Met Sir Edmund Hillary. He was presiding over a charity thing we were doing at our Cub Scout hall, where we were climbing a bit of scaffolding a bunch of times, trying to equal the height of Mt Everest with all the combined climbs.

I walked away from Karen Dunbar after my pal accidentally twatted her in the face with her purse in a nightclub.

Callum Beattie bought me a pint after a gig he did in Glasgow recently. My pal had bumped into him after the gig, told him there was a pub still open nearby, messaged me to say come and meet Callum Beattie, I had no idea who he was, seemed a nice dude.

Stuart Henderson from The Delgados bought me a pint after I bumped into him in my local and told him I saw him playing at the Kelvingrove Bandstand the night before in the pissing rain. He gave us a big hug as well.

I shook Anita from 2Unlimited's hand after a gig they played at Archaos in Glasgow.

Dinamic games certainly had a look about them that made them recognisably a Dinamic game. If the difficulty didn't give it away first.

Sod's law. Drowned in tang just before I got the chance to be tang'd.

Recovering from an engagement party last night, only to start getting ready for another night out tonight; Glasgow's premier rock club, the Cathouse, is having an "Overs" night where they open the doors at 6pm and let all us old bastards in to dance to music the Cathouse used to play 30 years ago, and then close in time for everyone to get the last bus home.

AND ROYSTON WILL ANSWER

Does anyone still use "bampot"? I haven't heard it used in real life in a long long time. Other than middle class Scottish celebrities trying to explain Glesga patter on the telly in the same sentence as "Pure dead brilliant". Or Limmy taking the piss out of middle class Scottish celebrities trying to explain Glesga patter on the telly.

RIP the 13th Note in Glasgow (Scotland). A tiny downstairs basement with no stage as such, just a space between the pillars, which made things more intimate. Seen so many bands there. Biggest band I saw (in terms of members) was probably the World Inferno Friendship Society, about 13 of them all crammed in, spilling out into the crowd.

But last year the owner refused to listen to worker's grievances, the staff unionised, she just closed the place down without warning and they took her to court, now the ex-staff are in talks to take over the place and open it again.

No worries, hope it's of some use.

Incidentally, both Glasgow and New York are like sister cities; both had a reputation for being rough and violent as fuck in the 70's and 80's, to the point where if you wanted a hard-man in UK/US media, you hired a Glaswegian or a New Yorker respectively. Glasgow was the murder capital of Europe, the high unemployment caused by all the industries collapsing was disastrous. But both cities had similar programs in the 80's and 90's to tidy up, encourage the arts and celebrate their own culture, to take a wee bit of pride in themselves, now both are tourist friendly destinations, while still retaining their tough reputations. My ex, a native New Yorker, commented on the similarities between the two, especially the tenements, the grid system and the hard sense of humour, saying she felt at home here.

Amongst my pals, everyone had a ZX Spectrum, and then either moved on to the Megadrive or the Amiga. I went the Amiga path and didn't buy a Megadrive until the late 90's, after I had bought an N64 and a new PC, it was my first step into retrogaming.

And aye, the cunt went to slash my face but I put my hand up and caught it in time, bloody sore but it was 30 year ago lol, just another scar to add to the list

I worked in a barber's sweeping hair at the weekend, and delivered newspapers mostly to afford games for my ZX Spectrum or Commodore Amiga. I'd regularly have enough money to go into Glasgow with pals to play Laser Quest and play arcade games or go to the cinema. Or down the Barras for pirated games and music on floppy disk and cassette respectively.

As far as video games go, it was the transitional period between (nearly) everyone having a ZX Spectrum computer and (nearly) everyone having a Sega Megadrive. I knew one person with a SNES, other than that, Sega ruled supreme over here  in terms of consoles*. Sega was seen as the edgier alternative to family-friendly Nintendo. Even then, Sega was still outsold by Commodore and the ZX Spectrum. Much easier to convince parents to buy a computer to "help with homework" and buy games for £2.99 every week than a console at double the price and games upwards of £40. And because computers weren't compatible with each other, everyone wanted the same computer as their pals, so the ZX Spectrum and C64/Amiga were really popular. Especially when you could pirate games using your parent's hi-fi.

Music-wise, most folk I knew were into Techno, Rave, and Dance music in general, usually just what was in the charts like The Shamen and the Prodigy, but a few of my pals were starting to DJ and were always in the 23rd Precinct record shop in town, buying stuff no one had ever heard of. Me, I was into punk, grunge and thrash metal, so my options for learning about new music were limited, other than magazines or staying up late to watch Noisy Mothers or The Word. I had my own video recorder in my bedroom, which was a luxury, something a few mates didn't even have in their living room, and I was always asked to record late night stuff that my pals weren't allowed to stay up to watch (mostly porn, like the dirty bits from Eurotrash, dirty films Channel 4 were showing and Margi Clarke's Good Sex Guide).

I was stabbed by a gang walking through a park at night, and was chased by gangs a couple of times; as regprenticer mentioned, it was a bad time with the "Young Teams" running about, we were just about to come out of an 18 year long Tory government that had caused high unemployment, so people's prospects were grim leaving school, and their home-lives weren't much better. As for myself, my friends and I would hang around in one of the many abandoned mental hospitals/foundries/gasworks in town and drink whatever booze we could pinch from our parents (or they'd get me to go into the shop for booze because I looked the oldest). Or, if someone's parents were out of the house (ie an "empty"), we'd have a party round at their's.

*I'm pointing that out as the majority of US-centric retrogaming channels on Youtube mention nothing but Nintendo ruling supreme in the US, and a lot of UK channels in recent years have been repeating this verbatim as if the same happened here. It's starting to change a bit now, with channels running out of content and looking further afield for information and finally learning the truth.

Wear a tuxedo and a tash, stick a first class stamp on your lapel, bingo, First Class Male.

On a sidenote, I have an "emergency costume" that I made years ago; it's a 1930's style radio, the kind with a big grill on the front, I made it from cardboard (with car dashboard rubber matting for the grill), painted brown, varnished to make it drinks-proof and I wear it on my head. Radiohead. I've won a couple of costume contests with it.

None of those, this is mine. 

I'm assuming you took so long in the boat because all the bullets you hoarded from barely shooting anyone were weighing you down? Jk, congrats on completing the game, are you going for the other endings?

My local MP picked my artwork to win "best in show" at a local art exhibition. Still didn't vote for her.

A Cintiq 16 digital art pad. Or an A3 scanner, either one would aid my artwork tremendously.

The trees at the start no longer look like dead Christmas trees that someone decorated with seaweed. It gets my thumbs up.

This isn't much help, but I just wanted to mention: I did art and design in college in the mid 90's just as Photoshop was being rolled out in classes, and we were still being taught actual airbrushing (which was cool as fuck but I haven't done it since) alongside PS. This is the kind of thing we were being taught to make by hand. Draw it in pencil, mask off particular bits for air-brushing, and repeat.

It can all be done easily in art packages these days (as other commenters have detailed), but I do miss using an airbrush.

It's a mock-up of a Bayonetta shmup by JNKBoy, you've more than likely seen more of his artwork on your travels on the internet, like the Haggar pile-driving a shark or the Halo as a 2D platformer mock-up. And if you haven't seen his artwork, you're in for a treat.

Hate with a passion. Trying to blindly feed one into it's slot without moving a heavy AF CRT telly could have been a task on The Crystal Maze or something. That one slightly angled corner is pointless when you can't feel the corner it's supposed to go into.

I was just saying the other day, it's been a long while since I've been in King Tuts, this is a perfect excuse to remedy that.

That was a hard poster to read btw, thought it was next month until I eventually saw the NO-VE-MB-ER.

My American ex thought it meant hand-job. It suddenly made sense why, in our online chats, whenever I said I was away for a jobby, she said she wished she could help.

We had a laugh about it once we realised.

Exactly, it was much easier to convince your parents to buy the same £125 computer as your pals "to help with homework" with games at £2.99 than it was to buy a console at double the price and £39.99 for the games. Plus, yeah, piracy was rampant because everyone had the tech to do it in their living room. And even amongst the consoles, Sega was king.

I'm slowly learning Blender, saw this post and thought that your solution was the way to do it before I read it, so thanks for the confirmation!

I get this when (generally younger) Youtubers in the UK go on about a) how the Video Games Crash™ affected everywhere (in America yeah, the rest of the world, not so much), and b) how everyone, even in the UK, was playing the NES back in the day, which couldn't be further from the truth. 

I put it down to bigger, more U.S.-centric Youtube channels like AVGN affecting the perception of retrogaming as a whole, and he isn't exactly a good source to base an opinion on. But I know plenty of people who grew up watching him and take his word as law, which is infuriating.

tl,dr: If you lived through it, you know the truth, but it's an up-hill struggle fighting the mis-information.

Aah, that's where I left it, thought I ate it all, cheers

I saw Judas Priest at the Hydro in Glasgow earlier this year. Never been to an all-seater metal gig before. The shine off of all the baldy heads was almost blinding at times. Felt sorry for Rob trying to get everyone off their arses and get the crowd going, but the majority of folk there were in there 60's or 70's (with a few "young" cunts like me in their 40's or below).

Oh, and The Cathouse, Glasgow's premiere rock club, is having an "Overs" night this weekend, opening up early for all us old bastards and playing 80's/90's/early 00's metal. Should be a blast. I don't give a fuck about my age when it comes to this type of thing. Traditionally the time-slot would have been for the teenage "Unders" and wouldn't sell alcohol then opened up later for the proper nightclub, but more and more clubs are having an "Overs" these days, it's an easy money maker.