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Friday, 06:59 pm, 30 July 2004 A long week comes to an end and a couple of updates. I'm hoping to get the Mailout out t'row with a bit of luck. Probably in the evening. The Originator (Part II) Earlier this month I wrote about a track of mine being played on ABC Classic radio in Australia. I found the track listing a couple of days ago; http://www.abc.net.au/classic/daily/stories/s1124647.htm It's funny to read the track listing in context. It isn't one of my better tracks but someone clearly liked it. I read the DJ's bio and he is 21. He would have been 16 when I left Australia. I do wonder about the exposure that Isle of the Apes received. Particularly as a number of people have noted that Aphex Twin's Window Licker seems derivative of the Noble Ape March. The March predates Window Licker by a year and a half. What momentum would be needed to return to recording music on a regular basis? The main issue in the UK is the cost of living. Also our living space isn't open to the kind of recording setup in the Shed. Chris Blair's Stunning Figures After seven months, Chris Blair's figures arrived. To be honest, I unwrapped them and looked at them for about a minute. I've seen a lot of high quality figures in my time. What caught me about Chris' figures was the writing. I have seen Chris' writing work on figures in White Dwarf. It looks great in print. But when you see the writing on the figures, they are only 30mm tall. The writing is less than a 1mm high in some cases. Here is a zoom of the early part of the work, it was taken about three months ago.  The writing on the pistol holster is really tiny. The manual skill involved in producing these figures - spectacular. Very very impressive. Good night. Monday, 07:46 pm, 26 July 2004 Today is the last day of my wife and my brief Summer holiday. With Noble Warfare, I have been working on the bridging point where organised units move into close combat slugging. There are a number of subtle factors I want to include in the game and there are definite trade-offs between speed and realism. In addition to this, I have been reading a number of Games Workshop's lesser known rule books - first Warmaster which I picked up in Liverpool and also Warhammer Ancient Battles, Warhammer Armies of Chivalry and Warhammer English Civil War. The depth of these texts as food for thought in creating combat simulation - spotless! Very well written. Very well structured and a pleasure to read. Finally, some moving-into-winter cleaning. The weather hasn't provided two sunny days in a row for a couple of months. I'm not holding my breath for a week of sunshine, so I have been cleaning things out for winter. The WeFunk website has been down for the past few days. I would email Nick (aka Prof Groove) but I only have a wefunkradio.com address for him... Good night. Friday, 11:00 pm, 23 July 2004 Liverpool My wife and I have just returned from two days in Liverpool. Although we have lived in the North West of England for nearly three years, we hadn't ventured the hour and a half to Liverpool. Having seen Liverpool I have mixed feelings. The two days were divided purely by rain. The first day produced some irritating and some heavy rain bursts which made doing touristy things next to impossible. We did get to the Tate Liverpool and wandered around Albert Docks and the city centre. But there wasn't much truly outdoors we could do. The centre of the city could really have been any midsized British city. I found a Games Workshop and one block following we were at the Cavern Club (cue tourist photo).  I picked up a couple of John Lennon post cards and a CD version of Shaved Fish. I had the vinyl in Australia. A good compilation to have. We retired to the hotel room and I went on a postcard writing marathon. Topping more than twenty in a couple of hours. Two things occurred to me (i) I really like writing postcards and (ii) I can remember a number of addresses off the top of my head. In fact, this batch of postcards was the smallest batch I had written in the past ten years. I have lost contact with so many people, it is difficult to write more than twenty postcards. Liverpool, in the entry to the city, was quite depressed. For all the income that came in through shipping and through the Beatles tax bracket. So little stuck. I felt sorry for Liverpool actually. It seemed to be the most pillaged of all the British cities I have seen. Where was the wealth? Where did it go? Nottingham had a solid middle class feel to it. But there were serious slums coming in to Liverpool and even the centre of the city showed real neglect in places. Where planners/the city council clearly couldn't be bothered. Disheartening. The second day opened with an ongoing debate about what we would do. My wife and I have totally opposing styles of holiday. My wife likes touristy things. I like to spend quality time in a city. In any case, it was my wife's morning and we did the hop-on bus tour of Liverpool followed by a ferry ride. Late the previous day my wife mentioned a surprise that she had planned. A trip to a historic ship yard that housed an actual U-Boat. Following the windswept ferry ride, we arrived at the historic ship yard. It was a typical poorly maintained British tourist destination in the middle of industrial dockland. But there was something honest about it. The U-Boat was closed to the public but still very impressive on the skyline. My wife went into one military boat with some protest and then went back to the car. I went on the remaining ships and found a submarine at the back of the boat display I could actually go on. My wife had long departed to the car, so I took a couple of photos with the timer on the camera.  You can see how wind/sun burnt the ferry trip had left me. My wife fared somewhat worse. We drove back stopping to have lunch and pick up some reading material at a Borders' on the way back. All in all, a good holiday. Marred initially by bad weather but concluding with some quality time on a submarine. Not yellow though. Good night. [ Previous Log ]
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