Meet Box-Cat. He is an idiot.



Box-Cat returns. Bigger box, same stupid cat! (This one gets good after about 1 minute)

This is a post about painting tiny little plastic men which includes pictures of said tiny little men in differing stages of paintedness, to avoid boring everyone to tears I will hide it behind this cut:
( Click here for tear enducing boredom... )

Someone much wiser than me once wrote something about 'putting away childish things when you become a man'. Well, reluctantly I have to admit that I'm probably classed as a man now. Hell, I'm only two years away from being thirty-five; by my reckoning that's exactly halfway through my allotted three-score and ten, so you could say I'm actually a middle-aged man! Christ, that's a scary thought. The idea of being a man has some pretty heavy ideals attached to it. Ideals such as wisdom, maturity and honour. Ideals that, despite my advancing years and receding hair-line, I find myself unwilling to embrace.

"Put away childish things"? No, that's not the way of my generation. My generation is one of the first to embrace eternal youth. Not a physical youth, obviously, but a mental one. A stubborn and belligerent refusal to grow-up gracefully, or even grow up at all. A generation of permanent seventeen year olds. My whole house has turned into a sort of multi-roomed teenage boys bedroom. There are film and music posters on the walls; computers, consoles and guitars in the living room, as opposed to a nest of tables and a print of The Haywain. Every room is stuffed with CD's, books, films and games, and there are toys everywhere. The fifteen year old me would kill for all this stuff, and I must admit, so would I. Do I really need it all? Probably not, the place would be a lot neater without it, that's for sure. Does it make me happy? Well, yes, it does actually, certainly happier than I'd be without it.

Comfortable in the knowledge that I'll probably never act my age, I'm about to embark on an adventure that millions of teenagers around the world have embarked upon before me, but one that I missed out on at the time. I'm about to embrace my inner-nerd and immerse myself in the worlds of Table-Top Gaming and "Warhammer-40000". Twenty years too late maybe, but as the old saying goes, 'better late than never!'

Well, one tip really. When you are grocery shopping, always check the "price per 100g" part of the label as well as the price of the item! Last night I was working on what we in the trade call "main aisle". The one with all the beans and soup and gravy and pasta and rice and stuff on. And I was quite shocked to notice that many of the so-called "value packs" actually worked out as being more expensive than buying the same number of individual tins. For example, there is currently an offer on Heinz Tomato Soup, four cans for £2. On the same shelf, right next to these cans are a pre-packed four-pack of the same cans, currently selling for £2.99... and STILL people are buying the four-pack, even though it's a whole British POUND more expensive than buying four single cans! Granted, once the offer on the single cans finishes it'll be cheaper to buy the multi-pack again, but wait, what's this lurking amongst the baked beans? A "Value Pack" of Heinz Baked Beans you say? With the words "Value Pack" emblazoned boldly all across the packaging. Three 200g cans in a cardboard sleeve for £1.57. Right next to them on the shelf are the same sized cans of the exact same product, not on offer this time, but at their regular sale price of 48p. So, three individual cans for £1.44, or three of the same cans in a cardboard sleeve for £1.57. Guess which we sell more of... that's right, the so called "value" packs!

Beware, dear shopper. Beware the "Value" multi-packs!

So, as you may or may not know, I am a YouTube "Bedroom Guitarist". You know the ones I'm talking about, you do a search for a music video on YouTube and instead of what you are after you are inundated with an array of headless guitarists sat in their bedrooms or living rooms playing along to the song you were looking for. There are thousands of us out there. Many from the Far East, (Japan and Korea mostly), countless hoards from the US, and probably just as many from all across Europe. All united by our love of guitar driven music and the need every guitar player has to learn their favourite songs! Thanks to the power and simplicity of YouTube it is now possible for us to share our passion with the whole world. Although, admittedly, it's usually only other guitarists who watch our videos, that's ok because that's exactly the audience we are playing for. It's a great way to challenge, impress and, above all, inspire each other into furthering our knowledge and ability. It's our way of paying tribute to our favourite bands and songs. Just good clean fun!

