Positive Things: The Utter Shamelessness of Mantic Games

This is not a Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer-Prophet. It is not mounted on a Lammasu. It is, in fact, an Abyssal Dwarf Iron-Caster on a Great Winged Halfbreed.

Yeah, it's a Chaos Dwarf on a Lammasu. The model comes from Mantic Games and will be released on the 25^th of this month, just slightly too late for me to ask for it for my birthday. I discovered this range on a recent trip up to London and a charming gaming store called Dark Sphere in Lambeth.

On the one hand the models, the plastics in particular, are not up to Games Workshop's standards. On the plus side, there are plastics in this range, the character models look amazing and they aren't at ridiculous Forge World prices. I have wanted a Chaos Dwarf army for years, ever since the Hellcannon was released and I found out there was such a thing.

I love how they work as a concept: how the positive aspects of the Dwarf race have been twisted into something sinister and malicious. I like the practically heretical notion of Dwarfs and Greenskins fighting side by side. I like the bizarre war machines. I like the sheer bizarre touch of half-Dwarf half horse centaurs and I really don't want to think about how that happened.

Chaos Dwarfs are a wonderful idea that GW never really supported. The original incarnation of the army had terrible models and a flimsy White Dwarf Presents army book. The Forge World version is prohibitively expensive and prone to all the flaws of Forge World resin. I'm glad that someone saw enough mileage in the concept to create a proper plastic range, albeit one with some serious flaws.

Recently I've been working on Empire, Lizardmen and various Elves, it has been too long since I've had a project based on good, old-fashioned villainy. I do so like being the bad guy. 

Positive Things: Early Christmas Food

I am the first person to bemoan the way that Christmas seems to come around earlier every year, about the way shops have their Christmas stuff out before we've even passed Hallowe'en. It genuinely irritates me when I see huge displays of mince pies with sell by dates saying late November.

Oh, but it also means I can get sandwiches with cranberry sauce in them for lunch every day.

I bloody love cranberry sauce. I love turkey and stuffing. I love these little wraps they've started doing with all Christmas dinner sort of leftovers food. I love the Christmas pasties at Gregg's The Baker.

This is literally delicious hypocrisy on my part but I maintain there is nothing inherently Christmassy about cranberry sauce so I don't feel too bad about it, mainly from being too full to care. 

Positive Things: Really Good Fan Fiction

Image supplied by the Scottish Tourist Board.

Don't you just love it when a fan author does something fantastically unexpected with a character you love? Not unexpected because it's out of character (though that can be fun) but because you yourself had never really considered it.

Last night I read The Festival Of The Moon by Kathkin on Archive Of Our Own. It's a Second Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie story where the four accidentally gatecrash an alien marriage ceremony and have to get married to each other or die. After that minor moment of jeopardy the story becomes a brilliant little character piece for Polly as she and Jamie they wander the festival bound together at the wrist.

What I like about this story are two things. First, that Kathkin eschews the more traditional romantic pairings (Two/Jamie and Ben/Polly) to concentrate on Polly and Jamie as friends. She's a Swinging Sixties secretary! He's a Jacobite rebel! Together they fight crime!

(No, not really.)

But it is sweet. Doctor Who in Season Four didn't really do character pieces, in fact it's probably the nadir of the series' engagement with writing character. As seen on TV the four leads are a set of tropes in a blue box largely saved by good acting (great acting in Troughton's case). As Polly and Jamie wander the festival and Polly introduces him to concepts like kites and 20 Questions, as they both realise they have no idea how two men can have sex (this being a matrimonial festival of the liberal future) and as they discuss whether they really want to go home one day, it becomes clear what could have been done with these characters with better writing.

And this is genuinely one of the best Doctor Who short stories I have ever read and I would never have seen it if not for the miracle of the internet and how it has opened up the world of self-publishing. Yes, this means there's a lot of drivel out there but there are some genuinely fantastic creative voices to enjoy. 

Positive Things: Big Dick Johnson

“The Back” is one of the strangest concepts in the already seriously strange wrestling industry. You see, even through the WWE tours and every person has to have been flown in for the event at company expense there are always random and seemingly unexpected people be hanging around backstage. Sometimes the camera will follow someone out of the arena and into the back where they will encounter, amongst other oddities, retired wrestlers trying to sell things, aliens, marauding managers, chicken deliverymen, and...

… Big Dick Johnson. Big Dick Johnson was, for several years, World Wrestling Entertainment's on-call male stripper as well as being one of the writers (under his real name of Christopher deJoseph). Whenever they needed a male stripper (and it happened more often than you'd think) out came Big Dick Johnson and a bottle of baby oil. Because of course they needed a slightly overweight male stripper about the place and of course he had his own entrance music, it made perfect sense.

Well, perfect sense for the wrestling industry, anyway.

As you can imagine, we wrestling fans are ridiculously fond of the guy. As evidence, please note this video where Big Dick Johnson (in “costume”) was invited to a wrestling industry event to present an award. His speech is... particularly memorable.

Professional wrestling is it's own particular brand of insane and I love it for that. 

A little less negativity

This month I am determined to stay positive.

It's too easy to be negative on the internet. There are whole forums and communities basically dedicated to bitching and moaning, which is fine and therapeutic in its place but it's also exhausting. It's not like I don't have my reasons for being grouchy recently: my landlord is selling my flat; my favourite game system recently died and took my favourite fantasy world with it; the comicbook and wrestling industries are as bizarrely inconsistently managed as ever; and we still have a Conservative government seemingly dedicated to disposing of the surplus population.

And I'm just tired of being annoyed. It's my birthday this month and I want to spend some time celebrating the things I love, the things that bring me joy.

I love comics, as ill-managed as the industry often is it's going in a direction I largely like. Warhammer may be officially dead but my friends and I are cobbling together our own continuation in The Age Of Rebuilding, which is proving absurdly fun to write. I may not agree with all (or even many) of the WWE's booking decision but they're finally promoting their women's division with some dedication.

If nothing else, a month of writing about what I love instead of what annoys me would be great self-therapy.

So, for the next thirty days I will only say only (well, mostly) positive things on this blog.