Go look at it.

Or look here if you’re from the future, again. Stop time travelling to read my stupid website! Go do something like avert the robot invasion. Or give me next weeks lottery numbers, whatever.

Two updates in one day? Its either madness, SPARTAAAA, or a half-hearted attempt at restarting the Henry Skull series. On reflection, the arc I’d taken the story in was very stupid. Mind you, the entire concept is stupid, but since the most praise I’ve ever had for my site was a friend in Sixth Form declaring that a skull saying “Oh, shit diggles” to be the zenith of comedy, I might as well give the people what they want. But I am restarting it, and am going to try and forge a story arc based on how I lost my fonts.

If you missed the last link, there’s another one. If you’re from the future, and missed this comic, here’s a direct link to where I hypothesise it will be. Quantum cutandpastecomicness!

Inexplicably, the short article I did on Nurgle Chaos Ogres has been the most searched-for thing on the site. So people who like me ranting about stuff will have to bother… erm… I’d have said Yahtzee, but he’s too busy talking too bloody fast these days.  (Yeah, like he really needs more people linking to him).

I thought it might be an idea to look at a few less guys this time, and go into more detail. Since that’s more useful. So we’ll have a look at a rank-and-file Ogre, and have another look at the Standard Bearer, mainly because I already took the pictures before realising I’d done him.

I hate Wordpress. Now, have a look at it there, and come back when you’re done. Click on it too, I’m not going to expound on my bad painting if you’re not going to look at it.

Now then, I’m not going to talk about his skin tone. If you’re going to do something like this for either your Ogre army or your Beasts of Chaos army, you just want to paint your Ogre skin normally, just with some green mixed in there (I used Catachan Green), and perhaps an extra highlight with Bleached Bone for that pale, unhealthy look. Nor am I going to talk about the rust effects on the gutplate and banner pole. If you need to know, find White Dwarf 301 and use their tips, or go consult the Internet.

The standard itself was taken from the Pestigor standard bearer, found on eBay after months of searching. The copper effect on it was achieved in two steps. I started with a white undercoat, all the better for brighter colours. I then coated it with a turquoise shade made of Snot Green, Enchanted Blue, and maybe some others. Drybrushed over this with a bronze colour. I used a mixture of Shining Gold and Bestial Brown, because I don’t have much reason to carry bronze paint around with me. Highlight as necessary. The banner itself was basecoated Bleached Bone, and washed in a mix of Dark Green Ink and Ogryn Flesh wash, thus colouring and shading it at the same time.

As an aside note, I’m sad Games Workshop got rid of the range of inks. Sure, the new washes are excellent at what Games Workshop say they’re designed for, but I used Flesh Ink for many things, because of its inky status. Keeping the inks and introducing the washes as well would have made me a much happier bunny.

The claw hand was taken from the Chaos Mutations spruce, painted Snot Green, and inked Dark Green. Nothig too exciting. The tentacle arm was sinply Green Stuff wrapped round the banner pole. The original hand had to be cur right back, and even now I’m not 100% sure on it.

Gotta love this guy. He’s the first one I made, and sadly still the best. His main feature is his big swelling eye, a wonderful mark of the Plague God. A simple orb of Green Stuff, almost painted the same as the skin surrounding it, just with a bit more Ogryn Flesh and Bleached Bone. Oh, and a slit like pupil for good measure. His other prominant feature, his giant hand, is taken from the Giant spruce. Works quite well as an ironfist, methinks.

His gutplate is mostly covered in sand. The three blobs, in the shape of the Mark of Nurgle, are of course Green Stuff. They’re also shaded up from the rusted metal to Bleached Bone, to look sort of like spots or boils.

His pet Nurgling is a Nurgling.

On reflection, Twitter may well be more useful than a sack of sycamore leaves in a toaster, based on some Canadian-based commentry I recieved. I still maintain, however, that a guy who’s already shackled up to a computer 20/6 an doesn’t do anything intersting doesn’t need it.

Now, onto the main item of business. Half of you who used to read this will have vacationed here from Night Life, and will know that once in a blue moon, I stick up an article in their Crappy News section. Basically, the idea was that once a day, a bizarre news article from somewhere gets stuck up and critiqued. Nowadays, its mostly just stuff in the news that pisses Barend off, but I do throw my hat in there. So an article I found was about to go up there, but I decided to see if I can get a full days ranting out of it myself.

Just for the record, this is the article in question. The short summery is that British nursery groups are being told to keep an eye out for pre-school kids making racist comments. A fine idea, until you actually read the article, wherein you discover that “this could include a child of as young as three who says “yuk” in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.”

Now, I’m well aware there is a conspiracy theory that the world is being run by a race of lizard creatures, and I’m now quite sure the National Childrens Bureau haven’t actually interacted with any kids longer than to try and devour them whole. But kids that small are honest, but essentially stupid. Yes, they’re quite prepared to turn up their nose at something they don’t like. They’re kids! Its hard enough to get them to eat a spoonful of peas if they don’t want to, let alone the goddamn tandoori chicken they’re evidently trying to stuff down these kids. But what gormless twunt thinks a small child is going to think “this food doesn’t taste good BECAUSE A PAKI MADE IT”? They wouldn’t even know who cooked it without ten minutes sitting in the kitchen being told in the first place. They simply don’t know any better, and they’re going to spit it out because they don’t like anything but Willy Wonkas Sugar Coated Mega Chocolate Whizz Puffs for breakfast, no matter how many overpaid white men in suits are wetting their pants over what we laughingly call “racism”.

