Scrapclub, in a nutshell, is a place where people get together and smash stuff (that doesn’t work) to pieces. This could be old white goods, computers, monitors or other electronics as well as a selection of scrap metals such as car doors.

I wasn’t quite sure beforehand if I wanted to really beat the crap out of inanimate objects, both because they’ve never done anything to me and I don’t really have anger issues (unless you count not getting angry at things as an issue). Plus there seemed to be some pics of a piano getting broken up, which you would think would be fixable, and there’s something that seems a bit wrong about breaking an instrument.

However, I signed up dutifully and as soon as my name was called to go into the pit I knew I was going to get involved.

The setup is that ‘things’ are placed into an area, around 8 people come up at a time and get 10 minutes to smash stuff with a variety of tools, sledgehammers, hammers, steel pipes, golf clubs, but alas no chainsaw this time.

Once we were kitted up (hard hat, gloves) we went out among the trash to get ready to ruin it. I selected a sledgehammer as my weapon of choice and then strode out to defeat the small child’s toy car I had elected to start with.

As the bell rang I raised the hammer and brought it crashing down atop… the ground. I misjudged the distance. Not to worry another big swing and it struck! And bounced immediately off for no lasting damage. Still, I wasn’t going to be defeated and a few hefty strikes later the toy was in pieces, huzzah!

I then allowed myself to be briefly distracted by a Darth Vader helmet which I jumped up and down on until it was broken, before turning my attention to a 18″ by 12″ cast iron radiator.

This was a poor choice.

I wailed on that thing for about 7 minutes, hardly putting more than a couple of inch deep dents in it. It was the most solid object I could have picked. While everyone else was on the finishing strokes of their washing machine or cooker, I had managed to make my radiator slightly concave.

As the bell tolled announcing to stop I looked down at my sturdy radiator and then out at the pieces of fridge elsewhere and wondered if I had made the best use of my time.

Still, it was top fun and there should be another one in February. My only concern is that recycling the computers may yield precious metals more readily than mining them, so I’ll need to look that up before going back and seeing if it’s a particularly environmental thing to do.

Very British tale of a thug home invasion. It’s all fairly realistic, except that real life doesn’t necessarily make good viewing, which is kind of the case in this film.

It strikes me as having been made by somebody who’s read a bit too much of Daily Mail, and that all middle-class families better watch out or be terrorised by youfs, not subtly highlighted by the kids flicking through the couple’s CDs and DVDs with disinterest.

It’s short, at just 77 minutes, but even that feels as if it’s been padded out and ultimately just another ‘hoody culture’ film.

I’d recommend seeing F over this and though I’ve not seen it a lot of people recommend Eden Lake.

Ooh, just saw the very low rating for F on IMDb, I thought it was okay, I’ll have to watch it again.

I managed to get Tom and Johannes round as well as a couple of other people for some 6 player Munchkin.

Trouble on the Hammersmith and City line meant some people turned up very late, but we got a game of Munchkin Impossible in and then a portal game of Munchkin Cthulhu.

Munchkin Cthulhu is brutal. I think 5 of us died in the first 3 rounds, never seen that before (and I’ve been playing every day since last week), and the rules were a little bit more complex.

Still, wasn’t a bad afternoon but people had some more fun Saturday night plans and left not long after 18:00.

I was going to go to my friend’s first club night, but by the time I had dinner and looked at making the trip to Kings X, I couldn’t really be bothered. So watched one of the films I missed at last year’s Frightfest, Cherry Tree Lane.

The fact that this was a singles night wasn’t of too much interest to me (though you never know), but I just fancied going this weekend, so bought my ticket and asked a few folks if they wanted to come along so there was about 6 of us that I directly knew and a few friends of friends type deal, all good.

The ceilidhs are organised by The Ceilidh Club and take place in Cecil Sharp House (the English Folk Dance and Song Society building) with the odd one in Hammersmith.

So I ironed a shirt (important when impressing the ladies, even if it would be wringing with sweat later) and went along for the start after work. We kicked off with the Gay Gordons, moved swiftly to the Dashing White Sergeant and then finished the first hour with Strip the Willow!!!

Then, I started feeling pretty ill.

At first I assumed I was just out of shape and chose to site a few out, but, actually this was the beginning of me coming down with something. So I spent the rest of the night just hanging out by the sidelines feeling a bit sorry for myself.

I did hang around to the end though and got a second lot of Gay Gordons in before the dance finished.

While my first ceilidh down here left me wanting to go again, this one has left me hating it. There was far too many people on the dance floor who had no idea what they were doing, some being far too drunk for this sort of event and with no space to dance it was impossible to not bang into and step on or be stood on by people. Not the sort of thing I enjoy.

I might try once more on a normal night and see what it’s like before writing it off completely.

Photo Credits: I Don’t Know, Maybe

I headed down with Alan & Laura and Dom & Laura for some confusing double Laura action.

It’s a standard Redtooth quiz, which are usually very good and Dom & Laura talked up that they’ve won a similar quiz twice just themselves. We were feeling reasonably confident that we’d do okay. As it turned out though, we sucked.

We just couldn’t get any of the questions. The picture round stumped us, we didn’t know anything that had been happening in the news and our general knowledge was generally lacking. It was pretty hard and we felt stupid. It was just one of those quizzes where we didn’t know anything, other days the quiz might be fine, but not today.

We still got a not bad 31/50, however it wasn’t a huge amount of fun and we ended up just rushing to play Munchkin.

Still, we’ll give it a try again next week and see if we can do any better.

It’s been years since I saw the first but remembered enough about it that I knew who the characters were and what they’d done, plus I think it was suitably explained in the film, but to be honest I only half watched it because it was pretty boring.

