WendyBunny's Rantings

Yesterday, in a charity shop...

2011-12-09T21:50:00.002Z

I found a cuddly me!

You can tell it's me by the hat.

I've got a cool t-shirt. :)

2011-10-27T23:06:00.004+01:00

I have a cool thing and that cool thing is a t-shirt and that t-shirt is a Grim Rabbit on and that Grim Rabbit one is in the picture below.

Aargh! No! It's a picture of me!

Oh, wait. There's one of those at the side of the post anyway... Hmm...

I hate photos of myself. I think I need a bigger hat than any of my current hats, one that I can hide under completely so I just appear as a giant hat with a pair of Converse, and maybe my stripy socks, sticking out the bottom like something out of a 1980s cartoon.

Anyway, this shirt came from the awesome people over at Tshirtprinting.net and is currently a complete one of a kind, unless you count the version that one of the cuddly bunnies I gave my mum last Christmas wears.

I made that coat thing from scratch and the t-shirt is a baby one with some extra stitching put in to make it fit. I should really have a go at making some more for my own toy bunnies sometime.

Speaking of bunnies, just look at those front teeth of mine.

Actually, come to think of it, please don't.

Robots, Lego and Hello Kitty

2011-10-26T00:27:00.005+01:00

A little while back I did a post about the awesome things I would sell if I had a toy company. Well, I designed an ad!

Then my scanner went and then I forgot all about it, but here it is!

So, who wants to give me money to make them, huh?
They'll be awesome I'm tellin' ya.

Talking about toys, have you seen these?

How cute are they?
Mega Bloks (Yes, I know, but they're really not as bad as some people say) have been selling Hello Kitty sets for a while now. These ones go for about £2 for a figure a brick and an accessory in a blind-pack, and £4 for the slightly larger sets.

There's another one of those £4 sets with Hello Kitty wearing a chef's hat, but I can't really justify buying that one too.

Here's the background bricks, unobscured by cats.

Here are the accessories. They're all pretty nice other than the balloons. The balloons are pretty rubbish to be honest. The rest though, they're very nice, specially the cupcake and the umbrellas.

One of the nice little touches I like with the Hello Kitty sets is that pieces that could just be straight recolours have properly different schemes. Likewise, the fact that only one of the two figures in the raincoat has buttons that stand out and that one of the party hats is patterned and the other one isn't.

I'd like it if the two versions of the sailor suit were a bit more different from each other. Maybe another main colour, although I suppose blue is the obvious colour, or maybe make one of them sleeveless, or something like that. Anyway, it's a minor complaint. I still like them. : )

What's kind of odd is that whereas the Halo and Marvel blind-packs all seem to include a 2x4 brick, only three out of the five Hello Kitty ones I've got have them. One of them has a 2x2 brick to stand on and one has a 2x6 flat piece. Weird.

Also kind of weird is that all four of the bricks have text printed on the end.

I wonder what those numbers mean and whether there's similar ones on the bricks in the Halo and Marvel ones.

All in all, they're pretty funky. There are two characters other than Hello Kitty in the larger sets, her sister (Hello Kitty with the bow on the wrong side) and a sheep character of some description. I don't know what she's called.

I've seen a couple of images of what appears to be series two of the blind-packs including two of the sheep and one of the sister. Hopefully they'll actually show up in the shops soon.

Hello Kitty appears in Commander Cottontail as the ambassador for the Sanrio-Mega Bloks alliance. That isn't much of a spoiler seeing as the entire comic is based around a one off strip featuring her and the commander, which I've already posted about a bit.

Anyway, what's next?

Oh, yes. I have a friend called Pete and he's awesome. See, he knew I wanted this Lego minifigure, but couldn't really justify or afford it. A short while after I mentioned it, one turned up in the post. Brilliant.

Do you want to see what I wanted it for?
Well, I'm going to show you anyway. =P

It's a little Lego me! Complete with stripy sleeves, a Mega Bloks red umbrella and a big black hat.

And a Brick Forge acoustic guitar. Tha-wum!

Of course there's a few part that I have been buying myself on ebay, such as the torso on the figure below.

Can you guess who it is?
I hope so.

If you can't scroll down.

Further down.

Just a bit further down still.

...

If you can't work it out now then there' simply no hope for you. =P

Finally, to finish up, here's Commander Cottontail and some of his crewmates on the space station. :)

Next post on Thursday, probably. Warning, will probably contain a picture of me and not the Lego me. You have been warned.

