Rick Brindle

  Get the model right, and they're good for all level of player . Epiphones are an excellent first choice for any aspiring axe monsters out there. They are well made, playable and pretty affordable. And while I play a Squier (with Seymour Duncan Hot Rail pick ups), and am perfectly happy with it, I’m sure I would be equally happy with an Epiphone SG. So that’s the beginners sorted out, and as for the pros, JayJay French of Twisted Sister tours with an Epiphone. He can absolutely afford a Gibson, but has said many times that the Epiphone is way good enough for live work, and his more expensive instruments won’t get messed up, or worse, stolen if he takes them on the road. And whether you like his music or not, he’s absolutely a professional musician, and he knows what he’s doing. Unlike Cold Steel. Cold Steel on the Rocks   We Are Cold Steel   Cold Steel and the Underground Boneyard   It's Not For Everyone   Sister Alex

  Cold Steel on the Rocks , the first instalment in the hilarious Cold Steel trilogy, is free to download from Amazon for a limited time. Get your free copy now!   When the pirate, Blackbeard, buried his treasure, he could never have imagined that it would fall to the heavy metal band, Cold Steel, to come looking for it. Cold Steel, high-octane British rockers who came close to legendary status, until the release of their fourth album, when their excesses send them spiralling into terminal decline. Struggling small-time band manager Johnny Faslane, in the right place at the right time, lands the dream job of managing Cold Steel, and then has the seemingly impossible mission of turning the band around. Cold Steel’s singer, Maxwell Diabolo, claims to have a treasure map that he thinks will lead him to Blackbeard’s lost riches. With the band bent on a terrifying path of self-destruction, Johnny wonders if they will even complete the tour, much less get to the Caribbean to embark ...

  Hey, never say never, but I think probably not. Bronze is made by combining copper and tin. It’s an alloy of two other metals and it took centuries to perfect as a process, and while it’s still in use as a specialised metal, it was then superseded by iron as the better all round metal. All of which was a long time ago. The problem post-apocalypse, would likely be joining the sources of copper and tin, because they don’t tend to be found in the same places. So the first thing you’d need is extraction, followed by trade, followed by then re-learning how to make the stuff. I’m not saying that it would be impossible, and of course, we all imagine our own apocalypse, but I’d imagine that the survivors, which of course will include you, will most likely revert to scavenging what’s already available and picking up on the remnants of whatever fragments of ‘civilisation’ have also survived. And if you’ve got someone like Lord Humungus on your arse, you’ve probably got more pressing matter...

  Sister Alex , my novel about post-apocalyptic survival in Berkshire, England, is free to download from Amazon for a limited time. Get your free copy now! Berkshire, England, and it’s no longer the promised land. Ever since a species-wide illness wiped out nearly every human being, the home counties have become a gender-based battlefield. The women stick together as a single, cohesive community, but only as long as you’re a woman. And it’s the same for the men, although they haven’t quite got the same group thing going, choosing instead to range as lone threats, taking what they want. Sometimes they team up and run in pairs, but only as long as you’re a man. They’re separate tribes, and they hate each other on sight. Pick your gender, pick your side. And then there’s Alex, born as a man, identifies as a woman, and thanks to a stash of scavenged hormones, she’s stuck somewhere between the two, lost in the middle and hated by them all. But she’s survived, and if what’s left of the w...

  Sister Alex , my novel about a trans woman surviving the apocalypse has just had its first review on  Goodreads .  Sister Alex Cold Steel on the Rocks   We Are Cold Steel   Cold Steel and the Underground Boneyard   It's Not For Everyone

  It's a definite yes from me! For the first six weeks of my training I used the SLR, and once I moved to Catterick for Basic Gunner training, it was the SA80/LSW all the way. And even though I was left handed and was issued with the A1 version, I still loved it. It had a great balance, the sling was a work of genius, and it was loads shorter than your average rifle config. And bullpups also meant that there wasn’t any appreciable reduction in barrel length, which meant you still had good accuracy and muzzle velocity. Bullpups aren’t hugely new, with the British EM-2 almost making it to universal adoption just after WW2. After passing Basics and being posted to a squadron, I was issued an SLR once again for a couple of months, but despite all of the old school fanbois banging on about how the SLR could shoot an elephant stone dead (because you really do see lots of elephants on the battlefield), I was perfectly happy with my bullpup SA80 that no one else seemed to like. But bullpup...

  Electric, every time,  and that’s even  after  the budget. Last year I drove a Hyundai i10. And it was a good, solid, reliable car, but every time I drove it I was putting carbon into the atmosphere and directly contributing to climate change. And to do it, I was paying about a thousand quid a year in petrol. Then I traded it for a Renault Zoe. It had 14k miles on the clock and cost £11k. The budget means I’ll have to pay 3p per mile in tax. That’s about 150 quid for the miles I tend to do, and my home charger adds about another 150 quid to ‘fill up.’ So compared to petrol, I’m still 700 quid better off for the same mileage, and I’m at least doing less damage to the climate. So for me it’s a no-brainer. Electric cars are cheaper to run, they’re better for the environment, and on a more mundane level, the ‘engine noise’ even sounds more modern. They are absolutely the future. Cold Steel on the Rocks   We Are Cold Steel   Cold Steel and the Underground Bone...