But in recent months something has happened that threatens the future of our little community. YouTube owners Google have quietly gotten into bed with some big record companies. It seems that when a mega-corporation like Universal or Warner take YouTube to task over copyright violations, they threaten court action, but often settle for becoming partners in the company. In a business sense of the word, obviously. As partners, they are entitled to scan every single video hosted on YouTube, (using a piece of software that does it automatically mind you, there is no human input into this, so there is no differentiation between somebody posting the original song over a picture and a cover video). Now they are flagging our cover versions as Copyright infringement and are removing them from the site, sometimes without notice. Usually you are notified of the removal and allowed to lodge an appeal which can buy a few weeks grace, but at the end of the day the record company that made the initial complaint has the final say, and as such all appeals that I know of have been rejected and the song has been removed.

Yesterday the appeal I had lodged against Warner Music Group against the removal of my cover of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" was rejected and the video was removed from YouTube. I had appealed on the grounds of "Fair Use". My covers aren't for profit, obviously no-one's going to PAY me to do this stuff! One of the other criteria for fair use is the amount of original material used. In my case the whole song was used as a backing track, but with my guitar screeching all over the top of it, and the fact it's recorded through the built in mic on a digital camera, means that the quality of the original track is diminished so substantially as to be of no use to anyone. Face it, if the only choices you had to listen to War Pigs was to go out and buy a legitimate copy or to listen to my cover version for free, you'd buy the fucking song!

There are also exemptions for educational or parody purposes, both of which could loosely apply to my vids, eg, how NOT to do it, and I'm so bad it could be classed as a parody of the original, in the style of Les Dawson's piano playing :)

The final criteria for a "fair use" exemption is how adversely the usage of the original material will affect it's monetary worth. Speaking more broadly now about the whole cover versions scene, I'd have to say that these videos actually promote the bands in question. It's not as if we are posting full quality soundtracks that people can listen to instead of spending money, so there's no negative effect there. I follow a few of these guys, one of whom is a drummer who plays Strapping Young Lad songs, now, he also covers Gojira songs, a band I had never even heard of before seeing one of this guys cover videos. I now own the two most recent Gojira albums, money in the bank for their record company entirely off the back of a YouTube cover video. These idiots who are ploughing in so heavy handedly are actually going to end up costing themselves money! Jerks.

Here's a video by bass monster ZodiakIronFist who explains it all way better than me!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fUKPg4doUs

If you happen to see this and agree with our point of view, please comment on the video page, or in my comments section, and pass the link on to all your friends! We need all the support we can get if we are going to get these fuckers to see sense.



Anyway, that's it. War Pigs denied. Fuck all I can do about it. Just waiting now for my other videos to start getting pulled.

Tribute is NOT theft. Rock on dudes \m/

Once you've learned how to ride a bike it's something you'll never need to do again. A skill that will be with you until your dying day. Or so the old saying goes anyway. Through painstaking scientific research I've discovered that this statement is, in fact, a big load of arse, to use the technical term.

I learned to ride as a child, (took my cycling proficiency test and everything), and spent many happy years in the saddle. From jumping over house bricks on a B.M.X. (18 off a 1 brick high ramp was my record. My brother did 21 but snapped his bike in half on landing and nearly killed himself), to extreme mountain biking on my racer, (I wasn't going to let the fact I didn't have a mountain bike get in the way). I was very confident in my abilities as a cyclist. Then in my teen years I stopped riding and haven't ridden since.

This was stage one of my scientific experiment: Get good at riding a bike. Stop riding a bike for a VERY long time.

Bringing things back to the present, Lucy bought herself a bike a few weeks ago with the intention of using it to get fit. Now, after replacing my deceased mobile phone I still had a sizeable chunk of Christmas/Birthday money left over and thought, "Fuck it, getting fit is something I should be considering, and I've not had a bike in aaaaaages, plus I'll have someone to go out with so I might actually use it". And Lo, a bike was bought!

This morning was the first chance I've had to go out on it. Just a short run down to Lucy's and back with a nice rest at her house in the middle. A nice gentle start.
Picture a new born deer's first faltering steps and you are some way to imagining what the first few yards of my journey was like. Picture a new born deer trying to ride a bike and you're pretty much there! It was horrible! I was weaving all over the road, couldn't balance, couldn't keep it in a straight line... almost fell off the first time I changed gear, and hand signals?! Forget about it! Both hands clamped onto the handlebars as if my life depended on it! Which it kind of did, as by now I was heading down a steep hill with a bus right behind me!

