February 2025 - Organic Patrick

now without additives

Apologies

I am very sorry for not completing another 'proper' Veins or D&D post this month. I told myself it was because I started a new part time job and was wired and drained of energy from that, but looking back on my actual February, I kind of did quite a lot of stuff? So probably I could have actually done more 'proper' work. I promise to try my best at having a more productive month in March - finishing 'Opal-Winged Chiropterae' at least.

February Brain Review

Suicidal Ideation

I got on this shit just before Covid hit because I was having an unusually long, deep and vivid period of intensive suicidal ideation which, who knows how close I actually was at that time, but that seems to be largely cleared up. When I was on Sertaline I only had glancing occasional suicidal thoughts and having been off it a month its pretty much the same now.

Moodiness

I get much more deeply and blackly angry now and it persists more. On Sertaline it was much easier to broadly ignore things that might make me upset. I can't tell if my positive emotions are also stronger but I think they might be. I can't tell if I am more easily overwhelmed with complex crossing streams of information. This may be a problem at work!

Memory and Self-Regulation

I began the record for February thinking I hadn't done much at all this month, but looking back I did quite a few things, but didn't have a clear sense of that in my head at all. A softer fuzzier memory is somewhat associated with depression. I wonder if this tendency will have some correlation/causation with my mood or where it might stand in the complex feedback loop of despair? Or am I just imagining that my memory is a little worse?

Racing Thoughts

I get much more of these and they are particularly noticeable before and after sleep when I suspect my conscious mind is taking the breaks off and trying to power down and that lets the leash off. I have gone to sleep having complex arguments or imagined situations in my head, had a night of strange intense dreams, and then woken up with a completely different set of, I would describe them as deeply imagined agonistic situations, arguments, debates what have you, still present in my awakening mind. I think this has got a little worse off the drugs.

Voices - Mild Schizoidal Thinking

At night before sleep I sometimes hear distant arguing/discussing in the next room over through the walls of this semi-detached house. I am 90% certain these are 90% not actually there. This tendency started about 15 years ago during a near (perhaps actual) nervous breakdown and has gradually lessened over time, returning and becoming more aggressive during times of deep distress and dislocation. Since that initial period I have never heard 'next door voices' when it was impossible for any voices to be there; i.e. when there was no house or flat next door. There was always a kind of veil of cognitive deniability, which is why I am only 90% certain they are 90% not real. These do not seem to have gotten significantly worse since going off the sertraline.

Farewell Chadly Orgasms

The Prozac/Sertaline family has something of a reputation for, let’s say, delaying, and then intensifying, orgasm. Well, sadly I am no long part of that elite ejaculation force, I am back on the normiegasms with the rest of you. Big sadge.

Current Sanity… 4 out of 5?

Maybe 3 out of 5. No deep suicidal ideation so don’t worry.

February 2nd – B.O.T.S. Arms and Warlocracy

The Coats of Arms of the British Overseas Territories

Still feeling vaguely sad around the start of the month, I happened upon the glorious Coats of Arms of the British Overseas Territories; a handful of island chains spread over the world oceans that no-one could be bothered trying to get off us.

What pleased me was the combination of a deep post-medieval signifying form with the curious and often tropical symbols of these microstates. Turtles and palm trees abound, as do strange mottoes.

They immediately call to mind a kind of peaceful, somewhat chill post-apocalyptic sailing and exploration game set between curious and forgotten island nations set within a structure of ancient storied feudal power.

The extremely ‘extra’ nature of the Coats of Arms also pleased me. While the sad cringe reddity cult of vexology descends into ever more contemptable abstractions, the glorious march of extremely based chadly Heraldry marches eternal into a world of piled and combined images and signs. Can a Coat of Arms ever be overdesigned?

Slavic Reality Review

This Slavic man describes and reviews CRPGs at length. As an expatriate Russian who fled during the recent business, he occasionally drops fragments of personal lore throughout his videos, usually when something from a game happens to remind him of his life. Of course if you want the true Real Life Lore you basically need to watch every Warlockracy review and assemble the resulting fragmentary Russia Review in your own mind.