Things, stuff and other subjects.

2011-10-23T01:45:00.003+01:00

So, stuff. Yeah.
I should update this thing more often.

Anyway, here's a roundup of stuff I've been up to in case you don't already know.

Sketches! Sketches! Get your free sketches here!

If you've got a DA account and some free time I've got a journal up offering free sketches, ten in fact. The only condition is that you also offer to do ten free sketches. It's kinda neat. You should get me to draw you something.

I did guest comics!

Now, I've already mentioned this on the Gilbert and Grim website and on Twitter, but I'll mention it again anyway.

I recently did two guest crossover pages for the webcomic L33T starting here. One comic is a crossover with Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit and the other is a crossover with Commander Cottontail, which I'm sure will be ready to go live any week now.

I also did a guest comic for Callous Comics back in August, which I don't believe I've posted here before. Maybe I did. I'm not sure really. I might as well post it anyway, right?

Yes.

Last, but definitely not least...

I need your help!

Yes, you right there. I need your help. Yes, definitely yours.

You see, me and Jess have been working with JJ Sandee of The House of Madness, Shazram and Nismorack.com to produce an awesome kit bag for artists.

It's heavy duty, waterproof, can fit a who load of pens and pencils, as well as A4 and A5 sketchbooks, a phone and other bits and bobs, and it's made in the UK. I have one that I use myself and really, they are really good. I'm not just saying that. They really are.

So here's where you come in.

We have a Crowdfunder page for the bag to try and raise the funds to get the first full scale production run made.

Obviously, if you'd like to put some money towards it and get yourself a bag, that would be awesome, but if not you can still help, and I know you want to help because you're an awesome individual like that, by spreading the word, letting other people know that this thing exists and that we're trying to raise the money to get it produced.

Thanks in advance for being so awesome.

Next update on Tuesday: More toy robots, Lego and an awesome thing I have to show off.

Coming soon to a computer near you...

2011-09-11T01:37:00.003+01:00

>

I'm not sure when it's going to be launching. It all depends on how long it takes me to get the rest of the parts I need, but once it launches it will be updating twice a week, every Monday and Friday. Neat, huh?

Well, I think it's neat anyway. :P

Rant About The Riots

2011-08-13T21:57:00.006+01:00

When I set up this blog I meant to keep it entirely on the lighthearted side of things, but I’m going to vent and theorise about society, politics and the relevance of class issues when it comes to the recent riots in England.

If you don’t want to read my getting all ranty then feel free to skip this post and wait until I get a scanner working when I will show you some more of my awesome toy robot designs.

There, that’s that bit out of the way.

Firstly, some background on me. I grew up in a council house. Through most of my childhood it was me, my mum who couldn’t work anymore and either one or both of my two older half brothers living in a house mostly made out of crooked plasterboard at the edge of a council estate.

My first job, was a weekend one working in a hell hole of a hospital kitchen, my second job was working in a convenience store that probably had almost as much stock shoplifted as bought by actual paying customers. As well as those I’ve had two jobs in supermarkets, neither of which I was (or am) physically fit to do, one of them was stocking shelves between 9pm at night and 1am in the morning. I used to have to walk home at 1 in the morning because the public transport was shut down for the night and I couldn’t afford the taxi fare after midnight.

It would take me an hour to get back to my one bedroom flat over a shop. It was covered in woodchip wallpaper. The front end was Victorian I think, the back end probably added sometime in the sixties. It was like something out of a Pulp song. The front was drafty and the back end was damp and suffered from subsidence. One night when it rained heavily the guttering fell off from over my bedroom window and lodged itself in the plastic roof of the extension attached to the shop below me. It stayed stuck in that roof until long after I moved out.

I was never really vey good at most of those jobs though and combined with my health problems I probably spent more time looking for work than in work. I think it’s fair to say I have some idea about what it’s like to live in a relatively poor neighbourhood then and not to have any money.

With all this in mind I would just like to say that these riots have next to nothing to do with class or income and it’s not about job availability. There are some major social issues behind this, but it’s not the ones that people like to drag out over and over.
It’s not about the internet and social networking. Twitter and the like have made it easier for people who want to help clean up, to organise donations and to inform the police of the identities of the criminals who have been wrecking the streets.

It’s not about class or income. There have been plenty of poorer, working class people helping clean the streets up and plenty of middle class idiots involved in the looting.