I stuck with it mainly because I wanted to see what sort of message it was trying to get out about alternative energy funding, but ultimately it was far too dull to really capture anyone’s imagination, so can’t recommend it.

Really just a sequel nobody needed to a pretty good 80′s film.

It all came about around a year ago when I first came across r/london and there were only about 800 people on it when a call went out for a way to get more Redditors together.

I foolishly suggested someone organise a pub crawl, which somehow ended up in me volunteering myself. Regardless I stepped up to the challenge and September 18th 2010 marked the first r/london pub crawl.

Around 40 people showed up and I led us a merry dance around Covent Garden and Soho, ending up in the LongAcre with a couple of bottles of vodka. Good times.

After that the mantle was taken up by others and after Pub Crawl 2: Electric Boogaloo, r/londonsocialclub sprung up organise a few more events beyond the monthly crawls.

After around 5 months, meetups were suggested almost weekly, with a core group of Redditors coming out to most and more and more n00bs turning up to every event.

This culminated in the Reddit Global Meet Up day in July seeing over 230 Redditors in one pub!

Since beginning r/london has grown to almost 4,500 members and r/lsc to almost 1,500!

‘We’ now go out at least 8 days a weeks (well, more like a minimum of 5) to different events all around London, even if there’s only 3 or 4 of us to an event.

So, that’s the background. Pub Crawl X is the latest of these big events and saw us again going around central London drinking (well, I wasn’t) and having a grand time.

We played another game of Munchkin in the pub, which I again won! You can see my perspective of the game below

After winning my third game however I was on a Munchkin high and after we left the 2nd pub I decided to pop into Orc’s Nest to grab myself a copy before going to B@1. However, as it turns out I bought a truck load of Munchkin and since I had two large carrier bags full I headed home to drop them off and never went back out.

I then played Munchkin with my flatmate all night. I’m rock’n'roll that way.

Photo Credits: NewsWorthyVision

It was a fairly subdued affair with not many people wanting to be up early on a Saturday ahead of a day of drinking, so initially there was just three of us, with Tom and Mark having played before. This would give me time to become acquainted with the rules over my (non-diet) large Wetherspoons full English breakfast.

The game was simple enough, start at level 1, defeat monsters to reach level 10 and win. The game is played with cards which grant bonuses or items to your character, spring traps, cast spells and mess up your opponents. There’s a hefty amount of luck but mitigated with a bit of skill in choosing when and how to play.

It’s easy enough to pick up on as the cards are really the rules. While there’s a basic outline given, the effects of the cards change the game significantly every time it’s played so there’s no huge advantage to have played a lot more than anyone else.

At least that’s what the guys told me after I beat them.

We picked up a fourth member for our second game, Johannes, and as he’d also played before so we quickly kicked off a the second game, which I again won. I am clearly the best Munchkin player the world has ever seen.

At that point I went to join the pub crawl and the other guys went to Chipotle for lunch.

There are a bunch of different Munchkins which I’ll ‘review’ individually as I play them, but as an introduction to the game this was top fun.

I’d never been the Archangel before and managed to get myself lost by blindly following my phone’s GPS directions (an increasingly common occurrence) but soon met up with everyone and we headed in.

I’m still not drinking but wasn’t going to let that stop me and soon put my name up for a few songs.

Unfortunately that evening also happened to have a few parties in, so was quite busy and also had a Meetup group – Active Karaoke In London!

Needless to say the singers were pretty damned awesome including this girl, who sang a fantastic rendition of Creep.

I wasn’t on great form anyway, so got in an early performance of 500 Miles on my own, despite being there with another 2 Scotsmen, poor show lads. I hung around until about 23:00 before I got too sober (or was everyone else getting too drunk) and wandered home.

Still a good night, even without a drink, and I did fall a little bit in love with the compere, Kirsty Crawford.

Craft fairs, to my mind, are really a small scale look into the future of micro-manufacturing. There are people there with a genuine flair and talent, turning material into products to be sold at a local level (and everyone should make more local purchases, not just food) and becoming an entrepreneur in the process. These are the sort of people who will be making designs and generating fans who buy their work in the future. The fact that they have to make the products is not where their value lies.

At the other end there are a lot of people who have made things from patterns picked up online (knitted beards as an example) and generic bead jewellery. These sort of people I don’t see taking their craft beyond a hobby and, as micro-manufacturing becomes more and more something available in the household, their commodity as a manufacturer becomes less valuable.

I’m not suggesting 3D printers are going to be printing wool or knitting any time soon but sites giving away standard patterns for crafts already exist, sites like Folksy and Etsy make hand crafted items easy to get and new sites like Ponoko are springing up for printable items.

For some reason there was also a very nature-y theme running throughout everyone’s products, with foxes and badgers taking center stage on a lot of products and all having a very ‘craft fair-y’ feel. This brought up thoughts which covered by part of the Future Human talk about copyright and piracy. If you’re interested it may be worth having a read of the full debrief especially this white paper [PDF].

Before leaving the market I decided I might as well buy something, though with no shopping agenda nothing particularly grabbed me, so I decided on just getting a couple of drinks coasters from Superfumi as seen in the image above.

I’m keeping the beer one (despite not currently drinking beer because of my diet) and sending the other to my coffee drinking friend in Germany.

I finished the night at a nearby Thai place where I had a couple of vegetarian dishes that were both very, very tasty. I’d recommend the Krew Krob.

As I’m still interested in everything, I’ll be finishing up my investigations into crafts and crafting by attending this Bright Club and having a wander around this free exhibition at the V&A museum.