The Non-Adventures of Geek Dad

Afternoon all,

So normally on a Thursday I'd cover how things are going trying to balance work, study, hobbies and raising my child.

As you know, last week I was sick with the flu, so no adventures then.

Today has been even worse: allow me to explain...

For the past year I've been battling on and off with gallstones. For those who don't know, these are mineral and bile deposits built up in the gall bladder. Sometimes these stones get lodged in the bile duct, and when this happens it is excruciating agony. If you have never had them, it's impossible to describe, I understand that even liver and kidney stone pain is supposed to pale in comparison.

This is the reason why this morning at roughly 0300 I was in an ambulance making my way to The Lister Hospital in Stevenage while being given a combination of Morphine and Gas&Air (and as an FYI, that combo is often the same thing given to women during child birth, that's how serious the pain is)



Anyway, it's now 13:45, I've been discharged and sent home and am now in the bath trying to get the smell of A&E off me.

This is the reason my friends why today there are no adventures, this is also the reason why I can't wait until 1st May, as that's when I'm having my gall bladder cut out, and personally, I can't wait to say good bye to the little bugger :D

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley

And The [Geek] Shall Inherit the Earth

Good Wednesday all,

So earlier this morning I was reading a response article to a Forbes article about Fake Geek Girls, and how apparently women pretending to be interested in geeky things is destroying our lives (or something to that effect).

This got me thinking, what actually is it to be a geek? And who are we to determine that someone either is, or is not, a geek?

I'd like to take you back to October 2010, Blizzcon, Chris Metzen one of the creators of Warcraft did a speech titled "Geek is:"
You Tube Link

As part of this he described the word Geek as:
"This word is power. This word is identity."

I would say that it's safe to assume this word has become to those of us who call ourselves 'Geeks' what the N word is to African Americans: It's our word now! We've reclaimed it from outsiders who used it in a derogatory manner in the past. "never again", so to speak.

But for me this is not enough, it has been said that words have power, and it is my experience that the same is true for Geek, but I am concerned by the motivation and almost ignorance behind this, to some it's simple a label, with little to no meaning, but to others it's a semi exclusive club where only with the secret decoder rings can you access the inner sanctum.

Let's start by looking at the history of the word:

Now the furthest back I can trace this word is to the 1900s (and I would be very interested if anyone can find an older use) to the travelling American Freak shows.

You can see the legacies of these today with performers often referred to as 'block heads'.

These performers have genuine talent and can move a crowd in a unique way, but back in the day it was not so.

Instead of housing Block Heads, the circus would normally have a young adult, virtually always mentally challenged, they would be dressed in rags and would be pulled around the stage by a chain.

This side show attraction was called The Geek.

The purpose of this character was to do nearly anything that the ring master demanded, more often than not this was to eat anything that the crowd would throw at him.

Because of the popularity of side shows and the Geek character, crowds would often bring things from home just to throw at the Geek and see him eat it, this would even involve broken glass and human shit.

In short the role of The Geek was to 'ingest and partake' in that which your 'normal' person would not.

Fast forward to the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Popular culture and 'traditional values' dictated that many things the modern geek enjoyed we're abnormal, after all, a normal adolescent boy spends his days playing football, not busing computers and role playing as dragon slayers!

From here it's not hard to see how the insult of Geek would have been thrown around, the irony of course is that now the word is synonymous with 'loser' rather than 'shit eater'.

But is it the correct term to use in today's society?

I asked myself, do I consider myself a Geek? The answer was clearly YES!

I then asked myself, am I proud to call myself a geek? The answer to that however was NO! Not because of embarrassment or shame, but to me being a Geek is just part of me, like the colour of my skin. It's like asking if I'm proud to be white, or male. To me that seems like a silly question.

Instead I look inside the umbrella that is the term Geek, what's inside?

To me there's many different titles, Video Gamer, War Gamer, Aliens obsessive, artist, writer, dreamer, imaginer and collector!

All of these I am proud of, each end every part of these I have poored blood sweat and tears into and I will fight for that.

I suppose you could argue that all of those elements fall under the title of Geek and so it just makes things easier, but to me that would be like lining up an Olympic swimmer, a bodybuilder and a footballer and saying "your all athletes, therefore I'll treat you all the same".

