I mentioned yesterday how I was happy that some long overdue bunnygirls had finally arrived - The reason their arrival made me happy was that I now have the beginnings of my own Bloodbowl team, as up until now I have been borrowing models to take part in games with friends. All I have to do now of course is paint them.
For the uninitiated and those who couldn’t be bothered to click the link, Bloodbowl is based on American Football, with Elves, Orcs and whatever weapons players can smuggle onto the pitch added.
Over the past couple of months I have been playing in two leagues, one with a few friends from around Bristol and another which I set up in my house with my housemates, where to make up for the shortage of players we each have three teams.
Within that league I have been doing rather well as after 6 weeks the standing are as follows:
Race
Played
W/D/L
Pts
GD
Cas*
Cas Diff**
Amazons
6
6/0/0
18
+7
11
+5
Wood Elves
6
4/0/2
12
+2
11
-7
Humans
9
3/2/4
11
-2
16
-6
Dark Elves
4
3/1/0
10
+5
8
+1
Necromantic
4
2/1/1
7
+2
16
+11
Ogres
5
2/0/3
6
-2
15
+6
Skaven
7
1/2/4
5
-4
15
-3
Orcs
7
1/1/5
4
-5
14
+2
Lizardmen
6
1/1/4
4
-5
8
-2
Wood Elves***
4
1/2/1
5
0
4
-7
*Total number of casualties recieved by opposing teams
** Total difference in casualties sustained between team and opponents.
*** Retired team, so although managed to attain 5 points automatically in last place due to retirement.
I started the house league up as training for the other league I am part of, as I am not as familiar with the rules as many other people in the league and also to speed up my play, as the other league is also planning on instituting 4 minute turns in an effort to speed up some of the more glacial players.
Looking at the league table I am doing rather well for myself as the top 3 teams are all mine (as is admittedly the retired team) and so I was confident about my chances today when I was playing a cup game in the other league.
Not only had I been practising lately I had also played the team I was meeting in the cup before and despite them being a much better team thanks to shenanigans I had come within a few dice rolls of potentially beating them, only my failing to declare a pass properly stopped me from (probably) taking the lead - This was why I had been training, to avoid such costly errors.
Unfortunately for me it didn’t pay off today as I was on the wrong end of a 5-1 scoreline. I can’t blame the dice as with one exception the touchdowns were ultimately caused by even better dice rolls by my opponent, giving him amongst other things 3 blitzes on the kick off table, effectively giving him free moves and two of his touchdowns.
Still I enjoyed the game and we were both laughing about the dice, and as any loser will tell you - “It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts” - Besides no one died, despite his best efforts to kill one of my players, by surrounding him with 7 of his and sticking 14 boots in and this just means I can beat him (or at least try to) next time.
Because I had 19 bunnygirls waiting for me when I got home today - Sadly they are only about 3cm tall, but them showing up has made me a happy, as I have been waiting for about two weeks for them to show up.
Last week I created a terrible joke, but I may have managed to top it today thanks to the inspiration provided by the above picture. It is actualy an extract from the July edition* of Empire, where hiding away at the back of the magazine is a double page feature on the “Top Ten Worst Sidekicks”.
Number 6 on the list is Chuck Norris’ canine buddy Reno and the only thing worse than this mismatched pairing is the description of the film, “a kickboxing cop teams up with a salon-puffed dog to defeat a racist hate group.” On the plus side though the film also apparently features a “magnificently tasteless” scene where Reno attacks the Pope.
However the point of this all is that I may have written a new worst joke:
Why does Chuck Norris need a side kick to fight bad guys?
He doesn’t. He already has a roundhouse kick to fight them with.
BOOM, BOOM!
*Which is a bit odd, as we’re only just a third of the way into June.
At first glance it might look like I have plenty of shoes, but none of the ones in the picture are exactly suitable for work are they?
As to why I own a red pair heels, I just like to point out I would never have thought of purchasing them for myself. A well-meaning friend saw them and purchased them for me - Of course now I own them I’ll have to find an occassion to wear them!
But one track isn’t a big enough sample to form any judgement of how great my music taste is! Luckily however I have a much largely sample to show you.
A year ago I signed up at LastFM to monitor my music listening habits and see what new music I could find. One yea and 26,489 tracks* later I have made two very worrying discoveries - The bands occupying the top 2 spots on my most listened to artists…
Queen and Abba…
Now I was expecting Queen to do well as I do own most of their albums, but that isn’t the real reason they did so well. Several months ago I was stuck with the same half a dozen albums on my mp3 player for far too long, as I kept for getting to change the albums over when I was at home.** Consequently I wound up listening to the Flash Gordon soundtrack about 8 times in the course of a week, meaning that Queen got a bonus 120 plays.
Still I am grateful that accident happened after all if it hadn’t happened ABBA would have been my most listened to band for the year and that would be even worse - Wouldn’t it?
Still despite the evidence so far to the contrary I do have at least a modicum of musical taste, dulled as it may have been by the saccharine of Stock, Aitken and Waterman in their glory days - Yes I was a Jason Donovan fan when I was younger, but I also listened to a plethora of music from the 60s when rock and roll, both rocked and rolled - Whatever that means!
Over the course of the year I have listened to over 26,000 tracks, which assuming that they were all of a radio friendly 3 minutes means I have listened to over 3.5 hours of music a day, and only 7.5 minutes of that has been either ABBA or Queen. Here’s my top 25 most listened to artists for the here to show you just some of the other things I have been listening to and to hopeful show that I have some taste when it comes to music.
I try to vary what I listen to and as 7 out of my top 25 are bands I “discovered” in the past year; Cake, Candy Dulfer, The Detroit Cobras, Bonde Do Role, Zero 7, The Long Blondes, Regina Spektor, Novelle Vague - I’d like to think that I’ve succeed somewhat.
That said there are some definite trends in my preferences, it is a running joke with my more musically aware friends that I am drawn towards female vocalists in particular and with 10 out of 25 being solo female artists and a further 9 being bands whose vocals are (predominantly) provided by females - I certainly stand guilty as charged.
Now go and listen them, if I have listened to them so much they must be good! I particularly recommend Cake, Emmy The Great, Nouvelle Vague and Zero 7.
And James, I know you’ll have a opinion on this - So go on tell me what you make of my music choices.
*This “only” counts music played on my computer and mp3 player - Radio and nights out are not factored in at all - If they were Rhianna would have the top spot purely for the number of times I have heard Umbrella over the past year.
**When you only have a 128Mb mp3 player, as I used to you need to change the music most days - But if you have a memory like I still have, you’ll forget. That is why I now own a 2Gb mp3 player, I only have to change the music once a week.
Yesterday whilst walking around with my headphones on; oblivious to the world around me, I had an idea. Sadly I didn’t have pen and paper near me at the time and so thanks to my appalling memory bequeathed to me from my father the idea has been lost to the ether.
The idea was for a short poem and had been inspired by one of the songs on my mp3 player* and had something to do with being imprisoned by common sense in small roos of four walls and wouldn’t it be better to be a bee where rooms have six walls. Whilst I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the idea was a good one, at the time it certainly didn’t seem to shoddy and might have been worth working on further - But I can’t remember it so the world and I will never know.
I can’t even remember which song it was that triggered the train of thought, but I do know that is is one of 120 possible songs that were on my mp3 player at the time and so this evening I blitzed through them to see if I could relocate my muse and possibly the idea - Sadly I failed and found another idea instead and instead of what may have quite possibly been a bad poem I have what is almost certainly a bad joke for you all instead:
How do you distress wood?
Threaten it with an axe!
So to try and make amends for the bad joke here is the song that inspired it, which I reckon is actually rather good!
*And no I can’t remember what song that provided the muse.