Now I’m not gormless enough to say “racism doesn’t exist anymore”. I spent an entire year with two delightful Mancunians (or is it Mancurians? Or does anyone really care?) who spent the entire year complaining about Pakis taking everyones jobs, in between berating everyone from the South. I know racism exists. I know that in most cases, and definatly if there isn’t a reason, its wrong. I don’t think, however, that panicking about every time someone alludes to the fact that someones a slightly different colour is terribly constructive. Same thing as the gender inequality thing - while I don’t agree with men royally stomping all over women, neither do I like everyone pussyfooting around while the ladies stomp on our goolies. It’d be quite nice if we tried that wonderful “understanding each other and working together as equals” things rather than “oooh nooo they’ll sueeeee” nonsense we seem to have inherited from America.

Sorry, seem to have gone off on one there. So yeah, perhaps we shouldn’t be tearing our hair out because a small child with delicate tastebuds doesn’t like a big bowl of curry, and perhaps I should get a job.

Its fun, having the website back. Now, instead of wasting my time doing nothing, I can waste my time writing nonsense that no sane man is going to read. Which means I can throw my verbal hat into topics I know next to nothing about like that Twitter website that’s appeared from somewhere.

As I understand it, you get a Twitter feed, and you update it by either text message or IMing it with news of your day to day minutae. Minutia? Minutemen? Not sure. This is, according to Twitters own welcome page blurb, so business colleagues know if you’re running late, something else, and to let your mum know you’re eating soup.

As I understood it from my time updating a LiveJournal (otherwise known as “time I wasn’t being drunk in my first year of uni”), actual blogs are perfectly fine for the rubbish you get up to day by day, and as for stuff like running late for business meetings… I may well be chronically unemployed, and therefore too far out of the employment loop to understand, but if you’re stuck in traffic, and have a phone on you, its a lot more relaible to just, y’know, phone in and say you’ll be late. Just a thought.

Now, another use for Twitter seems to be sticking little news posts on your website, and I understand my gormless blogging service Wordpress has about 583 plugins to allow this, but I’ve not seen many around. I think there’s…

• Jeph Jacques on his site.
• Heccubus on much the same
• And Chefelf… somewhere. There was a Twitter section…

…but he’s got rid of it, mainly because he has a perfectly functional blog, and assumably a perfectly functional phone. Now, observing this short list, you’ll see that two of the aforementioned stuck it up there because its nifty and techy and stuff, and the other is an efamous webcomic artist who assumably wants people to know what sandwich he ate while drawing his wonderfully well drawn Friends-esque comic (insert obligatory “Nah, j/k, they’re cool” etc here, because nah, j/k they are all cool).

People like me, who haven’t done anything really interesting ever, and can’t afford credit on their phone anyway, do not need Twitter. Although it might be interesting to see if Henry Rollins has a Twitter feed. Henry Rollins is a badass. Did you know this? Maybe I should write about Henry Rollins instead of the latest Web 2.0 bollocks that’ll be steamrollered in about 3 years or so.

Gingerbread houses have a fine pedigree in the world of internet comedy. From Laura Redclouds Gingerbread Barad Dur, to… erm…

Well, never mind then.

But neither lack of comedy value, it being almost exactly the middle of the year, therefore being thoroughly unseasonal, nor even the fact that no male over the age of 12 without his own kids should make a gingerbread house stopped me, when one day my girlfriend said “Why have you got a gingerbread house kit on your fridge?” After which she said “Lets make it!”

Fearing for my poor testicles, already trying to retreat down my trouser legs, and angling for something funny to write about later, I suggested a jellybaby Torture Garden, an idea which got half-heartedly pounced upon. Much as I’d like to talk you through how we made it, its a gingerbread house. Its not a complicated concept. Besides, Wordpress doesn’t seem to believe in letting you format your posts, for some ungodly reason. So lets let the captions have a go.

Nothing too exciting, just a brief overview of the house. Also, some teapots

A top-down view. The house is leaking icing sugar based blood, shock horror.

Is it a crucifix? No, its some sugar shaped like a mutated child. Only decapitated and stuck to a wall.

The... *sigh* front lawn. Also shown is what was supposed to be a pathway of severed heads, but just became what looks like us Brits on a Spanish beach in summer.

Two jelly babies sacrifing a third jelly baby on some dark altar made of dolly mix. I think we overdid the blood a bit.

Do you know how hard it is to represent a jelly baby being burned alive when you've only got dolly mix and smarties?

A lone jellyman being hung. Nothing too exciting, I'm afraid. Also, I spent years trying to put captions like these on my old sites pictures.

And from this fine afternoon, I learned an important thing: Wordpress sucks monkey balls. Here’s what happened with a rolling pin later.