Anyway, I finally managed to wobble and weave my way to Lucy's without being killed. I think the terror and adrenalin had stopped me from noticing how incredibly fucking exhausted I was. I got into the house, sat on the sofa and promptly died of a heart attack. Sort of. I was breathing like a paedophile at home time, my lungs felt like they were full of fire, my heart was beating so hard it was making the settee vibrate, and my legs just stopped working. They felt like they belonged to somebody else. What you need to bear in mind is that Lucy lives less than half a mile from my house. Oh dear.

So to conclude:
a) You CAN forget how to ride a bike.
b) I'm so unfit I'm probably technically dead.

It snowed for hours last night but the snow on the ground didn't really get much worse the whole time. Then from about five o'clock this morning it absolutely belted down fist-sized snowflakes for just over an hour, the result is there's now more snow on the ground than there has been all week! Lucy is supposed to be going to Plymouth today to some gig or other, but I heard on the radio on the way home that the main road through Devon is completely cut off, with around 200 people having to be rescued from their cars over night. I hope I can make her see sense and call the trip off. But then again, this is Lucy...

Anyway, that's not what I meant to write about today. The snow is relevant, but my friend's stubbornness isn't.

During the worst snow for two decades we find out that the snow clearing duties are the sole responsibility of local councils. Local councils who believe that severe snow is such a rarity that it's not worth investing in snow clearing equipment, or, as it turns out, buying enough grit to keep the roads treated for more than a week or two!

So they think keeping the roads clear is too expensive an operation to justify doing it. Well here's a thought. Everyone who can't get to work today because the council has failed to clear the roads, send them a bill demanding they reimburse you for your lost wages. If your job is better than mine and you still get paid for a snow day, get your employer to bill the council for all the lost hours they incurred.

Maybe, if every time it snows the council is landed with a huge wages bill because of their incompetence, they'll see fit to procure the equipment needed! Bunch of useless money grabbing bastards as they are! What exactly do I pay council tax for?!

I must be getting old. Tonight was the first time in my life that i let the snow stop me getting to work. It's not even that bad, but the crappy council failed to keep even the main arterial road through the valley clear. Useless bunch of pricks as they are. I'm confident enough in my snow driving abilities to think that I could have got there, eventually, but my faith in the abilities of other road users meant I didn't want to risk it. That and there's a great big hill about five miles from home that I'd have to climb, and if I got stuck that's a hell of a long walk home in the snow!

Enough procrastinating, time to tidy up a bit.

I finally got around to giving Keri her birthday present on Saturday, only a month and a half late, (sorry mate!), and went on to spend the night in Bristol with her and Gavin and Robert Englund. Alright, not actually Robert Englund, but we watched four very different horror films and he had cameos in three of them!

The films in question were Hatchet, (very funny good old fashioned slasher movie), Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, (a plumber with anger-management issues takes on Robert Englund's Demonically possessed science teacher), and finally, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, (really good take on the modern slasher movie, described by Gav as "What Scream would have been like if it hadn't been made for cunts"). We also crammed in Fido, a real gem of a Zombie movie, set in the 50's (I think) and staring Billy Connolly as a house trained zombie! Unfortunately there was no Robert Englund cameo in this one, which would obviously have made it better!
Throw in lots of booze, a brief trip to the pub and a delicious pizza and I think it's safe to say it was pretty much the perfect Saturday night! Cheers guys!

I even had a pleasant drive home. I left Bristol at just the right time to catch the sunset as I was crossing the Severn Bridge. It was a beautiful sight even though the sun itself had already dropped below the horizon. Behind me was the onrushing night, an ominous blackness made all the more impressive by the dark storm clouds stretching their fingers out as if to pull me back. Ahead of me the sky was blood red, with distant clouds silhouetted like huge floating mountains against it. Higher up, Venus was just starting to shine through where the pale yellows on the fringe of the sunset were giving way to the delicate blues of the coming night. All around me the river a living, changing thing; a reflection of the chaos and beauty of the sky above. At once as bright as a mirror and as dulled as a piece of slate...

Shame I didn't have my camera on me really.

Newport was brought to a standstill yesterday morning by the sheer volume of vulture-like bargain hunters who had come to pick over the still twitching corpse of Woolworths "Big W" superstore on the edge of town.

