Another blog??

I have a secret. Not much of a secret really. A long time ago now, on 28 October 2007 to be precise I started a videogaming blog in addition to this one. I've kept it going, so now it is over 6 years old. Not quite as long ago as when I started this blog but almost. I've been thinking for a while now about starting a music blog. I used to do a music podcast but deleted it after 3 or 4 seasons. I did it very diligently, sourcing podsafe music and writing to the creators and promoting their tours or CDs. I had a BlogSpot blog, an Odeo stream and a Myspace page. Some of the bands even posted complimentary stuff. I enjoyed doing it but it was a lot of work. What put me off eventually was a snotty nosed email from an artist. I liked what she was doing with interviewing bands and so I interviewed a friend of mine. I mentioned it to her in my usual email to artists I featured in my podcast and she wrote me back basically saying I was copying her! I thought she might say something like thanks for featuring her music in my podcast and promoting her stuff but actually she seemed to take offense. I mean, it seems ridiculous that just by interviewing a friend I could provoke that reaction. She wasn't interested in supporting another artist who was struggling to make a go of it, she was self-interested. Well, that whole experience kind of put me off. I know I shouldn't have let it get to me, it was one of a number of things but it did make me reconsider what I was doing. If I do create a music blog it would just be about the music I like. I don't think I would have any ambition other than that.
I have a writing blog and a drawing blog. Neither are very active unfortunately. This one and my videogaming blog are the most regularly posted to. I would think that the music blog would be an intermittent one too.

Colouring markers

One of the most awesome presents my wife has bought me has been my Pro Marker sets from Letraset. I have two sets, they're just called Set 1 and Set 2 and there are 12 markers in each set plus a special blending marker. Each Pro Marker has a dual nib, one end is fine and the other end is the thick angled marker variety. These provide a range of different effects. I'm not very good at colouring with these but that's down to not understanding the techniques properly and me not being a very good artist! I have only used them on about four drawings so far.

Lazer Tag

Sometimes I pick up toys for my kids from charity shops that I haven't heard of and it kickstarts an interest in something from me. This happened this week. I saw a couple of interesting looking guns in a charity shop on Monday and went back on Tuesday and fortunately they were still there. I picked them up for about £2.50 each or slightly less. I just thought they looked cool - I didn't expect them to work.
After the purchase, they were split between my son and his friend and so they aren't a pair anymore. However, they could get together and play them some time. Anyway, I did some research after the fact and discovered they could be linked together to play various multiplayer shooter games. Infact, they seem pretty awesome, if only I'd known at the time of purchase I might have had more respect! They were not sold with the original goggles and rumble packs though - that would be expecting a bit too much and I'm not sure that the goggles really add anything to the experience.

Holiday Humdrum

This is day 7 of my holiday (including the weekend days) and it's today that the rest of the world of work takes a break too, until Tuesday, because it's the Easter Bank Holiday. It's my favourite Bank Holiday because we also get Easter Monday off. I am taking Tuesday off this year in addition to the Bank Holiday Monday, so I get a tiny bit longer than most other working folks.
This week has been largely about the kids. Last Saturday my wife was out for most of the day and evening at a judo competition with my daughter and her friend. Then on Monday my son had a friend over for a sleepover and at the same time my daughter went to a sleepover with her friend. I took the boys to the local country park, after buying them a cool couple of guns (but they didn't really appreciate them!)
Tuesday, Wednesday went by nothing very memorable about them and yesterday it was just my son and I because my wife took my daughter down to Brighton and met up with her friend and her daughters. I did a bit of drawing and colouring with my rendering pens.
I've played a few videogames this week but that's mainly been it. I haven't planned to do very much this holiday and I haven't done much. I'm a little disappointed in myself for not doing more really. Never mind. Still a few days left but today and tomorrow I'm a taxi for my wife and daughter.