I’ve been ruminating on this idea since I started collecting Ogres. The idea being that the Chaos Ogres in the Beastman army no longer look like the Ogres Kingdoms ogres. So I decided to make them meet somewhere in the middle. I’ve always liked Nurgle, the god of decay, so that’s where I went with that. Here’s the guys in the front rank.

This guy is the units Bellower, who’s supposed to be the guy who shouts the orders for the unit. Amusingly enough, his jaw is hanging off, his eyes are missing and bleeding eyesockets. See his tounge hanging out (done in Green Stuff). He’s got a little beard and mohawk done in static grass. Not too much else to say.

Marginally more complicated, this guy is the unit leader, and has a bit more work done on him. Most obviously, he has three heads (three for each orb in the Mark of Nurgle), neck holes filled out with Green Stuff and stuck on. He’s got a club from the Giant Spruce, simply because it was crying out to be used by someone. See also, skin diseases on his shoulders, done with Green Stuff, hot pins, and purple ink.

Finally, the guy carrying the units standard. The story behind the unit is that they found this standard, and it corrupted them. So therefore, the guy carrying the standard is basically dribbling with diseases. See the tentacle hand, crab claw, tentacle tounge, sculpted pustules, and anything else I missed. Also the sort of copper effect on the standard.

If I feel like it, I’ll put up the rank and file later.

I like to think I have a finger on the pulse of popular culture. This is, of course, utter bollocks. I can muster some trivia about metal bands, and the obligatory Pretentious Rant About How Film Adaptions Of Books Are Crap. So I wasn’t too fazed by some film called Napoleon Dynamite swanning by, dropping memes and hipster T-shirts in its wake. If the box tells the truth, I was busy being drunk at the time.

Nonetheless, the time always comes when you’ve got nothing else to watch, you’re not sinking to taking the shrink wrap off of a boxed set of Lost someone thought was worth the cost of the DVDs, and your only other option is a DVD box with a guy wearing an afro.

Opinions from people I know have ranged between “Its awesome”, “give it a few plays and it’ll be awesome”, and “its shit”. All these people have, however, agreed on one thing: nothing really happens in the film. Which is sort of right. It is a story, in that it has characters whom things happen to, but there is no plot. Any goals the characters have last more than 15 minutes in film time.

What it is, thinks this pretentious pundit, is a shallow look at the life of the socially maladjusted. Everybody knew a Napoleon at school, some weird looking, weird acting guy who didn’t get on with many, if any, people, and perhaps didn’t come from a particularly well-off background, so probably smelt of beans. We didn’t know them (well, I assume not, unless the good reader was that guy), because they didn’t tell us, so we didn’t know what got them ticking. And his family doesn’t escape this banner either, his 27 year old brother still living at home chasing a girl on the internet, his uncle trying to stay flush with a desperate variety of jobs. Had a different director gone with this film, it could have been an interesting, perhaps introspective look at the life of the underdog.

But as you can easily forget, this was an MTV film, which brought us such cinematic classics as “Jackass: The Movie”, where a gang of thick Americans do dangerous stuff, and Henry Rollins drives an off-road vehicle, “Jackass The Movie 2″, where a gang of thick Americans do more dangerous stuff, but Henry Rollins does not drive an off-road vehicle, and “Coach Carter”, where Samuel Jackson is a badass scarty black man. Again. Only he coaches a basketball team while doing it.

With this fine pedigree of work behind them, they had to push out the boat to make Napoleon Dynamite a stupid film. Hence a distinct lack of plot, as mentioned, but also a bunch of pointless things like the dance routine at the end, and the whole “Vote For Pedro” thing. Even though he did have an awesome wig.

So, to ruin what was going to be a good piece of writing by just not caring about it anymore, if you’ve survived this long without seeing Napoleon Dynamite, you won’t miss much by not watching it. Unless you’re a gigantic nerd living in Idaho, in which case you might be worried by the biographical nature of the film.

I guess I need to write some words here, so that people can read them and get the impression that I can actually write stuff, instead of just having a website full of me writing about how I don’t write anything. And in time honoured fashion, I had an awesome idea for something to write about, that went away as soon as my eye got caught by something pretty, like a concrete bridge, or the twenty pound note being dangled on a fishing hook by a man standing on the bridge. That’s my explanation for having a fishing hook through my tounge and I’m sticking with it.

So instead of that, which was all nonsense and fabrication anyway, I’m going to write about stuff that comes to mind, and see where I go with it. Problem is, I’m been reading too much Achewood recently, so its going to end up with their awesome syntax, and probably hella references to things people who have a life won’t understand.

So I’m doing that jogging thing, or at least running around in circles near my house occasionly, and I’ve come to the conclusion you can’t run for thirty minutes wearing hiking boots. Let me stop pretending I’m not blogging, or let me put a coherent sentence structure rogether, I guess I can only pull one of these off.

Perhaps making such thing as a Guinness ice lolly would be a fine waste of time some day. Ice lollys are good, and people like Guinness, so it could work. And was not at all inspired by seeing the big Guinness hat in my room.

OK, I’m going to give up before I write something truly mediocre. I’ll put some pictures up soon or something. Take care, y’all.