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

Tangency ahead ...

It's late and I'm listening to the THACO podcast interspersed with Julian Bream playing Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez (there's some culture for you fuckers) and attention span problems are hitting. I need to be doing about four or five hobby projects at once. Stupid, yes, but it's how I'm wired. Rather than berate the reader with vitriolic diatribe interspersed with gay sex jokes (hurr u liek it up teh botti), I'll just get on with my latest scheme and what's going on with my Desert Nazis (just switched to Bream playing Bach's Fugue in A Minor).

The Skorne will be coming along (I'm just prepping my Tyrant Commander, a mini that looks like it's been fucking hit with a tattooist's needle it's that fucking pitted), to be followed by some Cataphract Cetratii. These will be speed painted (but hopefully not rushed). I have the mini I'm painting for my fellow pressganger (still in need of prep), Kaelyssa (bloody Matt DiPietro), basic sculpting to learn (blocking forms, correct proportion and the like). Add to this a novel I'm plugging away at in the background and I need one more project to fritter away my life with.

Enter the great devourer.

I know, it would have been better if I had wrote 'Enter the realm of Chaos, your nightmare has just begun' and waffled on about Bolt Thrower and how music was awesome when GW was more open to random projects and added some more gay jokes (u stil liek it up u'r bum) but I'm quite mellow at the moment (must be the music, I'm back to Rodrigo).

My history with GW has been quite odd. I think that the management buy out circa White Dwarf 120-ish was a bad thing, and their propensity to simplify and add space machines to everything pisses me off (not to mention the legal department headed, I'm reliably informed, by the very cliché of a greasy lawyer type) but GW kept the hobby alive during the dark times, and as I hob-nob with the higher-ups of the design studio every now and again (who are all really nice guys), I'm prepared to forgive them. Fuck, they aren't hitting me with a cease and desist and I don't really give two squirts of piss about your opinion on Bloodbowl.

The oddness comes from the fact I have never had a full army of GW's before. There, my shock admission is out in the open. When I played my only two games of 40K (then called Rogue trader) 22 years ago, I got had twice and decided to stick to roleplay. Battle at the Farm, where you could be Crimson Fists or Space Orks. My one game of Warhammer Fantasy came during my quest to paint like his holiness Mike McVey and I played with a friend's gobbos against his Dark Elves.

Then I stopped with the hobby for about 10-12 years. I had seen some of Mike's miniatures in real life (specifically his Heroquest diorama and his Eversor Assassin and Emperor vs. Horus dioramas) and I was shocked at how different they looked in real life. For one, you couldn't see the filligree painted on the Emperor's armour and the colours looked so much more rich and vibrant in reality. I was basing my painting style on the lighter way the models appeared in White Dwarf. So they looked quite bland compared to how the high end painters I desperately wanted to emulate really painted.

Add to that my rather punishing training shedule (8 hours work, 6-8 hours gym and martial arts a day) and there wasn't time to do the hobby any more. However, the great thing about toy soldiers is you can always go back to it. I also have found one of the last minis I ever painted before stopping, a test model for a Chaos army in WFB. Yes, I'll get some pictures so you can have a good chortle, you pack of bastards.

Which brings me to the point of this rather meandering post. I am embarking upon my very first 40K army, and it is Tyranids. The greatest menace the Imperium has ever known, and an archetypal 'horde' army. I have started at the top and got my army leader, the Hive Tyrant. He's huge, far bigger than most generals, and directs the will of the intelligence behind the 'Nids on the battlefield. He's also a bit of a bullet magnet, so I imagine there will be very angry posts on how everyone 'lieks it up teh bum bum' because they can beat me easily.

I'll be at Wargames Inc assembling and painting this army, so if you want to come on down and get or give hints and tips on painting, modelling (miniatures or 3d only please) then pop in for a chat.

I promise not to post about your propensity for receiving the sossage up your brown eye at all.

Honest.

Rob
Angry at ... err ... racism. Yeah, that's always a good one to be angry about