Procrastination by Numbers

[cunningmatt]

Update 1 – Tuesday 9th August 2011: What's In A Name?

Welcome to this, long-awaited (by fools at least), brand new shiny blog, called Procrastination by Numbers, it's so brand new and shiny I even have a new avatar photo for it – look it actually features my ugly mug, thankfully out of focus and obscured by sunglasses that make me look like a prick.

This blog in sorts is the sequel to Tale of OG Gamers – High Elves. For those of you unaware of Tale of OG Gamers – High Elves, it was a half-arsed rambling attempt of epic proportions to paint 2,000 points of High Elves in 10 months – which for some inexplicable reason many of you enjoyed (I suspect Class A drugs had a role). If you missed it you can find all 42 pages, consisting of 600+ replies here:

http://ogforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=1294.0

I warn you, that you may need to take a week off work to get through it all – and you'll probably find it about as long and unfulfilling as reading a Jeffery Archer novel (though without the niggling feeling you've given royalties to an ex-convict by purchasing his book – it's not that I'm not an ex-convict, it's just that I'm not charging). But if you can't be bothered with all that, and to be honest I can't blame you, I'll try and give you a flavour of what to expect. Procrastination by Numbers will essentially be a combination of painting blog, collection of bizarre competitions, retro battle reports and general ranting forum. Over the course of the coming weeks, months and maybe even years (don't push it), I'm as likely to discuss painting my new army as I am moaning about the tediousness of life, and as likely to discuss the latest Games Workshop products as I am to discuss how the Libyan revolution has personally inconvenienced me. So hopefully there'll be something for everyone or more likely nothing for no one, but we won't dwell on that. At this point you're probably getting a whiff of my writing style, essentially a ranting diatribe between myself and my ever critical subconscious, splattered across the page like a cross between a Jackson Pollock and an unsightly patch of diarrhoea – sorry it won't get any better.

For those of you familiar with Tale of OG Gamers – High Elves you're probably wondering why the change and what the difference is? Well to be honest I found the Tale of OG Gamers – High Elves a rather restricting title, it was very frustrating to be forced to talk about High Elves week in and week out without talking about anything else, so hopefully here I can go a little more off tangent here! Secondly, now and again my rambling became a little out of control, in fact some of my posts were so long you could have only possibly read them if you had a full time job and the monitor at your desk faced away from all your colleagues – everyone else would simply be too busy to read them. So I am hoping for slightly more succinct, but hopefully just as entertaining (and maybe even a bit more often) postings, which are laid out a little easier so you can follow them – as you may have noticed in the excessive formatting at the top of this post. Broadly speaking content-wise you can expect more of what you are used to, we'll be following the growth of the OG Gamers – High Elves army as it approaches tournament size and beyond, plus there's my Beastmen and Warriors of Chaos who will be getting reinforcements including Storm of Magic-ifying them. Plus I'll be grappling with Citadel Finecast, giving you more battle reports, "What's In the Box?" is back, in fact all your favourites will return including loads more bonkers things you really didn't think anyone would ever do. The one thing not returning is our Resident Four Year Old Artist,... but only because she had her fifth birthday over the summer.

As always I strongly welcome your comments, criticisms and abuse, feel free to post whatever you fancy no matter how random. And do bare in mind, the more you post the easier it is for me to work out what you like and steer this blog in the right direction, as best as this blog can ever be steered anyway. It often feels much like Captain Janeway trying in vein to gain control of Voyager as it tumbles through a black hole with consoles exploding all around her. The one caveat is that I'm not going to moan about Games Workshop, why? Well firstly I think they don't do bad a job, it's always difficult trying to turn someone's creative pastime into a profit making organisation. It's difficult riding the tricky road of appropriate pricing versus profit versus creativity, but when you compare it to the cost of say supporting a Premiership football team it suddenly all comes into perspective. Secondly Games Workshop is the thing that binds us all together, without them we wouldn't be here together reading this mess (so feel free to address any letters of complaint about this blog to them), so it feels rather churlish to attack that which feeds us, besides if you want to do that there's countless threads on countless forums that will actively encourage you to do that. I'd like this thread to be a little bit different, besides with the rest of the world to moan about we'd never get round to Games Workshop any way!

