Stray Dog Strut

Good evening!

If I was to choose very carefully, considering all the candidates, i’d have to say the highlight of my day today was a very nice customer saying “shove it up your arse” on the phone to me at work. Ahh, such nice people…

I’ve been playing Medieval: Total War tonight. It’s another game that’s been gathering dust in my cupboard for a few years and another one to rekindle the fires of passion for real time strategies.

I love the formations and the tactics: Should I place my archers on the hill for better range or charge in with spearmen? Shall I outflank the enemy with heavy cavalry or hide my forces in the forest for a suprise attack? Do I use my siege weapons to breach the castle walls or decimate their forces from a distance first? Tactical decisions such as these keep the mind active and I love it!

Here’s some screenies I Googled to give you an idea:

It’s a short update today as i’m pretty exhausted really – too many late nights and early mornings and a severe lack of food in between. See ya around…

So work yeah..that thing that seems to occupy most of your life..sucks your days dry doesn’t it? Well, how’s work been? Oh you know, the usual…

For Easter we were set the task of decorating our desks, a sort of competition thing, so we gave it a bash. I suggested we could make papier mache eggs so that became my job. I got balloons and covered them with layers of papier mache made from newspaper, flour and water. It took ages to dry and mum and Muffin gave me a hand (I started two days before the deadline but I was still trying to get them to dry the night before!).

In the morning they were mostly dry, I didn’t pop the balloons as some of the ’shell’ was a bit weak still. The arts and crafts paint I got didn’t hide the newspaper text very well so mum found some house paint, real matte paint you use for wallpaper, in the back cupboard and dad gave me a lift to work.

Half past eight in the morning I shuffle into the office with a black bag full of papier mache eggs, a backpack full of mugs, brushes and tins of paint. It actually worked really well – the paint covered the eggs very nicely and we were able to mix the red and yellow paint to make pink aswell.

One of my colleagues hung cardboard eggs she’d made from the ceiling and most people in the team had had a bash at painting their own boiled egg – it’s sort of a tradition here that we boil hen’s eggs, paint faces or designs on them and then roll them down a hill until they break (In Catholicism it’s to represent Jesus rolling the stone away from the tomb but i’ve left all that behind). Unfortunately there weren’t enough eggs for everyone, me included, and I didn’t have any eggs at home.

Well we didn’t win – the prize (Virgin Megastores vouchers) went to a team that raffled off an Easter egg to raise money for the Bank’s charity (bloody suck-ups!) but I found out this week that the management had a new meeting to discuss it – because people weren’t very happy! – and they decided we did win afterall – yay!lol So as a prize we’re each allowed to take an hour off at some point=) My team leader gave me a special mention for all the hard work I put in, lol.

Do you want to see a picture of it?? Do you really?? Well, i’m not ready to reveal myself yet so i’ll have to disappoint you. Here’s a picture of some boiled eggs people made though:

After all the festivities, I took last week off as it was my birthday on friday (yay me) and I went down to London to spend some time with Falling.

We had a pretty busy week – I got there on monday morning, feeling pretty rough after a nine hour coach journey (the train was going to be too expensive for that time of the month!) so we didn’t do alot that day.

On tuesday we went to Chinatown which is a section of London populated by mainly Chinese people. Needless to say there’s lots of nice Chinese restaurants so we had some lunch there. Then we went to see V For Vendetta at the cinema in Leceister Square (It hosts lots of premieres there so the tickets were expensive!). I’ve seen it but this one was subtitled so Falling saw it for the first time. I think she liked it, even if ‘V’ did blow up parliament=)

On wednesday we went to London Zoo which was a bit disappointing. I know Falling has wanted to take me there for years but when we went the Gorilla enclosure was being renovated and alot of the animals were either in Hibernation or their enclosures were being renovated. It didn’t seem that big either – we walked alot but didn’t actually see much – and the penguin pool was ridiculous: No bigger than a large paddling pool with only a foot of water=( The zoo does alot of conservation work though so most of the animals in the zoo were there because they were endangered, which is about the only kind of zoo I agree with.

On thursday we took Falling’s sister Piglet to the Tate Modern – it’s a modern art gallery in the centre of London. She needed to get some ideas for her art exam at school, she’s doing her GCSE’s next month – They’re like the first qualification you get from school before doing A-Levels (known as Highers here in Scotland) and/or going onto college or university.