There does seem to be an issue thought with three ways of thinking that have been allowed to spread through society.

1) There’s nothing wrong with looking out for myself. Why should I care what happens to strangers?

This attitude is nothing new and it’s not going to go away. It’s not the majority attitude in this country though. We give huge amounts of money to charity and we offer our time to help out when things go horribly wrong. Things like the riot clean up crews make me feel really good about people, but there is also those who simply don’t care what happens to other people and I think that is the biggest factor in what’s caused the looting and arson attacks we’ve been seeing.

2) Nothing’s going to happen to me. I can get away with it.

The elements in society who couldn’t care less about the damage they do to other people’s lives are usually kept in check by one thing; the fear of punishment.

What happens when people decide that the potential punishment is either a) pretty minor in comparison to the benefits of committing a crime (mostly in this case theft) or b) so unlikely to occur that they think the chances of them having to deal with the fallout is negligible? They don’t hold back.

When a peaceful protest in Tottenham was hijacked by rioters (peaceful protesters don’t usually have bricks with them and I doubt they were just laying about) and the police failed miserably to deal with the situation it opened the floodgates. Add that to a general feeling that the law fails to deal with criminal behaviour properly when people are caught and you’ve got every reason for them to think they are beyond punishment for their actions, that they can get away with it.

3) Breaking stuff is fun.

Out of these three, this is the one that I personally understand the least. Take a look at the following MTV advert/ident.

Apparently partying = breaking the hosts stuff and throwing it in the pool. Not angrily, not drunkenly, just because destroying stuff is fun. When I think party and drums I remember being at someone’s house (I cannot for the life of me remember who) whilst one of the local bands played a lyrically dubious version of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” in the corner of the living room. If anybody had deliberately broken something they’d probably have found themselves forcibly ejected onto the street.

I can’t find a youtube upload of it, but Kerrang! has an ident in which two people blow a whole load of (obviously not their) stuff up. Not that music channels are the only culprits of this kind of thing, but that particular example has been bugging the hell out of me. Largely, because I only watch MTV Rocks and MTV Classic, which really don’t play that kind of music. Not a fan, sorry. Anyway, MTV’s determination to shove the same ads on all their stations is a subject for another blog maybe.

Many of the looters and firebugs showed no sign of anger, no sign that they were fighting against anything. They were laughing, joking, smiling, having a good time, because destruction is apparently an acceptable way of having fun.

Combine the lack of empathy for other human beings, the confidence that they’ll get away with it and this concept that has been pushed for decades (and has arguably been growing) that destruction is fun and what do you get? You get what we’ve seen on the streets of London and across other areas.

Class and income seems to have little to do with it outside of a basic cost/benefit analysis. The risk of arrest is always the same, but the potential gains to be made from looting shift with income. Someone who earns less than £14,000 can physically carry the same amount out of a Sony electrical store as someone who earns £22,000 a year. The value of the goods that they can steal only varies as a percentage of income and that’s why the cost/benefit thing comes in.

There are many, many people who have less disposable income than many of the rioters who would never consider doing what they have done. Many who instead of taking everything they can have given everything they can.

Some people want to treat criminals as victims, victims of their circumstances. They want to help them, to the detriment of others who have grown up in those same circumstances.

Here’s an example. I won’t use names, but there are two people from my school. One of them is a chronic asthmatic and suffers various allergies, which have had a negative effect on her ability to work over time. She had to sit on a long waiting list to get a flat. It was a housing association property with no carpets and a window that you couldn’t open in case the glass fell out and of course she had to pay for prescriptions for the medication she would probably have to be on for the rest of her life.

A recovering heroin addict with a criminal record got a larger place straight away, because they needed to be kept in a safe environment to allow them to recover and to stop them from getting in a situation where they would reoffend.

These people went to the same school, lived in the same area, came from the same economic band and had the same opportunities open to them. One suffered from unavoidable medical conditions and the other caused their condition to themselves and screwed people over in the process. Who deserves more help?

This isn’t about class. This isn’t about income. This isn’t about what jobs are available in what areas. This is about individuals and this is about society as a whole. Stop giving excuses for criminals when their neighbours, their classmates, their co-workers or the people standing behind them in the job centre queue have somehow managed to restrain themselves from smashing the hell out of things, stealing from strangers and getting addicted to hard drugs.

I grew up in a family on benefits, on a council estate, at a school where the people who were expelled from the neighbouring schools fit in perfectly and I didn’t become thug. Whilst some of my fellow students did, most didn’t.

