The blog is closed, everybody get out.

Apparently (and much to the amusement of the other staff, customers and especially the owner of Wargames Inc) I am Bernard Black, crotchety book shop keeper and aggressive drunk of the sitcom 'Black Books'. Now, I do like the series, and Dylan Moran's stand-up is fantastic but I just don't see the resemblance. The hilarity stems from a staff member's wife saying 'That's Rob! Just replace the wine with coffee and it's Rob!' while watching series one and then it spread like a particularly virulent STD. Every time I interact with one particular staff member (you know who you are) I usually get the following response at least once: 'Jam jam jam jam jam eurgh!' followed by a mime of 'me' throwing toast to the ceiling. I think there has even been threats of sticking plastic toast to the shop roof. Irritating as this may be, I didn't think anything of it until the time came to go out and interact with real people.

A friend of mine, Amy, is going to work in China for a year as a part of the VSO programme, which means she has more balls than I do. Which also means she has far more balls than the rest of you, what with me having an American football as well as a couple of back-up testicles. This past Saturday was her going away party and I was invited for drinks. Yes, she is that committed to charity. The downside? It would be at a local pub frequented by people who don't play wargames. Not exactly my milieu but duty called (it had nothing to do with ogling her in her party dress either, before you start).

So when I got there I edged my way past the well-dressed people (I had chosen a rather fetching anorak and Primark t-shirt ensemble, complete with the requisite beige combat trousers of the sixty-year old), spotted Catherine's American beau Steve and quite quickly got myself a pint of coke and hid in the corner. Steve is a nice guy, automatically interesting because he's foreign so I could follow standard UK diplomatic policy and hide behind the nearest yank. Especially useful when the obligatory huge drunken guy from Nottingham demanded a chinwag.

As the evening progressed I eyed the svelte people passing in front of me. The women were like gazelles on the African veldt, graceful and alluring. Me? Was I some leonine predator on the hunt, you ask? Yes. Yes I was. If by leonine predator you mean fat, toothless hippo in a muddy, excremental wallowing hole. I steadfastly refused to move from my comfy, leather hidey hole unless it was to nip out for a fag.

Out of my depth? Considering that I can't actually swim it's a particularly apt metaphor. I got to meet some people who are so far out of my social circle I would normally need a fucking radio telescope to catch sight of their feet as they ran quickly away from me. All through the night I was having flashes of that episode where Manny locks Bernard out and Bernard is forced to brave the outside world for once. That was when it hit me.

Despite all of the good intentions from the lovely people I know (most of you can exclude yourselves from that prior statement. The people concerned know who they are) to include me in a broader social circle, I am Bernard Black. I am fiction made flesh and blood. Fucking typical. I'm not Batman or Raffles or Howard Carter, I'm the living avatar of a drunken Irish arsehole. Made slightly more ironic by the fact I am half Irish. For fuck's sake. When the party decided to decamp to a local bar for table dancing (the party were going to dance on tables, apparently. As I don't drink I wasn't going to do my Grandad shuffle and fall off a sticky, formica-topped table. That would have been the kicker, the sober guy breaking his leg while the drunken ladies in their improbable heels stayed safe) I took my leave. It had been a long day, I was shell-shocked by my revelation.

Seeing as the majority of you fuckers are so tight you fucking squeak, I'd like you to help Amy out here. You sure as shit ain't spending your cash in the shop, so why not do something unrelated to whining about the rising cost of GW products for once. Scroll down and you'll see that even I, grumpy Irish bully that I apparently am, have donated to the cause.

And yes, Amy did look alluring in her party dress. However, gentleman that I am, I didn't stare at her cleavage once. Or more than once. So there.

So onto a brief hobby update today. I have been painting (sort of) for a miniature painting competition I'm holding at the shop. The model I have chosen is Andy Foster's Feral Queen - a really nice female beastman type that could double for Valkyria the Bloody with the addition of some wings (and as long as you don't try to use it at Games Workshop).

In addition to this, I'm actually starting sculpting proper - no more likenesses of Burke from Trapdoor, I'm going for a (reasonably) whole miniature. I will be starting it about a half hour after this long winded and picture free update, so expect to see pics of my progress ... at some juncture in the future. I will be using Fimo over a wire armature and trying to sculpt a male figure. Hopefully it won't end up looking like some ancient fertility idol but you can never be too sure ...

