Bruce the Moose

A short story I wrote back in 2003 and was published in a collaboration of local young writers called Solid Ink.


Bruce the Moose.
Bruce the Moose was a Moose. A Moose with a dream. He kept it in a closet with his skeletons for company. It was a happy and playful little dream that liked playing fetch and eating custard. A lot of custard. It was quite expensive to keep actually.
So Bruce the Moose packed his suitcase full of antler warmers and custard and took his dream to market.
They walked together down the old road. Bruce the Moose walked awkwardly, as if he had five knees, which he may have had but didn't really know because he couldn't count that high. Occasionally he fell over but his dream helped to uplift him along the way.
They sang together as they walked along, It was a beautiful song, which was surprising since they were both singing completely different songs.
When they reached the market they found that it was quite crowded. Bruce the Moose's wide antlers kept getting in the way as they waded through the crowd, so he folded them up and carried them under his arm.
Along came Jimbo the Dog. "Hello Bruce the Moose," said Jimbo the Dog, "would you like to buy some fleas today? I have pedigree fleas as well as mixed breeds at a lower price."
Bruce the Moose shook his head politely. Of course, moose can't talk.
He walked up to the auctioning stage and waited for his turn, The was a skunk named Francois the Skunk selling second hand rubber chickens, then a cow named Isabel the Cow unsuccessfully trying to take applications for the local hamburger restaurant, and finally there was Paula the Rubber Chicken, giving a speech about the oppression of her kind.
Now was Bruce the Moose's turn. He stepped up on to the stage, and fell over. Again his dream helped him up to face the crowd. He looked at their expectant faces and took out his message board, which he had prepared earlier, and raised it above his head.
It read" "Ladies and Gentlemen, I have a dream. Bids start at twenty dollars with a five dollar increment." He gazed around the crowd as they took this in.
Paula the Rubber Chicken was the first to raise her rubber wing. Bruce the Moose nodded at her and pointed using one of his antlers in his hoof. Other animals raised arms, wings, legs and tentacles. The auction became quite heated. Eventually Francois the Skunk managed to outbid everybody using the money he had made selling all of his second hand rubber chickens to Paula the Rubber Chicken.
Bruce the Moose collected the money from Francois the Skunk and handed over his dream, along with its' leash, bowl and favourite fetching stick. He said goodbye and stumbled home, stopping at the supermarket along the way to buy three tons of custard with the money he had just made.
The moral of this story is Follow Your Dreams, and You Shall Receive Custard.

The man and his chair

The man was born in a small town in the country.
The chair was born in a factory in the city.
The man's parents were a doctor and a school teacher.
The chair never knew it's parents.
The man spent his younger years traveling and studying, learning from the world around him.
The chair spent it's life in front of the television.
The man philosophized on these very facts. The contrast between his life and that of his chair's.
The chair gave it no thought at all.
And despite the great many differences, the man loved his chair.
The chair, however, despised the man.

The Jeffrey's Strange Day,

Once upon a time there was a Jeffrey

He was a perfectly ordinary Jeffrey, as much an unremarkable Jeffrey as any could hope to be. He wore plaid jackets, at least three on any given day, and he kept his Giraffe brushed, morning, noon and night.

On this day, however, something very unusual happened to the Jeffrey.

It was when his potato was singing the blues, about 6pm of course, and the news was on in the background. The newsreader was setting the stage on fire to signal the end of the evening's stories. But something was strange here. The Jeffrey felt uneasy. He looked outside at the ducks on the pond, they looked back at him suspiciously and drew their curtains. Distant thunder could be heard on the radio, part of the regular Distant Thunder Tuesdays show. The Llamas frolicked on the lawn.
“Get off my lawn” The Jeffrey whispered into an envelope and pushed it out the mail slot in his front door. The Llamas came over to the porch, opened the envelope and then left quietly to return to their home across the street. They were good Llamas.

So the Jeffrey scratched his chin and wondered what it could be that had him feeling so strange. He turned to the day's crossword for answers. 4 down: a 5 letter word for the difference between a cheeseburger and a cold winter's day in which the anniversary of a happy memory fills you with warmth. The Jeffrey smiled and wrote down the answer.

This helped a lot. He forgot about the uneasy feeling.

He ran the bath and put all the pot plants in along with the potato, which had by now cheered up and was safe to leave with the plants. The giraffe stared at him blankly, as if questioning how he could carry on like everything was normal.

But Jeffrey carried on, scrubbing the plants lovingly and giving the potato some good advice for the future. He let the water out, dried off the plants and put them back in their puts. The Jeffrey carried the potato back into the living room when the uneasy feeling struck him again. He glanced up at the giraffe, which stared back at him silently. “I understand” said the Jeffrey. He didn't, but he wanted to reassure his friend. The Giraffe stared at him for a further 32 seconds before curling up in its' nest beside the television.

The Jeffrey stared around the room. Photos hung on the walls of himself and the Giraffe from their younger days at University. On a shelf a bowl of tulips, wilted and and lifeless sat in the same position as it had for the last 5 years. The television still showed the newsreader, now surrounded by flames, singing and dancing. Thunder continued in the distance through the speakers of the radio and the smell of roast pork filled the room.

The Jeffrey had forgotten the cooking, he rushed in to the kitchen and took the pork from the oven. It was in excellent condition, he breathe a sigh of relief. Carefully he took the steaming hot freshly made meal and tucked it into bed for later. He turned the light off and crept quietly out, pausing when he remembered to go back and give it it's little pig-teddy bear.

The Jeffrey turned the radio on in the bedroom for ambient noise, Distant thunder echoed once more and he realised the terrible thing. It was Monday, not Tuesday!

The Jeffrey quickly picked up the phone and called the radio station. In seconds the radio switch over to the sounds of elephants trumpeting over the top of a young girl singing the alphabet while unable to actually remember all the letters in the right order, and occasionally adding in random dates and times in place of letters, just as it should be for a regular Monday like this one.

Jeffrey sighed and laid down beside the roast pork. “What a disaster that could have been... how very strange.” he sighed. The potato rolled it's eyes as it walked past, toothbrush in hand.

Board Game Miniatures - Doctor Who Time of the Daleks

Time of the Daleks, by Gale Force 9, is a great game, in my opinion the only actually good Doctor Who game out there. A perfect example of theme & mechanics molded together, rather than the mechanics beaten into the theme as with many other rushed licensed games.

So I love this game. And I love Doctor Who in general. So it was a great pleasure to paint the pieces in this game.

Time of the Daleks

The game consists of 16 pieces:
4 Doctors (First, Fourth, Eleventh & Twelfth)
4 TARDIS's
1 K-9
5 Daleks
1 Davros
1 Dalek Mother Ship

The Doctors:
Certainly the hardest, or most pain-staking to paint - humanoids with faces particularly are always tricky. But I've very pleased with how they came out - and to be fair the faces on the models were not the best they could have been (see Fourth and First in particular, rather flat faces)

The First Doctor I decided to go with monochrome - partly because sourcing images of him in colour is difficult, but also it sparked the idea of having a monochrome set for the 60's era of the show.
The Fourth was an experiment of shades to get the colour of the coat right, and then the scarf... I was pointed to a website that detailed the exact colours and number of stitches used in the originals (there were a few different editions of the famous scarf) but I took from that the colours and randomly filled it in myself - there's accuracy and then there's a headache. I'm pleased with the outcome.
Eleven, similarly, was a tricky one to get to colouring right on the jacket. But her came together pretty easily, and Twelve finally was a few fairly simple base colours.

The Fourth Doctor

First and Eleventh Doctors

Twelve and K-9

K-9 was an exclusive piece that comes with the first edition of the game.

The TARDIS's
The TARDIS's came in a fairly good TARD?IS blue to start with, but still I repainted, shaded, added black and white to the windows and signage, as well as including a 60's TARDIS.

TARDIS's vs Daleks

And yes, it is TARDIS's. Not Tardi. It's an acronym, Latin word structure doesn't apply.


The Daleks.
I quickly solved the dilemma of what colour scheme for the Daleks with the idea of doing "Daleks of the world" and painting with different colours from across the history of the series - bronze, green, red, white & blue and finally and all monochrome 60's edition.
I looked up different Daleks to get the exact colouring right and realised how many subtle variations in the actual travel machines structure existed. So mostly the parts were just a compromise of what worked best with the models I had, which didn't really fit any one TV Daleks exactly as it was.

Daleks of the world

Davros
My favourite character in Doctor Who - painting the travel machine and his grizzled face worked really well.

First Doctor and Davros - a combo I would love to see!

Finally the Mothership I did with the 60's colour scheme as well (I checked - Dalek saucers were in the original Dalek Invasion of Earth)

The 60's collection.

Avengers Infinity War (with spoilers)

Spoilers
Thanos demands my silence no more.
As a Marvel Fan (capitalised to show fanatic intensity) it's not really possible to say anything other than I LOVED this movie.
This truly was the culmination of every success of the MCU over 10 years.
The timing of action, comedy and sadness was perfect, the was never a time where I felt it was taking too long, nor any moment where a scene switched to another and I wasn't just as enthralled to see how the other characters were progressing.
Every hero had at least one significant action scene and many of them had some fantastic quips that were spread throughout without being forced .

I'd compare this film to Civil War, which I enjoyed a lot, but had the issue of putting so many characters together for the first time, had one major battle scene (the airport) and other scenes interspersed between some slightly slower moments. It was a decent story with a different antagonist style to most other superhero movies, and the airport battle made everything worthwhile if that was the whole movie.
But that's why I'm so impressed with Infinity War, they took the scale of characters and more than doubled that and made it work seamlessly.

The villains were shown well enough as well. Thanos clearly as a well fleshed out character, we get to know him and understand his motivation, as well as seeing such emotion in the journey that he has taken to fulfill his plans.
The rest of the Black Order were a little forgettable perhaps, in that I think apart from Maw I'm not sure they were even named on screen. But they were there throughout until their end and each showed as a formidable adversary.
I particularly enjoyed Ebony Maw's zealous verbosity. Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive did somewhat blend in to being the same character in a way that they were just spear welding warriors, and Cull Obsidian came across as a super grunt... But in the end the were just the extension of Thanos doing his bidding, so character wasn't really a focus there.

It was hard seeing that ending, I wasn't too surprised knowing that Avengers 4 was coming relatively soon afterwards and knowing the potential of Thanos that there would be a hard end but it was still a shock to see so many characters lost, leaving us completely at a loss for where the characters go from here.

I'll write some more specifics about some of the characters and theories in future posts.
Seen it twice now, still too much to process...

Pandemic Legacy - the finale.

What an amazing game this was.
When I first started I wasn't certain I could go through with it (see previous post) but in the end this truly was like playing a hardcore mode board game. Definitely an experience to be had.

So after 19 games we scored 535 points (out of a possible 1000) which is apparently enough to say "the world will recover" in other words - good job, you held it together but only by a few threads.

But as a friend said, it's not about the points - Pandemic itself you lose more often than you win, but the enjoyment always comes from those crucial decisions.

Most memorable was the game where Greg would not conceit defeat on the final turn and we literally sat for half an hour, the rest of us had given up but Greg managed to find a convoluted way to save the day in the final moment... there was much relief.

The game presented some horror moments for the completionist in me, where I realised that there were certain awards given for winning every month, and certain awards for losing x number of games... you could not open everything!

So it was of great relief to open those unopenable things at the end when it was all over and learn they were mostly only shortcuts if you were falling behind that badly. And there was no fabled secret compartment in the bottom of the box (there is a pretty picture on the bottom of the tray though)

So the recap:
Our CODA was blue, and it hurt us bad. Except Paris. Paris was nice. All the way through - no panicking at all. It didn't take long for all of Europe to be swallowed by the spread of CODA once it was in it's full strength. We tried road blocking the troublesome locations but it was never enough - it always slipped out that corner "we're fine as long as that one doesn't outbrea - oh."
And in the end we had so many roadblocks that would come back and bite us hard in the final months!
North America received CODA before we could block it properly there as well and we had realised then that the roadblocks were out of hand. We got the Soldier and the Colonel and killing them was the better option.. until we searched and found the Paranoid Soldier. I wonder if that moment was as painful for everyone else as it was for us as he raised his finger and points to the player character that was active in finding him and declares that person the traitor... for us it was the Soldier. One less way of dealing with CODA. So many times after that "we could do this with the soldier" Stupid soldier.

It was only in the final two months that CODA seriously got into Asia, and when it did it was in a big way. By the end there were only two cities that were still actual red, hadn't been infected with CODA at all.

We began Immunizing too late - it was attempted when we gained the Immunologist but it always seemed like there were more important things to do - and then the November game we just won quite quickly. So come December and the sudden change in objectives... we managed to immunize probably more than we'd expected, but there was no hope in dealing with Europe at all. Our only way in and out of there was via the millitary shuttle flights, and then that meant spending extra actions to immunize because there was a military base there!

One final special moment - on the final game, Asia was getting out of control - red cubes everywhere, then we were actually saved by the Faded as they came in and took over the areas, then they build up... one outbreak on any of three different cities would have meant a chain that ended us immediately - until the Nuke card came out. It was an immediate and unanimous decision. We nuked Jakarta - which had only become unstable. We nuked it flat and save the rest of the world because of it... then we went in and immunized it. Because we care.

So the board at the end looks like this - we saved most of the world outside of Europe. Europe is a festering heap of sickness and crazed monstrous zombies.
Except for Paris.
Paris is still nice.

Pandemic Legacy: Session 2

In our second session of Pandemic Legacy we replayed January and went on to February.

We let the Scientist stay home this time, since she had developed PTSD apparently triggered by all of North America, and instead brought in the Researcher, Lucy Carlton, who proved to be a great asset to the team.

This game was incredibly short and simple - with extra government funding and researching powers we cured the three curable diseases, eradicating yellow (thanks to the no-research-station-necessary upgrade) and eradicating red as well.

In the end we upgraded Snotty to it's second upgrade - we now do not even need to spend an action to cure, if a player just gathers five yellow cards it's instantly cured!

We also upgraded red to the no-research-station-necessary status.

The was one casualty though - A CROOKED STICKER!

All upgraded and looking good.

So. Feeling good about the world we moved on to February. And it appears Snapper Rocks Pox (blue) just got worse - now it's beyond incurable but is now untreatable! No treat action will affect blue at all.

But on the plus side we are introduced to the Quarantiner - who's name is Tina Quaran (obviously). and quarantining abilities. Yay, now we can control the blue problems and cure the rest of the world.
Except first round we had a dilemma - get the medic to Europe to place a quarantine token on blue and control the area before it breaks out early, or Africa to fight the threat there.
We chose to control blue, and of course Africa broke out straight away. A few turns later South America was breaking out in multiple places and in next to no time we lost by number of outbreaks.
Not a single thing was cured that day.

 Rioting has been spreading. Still nothing worse than level 2 (only just) but it seems to be a common thing along the Atlantic.

The team returns home, slightly embarrassed, but determined with new tactics for February part 2.

Score so far:
Jan LOSS

Jan WIN

Feb LOSS

But in the end the main thing is, though some stickers were stuck this time, no cards were harmed in this session. A box was opened and some new cards and tokens added. And we got to scratch the scratchable thing. It was terrifying knowing there could have been a feature that we never knew about.

Oh and relationships! Our quarantiner and researcher have suddenly realised they're related. They now gain an extra action when they start in the same location. This seemed to be more work to attempt than anything, and a new rule to remember. But still something more good than bad.

Onwards to second attempt at February - and yet another risk of losing out on the scratchable :-/