So, last night I had the privilage of seeing that most splendid of drum’n'bass acts, Pendulum, doing their thing in Brixton Academy. In the style of my summer holiday review, here’s some thoughts on the evening.

• My santa hat got more action with the ladies than me. And I don’t mean in a “that’s a sexy hat!” way, I mean as in a “being stuffed down a very ample cleavage” way.
• Sixteen thousand crushed plastic cups are very hard to dance on.
• Over one thousand people trying to start a mosh pit in an approximatly hundred square meter area are very hard to dance with.
• Give the man handing out free badges a fake email address, you cretin.
• Don’t believe the official timetable on the venue website. The headlining band will not finish just before the last train home, it will start at the same time as the last train home.
• Do not believe the 3am bus driver. You will not be dropped by a pub in the middle of town, you will be dropped by a random A-road in the middle of nowhere.
• OK, I can see you need a smoke, and don’t want to leave the front of the stage to go to the smoking area. So yeah, ducking down to have a smoke is a genius plan. But why aren’t you dying of dehydration as well? And how does that make a fag palletable at all?
• When buying your tickets on eBay, check they’re on the main stalls, and not in the balcony a hundred miles away from the action. That took a bit of work to sort out.
• Do not try starting a circle pit to Pendulum, for fucks sake. They’re a drum’n'bass act with metal influences, not a goddamn metal band. You want to pull that shit, find Shellshock, they’re a metal band with drum’n'bass influences, you can do that shit with them. Let me have some room to dance already.
• London prices are always London prices.

As long memoried people will remember, I loves me some Slipknot. One of the first articles I wrote on the Internet was a pictoral review of The Subliminal Verses. So much so, that I was going to release a compilation of blog updates called The Moronic Verses, without realising that such an unnessersary book would be self-fufilling in name. But the album was good, their best by a good lead, and so I was pleasently surprised when I found out they’d released a new one when I was busy being told how much horses smelt this holiday.

With a title like All Hope Is Gone, its either going to be an awesome album, or a rather lacklustre one. Wikipedia tells us that we were to expect something with all the experimental properties of The Subliminal Verses, with the brutal heaviness of Iowa. And?

Erm, no.

The Subliminal Verses was a wonderful move for Slipknot, blending wonderfully quirky new sounds into something quite like their old sounds, and by fuck it was good. All Hope Is Gone, however, is a band that made a move, found it worked splendidly, and had no idea what to do with it after that. There’s supposed to be a lot more political undertones in there, but I just heard a large number of words that I could have written in Year 11. Politics and music are very comfortable bedfellows, but you have to do it whole-heartedly, and I don’t think Corey Taylor did in this one.

We didn’t get the bloody-minded madness that was Iowa, but we do occasionly get Corey chanting whatever the title of the song is, like happened in some songs in Iowa. And it didn’t really work then.  And these sounds didn’t have the same  quality as TSVs new sounds. They just sounded… bland, I’m afraid. A band who’ve done many mad things over ten years, and are starting to run out of ideas. Its very depressing, getting all excited over a new album, then being… not disappointed, it was still quite good, but not awesome. I will tell my girlfriend, another devoted maggot, “Slipknot released an album when you were down here with me”, she will say “Really?”, and I will say “Its not very good”. And I will write pointless sentences like that.

But to carry on, the best song on the album was… a bonus track, a remix of Vermillion Pt2. Yes, a song from their last album. Basically, I’m surprised it got so far up so many charts, and I think they’re going to be hanging up the masks for the last time after they’ve toured this one. Unless I’ve been wrong for six years, they stopped being truthful about being in it for the music, and they want to wring out something I don’t know. Album not amazing, me inarticulate. Boo.

Judging by this months site stats for now, it seems the only people searching for my wretched hole of the Internet are people who think I’m some sort of mine of Space Marine information. Such people evidently haven’t realised that said Codex is now very out, and its much easier to go and buy it, or at least hit up a reputable torrent site. When I’ve bought the right arm, we’ll see what my He’stan conversion is.

Until then, here’s some more nonsesne about Nanowrimo.

I’ve scoped out most of the ideas I want to use in my story now, which is always good. The main one being that its going to be done in a similar style to the works of the absolutly legendary Tom Sharpe. If I can pull off a fraction of what he can do with about 50,000 words, I’ll be happy. Nothing this, there’s a number of conventions I have to remember when doing a Sharpe.