Rob
Angry at the whole Cerebus the Aardvark turn his life seems to be taking

Madly in anger with you ...

Well, I'm back. I know, I know, I'm a lazy bastard who should blog more regularly. Obviously, I have nothing better to do because I spend most of my time snorting cocaine out of chorus girls' arseholes so I should be able to find the time to pause the hedonism and reconnect with the misfits who read the shit I post about. If I gave two squirts about the readership I would post more, but as I don't you can wait. The only way I'll be a regular blogger is if Metallica decide to follow this excremental tripe. And let's face it, I have more chance of becoming intimate with Gillian Anderson than that happening, so fuck you and your demands.

As to what I have been doing, well, that would be work. Fucking work takes up so much time I yearn for unemployment with it's scads of free time and high social status rather than the retail hell where I have to be nice to the life hoovers that suck away any vitality I have like socially inept, overweight psyche-vampires. Yes, I do mean you, fatty. The pointless tasks I have to perform daily grind down the poet in me like a particularly effective form of cult indoctrination. I am also less than keen on the almost exclusively male province of this past time. Far to many XYs about.

Hold on, I hear you cry. You said 'almost exclusively' which means some form of woman should come into the shop at some point. Why yes, they do. However, they are exclusively of the girlfriend/mother variety. I am reduced to purchasing the culinary services of beautiful women for my thrills. My only social interaction with the fair sex is purchasing a fucking breakfast sandwich or selling them something for their boyfriend/child and that is all.

Enough making you feel better about your lot and on to what little hobby I have been doing. After all, that's what you're here for. As you know, I have decided to do the Tyranid thing for my 40K army and here is the start: one Mawloc. Fully assembled and with some basecoat on the chitinous armour plates:


I am going for a more naturalistic feel than the standard 'nid scheme because I don't see why the most adaptable killers in the galaxy would forgo camouflage just because they are hard as coffin nails. I am also trying to get 20 points of my Skorne done for February, so here they are in their unpainted glory:

It's for a tournament and is as follows: Tyrant Xerxis, a full unit of Cataphract Cetrati, 2 Cyclops Brutes, an Agoniser and a Bloodrunner Master Tormentor - nice and simple and hopefully a quick paint as well. All the models will be painted with P3 paints (the colour on the Mawloc is P3 Battlefield Brown) so with a bit of luck I'll be able to use the fucking range soon.

I also have to paint a random fantasy miniature for a painting competition I'm running at Wargames Inc so if any of you fancy putting brush to model and entering pop on down before the end of February and I'll cave your fucking face in with the till. Or let you enter the compy. It depends on how capricious I'm feeling.

I haven't done any sculpting and my literary output has slowed simply because of the amount of time the shop takes up, which isn't sitting well with me. I always swore I wouldn't become a worker drone but it seems I'm becoming what I hate. Irony sucks. But not as much as you.

If you've managed to force yourself to read this far and are a regular (you really should have something better to do than read this bollocks) you might remember I promised a picture of the last miniature I painted before I had a break from the hobby (got a life and got some at the same time). Well here it is, one old school warrior of chaos (a Perry sculpt, I think):

The pictures are a bit blurry because I took them with my camera phone, but you can't have everything, can you? Otherwise I'd be a lottery winner in a posh whorehouse by now. Or I'd hire prostitutes to come to my batchelor pad. I wonder if you get a cheaper rate if you hire them to clean your flat with no sex? Send me a couple of grand and I'll find out for you.

Well, I'm running out of polite conversation, so I'll draw this entry to a close. I still haven't had any, I'm still a slow-ass painter and I still lose too much of my life to work. Status quo it is. That's right, my life is still the same three fucking chords all the damn time, even in this brand new decade. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, I suppose.

Rob
Angry at the phallocentric nature of the hobby

The after-con report in full lacklustre-o-rama

Well, last con of the year and it was Dragonmeet. Run by Angus Abranson, the director of Cubicle 7 Entertainment (publishers of SLA Industries and Cthulhu Britannica among others), Dragonmeet has been going for a little while to say the least. So, time to pack up the shop and head down to drizzly London for what is essentially an indoor market place for the hobby industry. Turned out it was a 16 hour day. Fucking 16 hours to get to and from and trade at what, essentially, is a roleplayers convention. This fact was hammered home later on in the day when a couple of Anne Rice twinkly vampire woe is me Twilight types pointed at the stall and opined 'We don't need any of that here'.