Pandorum

I'm into my Easter holiday now, this is my third day of leave. Only another three official days of leave left after today. I've spent a couple of days doing stuff for the kids as my son has had a friend staying over. I have managed to watch a film on Netflix on Sunday though - it was a film called Pandorum. The reviews on Metacritic were almost universally bad however it's one of those films that seems to split critics from fans. The fan rating on Metacritic was good. Critics claiming it is boring and derivative of other films, such as Alien. Well, I think there's some truth in it but I didn't think it was boring.
The starting sequence sees the population of Earth increasing and natural resources wasting and global wars developing to capture the resources. An Earth-like planet was discovered and a spaceship built to transport human life to colonise it.
The story begins with a man in a deep space chamber/pod thing being woken up. He's disoriented and can't remember things like what the mission is, what his name is etc. The power on board is flaky, the lights keeps going out or flickering. After a shave and a wash he's looking more human. Another pod lights up and a colleague is awakened in the same manner. The two of them start trying to work out why they have been woken up, what's happened to the rest of the crew, where they are supposed to be and why that seems not to be where they. They can't get into the bridge of the ship. So the younger man climbs into a vent to try and explore the ship.
There was an experiment on board the ship that has bred a super strong race of mutant beings. These have become hunters and our guy meets a terrified member of the crew strung up as bait by these mutants. He is freed and is questioned but doesn't know much other than simply to run away from the mutants.
Our young crew member then runs into two humans, an Asian guy and a young woman who have been surviving onboard the ship and learning to evade the mutants. They are both enlisted to help the crew member.
Whilst this is happening the older crew member meets another member of the crew, or rather pulls him out of a duct full of cables, like giving birth. It seems that this crew member knows a bit more and talks of a condition called Pandorum that affects the mind of those who live in space for prolonged periods.
The team of three head to the reactor core, which they eventually do despite  meeting a non-friendly human along the way. They activate the reactor manually. This sorts out a nest of the mutants but some still remain.
The older crew member and the crew member pulled out of the cables start to have conflicting views, the older one eventually locking the other into a pod. It turns out that the older man was suffering from Pandorum and the other crew member was a mental aberration.
Spoiler alert: the interesting bit is that it turns out the ship isn't in deep space. This explains a sequence when they open shutters to reveal only blackness - no stars at all. It is actually under water on Tanis, the Earth-like planet the ship was headed for. The team of three is reduced to two but they manage to survive the mutant hunters to slip into a deep space pod thing that is ejected from the ship. It fills with water but eventually surfaces and opens, amongst lots of other pods that contain the remains of humanity.
The last shot of the film is a shot of the planet with a population figure of just over a thousand humans.
The stars in the cast are Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster and Antje Traue. Antje is probably my highlight, not being known to me before but she is beautiful. She would make a good Selene in a future Underworld film.

Edging closer to Easter

As each day goes by my consoling thought is that my holiday also gets closer. It's now only three days away.
I'm pretty sure that some years I haven't taken any leave at Easter other than the mandatory Good Friday and Easter Monday Bank Holidays.
I'm glad of the break this time. I love spending time away from work. I don't really have any plans. I should draw up some plans for the break. The nice thing is, once I get home I just need to spend one more day at work and then I'm on my break.

Call of Duty Ghosts

I played this with the father of one of my sons friends on Saturday morning. We had some time after dropping our boys off at tennis and had a cup of tea, a chat and a couple of games in a mode called Gun Game. It's a mode where your gun automatically changes when you score a kill. You go through several different ranges before ending up with the final weapon, the ballistic knife.
I have never played a game with an adult before. It was good playing with another adult. We're going to organise a day playing games with the boys, who also like the games.

AutoSketch SketchbookX for tablet

Time to share a doodle with you, I've been doing a few doodles on my tablet this weekend. In this doodle, you have to imagine the woman has blonde hair.

Pirates of the Caribbean

On Saturday we went into London in the afternoon to go to the Royal Albert Hall. We attended a special showing of the film The Curse of the Black Pearl. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performed the score while we watched the film projected above them.
It was very good, the orchestra really got very loud at points. The music for that film is so good. Here's a photo of the stage before the performance began. The synchronisation was off for the first five minutes of the film, eventually it was restored, much to the audiences delight. For a few minutes I thought we would have a Singing In The Rain experience: "no no no" and "yes yes yes" with reverse actions. It was a little like that between Keira Knightley and Johnathon Pryce in the early exchanges of the film. The first Pirates film is my favourite I think.

