The first sign was his declaration that he was going off to play squash. Now bearing in mind his usual sum total of exercise is the hundred yard skive, that little gem came as a bit of a surprise.
Not as much of a surprise however as his sports gear was, which consisted of yellow tartan golfing pants, a pink feather boa and a saw-tooth machete.
There are certain things a chap does not wish to see before he's drunk, and others that he is really glad he isn't seeing during said pastime.
The good news is that we can't inflict any video evidence of this behavior on the general populace; for some reason videos have a habit of becoming non-existent in Kenneth's presence.
I do however have an insight into why he has taken a high dive into an extremely shallow bowl of custard.
Kenneth can't cope with the new sales format of individual categories.
And to be honest I don't blame him, because lately I'd rather do income tax returns than try and work out my niode budget with these new singular item sales.
I shall explain.
Lets forget for a moment the higher tier of spending player, since the rest of us poor folk simply imagine that they buy what they need when they need. They may not, but a gentleman doesn't ask others about their finances.
No, we are going to consider the rest of us who have to scrimp, save and melt down prizes to make budget. And when it comes to spending that meager budget we have two main ways of planning.
The first is to select one mech and completely trick it out into an uber mech of biblical proportions. This is where those massively expensive build plans come in.
Of course there is a downside to this, in that all your eggs are in one or a few baskets, and your mega mech can always be taken out by an unlucky critical. Even if that isn't the case, the other weak mechs in the same line can be taken out easier meaning you loose line coherency and start getting overpowered as an enemy has numerical supremacy in both mechs and the amount of shots they throw at you.
In terms of spending (says he pulling the conversation back on topic) it does mean that if you haven't finished outfitting an uber mech, you need to make a hard decision of whether to take advantage of a sale and start a new mech being upgraded or hold out for sales on the items you still need.
The other method of course is to spread the wealth and items a piece at a time around every mech in your formation. Relative strength is kept with no intrinsically weak spots, but of course you don't get anything earth shattering until after a huge amount of time and expenditure.
The problem with this method is that when an individual category sale comes up, you need to check every mech in your line to see where the weak points are, provided of course they are in that category, which they might not be, but you need to check anyway.
Then again in your specialist formation if you are regularly performing that duty.Then for the all the rest of the specialist formations because chances are you are weak in at least two or three of those, and you want to maximise your offensive points in the next war (please read 'get even with the annoying goit you haven't been able to take yet...').
It's around this point that you wish you'd kept track of your mech load-outs in a spreadsheet, and/or wish there was a way you could easily export the info from all of your squadrons into one.
At the point where you reach for a spreadsheet, please see above for my comment on 'rather be doing my tax returns'.
Or just commit sepuku using a tea spoon, whichever is less painful.
The point is, I don't blame Kenneth for having a funny turn.
I Just need to remember that next time I can take still photos of his outfit and there's always a handful of niodes to be made in blackmail.
But I draw the line at taking photos of him in that tooth fairy costume...
Submitted by David McCallum #701548