I was ready to perform one of the following actions: berate them with the history of roleplay games - essentially they are derivative of a game called 'Chainmail', which featured a fantasy supplement called 'Dungeons and Dragons' - or perform an anal lobotomy. Unfortunately I then remembered I can't pick on the disabled and left them to their rousing discussion of GNS theory and how cool it would be to suckle at Ron Edward's cock or whatever shit they were burbling on about.(Don't you just know that when the cover of an RPG has shit Poser models rendered in wank-o-vision it's going to be great. Or a portentous piece of storytelling twaddle).

Anyway, back to the con. The wonderful Smog:1889 miniatures I was sure that any self respecting miniature lover would give his functioning testicle for (or at least pay the price on the fucking box for) turned out to be a bit of a bust - only one person bought any. I did get complaints about the pricing, though. Apparently a direct conversion via xe.com isn't good enough for people who, surprisingly, are prepared to pay a premium for models cast in cheap-shit resin that don't fit together from Forge World. Oh no. Because it's not fucking space machines, because they are well cast with minimal (if any) mold lines and fit together almost perfectly people expect them for fuck all. People forget that these are 54mm minis, and the price point is competitive with Forge World on comparable models and the product is far more imaginative to boot. Bastards.

However, there were some great things about the con, too. Chief of which were Pagan Angel, where I got some awesome t-shirts (and the lovely lady who runs the shop wears skimpy fetish gear ALL DAY), and Leisure Games, who have a real cute girl working for them. Real cute. Shallow of me, I know. But it made the day worthwhile. Also cool were the guys who actually bought from me, especially Rob, an American who likes his Flames of War and Fred, who is into his 40K and Fantasy. I ended up talking to Fred and his friends quite a lot, and getting free cooking theory lessons from a Frenchman is all good.

Now I imagine some of you are thinking I'm one of those people who dislike roleplay games, and I do. On the computer, they generally suck (WoW is just a fancy chat program if you ask me). However, I got into the hobby through real roleplaying games (well, eventually, anyway) and I have a stash of goodies, including a pile of books from the greatest roleplay game ever, Cyberpunk. I'm just getting back into roleplaying, so I'm getting into it with a system I know and love - Dead Reign, from Palladium Games. Why the Palladium system? Because I like their stuff. I don't care if Kevin Siembieda is a dick who fucks people over, I like his product. So the trials and tribulations of my foray into the RPG world will feature here too. You lucky, lucky bastards.

The final highlight (aside from sneaking glances over at Leisure Games Girl and Pagan Angel Lady) was meeting Nigel and Ash Pyne, creators of War for Edaðh (Edath), a two player card game. I played Nigel and got crushed pretty handily, and I knew I had to have the game, so I borrowed the money off my helper and bought it. I also got my rulebooks signed by the pair of them. Just like a comics convention. Wargames Inc will be stocking it very soon, I'm sure.

I really enjoyed talking to people just to see the hunted look on their faces - you know, the 'Oh shit, I have to interact with someone and I bet the bastard is trying to sell me something' look that was on a fair few faces, I can tell you. It seems the average RPG geek is no better at social relationships than their digital counterparts, just more looked down upon. And I have to say, trim, good-looking French and American men aside, that I was a veritable sporting 'jock' type compared to some - even smoking 20 a day I could finish the 100 metres an hour before some of the people I saw. However, Dragonmeet is well worth going to, it's a great day out, just watch out for the expensive parking and the fact that it's £1.20 for a single can of Coke. I dread to think how much a pack of fags is.

Today, the plan is to get some prep done on my Skorne inbetween serving the multitude of customers (dodging the tumbleweed) so I can get some more batch-painting done for my Skorne. I want to get a unit done, so it might be the Praetorian Karax, or it might be the Tyrant Commander (which is a shitty cast - 90% of the model is covered in extensive pitting, so it's going to look like it's pebbledashed). I can't be arsed to change it though, so it stays. I'll be putting pictures of the progress up soon, along with some pics of my latest flight of idiocy which will provide many a chuckle, I'm sure.

As I sit here on my fattening arse at shitty o'clock in the morning typing this diatribe, all I can honestly think about is how much I would like a latte with an extra shot of espresso. What a cock, eh?

Rob
Angry at his insomnia