After giving Kris a lift to work, (the lazy bugger had slept late and missed his bus), I found myself in our nearest and newest city at store opening time. I figured I'd try and make a start on my Christmas shopping, and after hearing the sad news of Woolworths imminent demise, (and subsequent clearance sale), I thought I'd try my luck at the Big W. I arrived at five minutes past nine and the car park was already on the way to being full. The store itself was festooned with banners proclaiming "Up to 50% off! Biggest Sale EVER!!!". Having seen this I was rather disappointed to find that the emphasis had been put on the "Up To" part of the statement, with most things that I'd even consider buying having a measly 10% reduction, whereas the 50% reductions were reserved for a few rarefied items that only mad old women tend to buy, such as travel irons, toilet-roll covers and anything made by JML. After wandering around for twenty minutes and spectacularly failing to find a single Christmas gift I gave up and left.

By now a tailback was building up of traffic waiting to turn into the retail park where Woolies is located, but the traffic flowing back out towards the motorway was moving freely. I made the mistake of heading back towards town to go to Tesco rather than going straight home. The extra half an hour was enough for the tailback to have stretched all the way back out of town, across the roundabout by the Patent Office and on out to the motorway! The tailback was completely blocking the Patent Office roundabout and had thus stopped all traffic moving in all directions. It was a fucking farce of biblical proportions! I left Tesco at around ten o'clock, and the forty minute journey home ended up taking over two hours!

I am just this minute returned from the Children of Boredom/Machine Head/Slipknot gig in Cardiff. I'm very tired and even more very drunk, so my apologies if this entry is a little rambling and indecipherable. Woah, I can't be that drunk, I spelt indecipherable correctly on the first go!

Anyway, I just thought I'd make a note of how I've had an epiphany when it comes to Slipknot. I've always dismissed them as a manufactured style-over-substance type of band, and while there is certainly an argument for this, it may not be entirely fair, or entirely a bad thing. Think Slipknot, think 12 year olds in Slipknot t-shirts. This is entirely accurate, there were plenty of young kids at tonight's show, many with out-of-place disgruntled mothers in tow, but it's not necessarily bad. You see, these kids turn up to see Slipknot headlining the show, and before they know it a band like Machine Head comes on and absolutely dominates the proceedings. I have to admit that Slipknot were good, they had a cracking stage set-up, and Cory did his best to work the crowd, (including a slightly bizarre moment where he got the whole crowd to crouch down on the floor), but Machine Heads performance, stage presence and material just blew them away. And I couldn't help thinking that all those little kids who only ever really listen to Slipknot may have learned something, may have been turned on to another band or encouraged to seek out new things themselves. And for that I salute Slipknot, may they long continue to take bands on tour with them who are so much better than they are, for the sake of the future of metal!

Children of Bodom on the other hand, were bollocks.

I always end up feeling really frustrated with myself when I have a week off. I just can't seem to get anything done because I become obsessed with sleeping! Take yesterday for instance. The night before I'd made the mistake of going for a nap in the afternoon and managed to sleep well into the night, so, having bugger all else to do I watched some Kung Fu movies and played Assassins Creed on X-Box. Somehow doing stuff like clearing out the spare room doesn't seem like the thing to do at three in the morning, and so nights off tend to be frittered away in front of a screen of one kind or another. Then it's fourteen hours later and I haven't done anything useful, and I'm tired again. Yesterday I had archery club at 7:00, so come 2:00pm I decided I'd get a couple of hours kip in order to be refreshed enough to go. You don't want to do archery tired, it gets very frustrating. So I got up at six, and just felt so stewed and fuzzy headed that I didn't go in the end anyway. Come midnight I was falling asleep on the sofa so I took myself off to bed where I managed another pointless four hours of sleep. I've been lead in bed for hours reading and watching crap in the interweb. Which of course means I'm going to be nodding off at about tea time... oh it's a hard life!


Hahaha... man, I just read over that. I suck. *slaps self in face* Get up and stop bitching about shit that doesn't matter Jones! Just get on with it! At least you haven't got to go to work.

I just got out of bed and it's so cold I got straight back in! After turning the heating on of course. So, what to waffle about while the house defrosts?