But in this review for an od mod for Deus Ex, (set in the far off year of 2025), part of the game is set in central Moscow, leading to an ever-deepening interlacement of thoughts and memories which weave between the Cyberpunk immersive sim and actual memory; This fence is accurate, I jumped over it while being chase by police during the 2007 protests. We certainly saved the world that day didn’t we lads". Moscow Apartment level; "My grandma lived in one of these, this is where she taught me to play games."

February 3rd - Duck & Titans

I have re-printed the oft-requested ‘Night at the Golden Duck’ mini-game/experiment, and the creative team behind Silent Titans have gained control over the remaining 500 or so copies.

After continually promising myself that I would fold 200 ducks a day, I have given up and will now send them from my home, folding them up as and when required.

Silent Titans, the Book/Game with a deep personal connection to the Wirral and to the Folkloric tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is currently the only one of my books stored in the U.S., and moving any to the U.K. will be exorbitantly expensive.

But you can order one or both at the False Parcels Webstore!

February 7th – Ogryn Bus

A long-term Necromunda Kitbashing project received its final update before.. going right back into storage. Will base coat and complete one day in the distant future. I present to you… the Necromundan Ash Wastes Ogryn-Driven Omnibus!

Curiously the 40k vehicle scale exists in no known actual model scale, being somewhere between 28mm (far too small for most equivalent Warhammer figures), and 35mm, (a bit too big for most). However, a fat bellied Ogryn WILL fit behind the wheel of a 1920’s 35mm scale London Omnibus which might be available in a sale from the Tank Museums online shop because no-one goes to a Tank Museum and buys a model Omnibus. The slight needly, slim and sparse vibe of 1920’s vehicle tech fits quite well into Necromunda I think, as the seeming sparseness and vulnerability of its wheels and active parts carries a slight ‘teetering’ Blanchitsu vibe; the sense of a fat mutant with slim metal legs, or a war priest with an either too-clawlike or too-chunky mechanical arm. The sense of the weight and power of an improvised technological prosthetic being a misfit for the proportions of the body to which it is applied. A kind of cybernetic grotesque if you will.

February 8^th – Master and Emissary

Then I made a noble Wastelands Bounty Hunter riding a giant bat with a mans head.

They are hired and referred to as ‘The Master and his Emissary’, but no-one knows which is which and everyone is too afraid to ask. (This being Necromunda they probably guess that the giant bat mutant is ‘The Master’ and just don’t want to talk to is.).

February 8th - Dominion Genesis on Audible

A competent but unexceptional Admech tale. Written by Jonathan D Beer. Narrated by Colleen Prendergast. There is something there to say about the very hard to define difference between a high-level Audiobook narration and one that is just not-quite that. The idea is interesting because the difference is slight. One day I will think deeply about this.

February 10th - Vintage Frog Table Set

Looking though the rear parts of a local nerd shop I found this;

A French-made 35mm full improvised dining set for some Napoleonic troops. The spoons were hard to cut out easily. The accompanied text seems to be typewritten and is very charming.

The company making these is still active at the same address. They now make very detailed large scale historic and fantasy busts for the purchaser to paint to a presumably very high level. The Napoleonic bust market is eternal and largely unexplored.

February 17th - Outer Dark on Audible

By Robbie MacNiven. Narrated by Shogo Miyakita. The Space Sharks no longer like being called Space Sharks. This is a decent Space Shark story with able narration.

February 18th - Boris Complete

Someone in the specialist games department has presumably noticed the insane value of classic out of print minis on eBay and, luring an executive into their workspace with a very long line of cocaine, pressed their snout to a phone screen showing eBay and said; “These are selling for £150 online, we can make them for £20 and we still own the IP.”

Hence, now and then, GW will do fresh runs of classic metal models. It was during one of these a while ago I acquired this Marauder metal giant, which I only recently got around to painting;

He looks a bit better IRL than in this photo but my phone is broken so this is all you are getting. Also; big lead minis are real hard to paint.

February 21st - Plague Marines

I quite like how these came out;

Painted in a pseudo-Blanchitsu style, I cannot match actually good painters but I can apply weathering.

February 22nd - Vathek on Audible

By William Beckford. Narrated by Jonathan Keeble.

Few things could be as interesting as the strange and decadent life of William Beckford but this curious gothic novelty nearly manages it. A pseudo-arabian orientalist fairytail about the gloriously prolapsed Caliph Vathek and his growing obsession with a mysterious dwarf from the depths of the earth. A very D&D-like text. Paratactic, perverse, sentimental and full of tricks, bad miracles and lustring gems. Jonathan Keeble is an S-tier narrator and likely hugely raises the quality of this production.

February 24th - WHE Ahead & Strangely Viral Tweet

Good news everybody.

The Weird Hope Engines RPG Art show at Bonnington Gallery in Nottingham is going ahead next month on the 22^nd of March. And I will be there, and Tom Kemp, the artist of Gackling Moon, and Scrap and Zedeck Siew and Amanda Lee Franck and really a whole bunch of art nerds. Click the link to find out more!

I/we will be selling direct Gackling Moon at a discount from online, along with most of of the False Machine catalogue, (I ordered a box of Silent Titans from the US at extortionate cost), and I will be willing to sign copies if that’s what you want.

False Machine books will be on sale in the gallery bookshop during the course of the exhibition!

I would really like this to be a big success for everyone involved!

…………………………………….

On the same day…..

What the fuck?

138 retweets. I have no idea how ‘X’ works at all. Regardless, I do subscribe to the ‘Animation Obsessive’ Substack, and if you like art, so should you.

February 27th – Chuddah

Azelia Banks got me. It was the coffee all along. It was the coffee not me.

February 28^th – Questionable Update

HELLO WORMS

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gawain/queen-mabs-palace/posts/4325720

February 12th to 28th - the Zouniverse

This month I completed the lost Warhammer Samizat ‘Bastion Wars’ Trilogy. (I read the first one, ‘Emperors Mercy’ back in December).

Book Two; Flesh and Iron – Tropic Thunder

This book isn't especially about Flesh or Iron, at least no more than any other 40k book, a curious situation it shares with 40ks other Vietnam in space book - Peter Fehervari's Fire Caste, which was only nominally about any Fire Caste, whether literal or metaphorical.

Stolen Squalor

It’s hard to compliment this book because I don't know how much is 'writing' and how much is 'research', or even where that line lies. Zou was ‘got’ for directly stealing text from the biography of a real soldier. The story he stole was a deeply personal and disturbing aspect of war as directly experienced and engaged in. Why on earth did he do it? It really poisons any and every other good thing about the book.

My vague impression for a Henry Zou book is that it starts as a kind of collage or mosaic of other scenes and ideas from other books and then gets gradually overwritten and interlinked until, hopefully, it becomes a new thing. Hopefully. Clearly somewhere there is some kind of a line.

Reading lots of military history and after action reports and synthesising them into something 'new' - this is the Dan Abnett method (though, how similar is 'Necropolis' to Stalingrad? Isn't the fight in the big yard against the Woe machines torn straight from Anthony Beevor or 'Enemy at the Gates'?).

Then Henry does exactly the same thing, but just synthesises less, digests and alters less, until at some point an absolute direct replication gets through - the scene where a soldier throws a smoke grenade purely out of spite - which is a provable direct rip from an actual soldiers biography.

The whole thing then collapses into explicit collage, and that makes the questionable morality of the characters in some sense intolerable - because their actions and attitudes are taken from a real war in which real people died, where they may have been bad but at least told the truth about what war is actually like, and are now placed into a fictional war where one side is literally demon inspired, - I can think of no argument or paradigm that can answer the moral challenge of both of these situations, combined, at once. It really is a big hole in the dike.