I'm sorry, but that's just wrong. Show me a Predator fan, or an AvP (comic and video game) fan, and I'll fight by their side through thick and thin, but present me with a Star Wars fan, or someone who thinks the best Alien film is AvP or AvP2, and I'll punch them in their crap lousy face :D



- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley

Update on my works

Morning all,

So this weekend could have gone a little better.

I may be back at work, but in no respect am I counted as 'well'.

This translated to the weekend.

However I did manage to get some painting done for some terrain I bought from HobbyCraft:



As you can see from the above picture, I picked up a number of walls for my town, the scale is annoying, it's almost perfect, apart from a lack of a base.

These walls and gates for example, I wanted them to be in line with a human's pectorals.

If you remove a model from its base and place it up against the walls/gates, then that is exactly how high they are, however when mounted on bases, the models appear two big.

One way around this would be to base the walls, this will raise up the height and put it in line with the models.
- the problem there however is that these walls are designed to be slotted together, allowing for near infinite combinations and shapes.

I'm looking to have a game with the board either this weekend or the weekend after, I guess I'll just see how it goes.

Another purchase I made was for modelling plaster (I suppose that's what you would call it).
Essentially it's a plaster like what you would spread on a ceiling to make it textured.

My intent is to buy some 3x3 wood, cover the top with this stuff, before it drys add some sand/basalt/kitty litter and then spray paint/dry brush the whole thing a suitable desert colour.

The first problem I have here is deciding on what wood to use, any thoughts?

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley

What a difference 3 days make: 72 little hours!

Hi all,

So as you know I haven't been too well recently. Turns out what I thought was just a cold bloomed into full flu which I then passed onto my wife, but thankfully not yet to the kid.

But today is my first day back at work, and so id like to try and write something to keep everyone up to date with things

So today I would like to try and cover a couple of things:

1: thoughts on the WoW: MoP beta info currently released.

2: a few things I've noticed recently about the apparent narcissistic tendencies of your blogger.

3: thoughts and implications on the Dreamer errata and Bury changes.

1). MoP!

For those of you who don't know, this is relating to World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.

So yesterday the beta went live, and as I expected (but hoped would not be the case) I didn't get into the initial wave of invites, so I did the next best thing:

I read MMO Champion

What I saw was very interesting, very little about the new continent itself, but NPC models of the creatures found there, and I must say, I am impressed!

Take the cloud dragon, this creature puts out puffs of air from its nostrils, each puff looking like it belongs in a far east painting!


Then I saw the female Pandaran, available in 2 flavours: Black and White or Red and White. The latter is complete with a raccoon style tail.

Now this looks fine, just one little problem, the red and white - with tail option, this is to make it look like a Red Panda, however despite sharing the same name, a Red Panda is actually a closer relative to the raccoon family than the panda. It's like Koalas, some may call them Koala Bears, but that doesn't mean they have anything genetically in common with a grizzly!

Next up is the new glyphs. These look fun! Warriors who go on fire when they enrage! (I have a warrior, and this visual cue would be very helpful) Druids who can be ridden, Warlocks who can give their dread steeds trails of fire, this is all great stuff!

Then I read the rogue's and saw a few stat adjustment glyphs. As my main is a pve rogue, this was very disappointing.

2). I'm actually going to skip this bit for now and come back here later. Instead let's jump to:

3). Dreamer and Bury errata!
Dreamer Errata
Bury Errata

So let me summarise the two for you!

Pre rules change, in Malifaux, Day Dreams and The Dreamer could pull through Chompy because of The Dreamer's unbury spell. Now this has been changed so it no longer works with Chompy, instead you can only unbury Chompy with the (0) cost placement. This causes you to sacrifice mobility and also makes it a lot harder/near impossible to pull off the Chompy Slingshot which the master was famous for.

Reading the Internet this had the community by the throat, people thanking god because now the master will be beatable and others claiming that Chompy is too weak now 'post nerf'.

As someone who's only recently gotten into The Dreamer, I like this change. The first time I ever played him, I played him the exact way that this rule change will force players to use, and believe it or not he was still fun and he still packed one hell of a punch!

Next up is the bury rules.

Essentially it says that anything with a buff on it, loses that buff when it gets buried. - there's a lot more to it than that, but this is one of the most important aspects.

