10 March 2014 – Captain Pigheart

Egad, Be This The Sparklings of Spring?

It’s not coat weather anymore, that’s for sure. I despise the heat, and sweating is a bestial practice. That’s why I so adore the frigid months of wind and attempted snow. Now that damn sun’s back, it’s unimpeded gaze roasting my lily-white crypt-flesh. I have discarded coat and hoodie in a vain attempt to keep my juices inside my skin.

This has been a week of (incredibly trivial) changes. I’ve had my twice yearly change of morning order. I am a creature of habit – it keeps me relatively sane and orders the few activities I undertake. One of those is the difficult matter of breakfast – does it precede or succeed showering? In the winter it’s definitely eating first before I can bear to expose my skin to water. But this week I’ve switched. It makes no difference whatsoever to getting to work on time: either way I’m bad at it.

What else this week? Oh yes, being out for all of Sunday shunted my ‘getting-my-shit-togetherness’ back by four days. So it was not a terribly productive week… This week has the bright shininess of two days suffering bureaucratic idiocy during day-long ‘workshops’ where the painful ignorance of those who direct us shall be dragged bleeding into the limelight again. If I weren’t already convinced of the impending disaster it would be a depressing pair of days. Thankfully the week will be genuinely brightened by the joys of Gorilla Burger this Thursday and Knickerbocker Glorious on Saturday.

Oh, and also – Merly has been adorable this week.

Lego

The local shops have taunted me further with Lego bargains and I have been too weak to resist their plasticky charms. I have supplemented the Lego shelf with the Galaxy Squad Warp Stinger and Star Slicer and The Council of Elrond. They’re all going to be lovely little constructions and should add some pretty bobs and bits to my Lego heap. I’m like a dragon, but I don’t care for gold.

Books

As I said last week I’ve been burying my nose in books for fear of losing the tattered shreds of my humanity. Yesterday I finally finished Steven Erikson‘s Gardens of The Moon. I’d stumbled across his insane world of the Malazan Empire when Marilyn snagged me a gift of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach last year. Gardens of The Moon is the first in his massive sequence of massive books. I’ve been reading it on Kindle, so I don’t get the same sense of how far through the book I am. Despite dealing constantly in percentages being 65% of the way through a book doesn’t mean much to me.

It’s fantastic – a deep, complex and gloriously unexplained world of magic, gods, war and inhuman creatures. The battles are exciting, the plots loop around dozens of memorable and interesting characters. I love the magic (the ‘warrens’!), myths and landscape. He’s definitely on my Christmas list now.

From that I’ve gone on to join the Hipster crowd (appropriately behind the cool curve) – The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers. I’d never heard of it until the H.P.Podcraft guys started going through the various writers who inspired H.P. Lovecraft. The same week I listened to those podcasts my good friend @Dr_Mekloug started babbling about the True Detective series and the million web posts about how this book is the key to that series. Then it appeared for free on Kindle and I took an interest.

I can’t tell you much about it yet other than it seems fun…

♥Last Week’s Scribbles

Hmm, not terribly productive. I’ll do better this week, I swears to ya boss, swears to ya.

This week, Monday 3rd March 2014 – mainly the joys of Lego…

Naturalism, Intimacy and Ten Thousand Million Love Stories – an afternoon and evening of improv.

Events and Excitement

Thursday 13th March 2014

Gorilla Burger – Improv Comedy Carnage

Jam show – a chance for anyone to get on stage.

The Corner
8 Stoney Street
(off Broad Street)
Nottingham
7.30pm – £4

https://www.facebook.com/events/219306464925221/

Saturday 15th March 2014

Knickerbocker Glorious

A sweet layered stack of free live Entertainment, an abundance of Acoustic Music, a generous measure of Performing Arts. Topped off with a liberal sprinkling of family friendly Comedy. MissImp are bringing the improv to the street!

