Reign of Kings

Me and a mate of mine have been building like crazy in RoK, we're on a popular, well-run server and we've got one hell of a structure on the go!

Moody or what?!

We fully intend to continue building upwards, simply because we can't build outwards... the server rules restrict the size of our guild crest so subsequently our conquered territory is limited.

Great view though...

I can see mi'lord's house from here!

I've fallen off it, so I can vouch it's high!

Hopefully we can keep it going until the weekend when we'll got more members into the guild and wreak some righteous knightly medieval majestical havoc!

'Majectical'? Is that even a word?!

Lost in the written wilderness...

Haven't updated the blog in a while due to hangovers, work and total and absolute disappointment over England's loss to Wales last weekend... I literally lost the impetus to day anything except feel miserable.

I've gotten over it now, I think... plenty of time to prepare for two more days of alcoholism plus gaming and Rugby over next weekend ;)

We just need to bloody-well beat Australia.

RWC #12 (I think?)

Right, time to check out the Rugby pulse of Knowle village centre and see if any pubs are making an effort to show England v Wales, which, to me, is a bloody big game!

RWC Bad Dream

I've just had a bad dream:

England 20 - 25 Wales, 3 minutes left, England have a lineout on the Welsh 22... and then I woke up, FFS!

Lastest Hitman title delayed until march 2016

Article here

Delaying a game in order to fit more content into it? Wow, that's unusual... if it had been EA or Bungie, they'd have released it anyway and charged us for the content as an add-on download later on, probably around March 2016.

Cadbury Creme Eggs

I love Cadbury Creme eggs... I just wish they made them all year round, still, I suppose we wouldn't crave after them so much.

I've got to print, from what I can see, new artwork onto cast wrap vinyl for application to some large size wooden model eggs... I get all the best jobs!

Pic below is one that has the old artwork on, the wrapping looks a bit ropey but that can't be helped considering the shape.

Om nom! No wait... ahh crap, it's wooden!!

Take a step back...!

Well those last few posts seemed to make no sense but they backed-up the immense hangover I had throughout Saturday and some of Sunday. I literally have no memory of how I got home, the beer scooter strikes again!

We play Wales next Saturday, 20:00, at Twickenham and I'll be in a pub somewhere getting drunkenly stressed... again.

What is with England and sport that seems to send our collective national stress levels into the stratosphere? I'll bet all those Kiwis weren't bothered by their team's performance against the Pumas because they know that their team will pull out the stops when it matters.

Our lot will just keep running on the ragged edge, hoping for a bit of luck and a crap performance from the other side.

RWC #5

Next pub... they have a band in front of the dancefloor, actually, I tell a lie, we were in a previous place of alcoholism but it wasn't named... and long may it be unnamed you fuckers.... whuhaaaaay!

RWC #5

Fourth pub... at least I think it is.. bugger it, whatever... aaand booogey, yeah baby, yeah!

RWC #4

Okay we won, and got a try bonus... But, we played badly plus Fiji didn't plat that well themselves...

Now, there are teams that can play badly, lose, yet win a tournament... we need to play waay beyond that..

FFS, roll the next game of totat stress...

RWC #3

I am the only person in this pub wearing an England away shirt... in fact, apart from my brother (who is wearing a plain white England Rugby top, sans sponsors) we are the only two people wearing colours for a RWC game, in this pub...

Read into that if you will... whatever.

RWC #2

Second pub... and they serve Carling :)

I skipped the other pubs I'd planned to crawl 'cos my brother txt'ed me and said he was in the pub we were going to watch the match in... sooo 4 pints in and all is good baby!

RWC #1

Arrived at the pub (a Wetherspoon) to start my RWC celebration to find that they're having a problem with the Carling tap, had to have a Carlsberg instead... not a good start.

Ahh well, at least a pigeon hasn't shat on me...

Ahh, you've gotta love the internet!

This is quite possibly the funniest conversation thread I've read in a looong time ;)

It started out with me, whilst writing an artworking guide, doing some grammar checking on whether I should use 'rooves' as the plural of 'roof'.

As usual I did some Googling and, as most people do, clicked on the top result... and what a top result it is! The arguments in the thread following the explanation is internet gold. I certainly shows how much humanity is heading down the toilet!!

The screenshot below is possibly the best troll I've read in ages:

If I'd been drinking tea at the time it would have been all over the keyboard.

Rugby World Cup fans urged to plan ahead for travel...

Yeah don't go for the 'Rugby Special' train advertised at Waterloo, if you do, you'll spend half-an-hour or more queueing when you could have caught other trains on other routes and been well on your way to Twickenham.