When you use class, income or opportunities as an excuse for the behaviour shown by criminals and thugs you insult every other single one of us who have dealt with queuing up in the jobcentre, living in decrepit housing and counting the pennies in the supermarket because you only have a fiver left to last the rest of the week. We didn’t go mug people/set buildings on fire/joy ride/loot shops, so why the hell should they and why should they be excused for such things?

I did a guest thing!

2011-08-07T22:21:00.002+01:00

Callous Comics is celebrating 15 years, which is pretty awesome.

As part of the celebrations Carlo recently did me an awesome guest comic, the second one I've got from him.

Of course I drew him something as well. :)

Check it out.

If I owned a toy company...

2011-08-02T11:58:00.003+01:00

...it would make the most awesome toy robots ever.

1) Daisy-bot - The miniature desktop vacuum bot!

Whenever Daisy-bot reaches the edge of a surface her eyes flash and she beeps at you. Daisy-bot is programmed with 32 different hygene related insults if she vacuums up too much dust and dirt in a short time.

2) Mr.Bot - The highly original bump'n'go robot.

Walks around aimlessly until he bumps into something and changes course. LED light up eyes change espression as he goes. The smoother the journey, the happier he is.

3) Radioactive Bunny-bot - Not actually radioactive.

Radioactive Bunny-bot has a light sensor in his chest. Watch as he changes direction and speed depending on light conditions. Also has an FM radio alarm clock mode that has him zip around at high speed while the radio plays at ever increasing volume.

So who wants to give me some money to get these made then?

Look what I got delivered yesterday...

2011-04-03T13:17:00.000+01:00

I would have had these on Friday before the comic update went live, so I could post some pictures in the comment section for the comic. Unfortunately the postman delivered them to next door.

National Poetry Month Day Two

2011-04-02T23:46:00.000+01:00

Why I'm updating this eighteen minutes into day three. Yes, it's another poem about poetry.

I'm still running in GMT,
Because otherwise I've failed you see,
I forgot,
To change a clock,
Oh, how I hate BST,

National Poetry Month

2011-04-01T23:11:00.000+01:00

April is National Poetry Month and, along with some other equally mad people, I'm having a go at doing a poem a day for the whole month. Considering I don't write poetry normally, then this s just further proof that I've obviously lost my mind.

I've obviously gone a little mad,
You shouldn't worry - it's not that bad,
I'm just doing silly things,
Like writing poems that make you cringe,
(That's a half rhyme!)
And making books that might not sell,
And definitely won't sell well,
(Well, there are only two for sale)

I'm writing poems about writing poems,
What a silly, cliche thing to do,
It's almost midnight and it's all I can think of,
I said I'd do this too,

Now, this poem's structure might be strange,
But never mind, all the same,
I still managed to get one out,
Even if that's all it's about,

(I am a hack)

Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit: Ignorance is Bliss (Charity project)

2011-03-27T00:01:00.000Z

That there is the cover for a new Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit book. The first Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit book in fact and there are only going to be three copies of it, one of which is staying with me. If that sounds a little bit crazy then that's because it is. Let me explain...

A while back Meg Hunt decided she wanted to do something to help out people in Japan following the recent earthquake and tsunami, so she wrote a blog post asking for people to donate are to a charity auction to raise money. I was completely up for the idea. There was only one problem though. My art isn't all that special.

I had a think about what I could do that might actually be worth people bidding on and hit the absolutely insane idea that I would make an exclusive print collection of Gilbert and Grim strips.

I'm scanning and colouring one page away from getting that project finished. One copy will go for auction to raise money for Japan, one book will go to another charity auction at some later date and the other one will be kept in a nice safe box under my desk. After that there will be no more copies of the book and none of the extra work I did for it will ever appear anywhere else.

I'll let everyone know, loudly and repeatedly, when the first one goes up for sale.

The books contents are as follows:

1 - Intro Page – Little bit of new art at the bottom, mostly me talking about why I'm doing the book and how I once slept through a hurricane.

2 - Stalked by Death - A brand new remake of the most redrawn page of the comic.

3 - Ignorance is Bliss - A brand new remake of a page from the original archive that somehow I've never got round to redoing before now.

4 - Frankenfood - Reworked version of the version in the main archive. Messed with the inks a little and then coloured it from scratch again.