Lord of the Rings: BBC Collection dramatised for radio

I was in town on Saturday and along with the War of the Worlds DVD I also picked up this collection on gold audio disks. It was only 3 quid so I thought it was a bargain. My son loves the films so I decided to pick it up for him. All the disks were there and there was even a nice sleeve and a booklet and a copy of a map of Middle Earth. On Sunday evening I started ripping the disks to my son's iTunes library. It took a while as there were 13 of them. Actually there were 12, one was missing and unfortunately one disk had what I think was a pressing defect. Even so, it's a huge amount of content for a small amount of money. I might be missing some parts of the story but there is plenty there to enjoy. There are some great voices involved. Michael Horden plays Gandalf and he has a great voice, so too does John Le Measurer.

War of the Worlds

On a Saturday, one of the things I enjoy doing is visiting the charity shops in town. I regularly check the books, games, CDs and DVDs. Sometimes I buy a duff disk or scratched or something but most of the time the goods are in reasonable condition. Yesterday I bought myself a two disk special edition live concert DVD of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. It is awesome. I've had the music on my iPod for a while and have listened to bits of it and enjoyed but the live concert is a great show and through my TV and Hi Fi speakers it sounds amazing too. I would recommend it. I got it at the bargain price of £1.50! Justin Hayward sings on this version and I love his voice, it is so enchanting. I enjoyed his vocal work with The Moody Blues also - my dad was always a big fan of theirs, perhaps some has rubbed off? There has been a more recent update of this musical though, I think with Gary Barlow. I can't imagine it being very good but what do I know? I do like the version I picked up though. I believe it was recorded in 2006.

Lawn mowing again

With the more recent spell of good weather, the downside is that the lawn grass has started to grow. A fortnight ago I mowed the lawn and looking at the grass again today I realised I needed to cut it again today while the weather is dry. I don't know if I will be able to cut it next week and to leave it another two weeks would just mean it gets untidy and harder to cut. So I decided to cut it this afternoon. The mower I have is one I bought last year. My previous mower had served us well but it was a cheap little hover mower and was no longer suited to a bigger lawn as we have in our new house. Infact the biggest advantage of the new mower is that I can just push it around rather than potentially hurting my back and primarily that it collects the grass as it cuts - a real boon. It's a Qualcast mower (the green ones), my old one was a Flymo (orange ones), like the one pictured below but not exactly the same. I'd recommend Qualcast, they seem to be well made and cut the lawn nicely although I've really given up on trying to make nice even stripes in the lawn. That takes too much effort, I'm just happy with a tidy lawn. Actually, another reason I don't try and engineer stripes is that the quality of the grass is quite poor. There seems to be a lot of mud and moss. I don't know if this is the product of a long wet winter or what!?

Happy Mother's Day!

Today is Mother's Day, I got up ahead of my wife to feed the cats so that she could lie in. My daughter made breakfast in bed for her. My son gave her a card he wrote up last night, he had previously chosen the card last weekend. Then we all gave her the gift I had bought on everyone's behalf - an iPad. Not an inexpensive gift, I'm sure you'll agree. However, it is one that she deserves. She is always looking out for us and is unselfish and caring. She's the kindest person I know and I'm very lucky to be married to her.
I made lunch, a nice chicken, bacon and cheese bake with French beans, cream styled corn and rice. I went out to buy a fuse for my son's laptop plug and got ingredients for Eton Mess to eat later, yummy.
I called my mum just after eight o'clock this morning (the clocks went forwards an hour today, rather frustratingly meaning we lose an hour of the weekend) to wish her happy mother's day too. We sent her cards during the week and fortunately she got the last card yesterday.

Almost feels like summer...

The weather this weekend has been really lovely. I walked into town and back twice yesterday and I didn't mind because the weather was beautiful. I do enjoy it when there is enough wind that means the sun isn't scorching hot, this time of year is just right. On my way into town yesterday I even bought an iced cream from the shop and I think that's the first time I've ever done that.

It was a Wall's Magnum Classic and it was delicious. The perfect accompaniment to a bright sunny day.