It's not the train itself that's the problem, it's the ridiculous organisation by the so-called 'security' people that will marshall you up one side of the platform then back down the other side so you end up back where you started next at a load of ticket barriers that aren't closed off thereby allow people to queue-jump in front of you.

Kegel Exercises

I found myself reading this article today because apparently exercising the kegel muscle regularly can considerably increase the intensity of orgasms. I, erm... ahem, read about that whilst trolling through Google News articles... but hey, who doesn't want better orgasms, right?

Anyway what you're supposed to do initially is to find the kegel muscle so you can isolate it for the exercise routine. You do this by peeing, then, whilst attempting to keep your buttocks and upper leg muscles relaxed, reduce the flow of wee, if you successfully manage to do that, you've found the kegel muscle.

I tried this and ended up peeing all over the toilet seat and floor.

Train Fail

The trains failed me this morning... I checked my London Midland app to see if my train was running and it indicated that is was, when I got to the station it was delayed by 15 minutes due to the train 'running late out of the depot' ... hang on?! Surely if that was the case the damned app would have reflected this, it's not like I live next door to the depot?!

The next train to arrived was packed like sardines so I waited patiently for the one that was delayed, and it had loads of seats available.

I got to work 15 minutes late.

...this is how I roll in life, it's THAT interesting.

Drinking & Playing Reign of Kings

Round my mate's place doing as the title says...

FTW

England v Ireland

Hangover aside (see my previous post) I did manage to take some pics and videos of the day, this one proves that you don't need to be a professional footballer to get the Sky crossbar challenge

Hangover from HELL

I have just about recovered from quite possibly one of the worst hangovers I've ever had... and I've had LOTS.

Said hangover being the result of one heck of a day's drinking in around Twickenham Stadium, some of London and back around my home town... I woke up on my settee 6am Sunday morning, TV still on and the remnants of a kebab all over me. How I got back from London, let alone purchased and ate a kebab is a mystery that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Sunday was a right-off... Monday and Tuesday were too although I managed to get to work, good job I was busy enough to forget about the pain and dulness

I've really only been able to be properly aware of my surroundings today and had enough wits about me to write this blog entry.

England v Ireland

Just spent a pointless 20 minutes queueing at Waterloo due to some idiot from TFL deciding to coral us and hundreds of othe fans at platform 22, we missed two local trains because of it.

Rugby Special Train? My arse.

Life Lesson #203

Never stand under a lampost

England v Ireland

Fucking pigeon just shat on me, all over my jacket and onto the collar of my brand new England shirt. Had rush back and change, fortunately I had another Shirt and jacket.

Not a good omen

England v Ireland

Off to old Londinium and to Twickenham to watch England's last warmup match against Ireland before the RWC.

I have to say that I am apprehensive, we really need to get that set piece sorted especially against a side that has quite possibly the best set piece game in the world at the moment.

In the Six Nations they kicked us all over the park and won comfortably, I don't see that happening a lot today but what I do see is them shoving our scrum back and challenging our lineouts.

I feel the need... the need to numb myself with alcohol.

Autumn Mellow Fruitfulness

Now that we're approaching the latter half of the year it'll soon become necessary for me to wear a jacket... this is great as it doubles the amount of pockets available.

Here is a lump of vinyl...

I've just weeded it out of a load of cut jobs, it's fresh vinyl... and it smells lovely!

I love the smell of vinyl :)

Fast food or healthy food... makes bugger all difference sometimes.

Boy, I have been shitting through the eye of a needle this morning, clearly it was something I ate last night.

I'm thinking that if I'd gone to Five Guys and gotten a burger last night whilst walking through my local shopping centre yesterday evening I probably wouldn't be in this situation now.

However at the time I didn't because I had no cash on me and couldn't be bothered to go to a cash point plus I had some sweetcorn and asparagus in the fridge that I wanted to use up, "a healthier choice" I'd thought to myself.

So I cooked the sweetcorn and asparagus and had them with some breaded chicken, oven cooked straight from the freezer, all were cooked properly and tasted great. Granted, the asparagus was a day or two over the 'use by' date but they smelled and looked fine and had been stored in a tupperware dish in my fridge rather than left to rot in their original cling film packaging.

So I felt better for eating a supposedly healthier meal and being richer by around £10 (Five Guys burgers are ridiculously expensive but soo good!)

That ended around 11.15pm when I was roused from my slumber with a dash to the bog... then two more this morning after I got up, one of which was preceded with a very uncomfortable walk from the train station to work.

When England play Ireland at Twickenham tomorrow I'll be there and I'll be the one making a beeline to the burger vans!

That's A LOT of trees!

According to new research, there are 3 trillion trees in the world, or roughly 420 per person...

So now, on my regular travels I shall claim ownership of trees I like, up to a total of 420.

I love trees, I used to climb them a lot as a kid (and fell out of a fair few as a result) the world was so much more interesting from the top of a tree.

Trees - pine fresh!

My opinion of the new Google logo (2015)

Hmmm... I'm undecided, I think it makes them look too much like a toy manufacturer (although if their new self drive car is anything to go by, anyone would mistake them for precisely that!) Apparently it's more optimised to scale better on mobile devices so that's fair enough, as the previous one had serifs they do tend to break up more at smaller sizes and lower resolutions, plus the single G version with all colours on looks good:

Much better for devices with little to no screen real estate. On the whole I can see why they're doing it, to morph the brand better across a greater diverse of screen technology.

Of course if Jony Ive had gotten involved that logo would have been inlined to make it way thinner, and had a pink grad through it before you could say "Google it..."!

Anyway, it's brave new world for the chocolate factory in terms of brand identity, it will be interesting to see how well it will fair for them :)

FU ICC Media People

For all you ICC profiling people out there who no longer support the Epson GS6000 Stylus Pro:

This was printed on a polyester canvas which will be wrapped around
a picture frame, and it was printed using a generic ICC profile!

Still around, and still printing awesomely on pretty much anything printable! FU all!!

I say that because I can rarely find ICC profile for new media these days, they all seem to have a hard on for the SureColor series and HP's Latex printers.

Empyrion: Galactic Survival

I've been playing the pre-alpha of this game for a few weeks now and I'm loving it, more so than Reign of Kings which I've taken a sabbatical from because they recently decided that even the community servers had to be flattened in order to accommodate a fix to remove a bad bug, which pissed me off because I lost a castle that I'd spent an entire weekend building.

Anyhoo, back to Empyrion, I've now got a good base up and running and a couple of spaceships in my collection, hopefully the devs are competent enough to not have me lose this base in future updates!

This is my farm... ohh arrr!

Crafting is very in-depth, much more complex than other survival games I've played, trouble is, that can get frustrating in terms regularly of sending me off on a tangent when all I want to do get my sodding ship finished.

Not sure what I was thinking when I created this but it does kick ass... or NPC towers

The game is very early in development - you can't visit certain parts of each planet (the poles are closed off), vegetation just looks like it's been plonked down half-assed and the ship flight control mechanics are very sludgy.

This is my second, smaller, hopefully more manoeuvrable spaceship

The constant need to replenish oxygen and food bars is a bit annoying because they go down too quickly, which affects game balance because you're too distracted trying find food and manufacture oxygen to enjoy the scenery and explore. I'm hoping that future updates will 'slow' them down just a bit. Although having said that, I do think that they are an important part of the playability as this is a survival game and after all, the whole point of survival is to find items to, well, survive!

The devs are promising a lot in future updates like a fully working galaxy for instance, which is a big ask when the game has seamless exits and reentries to planets, God knows what the processing and data size requirements will be from a technical standpoint if they expand it galaxy wide... I guess we're trusting the devs with that one. However, if it does work out okay it will be awesome to be able to seamlessly fly from one planet to another in a massive multi-system universe... this game might even be the replacement to Freelancer that I've been searching for ever since Microsoft dropped it's development (and let's face it Star Citizen isn't going to be released anytime soon with all the faffing around they're doing).

My rooftop garage, complete with oxygen station...

Empyrion is hugely addictive, I often find my oxygen bar flashing red because I've been so embroiled in figuring out how to build my ships I've forgotten to replenish it prompting me to rush to the nearest oxygen station. I'm at the stage now where I've built so much stuff and taken so much time to build it all that I'm fearful of losing it. I have a huge list of game 'backups' that have array of confusing names, this is where the dedicated server part needs to come in so my progress is out there in the cloud rather than on my PC's local hard drive, the results of my addiction need a decent save point system!

In terms of stability for a pre-alpha it's pretty good, the only two bugs I've found is it hanging when I quit out (forcing a Windows 'searching for an answer to your problem' 'close' dialogue box) and a situation where I lose power cells when I try to mass load them into my water and oxygen generators (pro-tip to work around this bug: just load them one by one instead).

Definitely worth a go for £13, especially for the building system, it really has great potential.