5 - 2 Characters and a Couch - Another one from the original archive that I hadn't got round to redoing until now.

6 - Wibble - Partially re-inked from the version on the website. A strange hybrid between old and new. I think it works though.

7 - Grim Rabbit "Ink Drop" - A potential T-shirt design I did, now with funky abstract background.

8 - Stalked by a Demon - An old comic drawn again.

9 - Original Cover / The Hanged Man - A scrapbook style page featuring the full version of the art for my Webcomics Tarot submission and the first ever bit of cover art I did for the comic

10 - Hospital Visit - Another remake of a comic from chapter one.

11 - N. Smith - Another partially re-inked page.

12 - The Pirate - Minor tweaks only on this one.

13 - Best Viewed with Firefox - Made some changes to the inks and then coloured with a new scheme.

14 - Mordred the Cat / Grim by Jesse Justice - My image of Mordred from The Adventures of Wiglaf and Mordred as a cat as well as Grim drawn by Jesse Justice of Diablito del Ring

15 - Grim and the Vikings by oppernaR - A scene from Chapter two as interpreted by Roland van Duijn (or oppy as I normally call him) of oppernar.com, The Webcomic List and the newly started Let Me Show You My Pokemans!

16 - Mag and the Grim Rabbit - My image of Mag Flamequill from The Life of Mag Flamequill having tea with Grim.

17 - Grim by Bucky BA picture of Grim by the artist and writer of The Life of Mag Flamequill

18 - Cross Hare Cover - A slightly different version of the Cross Hare fan art I drew a while back.

19 - The Best of What's Left - My take on Future Paladin from The Best of What's Left as a Gilbert and Grim style demon.

20 - Fox TV - A minor recoloured version of the interlude comic from chapter four.

21 -Boom - Some new art featuring Gilbert and William.

22 - Delivery Day - Fully redrawn version of the comic from chapter one.

23 - White Rabbit - Slightly edited and partially recoloured version of another chapter one comic.

24 - Graveyard Grim - The poster design I posted on the site.

25 - Hippy Cat - An image of an as yet unnamed character who appeared a couple of times in chapter four. I don't think I've ever put this one online before. There's also some other stuff on that page too.

26 -Grim Rabbit by Joanne Wojtysiak - An awesome, specially produced image of Grim from the creator of Gothbunnies

27 - I wish I was a punkrocker - A brand new version of the image of Thalia that I posted on my DA page.

28 - Greatest Invention ever - A brand new version of another chapter one comic.

29 - Annoying appointment - A brand new, extra special page written just for the book.

30 - Cover re-coloured - Exactly what it says on the tin. It's the cover/title page for Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit with new colours.

31 - Toxic - A partially recoloured version of the comic from the archives.

32 - Back page credits and holiday art- A few notes and recoloured versions of one Valentine's and one Christmas piece.

How to identify a Wendy

2011-02-15T11:06:00.000Z

How to identify a Wendy by ~WendyW on deviant ART

Just in case you were wondering what the person rambling on here looks like.
Of course in reality my arms are the same length as each other, although one of my legs is slightly longer than the other because my spine used to be all crooked. Now it's reinforced with surgical steel.

Anyway, I drew this while I was out on Sunday and coloured in yesterday. This is exactly what I was wearing on the day I drew it and yes, those colours are pretty acurate. I sometimes dress like I'm in an old Batman comic.

The Webcomic List Awards Pt.2

2011-02-12T00:00:00.001Z

So, the awards have come and gone now. Didn't I say I'd post again in a couple of days? It's been more than a couple of days, hasn't it?

Hmm...

Maybe I should have posted something here about the awards when the winners were announced, but is there really anybody who looks at this that wouldn't already know?

Probably not.

Maybe...

Who knows?

Anyhow, if you haven't seen the results then click here and have a look at the illustrated ceremony, which I think is very good this year. It helps that I didn't draw any of it this time. :P

I'll post again in a couple of days...

The Webcomic List Awards Pt.1

2010-11-10T02:30:00.000Z

I've been emailing and posting about The Webcomic List Awards all over the web recently, the reason being I'm the silly person who offered to head up the organising committee.

A bit of background is in order I think on exactly why we have The Webcomic List Awards in the first place.

The Webcartoonists' Choice Awards ran every year between 2001 and 2008 and during that time they became quite a big thing for a lot of webcomic folk. Unfortunately things went awry and come last July people were starting to question whether or not there were going to be an awards at all for 2009. Specifically, people were beginning to question it on The Webcomic List forums, where I spend a large amount of my time deleting spam and occasionally telling people off.