• The book must be set in England, or at the absolute bare minumum, have Englishness as a central theme.
• In the fine tradition of British comedy, two of the main characters (usually the first two characters introduced) do not get along, but are stuck in a situation (marriage, working together) where they are forced to coexist.
• One of these characters will set up a cunning plan to make the other one look stupid, and get said other character out of the way of something.
• A combination of circumstances, bad luck, the other character reacting, and the other character setting up his own cunning plan will create a chain of snowballing misadventures.
• By the end of the book, any cunning plans have long since gone out of control, and ended up causing problems on a national scale, so that the government has to get involved in what started as two schoolteachers having a fight.
• There will be a character from the Army, usually a general.
• A character wil hang-ups about his sexuality will be advanced on by a fat, sexually vocarious woman, who will not get the cock she craves.
• A common setup for jokes will be a character saying something, then the book seguing into another characters actions, or another scene entirely, using a play on those words. For example:
• “Micheal dear, I thought you’d stopped smoking!” said his wife, smelling the smoke. He perhaps had stopped smoking, but his hat was smouldering in a corner where he’d thrown it.
• Only its done so its actually funny.
• Usually, by the end of the book, the status quo is completly restored, everything returned to how it was at the start of the book, just with a character or two locked up or blown to pieces.
• It will be a better book than any you’ve ever read.

There we go, how I can fail to do well with a plan like that? Apart from giving up by the end of the first week, of course.

I love horror, me. Nothing more wonderful than seeing people getting ripped to pieces, terrified out of their minds, by everything from supernatural monstrosities to simply being in the wrong place with the wrong people. Even wonderfully horrible 80s horror works fine by me, although I’d quite like to hang with the script writer for the original Hallowe’en, since he must be about five by now.

However, as most people with eyes and a working cerebellum can tell you, you try wanking off a successful franchise of anything, especially horror in this case, and you end up with a pile of wank and not much else. Although in this scenario, we’re imagining a load of wank coming from wanking off a franchise is a bad thing. My metaphors have been terrible lately. As is any attempt to keep a horror franchise alive. Freddy and Jason only managed to get to Freddy And Jason by sheer virtue of it beiing a big crossover thingy such as it was.

I think I’ve wandered a bit then, so lets return to my premise: make too many sequals of a film results in the last ones being horrible, and dragging down the awesome earlier films with it. Think Freddy, think Jason in space, think those Leprecaun films that nobody paid attention to after Jennifer Aniston ran off and joined a sitcom. Exactly.

But, as you may ahve expected from my long rambling intro, this isn’t a problem that’s staying in the past. Look at… well, every film in the cinema right about… NOW! LOOK NOW, YOU’LL MISS IT! FOR THE LOVE OF JESUS CHECK THE FILM LISTINGS!!!

Lots of sequals, right? Lots of crap as well? Exactly.

Now, to my point. Saw 5 is being advertised in those popup things in MSN Messanger. Saw Five. And while its saying its the last one, like fuck it is. For what was a very good reason. The first Saw was awesomely terrifying. A wonderfully twisted new antagonist, operating behind the scenes, setting horrifying traps to test his victims. And the traps themselves! Fuck me. Add to that, how they had all the subplots tying into, reinforcing, the main story of the two guys locked up in the bathroom. And the twist! It was so obvious in hindsight, yet so cleverly woven in there. When that fucking film came out, I was being dragged into girls bedrooms to check for axe murderers! I’m never dragged into girls bedrooms! Not even the girls who want me in there in the first place!

No I didn’t get booty in exchange for murderer hunting, you think I actually understand women?

Saw 2, not too shabby. Basically, Saw, only a bit grander in scope, and a bit less awesome. Not bad by any stretch, but certainly not its predecessor. Only I didn’t see the twist coming from a mile off. The traps were a bit less imaginative. The first one being a gun mounted in a door. A gun. That’s just lazy.

Saw 3, and by this point we can see the franchise wobbling quite badly. The twist was seen from miles away, almost paraded around on a stick. and while the traps were awesome, they didn’t feel as well explained as the last two films. They were just gory and elaborate. And for good measure, they decided to kill off all the antagonists. No Jigsaw, no Cutting Girl, just dead. And I haven’t seen Saw 4, but I can imagine the only way it can have gone without starting to parody itself would be carrying on the third film as if Jigsaw had planned he was going to be killed. Otherwise, its ridiculous.

Even with that, there’s no ground for a fifth Saw film to cover, save “bring people into cinema”. They’ve done it all. All. Far as I can see, some guys wearing Jigsaws skin as a mask. Imagine how you’d have felt if they released a Friday the 13th film if someone had just taken Jason’s mask and pretended to be him killing people. Then wish Bon Jovi would go back to the big hair again, and wonder what that sad sounding grunge music is.

I think I had a point there, but nobody needs a fifth Saw film, especially not the people who make Saw.

Since I don’t seem to have anything to write about, I think I’ll bore all of you, by wittering on about little plastic men again. And by “all of you”, I mean the janitor cleaning the floors of the empty concert hall I appear to be projecting into. Never mind.

