The Clan of the Cave Bague

It’s -3.5 degrees outside (that’s Celsius, for those heathens who use the ‘F’ system). Which is chilly, but nice. It was about the same temperature yesterday as well, which made marching along Linlithgow High Street while playing a tuba interesting. Still, it was nice and christmassy. And cold. Oh so very cold.

I’ve been having a rummage through my music collection and listening to some stuff from the seventies and eighties (yeah, alright – I’m an old crumbly who was listening to music way back then). Anyway, I rediscovered Saxon! I’ve been ploughing through such epic albums as “Strong Arm of the Law”, “Denim & Leather” and “Innocence is no excuse”, and I have to say it’s like a breath of fresh air hearing something simple, raw, and not overproduced to hell.

Yeah, so Rhapsody, Dragonforce et alia are ace, but these guys did it before everyone else and, in most cases, better than everyone else. And we’re not even going to make any jokes about the frontman going by the name of “Biff Byford”. D’oh! To late!

There Are No Words(tm)

My lovely lady wife has her first solo exhibition! Entitled ’Organic Form: Exploration of Spirituality’, it will be on display in the upper foyer of The Regal Community Theatre, Bathgate, from Monday, 17 November, to 31 December. If you find yourself in West Lothian, it’s well worth a visit.

It makes a change from the kind of stuff that’s normally displayed – it’s all very bright, colourful and BIG

More info here.

Honestly. There’s two ways I can describe today.

Firstly, imagine I am separated from the rest of the office by a giant fishtank that fills my whole field of view. Now imagine that the fishtank is full of huge, twitching, orange octopi which are juggling hand grenades. Next, imagine there’s a slow-motion car crash involving a big purple car and a wailing ambulance happening on the other side of the fishtank. Now, imagine I’m trying to work on a large amount of really important, really complicated things while trying to see if I’m going to be blown up by the grenade juggling octopi and morbidly drawn to the slow motion car crash.

That’s my day.

Alternately, it can be expressed in perl as follows:

require bleeps;

require stupid::purple;

require stupid::orange;

sub fail() {

SUMMON_RAPTORS();

}

while(1) fail;

That is also my day.

God, I love this game. My main character (on Karak Izor, if anyone’s interested) is a Black Orc called Barukadur (I think the spelling is correct). He behaves the way a Black Orc should and basically thumps anything that gets in the way and is quite happy to change routes to make sure things get in the way if they’re stunties.

Anyway, I’ve found the whole setting to be so wholly immersive that my playstyle has moved from ‘thoughtful and strategic WoW style’ to ‘behave like a black orc’. For example, having just ganked a specific dwarf for a quest, I had to leave the area. In order to leave the area, I had to pass through a group of dwarves. The WoW player in me was still working out the route that would draw aggro from the fewest dwarves when the Black Orc part of my brain kicked in and charged straight at the nearest one, and then ran around the whole area pulling them all at once and then, with a train of eight or nine dwarves one level higher than me all chasing, stopped turned, WAAAAAAGHed and beat the crap out of the whole lot of them

Of course, I could have been back at the base a lot quicker if I hadn’t just picked a twenty minute fight for no good reason. But I’m an Orc! It’s what I do!

As I said. I love this game.