Project Cosplay - Helmet completed

Well, this weekend there has been a focus for me on completing the Blake's 7 Federation Trooper helmet. It is now done, all bar touching up the paint in a few places. I decided in the end not to use the plastic from the drinks bottles I'd been collecting. Instead I bought a couple of plastic folders yesterday and used those for the plastic bands around the rim of the helmet. They actually worked better than the green bottle plastic would have for two main reasons: bottle plastic has a very strong memory and continually tries to wrap itself back round into the curve of a bottle and, probably harder to deal with, it is very thin and easily melts in contact with the hot glue. the plastic I did buy was quite strong but also just right in terms of the flexibility. It also came flat so was much easier to work with when bending around the helmet.
I modrocked the helmet on Sunday morning, which was very enjoyable actually. That stuff dries very quickly, so too did the black spray paint I bought on Saturday from Hobbycraft. I was able to glue the visor into place (two strips from a shandy bottle). It was a little trickier than I expected due to the melting of the thin plastic. I used a bit of flat black foam for the badge and a disk of cardboard, which I painted grey and added a bit of detail to with the glue gun.
The tricky part was working out how to suspend the plastic around the rim of the helmet, I'm still not sure whether I've done the right thing or not, I chopped up some cardboard and had two layers of struts that support the plastic rings. The lengths of folders didn't quite fit the circumference of the helmet so I had to use some extension pieces bit they are at the back and hopefully not too noticeable. One thing I've learned though about making helmets - if you're modelling the head with a balloon makes sure it's big enough. I used quite a small balloon and the helmet just about fits my head but is a little too snug and I fear I may have to work out a way for it to fit my head better.

Chromecast

During my lunchtime on Thursday last week I ordered a Google Chromecast dongle. It's a bit of kit that allows some apps to stream from a computer or tablet or phone to the TV.  My TV is an internet smart TV but there is no keyboard, making searching through YouTube a bit of a nightmare, for example. With Chromecast streaming video is really easy from YouTube. I suppose to be expected since both are owned by the same company. It will stream Netflix although I haven't tried that and I haven't tried WiFi only, my TV is connected to my router by a cable. The Google dongle is half the cost of a proprietary dongle for my Sony TV, I'll let you know how I get on.

ReVamp's first album

I liked the second ReVamp album Wild Card so much that I also bought their first album. It's really awesome, I'm so glad I did. Floor Jansen's voice is intoxicating. I can't stop listening to her, I spent over an hour on Friday night on YouTube watching different videos of her singing live in concert. Just amazing. She's now become my favourite female vocalist. I love the fact that she's a metal singer and has a range that includes opera but she loves heavy music and can also growl. One thing I particularly respect her for is that she writes songs and when she brings growls in to a song they are always in context and never seem over-used.

Blake's 7

I've been watching the second series of Blake's 7 today. It was first broadcast in the 1970s, so the special effects and sets are a little flimsy but they are good enough to convey the stories. I love the characters, they really are the strong point.  I include the computer cast in this too. One thing I noticed today but hadn't paid much attention to in the past is just how enormous the sleeves of Roj Blake's costumes are! You can see what I mean in this picture. I also ordered series 3 and 4 today, I have series 1 and 2 for several years but haven't bought the others until today. Couldn't resist. It also fits in with a little home project I'm working on - more at some point soon.

Cancelled: Amazon Instant Video

I've cancelled my subscription to what used to be LoveFilm. It was a streaming entertainment service allowing the download of hundreds of movies and TV shows. I've still got my Netflix subscription. The reasons I cancelled the service where several:

• I was already happy with the existing service but Amazon thought arrogantly that it could do a better job by integrating it into it's shopping site
• I don't want to subscribe to an entertainment service where what I watch is free, I don't want my family or me to accidentally purchase something
• I liked the brand of LoveFilm, it was a good name. Amazon Prime Instant Video is a meaningless name
• The way the interface has been integrated into the rest of the Amazon service is very poor and looks like a botched job to me
• The communications about the change to the service really focused on it being an extension to Amazon Prime customers and very little was said about LoveFilm only subscribers - a typical result of a larger company swamping a smaller one but not understanding why it was a success and then totally ruining what was special about it

Amazon's uninspiring logo replacing LoveFilm's

New project

I have decided to make myself a costume. Whether I wear it to Comicon this year, I'm not sure. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out. I have started making the helmet. I may buy some parts for it if the helmet turns out okay. The costume I'm going to try and make is deliberately quite a simple one. It's the Federation Trooper from Blake's 7. You can see it in these shots below, as you can see the helmet is the most striking feature of these costumes. I bought a cheap tea strainer for the mouth piece that I'm going to spray black. I've bought a 2 litre bottle of Morrisons pineapple fizzy pop which is made of the right colour of green plastic. I will probably need several bottles of this though. I don't know how I'm going to come up with the plastic for the visor.