Again, I'm lucky. So far I have played 4 games (hardly any I know) with The Dreamer, and I have yet to bury anything other than The Dreamer or Chompy, now this is actually an example of poor tactics from me, but it means that I don't need to learn anything new other than "what I never used before, I can't use now".

Personally I can't see that being a problem.

And now for 2!

2). The Narcissistic Tendencies of the average blogger.

Ok, now I know that I count as a blogger, this is a blog and so to one extent this does apply to me too, and at the same time, please take what I say with a pinch of salt, these are just my thoughts and observations, and after starting far too many unintentional desktop revolutions I know how moving/motivational the written word can be.

So here it is...

WTF is up with some Internet writers and their delusions of grandeur?

I mean seriously? It seems the minute people have viewers (read: followers/hits/diggs etc) they turn into the biggest ass wholes on the planet?

There's this one guy who's articles are on a gaming website I regularly read (I'll say this now, no names or sites will be listed here, consider this a nameless rant at the state of the Internet - yes I am aware of the irony/hypocrisy i am posting here).

Anyway, there's one website about video gaming that I read every day, and it has this one guy who posts at least one article a day. I don't know if he gets paid for it and I seriously hope he doesn't.

These articles are his random thoughts about other news that other websites and companies have published, essentially he's a blogger.

That's fine, I have no problem with that by itself.

No the problem is the content.

This man writes about his thoughts and feelings like they are fact.

A fact is that when a non-colour blind person looks at a clear sky at mid day in the UK they will see a blue sky. That us fact at the time I write this.

If said person thinks the blue sky in question is too blue, the existence of this thought, that would also be a fact that the thought existed while the person thought it.

However to say "the sky is too blue" is not stating fact. It's opinion, and opinion is not fact, neither is it news.

And so it angers me so much to see someone almost daily spout personal opinion as if it was fact: This game sucks because of X, This is amazing because of X.

No! Enough!

Another example, I was reading today a blog about WoW and someone 'outing' someone else who at some point snubbed them over something.

Essentially saying "you diss agree with me and the 5k followers I have over your 200 proves I'm right and your wrong".

Seriously?!? Please, if I ever become well known for my writing and I start acting like this, please please please, wrap a bag around my head and hold it tight until I stop wriggling.

Where do these people get off?

What event in their life made them think that people SHOULD listen to what they say?

I know this is where my own hypocrisy comes in, or would apparently do so, but I promise you, anyone reading this, I don't think you should.

Quite the opposite, I think my writing is quite poor, often uneducated and opinionated and about subject matters that even fellow gamers have no interest in but for reasons I can't explain ive got some regular readers and to these people I am very grateful.

You see, you people, the ones who've sat through my waffle before and doing so now, you give me the strength to keep writing, but would I do it even of no one read?

Of course I would! Why? Not because I think my message must be heard or anything like that, but because it's generally a good way of passing time during my morning/evening commute.

These people, these bloggers arn't like that.

I would hope that when I write an article I encourage people to post their own thoughts. This is for a few reasons:

1). To promote discussion about something I personally am interested in

2). Because I know I'm not always right, any someone reading this might be right and can put me so.

But these people don't want discussion, they want to be told how right they are, and anyone who disagrees with them is either stupid, immature or plain wrong.

And so I'd like to finish this very long post with a quick sentiment.

Thank you

Thank you for reading my own Narcissistic BS, for leaving your comments, for never hesitating in calling me out when I'm either unfair or wrong, and also for having your own blogs which I read whenever there's an update and is not like the arse holes I've described here.

*edit* as an added thank you for getting this far, I give you the big reveal, that's right, Dr Loxley is pulling back the curtain and showing everyone what the wizard really looks like:


- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley

Too sick to blog

Morning all,

I'm afraid to say that I spent all weekend being very ill, and sadly it's still with me today.

For this reason you won't find any new blogs from me until I'm feeling better, otherwise you're likely to just have a dribble for a post.

Hope your all feeling better than I am.

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley

The Adventures of Geek Dad: Part Six

Good evening all,

A bit of a change to today's Geek Dad as I've had the day off from work as annual leave. As such rather than writing this on the train during my morning commute, instead it's from the comfort of my bath at 2100!



Anyway! This week has been pretty interesting. For starters earlier today I found out that Diablo 3 finally has a release date (15th May), I also discovered that Aliens: Colonial Marines is due out on 30th March (in the UK), and to top it off my wife bought us our tickets to Salute2012!

But perhaps more important than all of these, we think we have come to the bottom of our daughter's crotchety behaviour! That's right, it all came to a head on Saturday when my wife was having her bath and the Mini Moo refused to stop crying with me, we didn't know what to do, she had been fed, she had been changed, but she wouldn't stop crying.

It was then my wife found out about something interesting: it turned out that at this age the baby's development is focused around hand manipulation and the thought processes around this. As such they require more sleep than normal, but as an added irony, their brains are almost stopping them from sleeping.

So come Sunday, we went into town, picked up a baby monitor and started what we're calling "enforced nap time". So far it's working wonders, she's like a different baby, she still sleeps through the night, but she is so much more pleasant during the afternoons/evenings.

We've even found that if she goes down at 1930, she stays asleep until around 2300. This gives us most of our evening back to do almost whatever we fancy!

I have no idea how this is going to continue, it might carry on as beautiful family bliss, or it might go horribly wrong, but for now, I'm loving my geek time!

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley

To Play or Not to Play? That is the question!

Good Tuesday all,

I would like to start off today's post with an explanation of yesterday's end:

The rules in my house regarding my hobby are simple: I'm allowed to make one purchase a month. The value of this purchase is flexible, but it should include no more than 1 box, or 1 box plus accessories.

This 'allowance' was agreed between my wife and I after 9 months graft to get my money out from the red and into the black.

You see, when it comes to money I am rubbish, I always have been and I always will be, so we've created these rules to stop me maxing out my entire payslip on models and not allow for bills and mortgage.

-if anything, id say the current set up is very generous, because my wife is now on statutory pay, she has even less to treat herself.

The reason it's been so long is for one reason: advanced purchases!

You see at Xmas my wife bought me the Dreamer's crew. I knew I would need Day Dreams and a Teddy to make it playable, but that counts as 2x purchases which covered December and January.

Then in January I picked up some GorkaMorka stuff off eBay, that covered my February payment meaning nothing till March's pay.

Since then there have been countless trips to B&Q for modelling supplies, SSX and other things, we're being nice and combining all of that into one purchase.

This means nothing till April, which works for me as there should be plenty at Salute I want to grab.

That said, I've requested 2 days leave for the end of this week, if I can wrangle it (it requires HR getting a data report to me on Wednesday rather than Friday, not easy) then I should be making a trip to Stevenage HobbyCraft. I have no idea how this will fit into the budgeting - I'm sure my wife will be more than happy to let me know after reading this - but there is one thing in particular I've set my eyes on:


They're 1:72 scale, which from what I have read is marginally bigger than GW minis, and as Malifaux is marginally bigger than GW it should be perfect, but I want to see it for myself before I purchase.

Anyway, my thoughts today are of a suggestion a friend on Facebook made, it was about World of Warcraft and arranging some sort of Guild Catch Up.

You see, WoW has been playing on my mind a lot recently, and my wife and I have discussed this in great detail.

It's not that I hate WoW, I don't! As a game I love it, and I have many fond memories there, it's just with the current content Cataclysm, I have very little to do.

You see this expansion has been more difficulty focused than any other before it. Because of a vocal minority, the game has been staggered to make even the easiest of end game tasks very difficult and requiring constant team synergy.

Sure, I know what your thinking: "what's wrong with a game requiring skill?" nothing! I just don't want to have to spend 2 hours planning and running a heroic run after I've been out for 12 hours at work.

The way I see it, I get paid to work, my hobbies that I pay to do, they should not feel like a job.

When I first started playing in TBC? That didn't feel like work. WotLK? That wasn't work either, plus the theme of Northrend and ol' Lichy Poo himself was fantastic.

But Cataclysm, with it's 'IM DEATHWING! I'M A FLAMING DRAGON OF BEARDY HOT MAGMA' yeah it gets old.

So what do I do? I miss playing with the guild, but with my free time existing only in short - baby free - blocks, do I really want to spend my free time playing a game I really don't feel the desire to play?

I think I'd rather wait till Mists of Pandara expansion myself.

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley