All posts by Newt

Games Designer, Publisher, Web Developer, Dad.

I have this pain all down my right diodes…

The weekend officially barfed. Huge chunks of grey barfness. Boring tedious painful barfness. Somehow last week I pulled my right back muscles, and instead of getting better over the weekend it got worse. Tired sleepy grouchy pain. Barf. Missed dr_misrule‘s 30th birthday party Saturday night because of it. Has sort of cleared up now, but I’m still taking it easy. Off to see Skinny Puppy tonight with keefybabe & attack_monkey, which will have to be a standing at the back absorbing the music rather than a way hey lets mosh type of gig.

Bah.

In good news all the resting over the weekend allowed me time to get reacquainted with Rome Total War and kick off a new campaign.

Bloody cat!!

I was only joking the other day that we were due a BBC related illness, since he tends to have a scape every 3-6 months (ear half bitten off, cancerous lump, tail nearly broken, suspected food poisoning…etc etc)

Then this lunch Rach rang me in a tearful state to tell me BBC has burst an abcess on his paw and has trotted all round the house with it.

He’s now at the vet and Rachel spent all morning cleaning carpets. I saw some of the blood on the tops of our bins on the way out this morning but thought it was that of a little rodent caught by one of the cats. Grrrrrrr!

Rach goes into more detail on her blog

Album of the Week


End. The Sounds of Disaster

01. You Only Live Once
02. To Hell With Everyone
03. Countdown To The End
04. Ruin Anyone Anywhere Anything
05. World Went Down
06. Mr Guns (The Theme From 11th Street)
07. Apache Indian Job
08. Brooklyn Home Invasion
09. Good Riddance
10. The Patricide Song
11. Fit To Die

Its been a week of grind. A continued armed police presence in both Leeds and Manchester, as the termites mill about perfumed and preened. Men with silly beards on TV threatening by the power of their voice and PR presense to bring more murder to our glasshouse lives. Yes kids welcome to the sloooooooooooooooow motion Apocalypse, and this week’s Album of the Week is the soundtrack.

This record pressed into my hands by keefybabe with the immortal words “you like loud and noisy stuff don’t cha?”. Well yes sir, I do. . Inspired by witnessing a rockerbilly act in a NY cellar bar playing on during a fire alarm, this album lives up to that inspiration. At turns jazz, hip hop, guitar based, its gloriously mixed with alarm sounds, electronic warning bleeps and infectus sense of whimsical tune. Nearest peers are Mr Bungle at their most demented, Frank Zappa at his most awkward (remember “Hot Rats” just when he got a tune going, he’d stop and play Kazoo. Lots of that sort of behavoir on this album.) and Jim Thirwell’s instrumental Steroid Maximus project. No surprise that its on Mike Patton’s Ipecac label. But I digress. This album is music to loosen your bowels to, give you giggly violent mood swings, and scare the neighbourhood cats.

Favourite track the right rollicking “To Hell With Everyone”.

Band website
Label web page

An odd day

My its been an odd day today.

A mix of strange internal feelings. On one hand I’ve been driven to do as much work as possible. Opposing this was a horrible “everything so tedious feeling” Add to this a Mental Slave Driver character to keep the show on the road and you’ve got a Newt whose increasingly feeling uptight. I’ve think I’ve won through, but reflection at home with a cup of tea will show this.

Going to have more days like this. Got lots of stuff I want to do.

Fortunately because I’m running the show I can say “Sod this I’m off home”.

Which I’m doing now. Bye

Farewell Dr Cabbage

Well the leafy one got up to Leeds on Friday night and him and deputy_dug had a right rollicking bachelor night out on the tiles, which deputy_dug can fill in the gory details.

Meanwhile me and littlerachcat chilled out and watched “Runaway Jury” which was jolly good for a courtroom drama, 4 stars out of 5.

Went over to Oldham during the day to visit Rach’s Grandma and go shopping at Morrisons. While Rach went round with her grandma doing her shopping, I went round on my own doing ours. This was one of the most deeply wrong experiences I’ve ever had. All the aisles were the same, but in a different order to Leeds. Add to this the fact it was a busy Saturday and I was never so glad to get to the pub for lunch. After a lunch we had a quick drive round some of the latest properties Rach has seen on the interweb for sale. Some very nice houses in a very nice area, just a couple of streets away from the in-laws. Hmmmmmn.

After a brief kip to burn of the food and alcohol from lunch got ready to go out to the Victoria Hotel in town.

As usual me and Rach were early, but much to my surprise so were Doug and Cab. How grown up we all are. Doug and Cab were especially fetching in matching white shirts (don’t ask). We talked we drank Rich, grannyannie, gillywoo,nikkyboy, glennkenobi, susannah_banana, Ruth and Alan turned up, we drank some more, the gurning began (see photo), we ended up in the Lounge, Rach fell asleep just after I bought a round and I abandoned my pint of Guiness to take the wife home. Handy the taxi rank being directly opposite the Lounge. Sunday was very quiet and hungover. MORE PHOTOS HERE

So in a couple of weeks time Dr Cab is off to Washington for 2-5 years to do some medical imaging nonsense involving lasers in a government funded brain drain institute being paid very nicely to put up with Americans.

Meanwhile in good ole blighty……..