It's almost the end of the year & for some almost the end to the opening decade to the 21st century, but they're wrong as the next decade doesn't start until 2011. This past week has been both lively & uneventful. I managed to play through the Prince of Persia on the 360, while I may have found it difficult to finish previous installments in the series (a sequence where I had to participoate in a gruelling chariot race before defeating a boss character before I could reach a save point was as far as I got in Two Thrones) but it is virtually impossible to die in this game as each time I leap of a wall, plunging to almost certain death, Elika reaches out & saves me! At the moment I have four stages to complete before I can defeat the Hunter & the Concubine & get around to completing the game, although I did go to the skin manager & switch over to the two 'Sands of Time' skins before I started playing

I made some mince pies & a Blancmange I'd found on the back of a packet of rice flour & having learned that putting a cake in the refigerator after it had been iced wasn't a good idea as the icing managed to melt off, so I had move it to a cupboard so it didn't all melt off.

On the 25th, I woke to find multiple objects thrust at me, each of them wrapped in bizarre paper. I steamed a pudding for two hours so it would drop out of the bowl when I inverted it! After heating up some snacks in the oven & some boiled Quail Eggs, I sat down to watch a few episodes of the Mysterious Cities of Gold & while it had a similar 80's dubbing to Ulysses 31, I had completely forgotten the faux history lessons that were included at the end of each episode. There was only enough time to watch a few episodes as there were a few DVD Box sets that other people wanted to watch, Bones, Seaquest DSV & Medium. As the day progressed there was a problem with the DVD player as it appeared to have eaten a DVD rather than play it, I was in another room at the time playing Dominoes, but rather than disconnect the DVD player from the mains & carefully remove the cover, the people in the other room decided to shake the DVD player & pry the DVD out with a screwdriver... One that could have been used to remove the cover & retrieve the DVD in half the time!

And for some reason I had this tune playing in my head:


The dominoes came from a Cracker, that along with numerous bad jokes & paper crowns, I found a wire Eggcup, although I found it somewhat cumbersome for my Quail Eggs!

I also tried out some of the modelling paints that I'd found lying around my house. I  had given my brother a model robot that was cast in a radioactive puke shade of green, but after a few applications of paint I was able to give it a more subdued beige coloursheme. I also took the opportunity to try out a technique I'd read somewhere. To achieve a somewhat realistic metalic sheen, you start by applying a black undercoat to the area you wish to paint. Once this has dried you then apply the metalic paint using a dry brush, the idea is to not use too much paint as to completely cover the black & the dry bristles will spread the paint in an uneven manner & the end rsult will be aesthetically pleasing!  

My brother was so impressed by the results that he dragged me all the way to Games Workshop in Maidenhead to buy some paints. The main problem being that he'd neglected to inform me what he wanted the paints for & as I attempted to explian to the salesperson waht sort of colours I needed, my brother then mentioned Red Vs Blue, which I took to mean that he wanted to paint up a collection of Halo 3 characters as the cast of Red Vs Blue. I then had to explain this to the salesperson, who fortunately already knew about Red Vs Blue & was able to pick out some colours for most of the cast.

Having no idea where to start, I opened the red paint & started to apply the first coat. There are two characters in Red Vs Blue that wear Red Armour, Sarge, who wears the Default colour of the Red Team & Simmons who has a slightly darker shade of red. Partway through covering the figure, I decided to go with Simmons, so after allowing the first coat to dry, i went over it with a darker shade of red, applied black paint to some areas that had been covered when I applied the red coat, then went to bed, safe in the knowledge that I had painted Simmons.

However, the following day, I decided to check up on the colours I needed for the rest of the cast & discovered that Simmons actually has a darker shade of red than I'd painted on the figure & that I'd actually ended up painting Sarge instead!!

This was something of a dissapointment as I'd decided to paint the characters in the order of their appearance in RvB. Starting with Simmons & Grif, then Church & Tucker followed by Sarge, Lopez, Caboose, Doughnut, Tex, Sister etc. But the ojnly real problem is the fact that while the cast of characters isn't really that large, it's still somnething of a challenge painting them all when he hasn't acquired enough figures to make up the whole cast.


As 2008 draws to a close, I've learned that due to the Earth slowing down, a whole extra second will be added to this year, just to draw it out a bit longer. I've no idea what 2009 will hold in store for me, but without a Bristol International Comic Expo (because all tables were booked before I even knew they were even available) I have no idea when I'll get around to finishing Stir Fried Product #4.