Give ROTW a sound limit of 75db

Give ROTW a sound limit of 75db.

Yeah, do it, basically.

Team Kate and Wills

Let's all play some Standard! Wait, no.

That’s what I  nearly registered my deck as on Sunday 1st May, as a sort of commemorative joke, because the deck that I had brought was in fact Team America. Given that we were at GP London on the weekend of the Royal wedding, however, it just felt kind of wrong. Not to mention that I’m sure many would question whether the list that I ran actually qualifies as a real Team America deck or not. Whatever, a blue/black/green shell that pretty much plays all the best cards that it possibly can (read: Force, Bob, Goyf, Brainstorm, Thoughtseize, Big Jace, Hymn, Wasteland etc.) is the exact kind of deck that I like to play – even if it is full of buzz words like ‘tempo’ that don’t really mean anything. Essentially the combination of cost-efficient card draw, discard, removal and beaters leads to a pretty good deck. Here’s the list:

Want.

I wish I had $150+ as this item has just become available on eBay:

The Necronomicon

This particular Necronomicon is “hand-bound in two colors of real hand-stitched leather and finished with high quality archival red felt.The sigil of The Necronomicon and the Elder Sign have been emblazoned on the front and back cover respectively. Each and every one of it’s 148 pages has been filled with original artwork, custom engravings, occult signs and circles, eldritch symbols and authentic occult texts in Latin. A few passages are in Old English as would be authentic to the time period of the piece.” Awesome.

Make a SAN check.

It was made for an off-Broadway production of H.P.Lovecraft’s The Hound, which looked kinda sweet and comes with all sorts of documentation (certificates of authentication, photos of it being used in the production, etc.). If you have more money than I do (and maybe feel like giving me a present) then head over to the item here: http://cgi.ebay.com/Hand-Made-Leather-Bound-Lovecraft-Necronomicon-/200592250129?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eb43ad511

In just a few hours.

This is going to be so awesome.

All Quiet

Recently things have been, and will continue to be, pretty quiet around here. I’m both working on several new projects and attempting to bring some ongoing things to a satisfying conclusion. It’s taking up quite a lot of my time.

Quick props list:

• Mr and Mrs Reeder – Congratulations! Fantastic reception last night.
• Burial, for making amazing music. Get the S/T and Untrue. Be wowed.
• Meal times, both Epic and Swedish.
• Wearing a suit and tie. It’s still undeniably classy.
• The Cthulhu Mythos and the people who keep it alive, as always.

I <3 Noise

Awesome.

Daniel Clough is a sound artist/electroacoustic composer living in London. He explores subjects such as noise, vocal manipulation, field recordings, drones, algorithmic compositional techniques and computer synthesis to create his work.”

He’s also a good friend of mine and is working on a compositional language of his own design for noise (an example of which you can see above). He’s finally using his blog again (I know, I’ve been a bit crap the past few days too) and has put some sweet sound clips up, as well as a bit of artwork and some links to free EPs. You should check it out, even if you wouldn’t normally listen to anything experimental, noisy, droney, whatever. Big up.

Dan and I (quite) a few years ago doing an improv noise session. Lots of Amen breaks that night...

Centurion (2)

I completely missed the fact that yesterday’s post was in fact the 200th of this blog. Perhaps my doodling wasn’t the best way to mark that particular occasion. Here are some pictures to rectify the situation.

Wish I'd been as cool as this kid when I was small. Picture taken from Zaxy.com - "geek girls FTW" - check it out, I just discovered the site today.

Variation on an old classic.

Forget Adrianne Palicki, how about Sasha Grey as Wonder Woman?

And my personal favourite... Burger King in Yellow by Amazonne (brazenly stolen from DA). This is just plain awesome.

Cthul Who?

The number of web comics that I regularly read has been steadily increasing over the past few weeks and now I find myself up-to-date with, and eagerly awaiting more from: XKCD, Nerf This, Axe Cop, Heroes Inc. and Tails. The last two are new and come on the recommendation of and/or sponsored links on the pages of some of the prior ones. All are quite different and seem to have enough story, humour and whatever else makes me tick to keep my interest up. All are very much worth checking out.

Seeing as how I’ve had a pretty quiet Sunday afternoon, I thought I’d turn my hand to a bit of slapdash… cartoonery? Cartooning? Either way, I’m not for a second suggesting that I will ever have anything on the artists responsible for the comics listed above, more that I was bored and fancied messing about. The joke’s a bit obvious and probably been done before, but it made me giggle.

(Click on the images to see them full size)

'Entrances' - Make a SAN check.

Believe it or not, amazing as you no doubt find my ‘artwork’ to be, I actually envisioned certain aspects of the strip being a little bit less simplistic. I actually sketched out what I thought it would like on my whiteboard (I love that thing) but then I ended up with really poor quality scans and photos and it seemed like a bit too much work to make it presentable. Here it is for reference, anyway:

More tentacles!

In sanity loss-related developments, I’ve ordered a copy of Masks of Nyarlothotep and am looking to start the campaign in about half a dozen sessions time, now that we have at least one (sort of) new player in our group. Binky’s back from university for the forseeable and there may or may not be another female joining us soon – we shall see! If anyone who has run the Masks campaign has any helpful hints or tips they’d be happy to impart to me I’d be really grateful.

The Robot King

“I am the robot king, I’m not made of tin
   I am the robot baron, my name is not Sharon” – InfernOtoriuM

ROBOT by Joshua Hoffine

So the other day Laura, ever a source of inspiring pictures, blogs, films, events, etc., pointed me in the direction of Joshua Hoffine’s personal website. He’s a pretty well known photographer specialising in horror shots – most of which are pretty gnarly (and some of which are almost certainly not work safe, in case that’s an issue). One of his most recent photos is the one above, entitled ROBOT. It’s a sweet shot and as I’ve been on a bit of a trip recently of 80’s classic horror and/or sci-fi films e.g. Blade Runner, Alien and The Thing  it should come as no surprise that I particularly liked this one (yes, I do know Alien was 1979, really, but it still falls into that same group of films in my mind). The actual robot also reminded me a little bit of IG-88.

Robot bounty hunter FTW

ThenI found out that he has a ‘behind the scenes’ blog, and has included a post about ROBOT that goes through everything from initial sketches, to the construction of the robot, from the prosthetics to the post-production. As I have, simultaneously to my film trip, also been getting steadily more and more interested in the whole world of special effects, this really captured me. You should check out Joshua’s blog detailing the full making of, his thought process behind creating the shot, etc. (it’s a WordPress blog, of course) over here:
http://joshuahoffine.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/making-robot/

Something Cool

A Yithian, as drawn by an 8yr old.

Here’s something cool that I found (again, pretty damn late) over at Comics Alliance, a Halloween art project run for a children’s choir in which the main focus was the stories of a one Mr. H. P. Lovecraft. An amazing selection of Yithians, Shoggoths, Elder Things and, of course, great Cthulhu himself. Click the link to see more of the same child-produced sanity destroying artwork!

Cosmic horror for kiddies, anyone?