Ah yes, saving the environment, recycling and carbon footprints! I'm all for saving the planet, win-win situation if you ask me. However, I think we as a society are kind of blundering headlong into this thing without really thinking it through first. A case in point being the newly revamped kerbside recycling scheme being run by the local council. Recycling saves resources and greatly reduces landfill, excellent! However, the way it works around here has a slight flaw. In the past you had one big lorry come around once a week to pick up all the black bags. Now the same big lorry comes around once a week to pick up the black bags, another one picks up the glass, metal and plastic, another one collects paper and cardboard and a fourth collects the food waste. So that's four big smelly lorries trundling around the streets, pumping out all sorts of noxious gases as opposed to one. All that good work being done by us householders to sort our refuse into different boxes and bags, all the good-will and expense of the council, all completely pointless due to the massively increased carbon footprint of the refuse collecting process! We won't need to worry about landfill space and resource depletion when the air is too toxic to breathe!

I don't know how to improve the situation, I haven't thought about it that hard... maybe all the rubbish could be collected at once like it always was and then get community service criminals to sort it out at the other end, or something. Yeah, that would work, back to only one lorry and the stuff still gets recycled, and community service wouldn't be seen as such a soft option anymore either! I think I missed my calling... I'd have made a fucking excellent Home Secretary!

Right, the house should have warmed up a little, time to crawl from my pit and face a new ... err... well, day I guess.

Point 1, the first.
Woolies is up shit creek without a paddle. Although there are loads of paddle boxes on the shelf they don't have any in stock at the moment. Woolworths drives me mad. When I was a kid it was THE shop to go to for pretty much anything you could think of. The staff were well trained, helpful and numerous, and a job in Woolies was considered the crème de la crème of Saturday jobs. These days the place seems to be staffed by two slack-jawed idiots and a manager without the intelligence to put his own trousers on without help. But the most irritating thing, and the thing that the swines deserve to go bankrupt for, is their insistence on putting DVD/CD/Video-game cases on the shelf when they aren't in stock! I've probably kept our local branch in profit single handedly these last few years with the amount of films and games I buy. During that time I've lost count of the number of times I've gone up to the counter with something, waited fifteen minutes for the troglodyte on duty to search through every item there only to be told, "I'm sorry, that's out of stock at the moment." Out of stock? If it's out of stock why is the case still on the shelf? Why are there another twenty five identical cases still on the shelf?! Why is there no "Out of Stock" label firmly and prominently attached to the shelf edge?!!!
Three exclamation marks? Damnit, I need to calm down... Right,ok. Where was I? Oh yes, during the farcical launch of Grand Theft Auto IV, which saw every single games retailer in the country run out of stock within 24 hours and then not get any more in for weeks, Woolworths had a huge display case prominently placed just inside the door, chock-full of game cases for every format. Obviously they didn't have any in stock, but they still left the display up, how many hundreds of times did they have to turn away a disappointed customer that week I wonder. More recently the launch of Guitar Hero: World Tour was badly handled, and not just because all the drum-kits they sold were broken. The game itself, and the game bundled with a guitar was launched a week before the full Band in a Box version. Unfortunately Woolies decided to display the Band in a Box packaging for the whole week, knowing full well that it wasn't even available. What a bunch of cocks.

Also;
Did you know that if you could distil banality down to its purest form, and then convert that essence of banality into a sound, it would sound exactly like The Backstreet Boys, only less mundane. The Backstreet Boys, so shit they make James Blunt sound like James fucking Brown! I hate the stereo in work.

I saw in the paper today that Barry "Film '91" Norman has called Bruce Willis "the worst clown, and not in a good way". Apparently, during a special showing of Bruce's ludicrous action spacktacular Armageddon back in 1998, during the "emotional" scene where Bruce is talking to his daughter just before blowing himself and the asteroid to bits, the audience of journalists all fell about in gales of laughter, much to the chagrin of Mr Willis. When Mr Norman asked him about the reaction in a later interview Willis replied "Who cares about the critics? Nobody reads them." And it was for this comment that Willis was singled out among all the dregs and lowlifes of Hollywood for a special attack from Norman.
Now we all know that Armageddon is a big pile of poo. It's a bit of popcorn munching fun that no-one was ever going to take seriously, although I can certainly understand why Bruce was so miffed about the critics reaction. Now, of all the things that Willis has done in his time, the thing Norman singled him out for being a prat for was saying that no-one reads the critics. Unfortunately Barry, the figures would agree with Bruce, not you. Armageddon was universally panned on release, yet it went on to cover it's ludicrous $140 million budget in the first month of release, and went on to take over half a billion dollars worldwide. Just thought I'd point that out, as I know Barry Norman is a regular reader of my blog. I expect to see an apology to Bruce 'Hudson Hawk' Willis in next months Radio Times!