The Fountain
Derby Market Square
Cathedral Quarter
Derby
11am-3pm – FREE

Saturday 22nd March 2014

Interrobang – Spontaneous Comedy Theatre

The only show of its kind in Derby, Interrobang features an improvised comedy jam in which everyone can take part followed by a showcase of the best improv in the region. Proudly presented by Furthest From The Sea and Derby Live.

45 Suite, The Assembly Rooms
Cathedral Quarter
Derby
7.30pm – £5

https://www.facebook.com/events/653231528070976/

Oh-oh-o, we’re in a dungeon now

I’ve been cheerfully modding my Jabba’s Palace since I got it some time last year. It was an absurd bargain and totally validated trekking all the way across the city using three different modes of transport just so I could hold it and grin manically at the terrified lady in the shop. She had no idea, none at all. I’d been watering at the face for months begging for it to be reduced below the frankly insane and insulting £129.99 RRP. Fuck you Lego, it’s not that many bricks. Or should that be fuck you Lucasfilms? I don’t know but I imagine they slap a whole heap o’ merch costs on top of it. It’s worth noting when you buy Lego that Star Wars Lego is frequently more than twice the cost per brick of the Creator stuff.

Anyway, I digress into number babble. So I’ve previously extended the corridor section and altered the tower so it could fit on our shelves, but the part of Jabba’s Palace I always really loved was the droid dungeon where they take R2D2 and C-3PO. You know, the room where they have a Gonk droid being tortured by burning the soles of its feet. That struck me as so weird that it’s emblazoned on my memory. So that’s what I wanted to build.

I turned to the internet for source pictures and really isn’t much out there. I re-watched Jedi twice for research purposes (I forgot to pause the first time round) and concluded that the dungeon is a black box with no visible features. Blank slate…

Outside and Inside

I’ve been slightly obsessed with oddly shaped bases for a while, and despite my better judgement have begun by building the base. There was that and the spiral staircase, which I adore and simply had to fit it in. So I ended up with an odd corridor branching into a couple of rooms. It’s very clear that R2 could never have gotten into this room.

The ‘play features’ I remembered were the Gonk droid being tortured and the protocol droid on a rack (it’s a weird scene), so they had to go in. After that it was a matter of making judicious use of my ever-rare sand and dark-sand bricks and filling up the gaps with junk. I am pleased with the Gonk droid. I think he’s the one I got out of an advent calendar from a couple of years ago, with a few brick switches. I had to make the torturer droid and I’m quite pleased with the result, even if he is rather chunkier than a Star Wars droid should be.

Similarly, the droid on the rack got his own whole corner of the set, with light up flamey bits too (god I love them light bricks). I couldn’t figure out a way to splay a minifigure, so I used those weird robot arm bricks and the helmet from General Zod to get the droid headed vibe. The rest of the dungeon was a chance to cram in robot and tech-like bits and pieces.

At Least There Are No Ewoks, or Jar-Jar

The most important bit I totally forgot to mention is of course R2 and Threepio being confronted by the dungeon boss droid, EB-9D (? I think – I’ve got his name mixed up with ED-209 in my head.) I had him from the original Jabba’s Palace set in the early millenial years.

The nice thing about a corridor is that it has a roof and I couldn’t help randomly bunging bricks and minifigures on top for even more action packed fun. It makes no sense of course, as obviously the dungeon is far underground… But it meant I could get my now really odd looking yellow Leia out (also from the original set).

The whole things looks quite nice at the end of the corridor, though I couldn’t finesse a join to the rest of the palace. Maybe next time… The whole set up is now scheduled for demolition! I need the space man, the space. That said, I’d like to revisit the massive doorway into Jabba’s Palace as a separate appropriate-ish-ly scaled model. I still don’t have the shelf height to allow for the Rancor pit extension.

Captain Pigheart

Day: 10 March 2014

This week, Monday 10th March 2014

Egad, Be This The Sparklings of Spring?

Lego

Books

♥Last Week’s Scribbles