With all that introductory spiel out the way, the one thing I do need to talk about is the name "Procrastination by Numbers", if you haven't got it yet (and I'm looking at you here Steven – though I hear you're a moderator now, so this will almost certainly be removed), then it's a play on the phrase "Painting by Numbers" – as that's primarily how I paint, and as you'll soon learn Procrastination often replaces Painting. It's clever,... ok?! And to be honest when you see the suggestions I had a few months ago for a new name, you'll see why I went with my own choice. Besides this isn't a f**king democracy, I'll do what I like.

Names are clearly important if you were to call your new family friendly theme park "Kiddy Fiddler Land" you'd probably find ticket sales would be hampered. For similar reasons I didn't go for Ol's suggestion for naming this blog – "Paintaway with Uncle Matt" which would have made me sound like a Jonathan King tribute act. Sadly not everyone in the business of naming important things has similar self-restraint, consider the PR genius who renamed Coco Pops to Choco Krispies, or the poor recent child of David and Victoria Beckham who has to endure sounding like a seventh generation lavatory disinfectant until they're old enough to discover Deed Poll. In fact celebrities have a lot to answer for in today's stupid modern world where children are no longer called Alice, Carol, David and Ben but instead Charmaine, Trixie-Bell, Blane and Jermajesty. No wonder children are badly behaved, I'd run off and loot London if you called me Fifi-Po Bell. Anyone who at this point feels the need to point out my erratic unit naming in my last blog needs to have their face rubbed up and down against a pebble-dashed wall – it was ironic sillyness, ok?!

So there you go – Procrastination by Numbers it's begun, you may never get your life back, I certainly won't, but then the resale value of it was so low as not to be a great concern.

In a bid to whet your appetite (yes, it's spelt "whet" not "wet" – the phrase actually means to sharpen one's appetite rather to drool all over the table - see you learn stuff here), I'm hoping to provide a barrage of posts this week to get the ball rolling. But don't whatever you do expect this every week, I've got things on, despite popular opinion to the contrary. Besides what else can I do when I'm barricaded in my flat to keep me away from the revolting masses? And I do mean revolting.

[Dave]

so are you actually going to paint anything or just blog rambly stuff?

[cunningmatt]

so are you actually going to paint anything or just blog rambly stuff?

Maybe... I'm busy procrastinating at present.

[cunningmatt]

Actually I am painting in the picture on the left - does that count?

[Draig]

Us procrastinators need to unite, get a union and a secret handshake or something. Maybe tomorrow.

That said, I painted a Man O War ship today, well, part of one, so I'm probably out of the club.

[cunningmatt]

Update 2 – Wednesday 10th August 2011: There's Nothing to Fear, except Fear itself - oh and Angry Rioting Mobs.

Ever sat at home watching a really good disaster movie, a very realistic one in which familiar places are being destroyed. Then it dawns on you that this isn't a disaster movie, it's the news, it's real - at which point your anal sphincter opens wider than Davina McCall's mouth and you need to reupholster your settee. Which is exceedingly hard when every sofa store within fifty miles is ablaze.

In case you've locked yourself in a secure vault, possibly not the worst idea I've heard all week, you won't know that over the last few days a number of places in London, and across the country, have decided to twin themselves with Tottenham. As civil disturbances, which are generally as welcome as a Jim Davidson comeback tour, spread the land. Rioting is generally better, I find, when it is happening somewhere else, Libya, Athens or Bradford. When it's happening down the road it's particularly scary.

The rioting has sparked a number of questions, such as what was the initial trigger for such acts? What are the socio-economic conditions that have caused such violence? Have the police been using the right tactics? And how is it possible to loot a Vision Express? I mean seriously, what was there to take from Tottenham's Vision Express? Ok, so there's the till, but that's just simple burglary, to loot you've got to do more than that. What did they do come away with hundreds of pairs of dummy glasses and a lifetime's supply of contact lens solution? Perhaps they turned up late and there were no shops left to loot, either the opticians or an estate agent and they realised that hundreds of pairs of glasses were better than a load of pictures of houses they don't own.

Ok, so I'm making light of a very serious situation with some very sad consequences. To some extent I have to, simply in order to keep myself sane – if I actually thought about this seriously all day and night my brain would have a fit, then explode and dribble out my ears, and we've already had far too much stray bodily fluid in this post.

The truth is I am supreme worrier, I can worry about anything and everything and frequently do. If worrying were an Olympic sport I wouldn't compete because I'd be worried the starting official might accidentally fire the gun when pointed in the wrong direction – seriously has that ever happened? Should I be worried? Thank god I didn't get those Olympic tickets. I'm the kind of person who walks past some broken glass on the street and worries that someone could fall over on it and DIE! Or that at any moment standing on a balcony the railing could rust and we'd all plunge to our deaths. It may seem overly paranoid here in text, but in my mind these are just the tip of the iceberg of the very real threats that plague my every waking moment.

As you can imagine this situation hasn't been improved by the fact that I passed through the corner of Clapham Junction, by Debenhams, just an hour or so before it descended into full scale anarchy on Monday on the way to the club, nor the fact I've been watching the BBC News Channel non-stop all day (thankfully I didn't watch Sky News or I'd have died in a fatal stress attack at about 11am). Television and film tend to have a very worrying effect on my psyche, far more that mere newspaper reports, radio or idle conversation can achieve. I'm not quite sure why that is, it must be something in the moving pictures convincing me that terrifying situations are indeed real – even when they're not. After seeing Jurassic Park 3, I remember being extra anxious walking the streets of my hometown for fear that a velociraptor might leap from a dark corner and rip my body limb from limb at any moment, this of course didn't happen, but it didn't stop my brain from cycling through the potential consequences in alarming detail.

I'm particularly "good", at imagining myself within films – not in an egotistical, "starring myself as the lead hunk" kind of way. But in "I wonder what would happen to me, if I was the character in the story", invariably these unstable psychosis based simulations don't end well for my imaginary self. I'm never the hero of any situation, simply the shrivelling wreck who lives a highly implausible but unfortunate life. Few of you may remember the 2000 film The 6th Day starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (you probably blocked it from your mind), but our good friend Arnie wakes up to discover that has been replaced by a clone who is currently living out his life and must battle to uncover the highly unbelievable, sinister multinational company plot that has given him two roles in this film. You probably remember it for the dodgy acting, two hours of your life you'll never get back, and the creepy dots the clones had on their eyeballs. All I remember is the fact that I spent most of the next week worrying about what would happen if I were replaced by a clone, and concluded that even though my clone would also be a pathetically weak individual I would lose out to him, and he would end up sitting all my university lectures. Obviously a pointless waste of my worrying energy which could have only been more misused, had I spent my time worrying about the prospects of entering a long term relationship.

So bad has this odd psychosis become that I can no longer watch end-of-civilization-epoch-shattering-apocalypse-disaster movies any more, as my chances of survival in the resultant imaginary sequel featuring myself are so remote that I end up deeply depressed. I don't know when this happened, as a child this didn't bother me. I remember going to see Independence Day at the age of about 12, and practically bursting with joy as aliens, who really should have renewed their Norton Anti-Virus subscription, blew city sized chunks out of humanity. I suspect that I'd been spoilt by a diet of sanitised children's television in which no matter the number of explosions or bullets everyone survived (except Bambi's mum) and no one had to rebuild their destroyed lives, as a quick swish of a broom tidied up even the worst of explosions. Perhaps if I'd grown up with the high body count of the current Doctor Who, or watching the surprisingly dark Captain Scarlett, I'd have had a more realistic appreciation of the consequences of alien invasion. Because it actually turns out having a sizeable chunk of the White House smack into your face at high velocity can really put a dampener on your career prospects. Certainly by the time I caught my last disaster story - when I accidentally watched the BBC's reimagining of Day of the Triffids last year, my priorities had changed. Rather than marvelling at the special effects, and odd casting of Eddie Izzard, I instead spent the entire programme worrying about the poor sods who'd been blinded by a solar flare and then eaten by a geranium. And then the rest of the week going to bed with a bottle of weed killer under my pillow.

Given that in the real world I'd lose out in a bare knuckle boxing match to any one of the Cheltenham Under 8s Ballet Class members, in my fictitious simulations of any of Hollywood's civilization destroying scenarios I meet the same fate. I end up surviving the initial mass destruction meted out to mankind, but in the process have my sanity utterly mauled by the horrific scenes I've witnessed, only to then die straight away in the "new world", as the "character that dies pointlessly, just to prove that even though the volcano/rampant virus/alien invasion is over, the world is a dangerous place". If I'd been in Lost I'd have been the guy who, after living through the trauma of a plane crash and emerging on the deserted island, promptly gets sucked through the plane's jet engine and chopped into a rather messy fifty billion piece jigsaw puzzle in episode one - just to prove to dear viewer how dangerous the island is. Still at least I wouldn't have had to live through trying to work out the remaining six seasons.

And in real life that's probably a good thing, I mean if civilization really does come to an end, what use am I going to be? How long after the Domestos style destruction of 99.99% of mankind, and the subsequent collapse of all society, will someone with the skills of a children's television producer actually be useful? I reckon it's going to be quite a while, in the meantime there's going to be lots of cold winters and my rotisseried buttock flesh will probably end up keeping those doctors and civil engineers from going hungry. Oh well, it's for the good of civilization I suppose.

So as not to end on a sour note, I'd like to go off on a complete tangent and recommend one of my favourite shows of the moment Only Connect which returns next week for a new series. The show's everything that ITV2 isn't, surely that should be sufficient encouragement to view? But it's essentially a logic based quiz-show which is unashamedly high brow, full of questions so fiendish that if you've scored zero by the end of the programme, you'll be quite proud. So make sure you tune in to BBC Four at 8.30pm this coming Monday, provided you haven't been vaporised by Lord Voldemort in the meantime. I mean it could happen... I knew I shouldn't have gone to see Harry Potter.

Oh and in case your looking for some painting here, there isn't any yet. But I do have a Warhammer based picture as I can exclusively reveal the first Warhammer casualty of riots:



Yes sadly due to my extreme cowardice turns out I clutched the box containing my Griffon a bit to hard on the way home from Monday's gaming session and so Althran and friend are currently grounded. Hoping that a bit of metal pinning should repair him, else I will cry.

[Annie]

Haha what a rather enjoyable blog! 

[Garzini]

Matt, If I were you, i'd steer clear of reading any Cthulhu related material.

(you may sleep better!)

[jackhoneysett]

Oh my god! - They killed Althran! - You bastards!
Did you use your warhammer case as a riot shield Matt?

Only Connect is great. Worth watching just to see Victoria Coren give withering looks when contestants score no points, she is like some kind of TV gorgon (or female Paxman). I approach it like university challenge, if I know even one of the answers I count that as success!

[Crompton]

I'm the same as you Jack. I sort of sit there waiting for the round without vowels and hop[ing I manage to get 12 points to win the show by myself...it actually happened in 1 episode.

Enjoyable blog Matt. Personally I always think people in disaster movies are very stupid and I'd be great in that sort of an environment even though I have no idea how to make fire or put up a tent or anything.