On friday it was my birthday – i’ve just turned 23 so only 7 more years before i’m 30 *groan* – and we went to a Pixar exhibition that i’d been yapping on about all week. I don’t think I need to explain who Pixar are;-) Again it was a bit of a disappointment (I did have a good week, honest!) as there wasn’t alot to the exhibition. Although I know how cartoons are made, and to some extent how digital 3D movies are made, I thought the exhibition would explain it to the public, showing frame by frame examples etc, but it didn’t really.

It had some frame by frame examples and some clay heads. It also showed character development – most striking was the original ideas for Monsters Inc’s ‘Sulivan’ before the final draft (good choice in the end!) – and it showed various colour schemes and character pictures, but it was only the size of 3 small rooms and could have had alot more. Falling said she’d seen some of the exhibits in other museums previously too.

It was based in the Science Museum which was good. We didn’t really look around as we were both hungry and tired, but we walked through the space and steam engine exhibits to get to the cafeteria and they were really good.

That evening we went to a restaurant called The Pumphouse which I think was an old water pumping station that’s been converted to a nice restaurant. It’s got a nice character and the food was great (we’ve been before). We went with Falling’s family, her granny, one of her aunties and Piglet’s friend. It was a fun night overall, Falling and I shared a nice bottle of rose wine and I had a nice lamb dish preceeded by a plateful of mussels.

Falling gave me a funky card with the words: “I thought this card was a good one for such a dreamer – don’t stop dreaming because there’s a world of possibility out there.” which was really sweet as all I do is dream. Without my dreams/imagination i’d be lost. Even if nothing comes of my dreams they keep me content in the meantime.

On saturday we went to a deaf event – it was like an open day for colleges and universities to show information for courses they had geared towards deaf people and for companies to exhibit products to aid deaf people. It was quite interesting, we saw a phone where Falling could call me and I could talk back but an operator would convert my words to text. At the moment Falling has a similar phone but she texts and the operator reads that directly to me (which can put you off!) but with the new system, Falling could speak (she can talk fine) and I would hear her directly and respond with the operator hiding in the background, converting my verbal responses to text. It sounds pretty good so I’m going to look into it.

In the evening we had a Chinese takeaway meal and then I got the coach home. I managed to sleep most of the way so I wasn’t so tired when I got back on sunday morning. I slept for a couple of hours at home and then put a tape in for the Celtic match (soccer) while I visited my brother. I spent most of the day round there, moving rubble from the area he’s setting out for garden decking and digging over a raised bed for some bushes he’s hoping to plant. When I got home I watched Solaris which was okay but didn’t really answer it’s own questions and then the end of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story which I’ve seen before but it’s really good. I want to research some history on Bruce Lee to see how accurate the film is. He’s more my dad’s generation’s hero as I’ve grown up with Jackie Chan and Jet Li etc but there’s no denying he was very skilled.

I found out this morning that my parents didnt leave enough credit in the electricity meter (it’s like a pay as you
go thing). They went to Ireland for a week (they just got back tonight) and took my dog Rocky with them – I missed him! So I was left with 80 pence of emergency power this morning and considering my shower took up 36 pence of that I was quite worried. I had to text dad to get the number for the card you use to buy powercards and then I had to buy four powercards at £5 each after work to get us back into credit (£15 worth to fill the emergency power). On top of that the strong wind last night ripped half the plastic guttering off the canopy thing over our front door so i tied it on with string before I left for work. It wasn’t a very good day.

I put in for more holidays at work – I can’t make it to Falling’s graduation as there’s too many people on holiday in July already, but I put in for three days around her graduation ball in June so I’ll be going to that. I might hire a kilt if I find a tartan I like – despite Falling’s protests. I can’t dance though so i’m not looking forward to it=S

I’m just chilling out tonight, I feel a bit empty to be honest, but I watched Battlestar Galactica which made me smile. I’m supposed to be typing up my Spanish notes for a guy at work. I offered to do it but i’ve not yet found the energy – there’s alot of handwritten scribbles – but i’m meant to have done it for mum and dad for long enough anyway so I’ll do it sometime this week.

