Outside Context

Wel­come back to OC, Cesca and I have been away for two weeks as she has been cre­at­ing a prize win­ning show garden at the pres­ti­gi­ous RHS Mal­vern Show and I have been camp­ing along­side her revis­ing for my dip­loma in Com­bat­ing Fin­an­cial Crime. Now we are back and on sched­ule for the sum­mer. Here is what you can expect from the OC over the next few months:

• This Is India pod­cast 2. We already have this one mapped out and it includes the Shiva temples of Hampi, the tech cap­ital of Ban­galore, the majestic palaces of Mysore and the high moun­tains of Ooty, where we meet up with one of our top trav­el­ling com­pan­ions for the rest of south­ern India: Gweny.
• Ker­ala. Enough said. This is a wonder.
• A review of Robin Hood – should it pro­voke one?
• A Basho film of the Mall.
• A Basho film of the forth­com­ing 3 day milsim event at TA, Sennybridge, includ­ing our Mag­pul send-up!
• A Basho film of the Mal­vern garden.

Any­way, before all that:

The Air­soft Adven­tures Podcast!

This pod­cast is not on our travels, rather it is about the sport I play with my team mates, the sport of airsoft.

I have been play­ing air­soft now for 7 years, which is an easy date for me to remem­ber as I star­ted my first proper skir­mish on my stag night. I went on from there to play reg­u­larly at the old Lon­don site of Elec­trow­erkz and was soon draf­ted into the Dark Angels (as they were then known); a 30 strong team of ser­i­ous CQB play­ers. Soon after that I was asked to join the mar­shalling team at Elec­trow­erkz and rose to become a senior mar­shal and even ran the venue on my own a few times. Unfor­tu­nately, Elec­trow­erkz closed on the day I left to go trav­el­ling and the Dark Angels became team Delta-Alpha. They have gone from strength to strength since then and have suc­cess­fully branched out into play­ing mil­it­ary sim­u­la­tion games as well as appear­ing on TV, a music video and as “res­ist­ance secur­ity” for the Sarah Con­nor Chron­icles Lon­don launch party. This year, a vote was taken to reduce the “pub­li­city” side of the team and focus on the air­soft and I was raised to become of the 5 com­mit­tee mem­bers. We now prowl around the air­soft cir­cuit, some­times being hired as a scrip­ted enemy, but always remind­ing people that Team DA plays a very com­mit­ted game at a very high stand­ard of fair­ness and honour.

If you have an air­soft ground, if you need 30 very well equipped and motiv­ated play­ers to come down and kick your local boy’s asses, and if you can find our web­site, then maybe you can hire: The DA Team.

Today’s pod­cast takes a look at the dif­fer­ences between play­ing at the Mall in Read­ing, which is a CQB venue in 250,000 square feet of dis­ser­ted shop­ping mall, and a Stirl­ing Com­bat mis­sion, which is a ser­i­ous role­play milsim event run by ex SAS mem­bers and not for the faint hearted.

In this epis­ode we cover:

• What is play­ing the Mall really like?
• Do Stirl­ing play­ers really tor­ture each other?
• Will vil­la­ger Trip fight for the Taliban team of oppress­ors, or the Amer­ican team hand­ing out biscuits?
• Is the Mall’s safety brief really 50 minutes long?

All will be revealed right here, so please click to play!

If the above doesn’t work try the dir­ect link: http://www.outsidecontext.com/wordpress/wp-content/podcast/TheMall.mp3

Sup­port­ing Media

Dur­ing the pod­cast, ref­er­ence is made to the fol­low­ing 12 man kill streak caught on cam­era by Basho:

This is the first pod­cast on this sub­ject and we hope to be able to do many more. If you would like to appear as a guest in the next one (over Skype) then please let me know via the com­ments form below.