I suppose we already have an effectual real life instantiation of the moral 'rules' of inspiration and synthesis as they are actually practiced, which is;

> If your sci fi war book seems a lot like parts from real life war books, people will notice and mention it online.

> A few will investigate. If you provably plagiarised direct text from actual war scenes, especially biographic details of actual soldiers, your career is over. This is the Zou zone.

> If you are clearly 'influenced by' but not directly 'stealing from', other books, you have a pass depending on the level of originality and competence of your work. This is the Dan Zone.

> For anyone perceived to be between the Dan Zone and the Zou Zone, judgements on this will be made at a time appropriate, (if anyone notices).

Other Points

If not for the crime of its birth, this would really be a very good book.

I liked how realistically racist and horrible the offworld Imperial Soldiers were some of the time, depending on circumstance. Soldiers wearing sunglasses at night so they don’t have to look the natives in the eye as they warcrime them was a great scene.

For being called Blood Gorgons, they are surprisingly rational Chaos Space Marines. Last time we saw one it was chasing a car like a dog, now they open conversations with philosophical precepts. Though one scene does have a Blood Gorgon fighting a bunch of Imperials who are riding a big car, which is very similar to a scene in the previous book where nearly the same thing happens, including a surprise power fist to the gut. These guys are either; "RRAaaagggGHHHH!!" or "What’s your opinion on Kant?"

The book is a surprisingly clear and calm fall to darkness, quite unlike a Fehervariesque dreamlike decay.

The main antagonist is a surprisingly banal evil cardinal; he wants to 'remove' the planets indigenous population so he can turn their land into imperial farms for him to make money off, so he essentially provokes the whole war. I wonder how much of this land reclamation and hypocritical church business is torn from real SE Asian history? The banality of evil is no crime in Imperium stories, but the lack of ideas in a deeply idealistic war feels a bit off and dumping the whole thing on one evil cardinal feels slightly gauche for the book of textured evil and incompetence in the books other scenes, but it’s a functional storytelling.

The feel, bricolage and mis-en-scene of 'the Indigs', the pseudo-Vietnamese culture of the planet, is really good. A heretic Astarte’s helmet lying waiting in a jungle temple, not a temple to chaos, one to the Emperor, and not just jungle but a little township in the jungle, but keeping artefacts of chaos alongside those of He On Earth; certain writers and gods would appreciate that I'm sure.

Book Three; Blood Gorgons – The High Zomia and the Doom of the Zouniverse

He Was Getting Better

This might be the best, certainly the most fun, out of all the Bastion Wars trilogy; a tale without anxiety as its just chaos marine v chaos marine. The vibe-check Blood Gorgons vs the Death Guard, and both are, in their way, pretty chill guys.

'Blood Gorgons' still wears its research deeply and openly, but, at least by my reading, the Zou's capacity to synthesise has evolved and consumed his slightly rattier goblinish tendencies of simply collecting and displaying information. For anyone who read my previous review; we are over more towards the 'Dabnetty' end of the spectrum, which makes the permanent fall of Henry Zou and the Inquisitorial seal over his works even more of a tragedy. If only he hadn't been such a fucking moron.

Just Blood Gorgon Vibes

The image this paints of the Blood Gorgons as almost, anxiety-free murder-hippies, is interesting. They don't serve any of the major chaos gods, nor do they seek to serve chaos in a fanatical religious sense, they recognise chaos. Their patron demon is a third rank off the shelf type, which they seem fine with. They hate the imperium, but not like, for instance, the Night Lords of ADB's trilogy. They have no Primarch or main-betrayer, no grand arc or supervillain face-off. The question becomes; what exactly are you guys doing up here? And the answer is; whatever we like.

