Hello members of the deviantart community randomly searching usernames at 2am and randomly managed to stumble across my account.

On the bizarre and random aspects of my life. As some of you may know I’m training as an aircraft pilot a Wellsbourne. I went up to do circuit training last week (you basically just take off, go around the airstrip and land) and when we went back up for the second run my instructor noticed someone parked on the runway. Turns out he’d had a pretty rough landing! (He was ok- just in case your conscience demanded it).

When you land a plane (For any of those who don’t like flying because it makes your ears pop) you glide over the runway at about 50-60 ft, decrease the power to minimum and it drops to the runway and you just roll to the end. Some planes have fixed wheels on their undercarriage and so they’re always ready to land. However some of the more expensive ones have a retractable landing gear that you pull up into the undercarriage in flight to increase speed and stability- problem is they’re a little more delicate. So when this guy tried to land he was a few feet higher than he should have been, landed, the landing gear snapped and he ended up skidding along the runway on their undercarriage.

This meant that the entire airport was shutdown for what they said would be ’30 minutes’. Wellsbourne is quite a small airport and as such standard procedure is usually- check the pilot call the tractor and have it drag the wreckage off, problem solved. However the same ‘Health and Safety people’ that ensure that when there’s roadwork’s on the motorway you’re reduced to 30mph to protect the workers who are 20 miles away in an office having a 2 hour safety briefing insist that the entire runway be cleared with a fine toothed comb to ensure there are no fragments of glass metal etc that are going to shred my tires or pierce into the cockpit and lodge in my skull. Thank the government for ensuring that I’m safely stuck 2,000 ft up in the air with about an hour’s worth of fuel to last the 3 hour clean up job they insist on undertaking every time someone smashes a bottle.

Since we were stuck up there anyway we hot footed it to Glouster for 3 main reasons. 1- We didn’t know how long it would take. They said 30 minutes but when you have an hour’s fuel you don’t want to be stuck up there for 30 minutes when they say ‘Sorry goanna be another 30 minutes’.

2- The only other closest airports to Wellsbourne are Birmingham and Coventry. Both of those are huge airports that hate it when small planes jump out of the sky and try to land. Plus security is a bitch because of everything that’s going on the welcoming party is several armed guards all snapping on rubber gloves. Plus landing charges are about £100 a day- the flying company pays for that but they’d be pretty pissed.

3- Glouster airport sells Aviation fuel cheaper than Wellsbourne, and we were the ones who were stuck with re-fuelling the thing.

Anyway long story short we just had to wait at Glouster till Wellsbourne reopened. That was about an hour.


But back to what this journal was made for. Red Alert 3. RE 3 is the spiritual successor to Red Alert 1 and 2 but with a few twists added onto the first two. Firstly the story picks up when the Soviet Union has collapsed, the Premier has jumped ship and the remnant of Soviet command structure attempts their ‘Get out of fuck up free plan’ by unleashing their rip-off of the Allied Time Machine to go back in time, kill Einstein and make the Soviets top dog once again.

However, they even manage to screw that up (Completely understandable since the Russians can’t even make a decent wrist watch so tampering with the very fabric of reality seems like a bit of a step too far for them). Sure enough shit hits the fan and while the Soviets are winning against the Allies it’s all a moot point as they now have a new enemy- the Japanese ‘Empire of the Rising Sun’ pushing in from the east to beat the living crap out of the both of them.

As with previous Command and Conquer titles you play along 3 separate campaigns, each thinly intertwined with eachother and ultimately leading to one faction’s dominance over the other two.

Gameplay is the same as any other C&C game- only difference being this time the entire campaign is 2-player with you and either an AI or buddy controlling your ‘Co-commander’. If it’s an AI you can boss them around to defend, attack or destroy things within target locations or just leave them to do whatever. That doesn’t mean you can rely on them to do the job for you however as the AI was designed without even the most basic idea of military strategy i.e. if the enemy base is solely defended against an Air attack they won’t bother with that whole ‘thinking up a plan’ thing and instead just send whatever they have available to attack it. They also seem to have a problem on maps with about ¼ water and the rest land when if they’re engaged on the water first they fill their entire army with subs, dolphins etc and destroy all opposition on the water there by leaving you to assail the fortress protecting the ultimate objective by yourself while they protect the Thames from invading whales. The banter and wit of your AI counterpart is also a joy to listen too when they’re actually still alive to utter it and haven’t been obliterated by the enemies first wave.

The option also exists now to construct most buildings on either land or sea- there by making the early tank blitzes seen in the multiplayer of previous RE games a little harder to enact.

Returning once again is the female tech support character wearing an outfit tailored in the style of their faction so short it can’t have been designed by anything but the middle-aged male.

But overall I really enjoyed RE3 and I recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed the series thus far. My only hope is that the developers realize that this is where the series should end before they start spiralling down hill fast like what Halo is predictably going to be doing within the next year or so. Hopefully Halo ODST and Reach will still have some life left to breath into the series. But it can’t go much further than that and considering you ‘Finished the fight’ in Halo 3 what’s left too do? Kill a few Brute remnants? Annihilate the flood? And I highly doubt even the most hard core fans will be camping out in front of GAME for Halo: Peacetime War-games.


Also on a more personal note I am now one of the few ‘Un-sung heroes’ as the NHS would have me believe that have officially signed up to donate blood and organs.

I know most people don’t give blood because they fear the pain and it is very weird having a needle in you draining blood but I can assure you the processes the NHS use these days are very painless (I’m afraid I can’t speak for the Americans or Australians etc).

You do feel so much better afterwards- both physically and mentally in knowing you’ve done something to help. It is really relaxing throughout- though I am considered quite a mellow person by most peoples standards so chances are that might just be me. My brother has been donating for years and I decided to join up as well- he took it upon himself to convince someone else to donate, then they convince someone else etc and it creates a chain of new donors.

So if you live in the UK and are aged 17-65 chances are you’re free to donate a pint every four months. My advice if you are going to do it is go with someone else- either another donor or just someone for support. It’s a very worthwhile cause which can save lives, and if that’s not enough you get free drinks and biscuits. You could also consider it a form of insurance- so if I’m in a car crash in the next two weeks then chances are there will be a bag of my blood type in the freezer with my name on it- literally.