I'm not sure I should really be ranting and stressing out over such trivial things as Woolworths and Barry Norman talking out of his bum-hole, you see, it's not exactly in the spirit of my religion. Yes, you read that right, Doktor "Atheist" Chaos has caught a dose of religion! Not only that but he's gone and got himself ordained! Why not take a look and see if The Church of the Latter-Day Dude has anything to offer you. Until next time, take it easy, man.

The Reverend Chaos

I set my alarm for eight o'clock yesterday evening, which would have meant a healthy six hours sleep and a bit of an evening to go and see Kris and Rach in before setting about the mammoth task of tidying my bedroom ready for a new bed to be delivered today. I managed to sleep through my alarm and woke up at 3:50am instead. So, no time for any socialising, no shops open to go buy my dinner,(although I am rather tempted to go over to the 24hr Tesco in Ebbw Vale...), and probably not enough time to sort my pit out befor the bed arrives! Doh! I feel fucking great though, I really needed that sleep. I've just finished seven hard shifts on the trot and they must have taken their toll on me.

In other news, the cable needed to re-calibrate my Guitar Hero drum-kit has arrived, so hopefully I can finally get the bastards working as they should do, although I've got a sneaking suspicion I may need to re-solder the blue pad, as it was being a bit temperamental yesterday morning. Lucy and I were ripping through some of the songs, her on Expert difficulty vocals and me on medium drums, which was knackering!

I've now got pins-and-needles in both legs from sitting in bed with the laptop cutting off circulation to my lower extremities... time to get up I think.

I stayed on in work a little later than normal as I had the absurd need to get the beer aisle looking all lovely before I left. Anyway, the delay meant that I got caught up in another bloody car crash on the way home! This time I arrived a minute or two after the event, rather than actually witnessing it, still got there before any emergency services were on scene though. This time it was a flat-bed truck, (the kind builders tend to use), that seemed to have lost it's back axle and swerved across the road and into the hedge. It didn't look like any other cars were involved, and the driver was wandering about with a mobile phone to his ear, so I figured there was no need to offer assistance this time and just turned around and headed home.

It's got me thinking though, am I just making a daily commute to and from work, or am I actually playing a game of "How many times can I drive to Pontypool and back without crashing"? It's a slightly worrying thought!

I've been introduced to twitter.com by Kris. It's a slightly odd concept, it basically revolves around it's users making short statements in answer to the question "What are you doing now?". You could think of it as a mini-blog, only one sentence per entry, or for those of you who use such things, a whole website based on Farcebook's status feature. Apparently you can update it via text message, but I haven't quite worked that bit out yet, which may well lead to all sorts of randomness, although I promise not to make too many "I'm going to the toilet now" type posts ;)

Anyway, if you want to see what pointless kind of crap I get up to, (at least until I get bored of updating it anyway), you can find me at http://twitter.com/DokChaos, sign up and click on the follow button under my name to keep track of me. You might also like to try stalking some celebrities on there, I am currently being updated on the every move of Mr Stephen Fry, of all people!

Those fools at X-box, or Microsoft or whoever is in charge, why do they have to potch about with things that work perfectly well? I think it's what happens to perfectly normal people when they reach some kind of management status that gives them a tiny bit of power.
They've only gone and completely changed the way the X-box main menu system works and ballsed it all up. On top of that they've tried to turn it into some kind of Wii-lite type thingy by introducing your own cute little avatar/character just like Nintendo's Mii system. If I wanted a Nintendo I would go out and by one! The reason I haven't got one is because of Nintendo's insistence of making everything so bloody cartoony and cutesy-poo!

WHICH I HATE!

I bought an X-box (over a Wii or PS3) mainly because of the range of games and the lower price/better availability, but it has to be said it did have a certain kind of grown-up cool about it that the other two didn't have. Now look at it! Every time I open my friends list there's an army of fucking childrens drawings all waving at me! What's COOL about that!