It was Muffin’s birthday last week too – I got her “Un mago de terramar” which is basically “A Wizard of EarthSea” in Spanish. After hunting for hours through the Spanish version of Ebay and various .es (the Spanish suffix) web addresses I eventually found a new copy hidden in the Amazon UK marketplace (I found copies everywhere, but mostly they were the sequel and not the original). It came all the way from a seller in America and took about three weeks to arrive but it was worth it. She’s enjoying it and was pretty suprised to receive a book in Spanish. She’s currently reading Harry Potter in English (She’s on The Goblet of Fire) but I wanted her to have an easier time with this book as some of the words are made up and she’d said before that it might be tricky. I didn’t want her to lose the story in the translation as I consider it a must-read!

Well I think that’s everything – pretty long update huh? I hope your still awake. I’m not, I must still be dreaming…

I’ve been playing Starcraft on and off lately and i’ve just completed the hardest mission i’ve faced yet – this one took three attempts, not because I failed the mission, but I ran out of minerals to build with so my defeat was inevitable.

I don’t know what the mission was called but I had the Zerg on one side whom I was to protect and the Protoss on the other whom I was to defeat. It was pretty tricky seeing as there was no alliance with the Zerg, they still attacked me, I just had to avoid destroying any of their buildings. To make matters worse there were two Protoss bases to conquer and a limited supply of minerals.

My first attempt relied too heavily on bunkers so I had more structures than troops (you can’t sell structures in Starcraft like you can in Command & Conquer) and I wasn’t able to launch an assault on either base.

My second attempt didn’t go much better and it wasn’t until my third attempt that I discovered a small mineral formation at the bottom of the map. Using this I was able to build a second base and launch an assault on the northern Protoss base. I flew a handful of marines and an SCV (Space Construction Vehicle) to the westernmost tip of the Protoss base using a drop ship, just out of sight of their photon cannons. Then while my troops fought off the zealots and dragoons (zealots are incredibly tough fighters when they get up close!) I got the SCV to build first a couple of bunkers and then a barracks. Slowly but surely, using drop ship after drop ship and flying in Siege tanks, marines and firebats, I got a foothold and then proceeded to take out the photon cannons at range.

One of the most effective weapons in my arsenal, and I used it repeatedly in the previous mission, is the Nuclear Missile. It takes a long time to get it (Science Facility-Covert Ops-Nuclear Silo) but it’s worth it. The silo attaches to your Command Centre – your first and most important building – you can also have a Comsat Station (satelite imaging) but you can’t have both at once. Most Terran buildings can fly so when I’m pushed I can fly the Command Centre between the two add-ons, but in this mission I was able to build a second command centre where the old Protoss base had been. I used nukes to decimate a good part of the Protoss base then I sent in marines and siege tanks to mop up.

Had the southern Protoss base decided to launch a serious attack at this point I wouldn’t have been able to keep a hold of my position and I wasn’t bringing in so many minerals again so I had to act fast.

I managed to drop ship some Firebats and an SCV into a corner of the southern base and again, by slowly building more bunkers I was able to establish a secure base of operations. Then, after building a second Nuclear silo and a handful of Ghosts (specialist cloakable units that guide in the nuke) I was able to take out the most important buildings before sending in the rest of my marines and siege tanks to finish the job.

One thing I did not expect was the sudden rush of Zerg units at this point – they overpowered the minimal defences in my original base (I had shifted almost every available unit to help fight the Protoss) and started laying waste to my buildings. Thankfully this turned out to be a set-piece as part of the ongoing plot but I had to move my ‘hero’ unit Kerrigan away from danger as it’s a prerequisite that she must survive. It would have been nice to try to take on the Zerg though.

Turns out the religious nut, Arcturus, that I’m fighting with is mad afterall and decided to leave Kerrigan to face the Zerg alone so my friend Raynor and I have branched off on our own to launch a rescue attempt. This is all part of the plot by the way – we can’t have violence for no reason can we? – it actually reminds me alot of Dawn of War though whether Dawn of War got inspiration from StarCraft or vice versa (Warhammer table-top games) is hard to tell. Alot of the units have big similarities anyway.

Anyway, i’m feeling pretty stiff – strategy games have a habit of inflicting these aches and pains as it’s impossible to predict how long a game will really take. Time for a coffee break anyway and I’ll post tomorrow with an update of what i’ve been doing when i’ve not been playing StarCraft.

P.S. I don’t have any from that battle, but here are some screenies from a previous fight: