Death Korps of Krieg

Last sunday I finally fought Piotr's Death Korps of Krieg. They are Imperial Guard from Forgeworld and the models just blow your mind (nothing to do with the enormous amount of ordance they bring). For those who don't play 40K, just scroll down towards the photo's!!!! It really pays off to enlarge them *click 'em*.

We played a 2000pts game (I'm used to play 1500).
In short:
Broodlord + 5 stealer retinue
Flying Tyrant
19 hormagaunts (s3)
16 hormagaunts (s4)
18 spinegaunts
12 termagants
8 stealers
2x 3 leaping warriors
1x 3 shooting warriors
2 raveners
3 Thropes
1 carnifex with barbed strangler + venomcannon & spinebanks
1 carnifex with barbed strangler + talons

Against
4x 5 Roughriders (EVIL!!! )
3 Large artillery pieces
5 smaller artillery pieces (you'll see the difference in the photo's)
2 Diggerunits (unit can dig underneath the enemy, large blast s10 ap2, and then the unit behind it can still shoot & charge.
and a LOT of troops with lasguns and some other weaponry.

As you could see before, he's a great painter. The pics below proof it once again. Unfortunately the lighting was bad and I didn't take much time to set up a decent photo-shoot so I'm not happy with all pics. I will do that another time.

The large ordnance piece


The smaller ordnance piece


Roughriders

Part of the dig-crew




Some leader figures


Banner and flag
Random guards

The game was a big slaughter, but in the end we called it a draw because we lacked the time to finish it, but we agreed that I had the better chance of winning in the end, even though I've lost lots and lots of troops.

DSB Bank tumbling or not?

First of all, I'm not big on economics so don't shoot me too hard if I'm off now and then..

About 3 years ago a bank filed for bankrupcy (this word seems thé perfect word at the moment), before that it was 24-25 years ago since a bank tumbled. Last year saw our government spend billions on banks to keep them running. I got all of my accounts with the ABN Amro which got taken over for if I'm not mistaken 51%. It's of course debatable if a country should invest so much in banks to keep them upright.

But yesterday the definite news came that the DSB Bank was in really big trouble and might have to file for bankrupcy. As we speak there are curators who are looking at possible ways to save the bank (and more important the money of its clients). The Dutch (and probably some other) customers already picked up a couple of hundred million euro's to put into accounts in other banks. The state declared that they would ensure any amount of money of the clients upto 100 000€. So for the little man there shouldn't be too many problems untill house-sales come into the picture.

But I just received a mail from my employment agency that if you called in today before 5pm (and only today!), you could change the account into which they pay your salary if you are a DSB client. That's a hard service.

There are two sides to this.
1) The trust in the states promise to guarantee your money upto 100K € seems to (if still possible) tumble even further. The fact that the agency mailed this enhances the distrust so even if people didn't transfer all of their money, they'll feel supported to do so now (even if they are far below the guaranteed amount) and if nothing else, if able, change their salary account. I hope for the people who have more than 100K in the bank that DSB comes up with a plan to be able to support itself and at least save its customers from MAJOR money loss.

2) As said before it's a hard service. A hard service, but in a time where jobs are sometimes hard to find and you really want to be sure of your income as well as you can, it's a writing on the wall that the agency does nót trust the government to be able to save all banks, let alone the DSB and the agency wants the best for its clients. The least it has done by this mail is to keep the trust of its 'employees'.

Has anything like this happened in your country or are you expecting it? People weren't expecting it here, that's for sure!

I'm sooooo retro

It's a public secret I don't have an Ipod, I use some ancient device called an mp3-cdplayer to listen to my music while on the road. It's still working after 8 years and I'm not planning to replace it anytime soon (as long as it's still working of course).

Everytime someone sees me pull this one:

out of my pocket they're like WHAT THE F is that! But I like being able to just grab a normal cd or an mp3 cd out of a rack and press play, instead of hooking a machine up to the pc and having to erase-copy stuff and fix playlists and whatnot, and I'm not getting started about being forced to use itunes. I'm just lazy like that.

Another advantage is that I just use rechargable batteries and I always have an extra set with me so that I'm not stuck without music.