It was actually Luke Surl of lukesurl.com that first made the suggestion of starting up our own replacement.

"How about starting a TWCL awards?" he wrote, "I'm actually serious, talk to Ash and see if he'll give the full TWCL endorsement. We can then use our combined resources & contacts to create the necessary system (be it a select jury of esteemed persons, a closed election of peers, or an open election of general public). Thoughts?"

Other people starting chiming in with ideas including Zoë Robinson, Oliver Knörzer and future fellow forum lacky Chilari, who ended up as part of the organising committee. In a moment of madness I offered my support for the idea, sought out the approval of my higher ups on the site and suddenly, and reading through the threads in question, without any big decision I was organising the thing somehow.

I thought, and still think, it would be a terrible shame not to have anything like the WCCAs or TWCLAs around. I believe in things that can bring the webcomic community, or communities, together in some way and I think things like the awards offer that.

We held a poll to pick the name of the awards. The Webcomic List Awards won. After that there were several public polls on the forums, a committee was formed and barely organised chaos ensued. Eventually the awards took shape and on the 1st of November the nomination phase went live.

Nominations were collected, massive amounts of emails were answered and sorted, judges were recruited and given comics to judge and artists were given things to draw for the site. Somewhere in the middle of that I moved house and my intenet was accidentally disconnected when it wasn't meant to be, but somehow we pulled it all together and the ceremony went live on the 7th of February this year, only a little bit behind schedule.

On the 8th of this month nominations opened for The Webcomic List Awards 2010, a new, bigger and better version of the awards.

So far things are going well. We have a really good committee and selection of judges aboard and nominations are coming in at a steady pace already.

All in all, I'm very happy with how things are going this year.

So, one final word before I get back to work, go check out the site and if you happen to be involved in creating comics yourself or reviewing comics or distributing comics or are in any other way actively involving yourself comics then go nominate some webcomics that you think deserve the recognition.

Just make sure to read the insturctions first, okay? :)

That's all for now. I'll post more in the next couple of days. Right now I have some work to be getting on with.

TTFN.

Midi .2 EP

2010-09-11T08:30:00.001+01:00

Here it is the long awaited (well, for two weeks) follow up to Midi .1 EP, the twenty-something minute, slightly silly instrumental EP unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

This new follow up consists mostly of reworkings and reinterpretations (different enough for the most part to still be interesting I hope) of the tracks from Midi .1 EP, but also contains two brand new tracks Tin Dog and Winter Bells. Hopefully you'll find it all quite interesting.

01 - False Starts
02 - Wake Up Again
03 - A Brief Conversation Between a Piano and Some Drums
04 - Tin Dog
05 - Demented Dance of the 8bit Fairies
06 - Revamped Theme
07 - A Minor Return of the Musical Giggles
08 - Winter Bells
09 - One Minute Thirty Seven
10 - The Drums Get The Last Word
11 - Closed Again

Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit returns and the world's greatest sport

2010-08-31T01:38:00.001+01:00

Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit, my far too infrequently updating webcomic is back!

It's been away for a while, but now it's back and updating every Tuesday and Friday. (For those of you reading this and it's still Monday, it's Tuesday already here in the UK.)

Also, Bunny Hopping is the greatest sport ever. How can any sport ever beat that?

Midi .1 EP released!

2010-08-28T21:08:00.001+01:00

Hello.

So, firstly, I'm really bad at updating blogs aren't I?

Secondly, I have music to unleash upon the world!

Midi .1 EP is a short collection of 11 midi tracks I created recently. It started off with my decision to revamp a piece I wrote for college. It was a by the books Renaissance piece. Alright, but a little boring, so I decided to have a go at creating a midi version of it, but this time breaking a few rules along the way and the result is Dance of the Demented Fairies.

That's the oldest track on the EP, with parts dating back ten years and the rest dating back to this March.The newest one is Sketch Ditty Ditty, which I only declared finished a few days ago. The whole record is a big pile of electronic silliness and I hope that you (whoever you are) enjoy it.

The front cover here is mostly for my own amusement, because it's far too small to actually print up.

