(First written in June 2013)
As always, spoilers abound. See Wikipedia for production details
Doctor Who (sic) - Patrick Troughton Jamie McCrimmon - Frazer Hines Victoria Waterfield - Deborah Watling Zoe Heriot - Wendy Padbury
The seventh book (or, if you believe the publisher, sixth) in Lackey's Elemental Masters series; for a change, it's not just more of the same.
There are various ways to get and keep good equipment in GURPS, other than just laying down money for it. Here are most of them.
The tenth book in Leon's Commissario Brunetti series, as with other series entries I've been reading lately, offers more of the same: descriptions of the seamy underside of Venice interspersed with lightweight police work.
(First written in November 2012)
As before, spoilers abound. See Wikipedia for production details
Doctor Who (sic) - William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton Ben Jackson - Michael Craze Polly - Anneke Wills Jamie McCrimmon - Frazer Hines Victoria Waterfield - Deborah Watling
1965, dir. Michael Anderson, George Peppard, Sophia Loren: IMDb / allmovie
This is a highly-fictionalised account, a triple-stranded story of the German V-weapon development programme, the British efforts (the actual Crossbow) to work out what was going on and develop countermeasures, and as part of that a mission to insert agents into the rocket development and construction programmes.
Ready Player One is a young adult SF novel, the first by this author. Set in the future, it deals with its protagonist's efforts in a pervasive virtual world to win a contest based in the videogaming and related culture of the 1980s.
I saw this at The Battletech State forwarded from a sarna.net blog post, and thought I'd join in. "What are your five favourite 'Mechs from the original 3025 Technical Readout?"
(First written in April 2012)
Doctor Who (sic) - William Hartnell Vicki - Maureen O'Brien Steven Taylor - Peter Purves Katarina - Adrienne Hill Sara Kingdom - Jean Marsh Dodo Chaplet - Jackie Lane Ben Jackson - Michael Craze Polly - Anneke Wills
I've written a set of rules that replace BattleTech. Why would I do such a foolhardy thing? Here I'm planning to write a bit about what's wrong with BattleTech.
The Vault is the sixth book in Lovesey's Peter Diamond series. I'm definitely liking Lovesey: like any good author of detective fiction, he plays fair with the reader, giving all the necessary clues while hiding them under a chaff-screen of red herrings and misdirection.
(Readers not in England, if any, please ignore.)
Have you even heard of care.data?
Yesterday I played my second game of Chain of Command, and got reasonably thoroughly thrashed. But it was still a very enjoyable experience. (Always a sign of a good wargame, that.) Be warned, this is a fairly image-heavy post.
(First written in February 2012)
Doctor Who (sic) - William Hartnell Susan Foreman - Carole Ann Ford Barbara Wright - Jacqueline Hill Ian Chesterton - William Russell Vicki - Maureen O'Brien
Since we happened to be in Marlow again today, we thought we'd see how things were getting on. The water seemed generally to be between nine inches and a foot lower than last week.
Explosions in GURPS confuse many people. Here's how they work, broken down at greater length than was available in the rules.
Thankless in Death is the forty-sixth of J. D. Robb's In Death series. It's also, for me, the first disappointment.
(First written in December 2011)
I've recently started watching Doctor Who from the beginning. I've seen occasional episodes and stories here and there (e.g. back when I had a television and the BBC would do anniversary specials), but my experience as a regular viewer starts towards the end of the Sarah Jane Smith era.
I'm not going to worry about listing alternative titles or any of that guff. See Wikipedia for that. I am interested primarily in the progress and development of the show as a show rather than in constructing complex fanwank explanations for why decisions that were made differently the second time they came up, or dodgy effects shots, aren't really mistakes.
So here are my thoughts on re-watching the first series... spoilers abound, obviously.
Had a five-minute hailstorm just before noon today.
GURPS 4th edition introduced a completely new mechanism for the resolution of attacks with rapid-firing and automatic weapons, and uses the same one for shotgun pellet hits (which are after all a similar sort of multi-projectile attack). Here's how it works.
As one can see from the title, this is the nineteenth full novel in Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. And, well, it feels like a nineteenth novel: it's tired.
OK, we've taken out American and European industry. We still need to deal with China, which the original game completely neglected, and Japan. I'm wondering here about a blend: wuxia action with conspiracy thriller in the style of some modern Asian action films.
My wife heard about the flooding at Marlow, and we thought we'd go to see what we could see. Several of the houses along the waterfront were inaccessible by foot, though I didn't see any water actually above door-sills. While I wasn't feeling in a particularly journalistic mood, I took a few pictures with my phone.
Yes, I'm talking about the book, or more accurately the collection of newspaper columns, not the film. The film is a wartime story, made as part of the Allied propaganda effort. The columns are earlier and more interesting:
Firefly is a 1-5 player boardgame of travelling through space, taking jobs, trying to make enough money to keep flying. I played it on the Sunday of Stabcon and bought a copy before the game was over. What's good about it?
I'm running Torg at the moment. Because I didn't want it to turn into a research-fest, I'm running it pretty much as it was written.
But this raised the question: what would be a more representative, and more interesting, set of worlds to choose as invaders? One of the original ideas of Torg was that the worlds should be representative of popular role-playing genres, but this doesn't seem to have made it into the final game -- cyberpunk may well have been big, but lost-world fantasy with dinosaurs? Really?
Yes, Roger has finally started blogging. I expect to write about games, computers, beer, and other things I find interesting. You may find you want to follow entries by tag (they will appear as I post the entries) rather than reading the whole thing.
Because I'm using Steve Kemp's excellent chronicle software, comments won't be published immediately as they're entered, but any that I approve will be pushed to the site when I rebuild it.
I plan to use this as a platform for bloviation and pontification. Because I don't have enough of those already.