But what I was building up to was that about a month (or is it already 1,5?) ago I bought an LP player, brand new but it still has a retro feel to it buying a new thing to play old music. My parents got a ton of lp's that they want to put on cd, and I would just like to play them as lp's.
I'm really looking forward to be able to play Peter and the wolf or some other oldies again:

It's at least 10 years since I've heard this one!

Next to that, last week I bought 2 LP's. One with the best of Ennio Morricone and BÖC's Imaginos:

I'm really eager to play those.
But somehow I can't get my lp player to work. I only have an old miniset radio with an aux function on it but the LP player has the option of using a line-in connection instead of the phono. And besides that I couldn't get the thing to at least start turning which you would expect even if the music signal couldn't be transferred if it's plugged into current. I hope I'll be able to solve this and listen to old music again before long.

Of course the 'I'm soooo retro' is in jest, I just like the fact that my mp3 player still works and I really love to be able to play those old lps again.

Dutch movies (top 10) pt 2: Blackbook

I watched Zwartboek (Blackbook) today. As said before I'm not planning on making a real ranked list but seeing this movie I do want to place it in the list.



In (very) short: the movie is about the resistance in the Netherlands (Holland..whatever Dan..) and about the Germans taking away & killing Jews. I could extend the synopsis, but you just have to believe me here that it's darn worth watching.

The movie is spoken is mainly spoken in Dutch, but when needed in German and English which is personally already a testament of quality. The version I got was subtitled when it wasn't spoken in English and it even mentioned when German was spoken (eg. (Geman) Thank you).

Stuff people throw out of the window pt 3?

I'm not sure if it's part 3, but it doesn't matter really, it could just as well be part 25 to me.

As some might know, I live in a flat filled with about 80-90% students or people who just finished their studies. The rest are a strange collection of young families and elderly people. The thing with students (yeah I know I'm one too) is that some think that because they are students they can thrash stuff and throw it out of the window and leave it there to rot just because no-one cares..
I care as much as far as to the point that it irritates me when someone throws a pc out of their window at 3AM or something or chairs or whatever. It wakes me up and instead of just throwing it away with the garbage it lies there waiting for someone (the flatowners possibly) to send a clean-up crew and take it away.

What it's all about:







The guy in the lawnmower was happy to shred some stuff like the pillow and the keyboard.

Blue Öyster Cult in concert!

Last saturday (5 september!) I went to a Blue Öyster Cult concert in Zoetermeer and it was really really cool! There was a band warming us up that I never heard of (666 the nightmare) they were a Dutch band which played covers of great 80s rock tracks and performed really well, so I'd say youtube them and don't be scared by the way they dress up, all part of the act.



Around a quarter to ten the BOC themselves entered the stage and the whole crowd got excited. The band (although in a changing group) has been going at it for 40 years! As far as their fitness goes, they shouldn't have any trouble to add at least another 10 good years. Of course they played great hits like Don't fear the reaper, Burning for you and Then came the last days of May, but they also played a lot of other tracks. There was a 50 years+ guy next to me who completely broke the stereotype that you would've given him on the street (he looked like a major executive) and he just went completely crazy shouting and whistling. That was just awesome.

Eric Bloom & Buck Dharma:


Richie Castellano and the bassguitarist from Queen as a subsitute for the BOC bassplayer Rudy.


Eric Bloom telling us something important


He made these concentrated faces constantly, he would throw up his stick fetch it and just continue drumming like nothing happened, awesome.


The band:


Minor improvement points for the Merchandise stand: they only had 2 different t-shirts on sale and they didn't sell any cd's...would've been a smart move because the shirts sold like crazy (got one myself too).

Other small downside..I had to drive back home for 3,5 hours..well 3..but I took 2 breaks to prevent me falling asleep at the wheel..

The photo's above are all made by Moon in Virgo. Take a look either at my photobucket or her site (linked in name above) for all photo's. I'm still waiting for some photo's a guy would send to me, but this is what I ripped from the website of the Cultuurboerderij itself.

Tsunami vs 9-11

I came across this Brazillian commercial from WWF, which as far as I understand is no(t) longer shown on tv.



WWF already excused itself for this and said it should never have been published etc. But on the other hand..if there wasn't such a fuss about it I would have probably not seen this on a Dutch newspaper website. Maybe..after 8 years (no matter how difficult it still is) people should no longer cringe about it as hard as if it was published on 10-11. Although it still doesn't feel quit right to put it out as a commercial.