Sorry

Sorry about the poor performance of this site over the last few days, you may have had timeouts or the page loading without any style sheets, or just taking an absolute age to actually show up.

My web host (Gradwell) is once again suffering major performance issues on it’s shared hosting platform and so far, hasn’t commented on the problem ticket I raised yesterday.

The poor performance is most apparent between 2pm and 7pm (UK time) so if you have trouble then, try again earlier or later and hopefully this will get resolved next week.

Thanks for your patience.

The weekend already!?

Been a bit of an odd week, was on holiday last week obviously, then working this week but from home every day other than Monday (the office would have been deserted) with holiday Thursday breaking the week up.  Was on call from Tuesday to today as well.  But didn’t really get started and then everything sort of fizzled out.

Which means it’s the weekend again already, got back from C&C’s place about 40 minutes ago after D&D, and we’re currently waiting for Bubbles to grace us with her presence after we let her out (she looked desperate) before we head to bed.

And it’s cold.

Back to our normal routine as of tomorrow with breakfasts and shopping and work and TV and life and stuff.  Hopefully more wii fit as well, and less carbohydrate.  No new years resolution from me, just a promise to myself to try and be more me, and more positive in general maybe and do the stuff I enjoy.

No more roasts!

Thankfully the season of ‘huge roast dinners’ has come to an end and I can stop trying to cram eighteen types of vegetable onto our plates.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a good roast dinner with yorkshire puddings and nine litres of gravy, but they’re even better after a long break, we’ve managed to cram about four in during the Christmas / New Year holidays and I think we’re both pretty much done now.

On an unrelated note (er, no pun intended), I’m playing with a ‘related posts plugin’ but I’m not sure how much value it adds and how annoying it might be, so it may go away again.

Beaten by the zombie hoard

So I didn’t finish them all, but I put in a damn good showing!  They are zombies after all and eventually, all mortals fall to them.

Four more done, only 5 of the 20 left to go!

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I’m really tired of these zombies now and it’s showing in the detail (or lack of it).  In fact, looking back at the way I cleaned them (hardly at all) and undercoated them (badly) it’s clear I wasn’t that excited about them from the start.  I bought them when it looked like I was going to give Warhammer the game a go, but that never really got off the ground.  I’ve enjoyed painting them, don’t get me wrong, but in order to enjoy it I’ve had to basically use the figures as experiments, playing with technique and colour and seeing how things look.

Five more to go … but working tomorrow and roleplaying in the evening (yay), so they won’t get touched until the weekend at the earliest.

Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part five

Cloak and not Dagger

First couple of washes go onThis is the fifth post in the Sasha DuBois painting diary set (the others are one, two, three and four).  I’m a bit up and down about my painting skill level at the moment (my regular normal state for anything I create), some days thinking I’m quite happy with my skill level thank you very much and other days a bit down because I feel I should be better, if I just spent a bit more time.  However, I spend as much time as I spend and I enjoy that time and at the end of the day that’s what truly matters, it’s relaxing and enjoyable.  I’m happy with being slightly better than barely average (at the moment).

At the end of the fourth post I’d just put the base coat onto the coat (this could get confusing), using scab red.  I then spent a little while (a few days) not really painting anything, and finally got back into the swing by putting a lot of effort into the zombies.  I also managed to wash and brush the coat on this mini and then put some black onto the boots (too thickly, sigh).  Anyway.

Continue reading

Movie Memories: Ghostbusters

ghostbustersposterI was 13 when Ghostbusters was released in the UK and that is a very impressionable age.  Frankly, I loved it and everything about it.  I think I probably sang the theme tune for about 18 months after I’d seen it and I think I may have even had the 7 inch single.  I was probably just the right age to really find the film exciting, there was humour I wasn’t supposed to get (because it was a bit rude) but did, there was Sigourney Weaver looking hot (I was 13), there was some alien chick in cellophane who was maybe naked and maybe not, and there were truly amazing ground breaking special effects the likes of which had never been seen before.

I came away from that movie with a lifetime of quotes that have kept me going ever since (although they warp over time, naturally so please don’t correct them, I know they’re morphed),

  • where do these stairs go? they go up!
  • mother puss-bucket
  • what a lovely singing voice you must have
  • save some for me
  • woah, woah, woah nice shooting Tex
  • she sleeps above her covers, four feet above her covers, she barks, she drools
  • it sounds like you’ve got at least two or three people in there already
  • nimble little minx isn’t she
  • this is the last of the petty cash
  • i don’t have to take this abuse from you, i’ve got hundreds of people dying to abuse me.

And so on, and so forth.  Some of the lines from Ghostbusters have entered common usage in my age demographic (I dare you to find someone in my age group who doesn’t laugh when you say ‘Don’t cross the streams!’).  I even made a Ghostbusters backpack for a fancy dress thing we did that may have been that year or perhaps a couple of years later.

But all that asside, I have two lasting memories of this film.  Firstly, I remember being scared witless by the ghost in the library when she transforms into the evil version.  I think I remember talking to my sister about that on the way home from having seen the film.

And secondly, I remember being appalled when Ghostbusters was on TV for the first time, I think it may have been ITV, and it was edited, redubbed and cut to hell.  They changed mother puss-bucket to something totally stupid, and a bunch of other lines (like ‘thanks to dickless over here.  Is this true?  Yes, this man has no dick’ being changed to ‘yes this man is some kind of rodent’).  It was my first exposure to being ‘protected’ from evil movie content by having it badly redubbed to save me from myself.

Forget the fact that this was a PG in the UK and so by the time it came on TV any kid who wanted to had seen it in the cinema, but we had to be saved from the terrible language (like shit!) and the accusation of having no dick.  Folks, don’t be too surprised to learn that at 13, I’d heard words worse than that at school.  A lot.  I know, hard to believe, and I thank everyone for saving me from hearing it on the Television.  Ghostbusters was my first lesson in how the dialog can totally change a scene, how some words are just funnier than others, and that TV censors were hypocrits.

So, Ghostbusters, awesome movie which I love to this day that sticks in my mind because it was butchered by the censors.