But yeah, if you’ve come here by some miracle of Goggle pointing you here, and you actually want to learn about the new Space Marine Codex, halfway there, old bean. As most good Warhammer nerds should know, the new Space Marine Codex is out next Saturday, along with a bunch of new models, none of which I intend to buy. Except maybe the new Land Raider with flamethrower sponsons. And there’s a very good reason.

While I’ve powered through at least three Fantasy armies in my time, in 40K I’ve always stuck with my beloved Salamanders Space Marines. Green armoured, tribal-African* warriors who aren’t particularly swift, but love burning people with many, many flamers/meltas. Also, having their own armylist in Codex: Armageddon. Something just clicked, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

*I know I’m not alone in thinking African-American is a ridiculous term for people of a black persuasion. What if they’re not from America? And are they necessarily African? Its a very silly word used by people who are afraid they’re going to be killed/sued if they call someone black. Anyway.

Then 4th edition swung round. Byebye special rules for Salamanders, replaced by a few Chapter Traits that worked fine enough for me, mainly because I could then take lightning claws again. New Techmarine, new plastic Terminators, improved colour scheme.

Then 5th edition came out, and I acquired a copy of the new Codex. No, its not paper, but it is perfectly legal, of course. And now I’m telling you what the Salamanders have got out of it.

In terms of fluff, they’re sorted. References to them appear all over the place, including hints at their own make of Land Raider. Its all good, coupled with the fact that they’re getting some books written about them by Nick Kyme, former White Dwarfer. By the looks of it, he’s going to do a bloody good job of it too.

The big problem is that Games Workshop seem to have gone a bit funny with the whole “black” thing. Instead of “whatever-word-I-should-use-instead-African-American-now black”, they’re thinking “literally black”. Apparently, “they were always supposed to be jet black with red eyes”. And maybe they were, back in the days of Rogue Trader, when games were played in black and white, but there would be a good reason to get rid of it: it doesn’t make a shred of goddamn sense. Plus, now all my helmetless marines look like I haven’t painted them properly, which is bad, because coupled with the fact that I haven’t painted them properly makes me look even lazier.

Quite a few new special characters in this book as well, including more bloody Ultramarines (I think they’re trying to force people to play them, because, lets be honest, no one wants to). But the Sallies get a new guy*, bringing in a healthy new dose of fluff. Forgefather Vulkan He’stan, former 4th Company Commander, is the latest Forgefather, a title given to whichever lucky/poor sod is sent roaming the galaxy, looking for the nine technological artefacts their Primach, Vulkan, left all over the galaxy. While a wonderful piece of fluff, it does raise some problems, in that as far as I can tell, Vulkan was supposed to have been killed at the Istvaan Massacre.

*Don’t know why they didn’t just bring back Chaplain Xavier. They actually made a damn model for him, it makes much more sense on considering it. We need that Xavier model! We need Salamander mantles so we can convert our characters! Although that wouldn’t work, considering Games Workshop got rid of their bitz service. Brilliant way to alienate your fanbase there. And why am I doing all these things with asterixes this week?

Coupled with that, how are you supposed to scatter everythig from spears to orbital defense lasers throughout the galaxy without being noticed? If you’re the godlike commander of one of the Emperors Space Marine Legions, you can’t go around hiding things around everywhere without people asking questions. And this is difficult enough with small things like He’stans equipment – a kickass spear, a heavy flamer gauntlet, and an awesome salamander cloak. These are small and easily hideable. The other two artefacts that have been found were a giant forgeship and a giant orbital defense laser. How do you hide one of those? They’re about as big as the moon! You can’t just put a tarp on it and hope nobody notices for ten thousand years!

Inconsistancies aside, He’stan is an awesome warrior, but his inclusion gives Salamanders specialist weapons a boost – all thunder hammers are master crafted, all flamer/melta weapons become twin linked. A very characterful rule which would encourage you to play in a fluff-based way – if they hadn’t buggerd up the special weapons.

Yes, without Chapter Traits anymore, Salamanders can no longer take two flamers in a unit. This completly fucking blows, because I have umpteen flamers, and now I can’t use them. You can still have a meltagun/multimelta in a unit, but that wasn’t something I did very often (not having plastic melta weapons when I assembled my army). Small compensation in that as a nod to the fluff, you can have two flamers – or even heavy flamers – in a Sternguard Veteran squad. Sadly not good enough, but now meaning that in order to have an army that plays in a Salamandery way, I have to take He’stan. Which isn’t good, as my army is themed around the 3rd Company, not around some guys wandering round looking for a kickass hammer, or a pimped out tank, or whatever the last four artefacts are.

Cool thought I’ve just had, and I don’t want you lot stealing (“What lot? Who are you talking to?” hollers the janitor). I might take He’stan, but model him as an Emperors Champion (a la Black Templars, only not in this case). Makes some sense.

So overall, the Salamanders are a lot more fluffed out, but in-game, they kinda suck unless you take a special character every game. I’ve been writing this article for an hour now. Byebye already.