01 - False Beginings
02 - Wake Up Sleepy Head
03 - One October Morning
04 - Extended Theme From a 1970's Children's Art Show
05 - A Brief Conversation Between One Piano and Itself
06 - A Minor Case of the Musical Giggles
07 - Sketch Ditty Ditty
08 - A Brief Reprise of a Prior Conversation
09 - Dance of the Demented Fairies
10 - One Minute Twenty Six
11 - Close

I will be uploading 'Midi .2 EP' in two weeks time.

My next record after that will actually contain real instruments! : O
It will probably take a very long time.

Omnipresent Temporal Plot Hole

2010-06-02T08:31:00.000+01:00

No. It's not the title of a Muse song (but on the subject of Muse I did pick up the tab book for their second album for £2.99 the other day - bargain!). It is the title of a very long blog entry about Doctor Who. If you only ended up on this entry because of the Lego tag I suggest you just scroll right on down to the bottom.

So, generally I've been a big fan of Doctor Who since it was brought back to TV in 2004. I have a small collection of Daleks in the office and it got me watching the old version of the show for the first time in a long time. It's the only current TV show that I watch on a regular basis these days. Apart from that I mostly end up watching reruns and documentaries on Sky Arts.

That said, I didn't think much of the 2009 Torchwood mini-series, Children of Earth. I think it pushed things further than they needed to go.

Generally though, Doctor Who has been my favourite show in a long time, which is why it's so disappointing that the current series is making me question if Steven Moffat has lost the plot a little.

When Matt Smith was announced as the new Doctor I was pretty sceptical about the decision, but, happily, my scepticism was unfounded and I have to say he is brilliant in the role. A great bit of casting.

Unfortunately, I'm less happy with some of the rest. Beyond the normal Doctor/companion situation we seem to have three big, long arcs going on; River Song, the new Daleks and of course the crack in the univers that likes to eat everything in sight.

Now, as much as I like the individual episodes all three of these things have been giving me problems. Doctor Who has a well earnt reputation for having somewhat flexible continuity sometimes, but the new series is pushing it in my opinion.

In River Song's first appearance she recognised the 10th Doctor and at first appeared to think they were at the same point in each other's relative timelines. Then she died. This brings up a question to me, because I over-think this kind of stuff. If she thought the 10th version of the Doctor was at the same or similar point in their relationship as her how come the 11th Doctor has not yet lived through it? How did she look at his next incarnation and know he was too young?

It doesn't really make sense and Moffat did admit in one of the corresponding Confidential episodes that she wasn't originally written to be a recurring character, which I think shows.

The second issue is the Daleks.

Daleks are awesome. They're viscous, half insane, alien squid things in personal tanks with plungers for weapons. What's not to like?

Well, the new tanks look a bit naff to be honest. They look a bit too plasticky and I'm not really sure why they look like they do. The logic is that they are 'pure' Daleks whilst the others are remnants of the messed up hybrid Daleks from the Game Station in series one. That makes some kind of sense I suppose, but why the different tank design?

The way the copper coloured Daleks were treated within the show was as if they looked like normal Daleks. The Doctor never questioned their appearance. UNIT never questioned their appearance. Captain Jack, who had also witnessed Daleks before, never questioned it either.

That gives a pretty strong suggestion, to me at least, that the old style Daleks had been retconned in favour of the newer, updated style. Out were bright colours that screamed of the sixties and seventies and in one more sombre, more suitably military colours and as far as anyone let on this was the way it had always been. All of this makes the return of the bright colours and the introduction of the bigger, bulkier tanks all a little weird.

Finally we came to the thing that this post is named after, the crack in Amy Pond's bedroom wall. Anything absorbed into it ceases to have ever existed. Okay, got it, but isn't it kind of odd that the thing has next to no regard for cause and effect?

And what about those big unchangeable points in time. The Daleks stealing Earth was the first in an unbreakable chain of events that led to or will lead to or will probably lead to the first human colonies outside our solar system. Does that mean that almost all of the episodes set in the future have effectively been retconned and what happened to Donna? Donna who was only dropped off of the TARDIS because of what happened to her during those events. In the adjusted timeline did she ever leave the TARDIS? If not then she's just ceased to exist too.