And what exactly was so wrong with the old menus? They worked, were easy to navigate and above all had a fucking HUGE "play the game currently in the CD tray" button prominently placed on every page. After all, that's the reason for having a GAMES console, isn't it. Playing games! Well the spacktard who redesigned it doesn't seem to think so! The Play button is hidden in the depths of the menu's, and there's only ONE button, out of about 15 new and pointless lists.

If I want to watch a movie, I'll pop it in my DVD player, thanks very much, I'm not going to wait four hours for it to download and then watch it on a machine that makes more noise than a skeleton having a wank in a biscuit tin! If I want to type messages to my friends I'll use twitter... and a KEYBOARD!!!

Stop cluttering things up with pointless crap! I'm all for useful gadgets, I mean, who doesn't want a phone that takes pictures, plays music and tells you were you are in the world, but my games console is just that, a game, a toy! I want to just switch it on, sit down and play something fun for a bit. If I want to battle through pointless technology I'll turn my PC on instead!

I missed out on the Abertoir Welsh horror film festival that Kez invited me to tag along to, (cheers matey, I appreciated the offer and felt bad about having to turn it down,) due to work on the Friday night and a stupid family thing on the Sunday... stupid relatives going off to New Zealand to live! Anyway, I consoled myself for a weekend off wasted by buying Guitar Hero World Tour, complete with guitar, microphone and drum kit!

The GHWT drum kit is brilliant fun, or at least it was for the first few hours... after that the snare pad stopped working, one of the cymbal pads needed to be hit very hard and the kick pedal would trigger two or three hits every time you touched it. Great, the most expensive toy I've ever bought and it's fucked after only a few hours! Some rooting around on the intertubes quickly turned up a host of similar complaints, hundreds of them in fact, and also a statement from Activision acknowledging that the drums are "having some limited sensitivity issues on a small number of units". And this is on the day of release! What a fucking cock-up! Small number of units my hairy arse! From the number of forum threads bitching about it I'd say it has to be the majority of the damn things.

In response, Activision have released a PC application that allows users to tune the sensitivity of their drums to the levels they like, the catch is that the lead needed to connect the drums to a PC costs thirty quid. The good news is the company are shipping out said cables free of charge to everyone who reports the fault on their customer support site, the bad news is, when it'll arrive is anyone's guess!

So I applied for a cable and downloaded the tuning kit, but on my travels I'd seen several mentions of shoddy workmanship and loose wires on the red pad, the one I was having trouble with. Earlier tonight I decided to have a look at mine, as the complete failure of the pad seemed to suggest more than a sensitivity issue. Rather than remove the back cover and void the warranty, I decided to prise the cover off the pad and take a peek that way. It came off easy enough, no glue or security seals, just a series of rubber pegs that clipped into holes on the plate behind. Sure enough there was a broken wire, snapped clean off where it was soldered to the receiver on the back of the pad. "Right", I thought, "lets get the cover back on and send the damn thing back". It was then that I discovered that it is utterly impossible to refit the drum pad cover without taking the whole unit apart! Bollocks! I couldn't return it like that because they would just say I'd broken it pulling the pad off, which I hadn't. So I broke out the soldering iron and the funny star-headed screwdriver and took the bastard apart... after having to slightly modify some of the holes to get the stupid fat screwdriver in, (for modify, read "hack at with a sharp knife"). Anyway, forty odd minutes later and with the house smelling of newly melted solder it was all back together and working like a charm! Woohoo! I just hope nothing else goes wrong with it now because the warranty is well and truly void!

By the time I was done it was too late to play the drums for long without upsetting the neighbours, so I carried on with the guitar instead, and completed it on hard mode, which was nice :)

Thursdays and Fridays are usually busy nights for me in work. The produce department gets as much delivery on those two nights as it does for the rest of the week combined. As a result, every now and then I don't always finish all of the delivery on a Friday. Usually I only leave five or six cages for the dayshift (gayshift) to finish off, I think the most I've ever left them is about ten cages... last night I left the fuckers twenty one cages, plus a shit-load of bananas to work! A new personal best! Woohoo! Well, if the useless tossers in stock-control didn't order so much shit that we don't need then it wouldn't happen, would it?!

My neck held out ok though, just a few little twinges now and then, so hopefully it'll be ok for archery tomorrow. I'm going for my 2nd Class Bowman badge now, the week before last I had a 2nd class scoring round of 450, so now I need to do it twice more in a year to get my badge.