I’ve stuck up a couple of pics I took at the blogmeet using the crappy camera on my phone.

Pic 1 – Lori and Sarah.
Pic 2 – Lori and Sarah again.
Pic 3 – Moose porn.
Pic 4 – Lyle – by popular demand 🙂

I’ve (probably) got some better ones on my other camera, but I’ve not had the film developed yet (it’s a B&W film, so developing is going to take a while anyway :-/)

Call it childish, but I couldn’t help sniggering at this film review.

It’s Sunday. I’m in the office. I’m freezing my nuts off. We have to have a beta ready by next friday, and the final thing done by middle of November (no, it’s not Starship Troopers, it’s another game we’re working on alongside). This isn’t going to be a fun couple of weeks.

I’ve just bought myself a new toy. A HiFly Matrix windsurf board with a 6.0m Gaastra Matrix freeride sail, 30% carbon mast, boom, and harness. Woo and, indeed, yay.

I now await the phonecall from my bank manager asking me what the hell is going on 🙂

Lyle is a big softie, really. And his singing moose is hysterical. If you’ve had enough Guiness.

Sarah is thoroughly lovely, and has excellent taste in films. Ladies of Newcastle: You don’t know what you’re missing.

Lori is actually a man called Brian.

Topper still doesn’t have a blog.

I’ll write some more in the morning.

One of the above factettes may not actually be true.

Quite a lot, it seems. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Fab Cafe. 8pm. I’ll be there. I’ll have a moose. And I’ll look something like this. Maybe.

Other attendees should hopefully include Lori, Lyle and some other exciting people. Come along, bring a moose. There’ll be beer. And mooses.

Or Moosen.

Hmm. Meese?

Moosi?

Whatever.

Exactly as expected, The Darkness put on one hell of a show, complete with outrageous costumery, unnecessary guitar solos, the campest dancing this side of a Freddie Mercury impersonator contest and a moody bass player with a moustache. It’s Spinal Tap come alive. It’s what Wyld Stallyns wished they could have been. Somebody get these guys in a stadium, with pyros and inflatable effigies and video screens, right now, damnit.

Shame the support were a bit of a let down. The first band, The Webb Brothers, had shamelessly stolen their image from AC/DC, appearing, as they did, onstage in school uniform. That was as far as it went, though, because stylistically they veered from Beach Boy’s-esque harmony-led surf rock through Verve-style indie right out the other side to, er, early Pink Floyd. They weren’t bad, as such. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to see them again.

The next band, 3 Inches Of Blood, were, well, a bit unexpected. They were Canadian. They were an 80s-style thrash metal outfit. They had song titles like “Premonition of Pain” and “Curse of the Lighthouse Keeper”. Whenever they spoke onstage, they used a growly, “spooky” voice, and said things like the creepy old man out of Scooby Doo would say. And they had the most astonishingly gay looking drummer you have ever seen. I still can’t decide if they were taking the piss or not. They didn’t go down especially well.

But anyway, we were there for The Darkness, and they were ace. Their cover of Fade Out (Street Spirit) deserves some kind of award for “Most Unexpected Display of Rocktastic Genius” or something.

Glass doesn’t flow.

The story about the midget mincer on Custard’s site is, yes, (1) about me and (2) at least partially true.

Ooh, nearly forgot to mention. Custard asked me to be his best man at the weekend. This is good, because it means I get to arrange a day of extreme paintballing and much ale. It is bad, though, because I will have to wear a suit and attempt to prevent him from running away gibbering when the full enormity of the situation hits him on the morning of his wedding. I also get to partake in a ceremony in which one of my best mates – the man who introduced me to the joys of real ale, the man who is consequently responsible for my rather unsightly beer gut, the man who joined with me in creating this tribute to the many delights of the female of the species, amongst many other things – loses his freedom and becomes shackled to a woman for the remainder of his earthly days. And, y’know, it’s kind of hard to do that do a friend 🙂

Also, much as I’m sure he must have done something cringingly embarassing I can talk about in the speech, I can’t actually think of anything. Except for the thing with the lesbians. Or the other thing with the lesbians.

(disclaimer: it may be the case that neither of the embarassing things with the lesbians actually involved actual real live lesbians at all. Also, that girls are evil website hasn’t been updated in, ooh, years, because frankly we’re lazy and have both got ourselves women since we created it)