All posts by Newt

Games Designer, Publisher, Web Developer, Dad.

The weekend thus far

So far this weekend can be summed up by the following words;

Tired Was so wired and tired by the time I got home, delayed by being stuck behind a slow train from Huddersfield (grrr). Went to Boarders with Rach, bought zip, and then had a quick tea. Was grumpy then went to bed.

Productive Went to Morrisons, stocked up on provisions. While we were there stopped by the HSBC branch and sorted out our joint finances. Also got a mortgage certificate which shows that the HSBC will loan us a silly amount of money. All in all really set my mind at rest about money matters (which have been bothering me recently). Then came home and sorted out about a hundred records to give to keefybabe and finished off the “Song for Keef” project (see cut below for results).

Party keefybabe was five yesterday so I and a bunch of other peeps went round his gaff for a parteeeee. Been a while since I’ve been to one of these ‘hey lets cram everyone in a room” type affairs and I nearly passed out with the heat in the first hour or two. Had a great time and chatted to a bunch of people that I have previously known only from keefybabe’s friends list. Was a wuss and came home at 11, because I’m an early morning person these days, and the bedroom needs painting today.

Crap Finished off House of Flying Daggers, which I thought was a pile of tosh. Completely overdone bullocks! Also struggling my way through “A touch of Zen”, a martial arts film from the 70s, which although lovely filmed and very evocative is as slow as a turtle. One hour in and there’s been one, rather good, fight scene. Sticking with it (will watch rest later) since it has had positive reviews, e.g. this one at Kungfucinema.com. It could me however going off Martial Arts films, so I’m going to watch Enter the Dragon or Hard boiled later to test if this is the case.

Procrastinate Is what I am doing now. I’ve a bedroom to paint and a house to tidy…hum more COD2 I think 😀

Lonely Is what I’ll be tonight, since Rach is at work today and is going over to stay at her mums tonight. This shouldn’t bother me but after the “wayyhey I can do what I like” wears off after a couple of hours, it gets very creepy being in the house alone.

A song for Keef the final results

Positive thought for the day

Not that I’m feeling at all pessimistic or shaky, this just fell out of my “Complete book of pocket positives”

“Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will create the fact”Wiliam James 1842-1910 American Psychologist and Philosopher

Song for Keef-Update

Thanks for all the people who have given me songs for keefybabe’s compliation so far.

This is how it looking so far;

1. Lawnmower Deth – Ooh Crikey [Richard Bartlet]
2. BBC Radiophonic Workshop-Dr. Who Theme
3. Leonard Nimoy & William Shatner – Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins
4. Nasenbluten – Cuntface [Cloneboy]
5. Madness – House of Fun [Gillywoo]
6. Lawnmower Deth – Seventh Church Of The Apocalyptic Lawnmower [Richard Bartlet]
7. Village people – YMCA [LittleRach]
8. Front Line Assembly – Mindphaser[Glennkenobi]
9. Stephenwolf- Magic Carpet Ride[deputydoug]

Note there’s still a couple of tracks I’m still tracking down.

If you stil haven’t sent me a song, hopefully the above list should give some inspiration 🙂 Either post here or email me at newtus at ntlworld dot com.

Nikkyboy has sent some cracking images of Keef for the cover, but if you have any more send them on.

Gah its Monday morning

My lungs and body is aching from the tail end of yet another cold. However from Rach’s experience it is short sharp and eck so today should be the end.

As well as gaming nonsense spent most of the weekend enjoying having Rach about the house, since it was the first entire weekend she’s had off since she started as a Midwife a month ago.

Work is steady but calm. Got quite an exciting piece of work to do which will see me flex my programming muscles, getting me away from the awful process of procuring content and reviewing (which in this place is like extracting blood from a stone). I’ve also got to procure a major piece of software, which should see me be able to put another point on my CV.

This weekend I have been mainly seeing this message…..

…on my computer screen.

Yup I’ve been wasting more time and money playing Call of Duty 2, and the above is one of the many user-friendly messages the game gives you at any applicable time. Its abit like the Microsoft Office Assistant has snuck into the game engine, “I see you’ve found an MG42 you might want to press F to use against the mass of Germans rushing your position”. Playing wise its like the first game on steroids. bigger maps, frighting amounts of enemies and more explosions. The big strength of the original Call of Duty games was the fact that you had an AI squad fighting alongside you. This time there’s more of them, and overall it plays less like a game of Tag (“Hey Jenkins your it, go over there and blow up that bridge while every Jerry on the map tries to shoot you) and more like a game of British bulldog (“Hey Jenkins, lets all rush the bridge while the whole of the third Reich charges to met us!”) where if you go too far ahead you suddenly find your self surrounded by big burly Germans pummelling you to death with the butts of their rifles.

My only gripes with this awesome game.

  • Its too short
  • Russian campaign far too short
  • What’s with the fat comedy Germans? (I kid you not)

Here’s some images of playing catch the grenade in the Moscow level with my Russian chums

A Song for Keef

IF YOU ARE SEEING THIS YOU ARE ON A CUSTOM FREINDS LIST, AND YOU ARE NOT keefybabe

As you probably know its keefybabe’s birthday next week. I’m going to be putting together a compliation CD and thought it would be nice if other people apart from myself contributed.

So post me a Artist/Song title, and I’ll try to track it down.

Also I’ll be doing a proper CD covers, using my mad photoshop skillz, something along the lines of my previous keef pictures. However being a creative type I’ld like to do a new image(s) for this project, so if you’ve got any pictures of Keef , the siller or embarassing the better, do pass them on.

Let other people know who aren’t on my friends list or don’t use LJ and ask them to email me their song and/or pictures at newtus AT ntlworld DOT com

Cheers

Calling Dr Rock!

Woke up early awoken by my cat Holly gently clawing my face! Swearing and feeding ensued along with the realisation I still ached from Saturday night and worse than this the crap music that they were playing at Sandanestas was still echoing through my brain. The Streets , arrrghh! Franz Ferdinand, please god no! The Kaiser Chiefs, just say no to limp wristed indie gitar bollocks.

Temporarily brushed this aside by doing my morning Chi kung exercises, and while they nicely woke me up and started to sedate the pain I was resolved to a day of dull aches and poor temper. “Oh well these things will happen if you drink your shoe size in pints at the weekend” I thought morosely

Then an amazing thing happened. I brought my mp3 player back from the dead, by the simple act of feeding it a battery, and I causally put on the headphones the thump, crash bang whoop fish of System of a Down streaming through them. Suddenly energy and vitality started to return. Fast forward to a couple of tracks by britnoisemongers of yesteryear, Fudge Tunnel and Godflesh, and I was skipping round the room which was becoming more luminous by the moment. “Eh calm down lad, less giddy like, got to go to work” I thought as I quickly shaved before setting off.

On the train noise was the order of the day, with Strapping Young Lad’s latest Alien being enjoyed, a couple of tracks of the The Damned’s Machine Gun Ettiqutte all topped off with about 15 minutes of pure quality from keefybabe’s “Widnes Years”.

Feeling completely 110% now. I’m off to Vinyl Exchange (second hand record shop on Oldham Road in Manchester) this lunch to get me some Godflesh and/or Fudge Tunnel.

As the Damned once said “Noise is for heroes, we’ve got music for zeroes” Too effing right!