The Blood Gorgons now exist.. to be Blood Gorgons. A self-sustaining Spartan/Malmuke/Pirate empire/protectorate. A wandering and occasional government if you will, with some (brutal and amoral), affection for and interest in, worlds under its nominal control, but a pretty lassiez faire(?) attitude. One desert world has a giant, well-protected ostensibly imperial hive city, and the Blood Gorgons leave it alone, because why bother conquering it when they can just recruit from and distantly rule the desert tribes outside? This is similar to their behaviour on the jungle world of the second book. In a Vietnman-esque biome they dominated the zomia-like uplands, not directly, but through cultural pressure, and they never tried to purge the Imperium from that world, or its religion, (until the Ecclesiarchy went metal), and as we discover during the book, outright Emperor-worship quietly existed alongside less-visible recognition of the chaos powers, and a general knowledge of the Blood Gorgons existence. There are no points during any book where a Blood Gorgon gives a big speech about the failing false worship of the corpse-emperor bwa ha ha. They do think that, but why worry about it?

And this is a deliberate, (and evolved, but still chosen and maintained), ethos of rulership. In fact the plot of the book is about this; between a kind of 'High Zomia' wandering barbarian ideal, where the Blood Gorgons are (relatively) materially poor compared to at least some big Chaos Factions, relatively under-resourced in aethereal materiel, are subject to no grand crusade, part of no epoch-spanning plot, have no grand ideal or point they are trying to make, but also, they submit to none, go where they will and lack anxiety - for deranged ultra-homicidal mutated chaos-infected space warriors, they are 'at peace'.

The big planet at the core of the book has huge theoretical magic metal resources, but the Blood Gorgons don't care about that and have no interest in mining it. One faction amongst the Blood Gorgons doesn't feel this way and actively wants all the stuff the main warband doesn't; larger purpose, exalted rank, more hierarchy, more "money" (or resources in whatever way chaos marines are currently counting that), and broadly a more "settled life" (in super-murderer space-warrior terms) - so they intrigue to get it, and to fundamentally change the culture of the Blood Gorgons, and so a war breaks out, which is what this book is about. How dare you replace our boutique warp-decay fishtank-style infestations and ritual bone corridors with dirty neo-nurglite sick-based fartitecture and free dick boils? This is cultural replacement. Truly the Gorgons have fallen. Billions must cry.

A curious aspect of developed in-world metatext is that, by acting the way they do, the Blood Gorgons are, in a way, fulfilling the Emperors Will, or one aspect of his design for Astartes. Orks after all, are just alien astartes that escaped the need for their base species, and the chill and murdery Blood Gorgons are a lot like Orks in their self-fulfilled nature, but by wandering around largely not bothering most people on most of their worlds most of the time, and 'defending' their recruiting ground, which means maintaining a healthy population of mainline humans to recruit from, while fighting anything big and nasty that turns up, partly for resources, but partly because they want to, they are acting in the pre-designed fallback position of Astartes, of protecting and sustaining relatively "pure" (or the gene seed stops working), human populations, not out of duty, but necessity. The protectors of humanity indeed.

The Book He Wanted to Write

Zou seems to just be having a lot more fun with the Blood Gorgons. Our story is split mainly between the desert world of Hauts Bassiq and the Gorgons flying fortress space hulk/star destroyer the 'Cauldron Born'. Both of these are delineated with a degree of invention and easy pleasure (though Zou's world-building was always pretty good). Hauts-Bassiq has post-industrial-survivor evolved-Aboriginal culture with elements of Australian Aboriginals and god knows what else; the factoids and details of the rituals and materials of cultural life are pleasing; the ritual of oiling your terror-bird cavalry mount, what it means when a certain sheet is flying, the religious/shamanic ritual of space-marine summoning in a fossilised cathedral, a grand battle between bird riding arrow-firing tribals and nurgly industrial goons. All excellent scenes.

The Cauldron-Born is happily pelagic; peak Space-Hulk vibes; layers of crazy chapter history burnt and grown into the decks and patterns of its remaking; echoing vaults with space marine vibe-towers grown or hanging from the space-ribs - linked by bridges, or not, as the dramas and politics of the Astartian culture shifts one way or another. The chapter/warbands ancient history - (a cursed 13th founding chapter who went rogue, got sanctioned and chased by the space wolves, were nearly wiped out by that but survived, then were nearly wiped out in intra-chapter war, but re-constituted but a hyper-charismatic leader), all of this written into the lovely spolia and baroque autismal miscellania of 40k.

Later in the enclosed fortress city of Ur, Zou has great play with noble courts made up of largely undead zombies (Nurgly humour or do they really not care much about the exact border between life and death?), and with the randomly-generated, seen-once, contents of a 'liberated' insane asylum of a chaos city (too-uncontrollable serial killers and an alpha-level psyker toddler who really liked ‘the seventh seal’.)

Sigh. At least he got to go out on a high note. Farewell Henry Zou, I hope wherever you are, possibly under a new name, you are still writing. It really did seem like you were getting better.

Currently on Sale, Sale Sale….

I am clearing shelves and the entire ‘Bastion Wars’ Trilogy is currently on offer on eBay. (As is my collected ‘Berserk Deluxe’ set.

Hit the link to find out more.

February 29th - The Monkey (2025)

A film by Osgood Perkins, whose father, the actor Anthony Perkins, died of Aids, and whose mother was one of the passengers in the 911 flights.

If you go into this not knowing that it’s a weird philosophical horror-comedy inspired at least partly by the tragic and strange deaths of the directors parents, then you will enjoy it less because, as a horror movie, it’s not good, in that it’s not actually horrifying. It is quite good and interesting as a curates egg, with a lot of notable qualities of its own. I would rate it an honourable three out of five, a three with Laurels, maybe even a four if it was better fit.

The acting is universally good. Theo James has an amazing voice and strong noetic screen presence, a forgotten 'average guy' type from a 90's movie (if the average guy was actually unusually good looking). Miscast. He is too chadly (I have been saying this a lot this month), for either of his dual roles - a self-loathing fearful neurotic and a schitzoidal vengeful narcissistic bastard. It’s not a failure of talent but a misfit of type; this man will never feel weird on screen to me. This could be a reverse-Farrel situation. Get this man some normal roles! He will sing!

As we venture out into the rest of the cast there are lots of lovely slightly heightened emblematic performances. Tatiana Maslany and Elijah Wood are great. Wood is really enjoying being a cunt on film. Tess Degenstein has a stand out scene as a waxen midwesterner from a bloodstained fairytail. She was taken from us far too soon; in that she has about 15 lines. (She is still alive).

All the other actors are good and distinct, they get the tone; dark ridiculous peasant tale refracted through a folksy King-infused commedia dell'arte; everyone is a type, maybe not a type you have seen but a type someone has. The film exists in no particular era. Its versions of childhood are meant to be from 2000 but, since culture became a morass after the 90s there are no meaningful signifiers and this feels much more like a 70's childhood aging into an unknown era. This is fine, take the date off the start, all that really matters is that the second part is 25 years after the first.

Mild woke elements; the only part which doesn't work is having Hal bullied by a mixed race group of athletic girls which, I get the intellectual concept behind this but first, you abandon the primal emotional drive of male-on-male bullying and second, when women do bully, they do so in a much more insidious, ruthless and effective way than men, not with the ritual despoilments of a fairytale 80s childhood. This feels off and doesn't hit emotionally, though it is but a slim and passing cringe.

Original idea with actual moral and point, strong presentation, top effort all round, acting good, actual jokes… So, why a C plus Patrick?

It does not quite fit, especially for a mass audience. They expect one thing, get quite another, but the other they get is too silly to be horror and a little too fey to be something else. It does not tell you when to laugh or cry, nor does it strongly impel you to do either. It’s a folktale. Its better watched alone and will get substantially better as it finds and lives with its audience. When surrounded by people who know what it is it will be like a warm fire. Probably a B+ four-star film in ten years time.

Apologies Again

I will try to do more actual D&D shit over March. (At least before things get chaotic mid-month).

Don’t forget Weird Hope Engines this month!!!!