, on the off chance there is a major accident or road works that I have to avoid, and I know most of it.

What I have realised thanks to this top 10 list, is that I don’t know the local area (that I have lived in since I was born) half as well as I know Liberty City.

The slow decline of a once great show…

I couldn’t think of much to write tonight, so I will write about something that has bothered me for quite some time. This is more of a venting session than a blog.
It is about the unfortunate decline of one of the greatest television shows ever created, The Simpsons.
A lot of television series suffer after several series, and are eventually cancelled, or the writers decide to end it. I am not saying I want The Simpsons to end, I am saying that I think it should have.
I think it started around series 11, or 12. The writing began to suffer, and the animation switched from being the classic hand animated style to using computers, and the most annoying thing in the world started. The Simpsons had used celebrity cameos for some time, and used them well (one of my favourites being Mel Gibson). During the later series though, they began using them in just about every episode, and at every introduction one of the family would first gasp, and then say in exactly the same tone the stars name.

There was a beacon of light, the film I thought was brilliant. A bit different, but they used the original writers and it was well done. I think maybe the film would’ve been the ideal point to end the adventures of Homer the Simpsons.
But it kept going, more and more stars, and references to current day popular culture that was not needed before. Two days ago I left the room in rage after the intro was replaced with Ke$ha’s “Tick Tock”. I had actually seen most of the episode before, I discovered it was the one with Eddie Izzard (great comedian by the way). I already don’t like the new intro, with the flat screen TV replacing the classic Simpsons crappy television, but now they completely alter an entire intro with a terrible pop song for no good reason.
The is only one time alternate intros have ever worked for the Simpsons,for the Halloween specials.

I don’t even really watch the Simpsons on TV any more, if anything it makes me angry. I feel happy when I see a grainy old version of the titles appear on screen, as I know it will be a repeat and there is a greater chance it is one of the older episodes. And thankfully, there will always be the DVDs.

Are you afraid of the dark?

Okay so again its been a pretty average to boring day. Made great headway on my models, only have a small handful to paint and good news, the guy on ebay finally dispatched my dreadnought!  When that beast shows up I will be ready to decimate just about anything!
Unfortunately, it is not the Space Wolves official dreadnought, “Bjorn the Fell Handed”, who is actually the oldest Space Marine aside from the emperor himself. For those of you who care and are not in the know, in warhammer a dreadnought is a huge bi-pedal battle tank, like a rustic ED-209 kind of thing. When a truly epic space marine that has proven himself hundreds of times is messed up beyond all repair, but still just about alive, his battle brothers have him placed in a dreadnought. From there, in a state of near death they operate this giant, destructive walking sarcophagus in major battles, and spend the rest of the time sleeping. I really want to get Bjorn as he is one of the most powerful characters in warhammer, and I love the part of his bio that states how whenever he is bought on-line to battle, the younger Space Wolves keep asking him to tell stories of his battles, and he has grown so tired of this he is pretending to go senile just to avoid telling the same stories again and again.

In other news, today I descovered a great web series on youtube, called “The Haunting of Sunshine Girl”, linkage occurs here – Haunted Sunshine Girl’s youtube account.
Basically its about this girl called Sunshine, and her mother, and a load of creepy hauntings and weird people affecting them in their new home. For a web series I think “Sunshine” (her real name is never revealed) is a fantastic actress, as is her mother. Sunshine really plays up the cute teen girl role perfectly, aided by the fact she is actually very cute. The series is huge although the videos are usually quite short. It is also split into separate play lists so you can better follow the story, as it seems to branch from the original haunting onto more as Sunshine and her mother go searching for other haunted places.

In a strange little aside to this topic, Sunshine girl is a huge fan of a paranormal phenomenon known as “BEKs” or Black Eyed Kids, which in the last few months has been a big interest to me too. It may be fake, it may be real, I don’t care the concept is just so eerie its cool. And very frightening.
Here is a great link if you want to learn about them.
It all started when a journalist called Brian Bethel reported to a friend on line a creepy encounter he had with two children back in 1998. Bethel was getting into his car ready to travel home from work, when two children, no older than about 12 or 13, came up next to the car and asked if they could have a ride.
Bethel was about to give them a lift, being a decent sort, but he had a strange feeling about the kids and ended up refusing. The kids kept on asking for a lift, and being refused, becoming more insistant each time, and Bethel felt that there was a strange threatening tone to the older boy’s voice (the younger one actually never made much if any sound).
It was only then that Bethel noticed something about both boys, something that despite looking at them for a good few minutes, seemed completely normal until this point. Both boy’s eyes were completely pitch black. No iris, cornea, anything, just pure black eyeballs.
When Bethel noticed this the older boy became even more threatening and was demanding he be let into the car, and Bethel drove away.

Definitely strange right? but what was worse for Bethel was, a friend of this friend had reported a similar incident. He was getting a lift off someone else after some evening class, and before the class the driver had perhaps unwittingly offered to give two boys a lift home after the class had ended.
The boys were not around initially, so the two men got into the car, and were about to leave when suddenly the boys appeared, but the driver became apprehensive and decided to tell the boys they could not have a ride home. The same occurred in which the older boy became insistent, and then the driver and passenger both noticed the black eyes, after which the boy became threatening and was quoted as saying “Let me in, I don’t have a knife!”, which the passenger said he felt was not intended to calm the men, as it actually had the tone of “I don’t NEED a knife!”. The driver then pulled away quickly, but both men returned about 30 minutes later to see that the boys had left.

Since these encounters, numerous others have occurred with people reporting children, boys and girls, never seeming older than 13, asking for something and becoming insistent, sometimes there is a girl either in place of the younger boy, or with both boys. It is not always in a car either, sometimes the children have been reported knocking on peoples doors and asking to be let in. The strange factor is that no-one has ever instantly noticed the children had black eyes. This has lead some people to believe that, if these tales are true, perhaps there is some low level mind control at work. Perhaps that is why at first people feel as if they should give the children what they want.

There have been no reports of BEKs actually physically harming anyone to my knowledge. However we do not know if anyone has actually encountered a BEK and given in to its demands. Would it harm you? they’re behaviour leads me to believe they would but it could be some form of test. Also they require permission to enter your home, or your car, which has some paranormal fans thinking they could be vampire like entities.
Make of it what you will, I neither believe nor disbelieve the existence of BEKs, or many other paranormal entities, as I await concrete proof that they do or do not exist.

Just promise me, my dear readers, that if a small group of mysterious young children ask you for a favour, check their eyes first.

A quick wash

Another mostly uninteresting day.

I didn’t mention it yesterday but as all the world is now well aware, Steve Jobs has unfortunately passed away. I am not an apple fanatic although I do love my iphone and ipad, but I don’t think you need to be a fanatic to see how much good he had done for the industry in his life. Shame he died so soon, I think he probably had a few more years worth of great designs and ideas left in him.

Back to me, dropped off another job application today, this time for an IT Tech at a school over the other side of the valleys, fingers cross something will come of it.

On the subject of modeling, I have today discovered the amazing power of washes. Seen them used a few times before but never realised exactly how much they add to a model until I tried them.
Basically it is just paint thinned out by water and other chemicals (some people make there own with some sort of floor cleaner, but risky). But it adds a darker (or lighter, depending on what you are using) tint to he model, and also fills in all the crevices and gaps that the base paint will probably have filled in. I have now used “Badab Black” and a bit of  “Devlan Mud” wash on all of my models painted so far, and for such a simple thing it has added more life to the figures.

For example below is a picture of a terminator I painted today. With the exception of the power claws, everything else was just coloured in one solid colour (be it armour, flesh or hair). I then quickly dry brushed a bit of silver over the armour as I like to have a scratched effect. The model at this point looked very bland and unprofessional as I had made no attempt to mix paints or blend any colours.
However I then applied the Badab Black, and it really has given the model a gritty depth.
The power claws I painted afterwards, as they are supposed to be energy based so they did not need to be defined with the wash.
Hope you like it! I am quite proud of it, especially for an experiment piece.

Like watching paint dry

Well, more to the fact, we are going to watch paint dry!

Thankfully the weather today was much better, nice and sunny and not to windy so I finally managed to get the basecoat on all my current Space Wolves. The undercoat only takes 15 minutes to touch dry, and 1 hour to be ready to paint on, so I decided to have a go at painting one of my Terminator / Wolf Guard units, armed with a Storm Bolter and Power Sword.
The paint job and video aren’t that great but I was bored and thought I’d share it with you all anyway, spruce up the ol blog a bit.
I do have to go back and re do some parts, I am not to happy with the face yet but they are notoriously hard to paint, especially the eyes.
Also for those wondering, the music is from Star Trek the Next Generation, it is Tasha’s Farewell.
Anyway, hope you enjoy, thanks for watching!

Horrible day…

Outside it is, horrible. Rain and high winds. Which is a shame really as lately we have had a blistering heatwave, and I was hoping to;
1. Go for a walk in the park and film some stock footage for my videos.
2. Base coat my miniatures so I’d have more ready to paint.

I can’t do the latter as I spray the miniatures with a black undercoat spray paint that cant be used indoors. got a box set up to spray them in so I can leave them to dry for 15 minutes but the box would get soaked in this weather.

I have however managed to glue all of them together now, except for the shoulder pads which I would rather paint individually. I am also still waiting on the Dreadnought, which I ordered from E-bay, when that arrives I should have a ready to go small army.

More tomorrow, sorry for the brief update but I am keeping an eye on tomorrows curry that is warming in the pot!

Welcome to the party pal!

Good-day fellow blogionites!

Well, I have had this blog for several years now and never done anything with it, but my good chum Shepherdnick has introduced me to the wonderful idea of Blogtober. Unfortunatly I am about 4 days late to the Blogtoberfest but flip it like a pancake I will do my best.

Don’t know quite what to write about so I will just wing it for now. It’s a normal lazy Tuesday for me today. I am currently unemployed and alternate Tuesday’s are my sign on day, thankfully today is my non-sign in day.  I say thankfully as I woke up with a mad case of indigestion, felt very ill indeed and didn’t want to move out of bed. Thankfully that has passed now.

I am planning on spending the afternoon gluing together some miniatures. I have recently gotten into the game Warhammer 40k. I haven’t played any games yet as I don’t have a field-able army, I am still in the process of assembling and painting.
I have chosen the fricking awesome Space Marine chapter known as “Space Wolves”. They are best described as Vikings in power armour.

Here is a shot of one of my scout snipers, favourite of my paint jobs so far.

Well thats all for today, see you tomorrow for another Blogtober update!