As many of the stoned, over fifties demographic will tell you, if you put on the film “The Wizard Of Oz”, and stick on the Pink Floyd album, “Dark Side Of The Moon”, you have obviously smoked enough draw in the Seventies to do something so utterly pointless. Also, you’ll see an eerie synchronisation between the two. Thinking this was an awesome idea, I hunted down a mashup video off of a perfectly legal download site, then had a watch.

By sheer force of willpower, I managed just under half of the video before declaring “Fuck this”, and throwing it out the window. And by ‘declaring “Fuck this”‘, I mean ‘thinking it to myself, because there wasn’t anyone else there’, and by ‘throwing it out the window’, I mean ‘closing Media Player’. Much less exciting, but I do pride myself on my accuracy. And my good looks. And my command of thirteen languages, incluiding binary, Morse code, and whatever language light bulbs talk in.

I was expecting a marvel of weird, cross-media perculiarities. At the very least, I was expecting something that vaguely resembled a similarity. I think I got two things. Could have been a dodgy video, but I think its because, as I’ve already mentioned, there wasn’t anything better to do in the Seventies when having a spliff. Somebody tried looping them up when stoned off their face, thought it seemed a bit similar, and created a phenomena. This is not something you should do.

Case in point, coupled with another student-life story. One time in Hull, we had a bit to smoke one evening, and that means quite a bit. We then put on a DVD of a program called Phoenix Nights, which I thought to be a documentry series about the unluckiest bar in the entire country. An hours worth of what I thought were horrifying coincidences in bad luck went by, before I realised that it was Peter Kays Phoenix Nights, was supposed to be funny, and was in fact a sitcom, and in no way real whatsoever. This is the sort of mindset I refer you to.

Coupled with that, and hastening my angrily closing the video, is the fact that Pink Floyd is as boring as shit. I recall Jeremy Clarkson, an otherwise impeccably right gentleman, writing that he enjoyed his music to take its time in such a manner, and why do all songs need to be three minutes rushed along and suchlike.

Because if everyone followed the Pink Floyd method, Mr Clarkson, songs would still have one verse, then fifteen minutes of long, repetitive instumental interlude, before another such interlude, and maybe an extra line if you’re good and don’t complain, and have another half an hour of monotonous guitar as well. I don’t follow this. Prog rock is supposed to be the stoner music our fathers had before us, but even with my head submerged in liquid THC, you couldn’t make Pink Floyd sound interesting. When I smoked, you could have said my name in a different accent and had me in a fit of giggles, and I’d have still told you to turn that shit off.

Basically, don’t go playing Dark Side with Oz, or you’ll fall asleep, knock over the ashtray, set you house on fire, then sue me for giving you head trauma. I don’t have a lawyer. I don’t have money. I have some blue cotton thread I found on my desk when I tidied it up earlier. Please don’t do it.

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.

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.

Yeah, so I’ve started that whole blogging thing again, as you’ve obviously noticed. So what brought that about, and how many days can you expect me to be a-blogging before I give up again?

Well, the answer to the second one is “who the fuck knows”, but the first ones a bit more straightforward. I’ve been making websites for years now. From a crappy one about Tamagotchis ten years ago, to sites for the family business, and of course the garbage on this humble domain.

About three months ago, I actually realised this, and how much fun it actually is. I then coupled this with the more pressing concern: “I’m 22 and still living with my parents, I need a fucking job that pays”. And while temping is fun, and many lessons have been learned from Yahtzee about the joys of data entry, they just don’t call me often enough. Apparently, the concept of sending out someone who types really fast and efficiently is anathema when the agency only gets paid twice the amount you get paid per hour. So I barely get paid enough to keep me in plastic models and failed driving tests, let alone renting somewhere to live.

…seem to have got a bit lost there, let me backtrack.

So seeing as how web design is fun, and IT peoples get paid fuckloads, I thought it would be a good idea. So I shelled out for proper web design lessons (or so far, two weeks of in-depth Microsoft Office work, and two point five months of my tutor not emailing me back), and then the economy decided to play crashy crashy.

So somewhere in all this, I realised I have a domain name, lots of free time, and nothing really interesting to write about. So a blog it is then.

I imagine that once I’m back in my Less Is More mindset, you may well get what used to go up here, only it’ll actually be well written. But also other random crap might end up here. For example, once I learn how to use Flash, expect this site to be hosting my coursework. And when I film some new videos, they’ll be here as well. And I may do some actual blogging at some point, too, so expect lots of posts about “Yeop, quiet here”.

And since everyone is just going to ask “Do we get Henry Skull back? I liked Henry Skull”, he’ll be back once I find some way of running a comic script alongside a Wordpress blog instead of replacing one with the other. I may just start again, because that last story was going nowhere.

Nice to be back, everyone.