The Download Munkey : A Link A Day ;)

This fantastic artwork on a promotional wallpaper for BrikWars caught my eye as I was randomly browsing the web. It strongly reminds me of Kev Walker’s Last Stand artwork for Warhammer 40,000 Space Marines (bottom right picture).

© Mike Rayhawk

© Kev Walker / Games Workshop

Mikle Rayhawk’s BrikWars online rulebook for tabletop games of mini-fig warfare is a well-formatted and immensely enjoyable read for a rulebook (most rulebooks that I come across read more like my Mathematics textbook. Since combat between several mini-figs is a waste of the massive plastic brick collections that some collectors possess, rules are also provided for heroes and squad combat as well as for those who wish to include vehicles, large units and buildings for additional mayhem.

© Mike Rayhawk

The rules aren’t overly complex since they emphasize fun over rules-fiddling - I especially love the What I Say Goes rule in Chapter 1.2 which succintly states that “Players are smarter than rulebooks. Especially the ones with the highest dice rolls.” A very handy rule indeed for resolving difference of opinions during games

Unforunately the 8 chapters of rules are available as online HTML only so you’ll have to download it with a website copier like WinHTTrack if you wish to peruse it offline.

Read the BrikWars rules (10th Anniversary’s Edition - 2005) or download the cool wallpapers over at BrikWars. More of Mike’s artwork for BrikWars available at his official site.

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Warhammer 40,000 vehicles in Lego
Devil Brigade’s Lux - Customized Risk Game
Warhammer 40,000 Dark Crusade Wallpapers From RelicForums

It’s Halloween today so I’m presenting some cool Jack o’ Lantern wallpapers I found over at HQ Wallpapers, which I believe stands for High Quality Wallpapers

33 wallpapers in 1280×1024 resolutions of Jack o’ Lanterns carved with silly expressions and 6 other Halloween wallpapers of assorted designs.

© Nathan Wesling

Pics above have been edited so that the Jack o’ Lantern looks bigger

Although HQ Wallpapers didn’t state the source of these pics, I have googled a bit and found that these marvellous Jack o’ Lanterns were carved by Nathan Wesling of pumpkinway.com and have therefore credited him accordingly.

Happy Halloween!

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DarkWatch Wallpapers
CuteDeadThings Wallpapers
Martin Abel’s Comic Pin-up Wallpapers
The Darkness Wallpapers
Oneechanbara vorteX Wallpapers

Graffiti Studio 2.0 is a cool freeware application specially created by LRPD Vandalsquad for anyone who wants to experiment with graffiti art. As the official website has been online since 1997, I guess I’m late by 7(!) years in discovering this little gem

© Less Rain

Anyone remotely interested in drawing graffiti should play around with this application because unlike real-life graffiti artists, they:

• Need not look out or evade the police while concentrating on their work of art.
• Need not worry about buying spray cans of the wrong colours.
• Need not fear their artpiece being cleaned away as Graffiti Studio users get to upload their works to the Vandalsquad archives for posterity.

If you need inspiration, the archives and the most popular works are just a click away on the official site.

Some tips to get the most out of Graffiti Studio:

• Tapping Q moves the spray can nearer to the spray surface, resulting in a thicker and smaller area of paint. Tapping A does the opposite.
• Undo only resets the last spray. Therefore …
• Remember to save regularly. There’s only one save slot so the newest save always overwrites the previous one so save wisely.
• Don’t feel like a graffiti artist yet? Shake the can to get that familiar spray can sound

Below is one good reason why I should stick to writing posts instead of drawing.

(View in original size)

Download the Windows or Mac version of Graffiti Studio from vandalsquad.com or mess around with the online version. (Click on the Paint Offline button and then select a PC or Mac version to download)

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Elphonso Lam - Artist / Toy Designer / Punk Rocker
Shin Tanaka’s Cool Paper Toys
Asian Artists @ Tiger Translate 2007
STAMP SG
Simone Legno - Tokidoki

Read this on the Friends of EML blog next week and have been playing with this nifty little Flash application for the whole of last week

Orange Mixer allows you to arrange preloaded samples into tracks (max 16 samples per mix) and then apply effects to each individual track like fading and panning (switch to Advanced mode, add points and drag - a bit like drawing and tweaking Bezier curves in drawing applications). Each mix can consist of up to 20 bars which means a song can be up to close to 7 minutes for hip-hop or close to 4 minutes for drum n’ bass.

The included audio samples comprise drum, bass, percussion, music (piano, guitar), sfx, some really hair-raising vocals as well of some of the Chemical Brothers’ bleepy electro stuff.

Electro (above) and drum n’ bass (below) mixes

Here’s my 1 minute long efforts - dnb and electro - hack jobs done in a few minutes which shows how easy it is to create your own stuff from the included samples even for a amateur like me Try my 30 seconds funky house mix too

Before you dismiss this as an application for electronic music only, here’s an absolutely cringe-worthy rock mix to show the possibilities of making non-electronic music - click here for a truly awful experience

The above samples were recorded into .WAV and then converted to MP3 with Audacity. You can also save your mix online and finalize it as MP3 although I find the former process more convenient.

Pros

• Free! Free! Free! Registration is required though.
• Very easy to use.
• Preloaded with audio samples from multiple genres, all samples in the particular being at the same tempo to eliminate the need to adjust the BPM for each sample

Cons

• Unable to load own samples makes it a little boring after a while as there will always be samples that you won’t like and will never use which limits you to reusing the same few samples after making a few mixes:(
• Cannot mix and match samples from different genres due to different BPM for samples of each genre.
• Playback cannot commence from the middle of a bar, only from the start of a bar.
• For an application made in the UK, there’s no breaks samples. WTF!!

Then again, you can’t really fault the application for the cons when it’s such a user-friendly application with such a low learning curve (plus it’s free too!!)

Play the Orange Mixer.

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BestPractice - Speed up or slowdown audio
Technics SL-DZ1200 Video Demo
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A couple of not-so-serious military-related stuff that I read several weeks back on other blogs.

Liberian Infantry Tactics
First one is from the Airborne Combat Engineer’s archives featuring photos taken during the Liberian civil war in 2005. I sure hope that these photos were staged for the camera because it’s pure suicide for anyone attempting these kind of tactics on an actual battlefield.

Some of the photos at the site linked by ACE are down so I have searched the .Net for an alternative source. View these photos at Free Market Fairy Tales along with a thorough tongue-in-cheek analysis of the tactics exhibited in these photos.

Dummies’ Guide to Military Hand Signals
Credit goes to www.sicarii.net for posting about this one.

Shut Up A Second

Shit, I Think He Was On Our Side

Now we know what the hand signals used by SWAT teams in movies really mean

More hand signals (42 in total) over at www.petebevin.com.

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Assault Rifle Vidcasts
ACE’s WTFs
Human Security Brief 2006 photo of MEND militant
South China Sea Pirates & Other Interesting Photos