Pushing that point further, any major change to the timeline could and probably would also lead to things like Captain Jack Harkness not existing, which means he couldn't end up going too far back in time, get hired by Torchwood, build a rift manipulator to keep the Cardiff rift in check, which ended up seeming to be the cause of the rift (depending on your point of view of course) and if that was actually the case then all sorts of crazy things wouldn't have happened, which further affects the timeline. In all likelihood a certain Professor Yana probably wouldn't have ended up on a certain planet at a certain time and even if he did end up there the TARDIS would probably not have ended up there without Jack and the Master would have never ended up on early 21st century Earth, so thinking about it (which I have been doing a lot) individual changes could lead to earlier changes happening as a result of the amount of time travel we're already dealing with. A change further back, for example Captain Jack not ending up in Wales a couple of hundred years too early, would cause changes to happen before the appearance of the crack, so when the crack did finally appear there it ends up swallowing something else, something that previously wasn't there, leading to possibly more of the same and rendering the entire universe into one great big, complicated paradox.

The biggest question of all of course is this: Why isn't the Doctor doing anything about it? Cracks are opening across the whole of space and time, taking entire worlds with them, making catastrophic changes and what does he do? He takes his companions on a trip to Rio, or trys to anyway.

That's not exactly responsible of him, is it?

Well, congratulations if you've actually managed to read all of that. Well done and on a side note, Louise Dade who does the excellent Lego webcomic, Tranquility Base, made a little something on the subject of the new Daleks that made me smile.

Also check out these awesome lego mini-daleks.

Unknown Strat Restoration Project Pt.1

2010-05-27T17:48:00.000+01:00

So, I've been trying to think of a suitable first post for my new blog and I suddenly thought of a little project that's sitting downstairs in the front room.

Back on the 17th of this month me and my other half, Jess for those who don't know, received a reply to a request we put on Freecycle (or more correctly Freegle as it's now called - stupid name) for damaged guitars or spare parts. We have two guitars in need of some work and the wreck of an old Satelite bass that I want to turn into a new shinier, less plyboard bass guitar. Basically I like the neck because it's standard guitar scale and I can't stretch my fingers far. We were mostly hoping for some parts we could put towards one of those projects, but instead we got offered a (nearly) full guitar.

The next day we picked up this lot, all loaded up in a quite nice but rather smelly gig bag. Trawling through images and specs of Strat clones and comparing the exact shape of the headstock we think it's either a Tokai or an Encore, or largely one of those anyway.

The bag's had a trip through the washer and the guitar strap had three nice long soaks in the shower room sink, which eventually got the smell out, which backed up by the colour that came out of it, I believe to be the results of a very old beer spill.

The previous owner had them for quite a while, an abandoned project of someone else, but hadn't got round to doing anything with it yet, so thought it was time to call it time and hand off to another someone else.

As you can see below the wiring was a mess and was partially held together by sticky tape. The centre pickup also turned out to be dead and not exactly what it seems.

You see, that's not a twin coil humbucker in the middle, but a single coil pickup shoved into the twin coil's casing. Oh yes, and it's dead.

The bridge is also damaged, but won't cause a problem unless you want to hook up a whammy bar, so although we will replace it, it isn't high priority right now as none of our guitars currently have one anyway.

First thing to do (after going to the hardware store, realising our money was at home, going back to pick it up and then going back to the hardware store, oh and taking some photographs) was for us to head out into the garden with a blue sheet, some paint, varnish and lacquer remover, an old toothbrush and lots of dispoable cleaning cloths.

It seems to have been repainted quite a few times.

After that the body had a quick, and rather noxious, bath, was dried off and taken indoors because it was getting cold, dark and windy out.

It now looks like a candidate for the next Fender "Relic" series.

Next came five grades of sandpaper, scrubbing some gunk off the neck plate, disassembling and reassembling the machine heads to get them good and tight and then a good night's sleep.

This is what she looked like the next morning having taken around six or seven hours and several cups of tea to get there.

Two days, some more sanding, four coats of wood stain on the body, two on the neck and a bit more sanding later this is what we had:

The body's going to get three more coats when we can hook up a good way of hanging it in order to get a nice even coating and the neck probably four. Before the last coat it's going to get a custom decal applied. Due to the positioning of the humbucker, or the fake humbucker that we're going to replace with a real one, we've come up with some funky alternate wiring that requires a second switch installed, so it's really not going to be a Strat clone anymore, not truly anyway, so we've given it it's own custom model name, the JW-1.

I quite like the effect of the chrome coloured casing with the natural looking body. With the black finish it looked a bit hack-ish to me. Well, it still looks a bit hackish I suppose, but now that comes with a bit of charm I think.

Hopefully it won't be too long until we can get the parts to finish her off completely, but that might have to wait for a while yet with our money having lots of directions it needs to go out in.