Some time in the future, two convicts working on the Moon discover something strange: a flower, blooming on the surface. Then things get weird.
2009: Okrent examines the history of invented languages, and in particular the rare instances that weren't immediately forgotten.
It's often tempting, but usually an error, to allow control signals to be sent by the same channel as the data. This is an example of why.
2014, 13 episodes: AniDB, sequel to Free! (2013).
High school sports club anime: the sport in this instance is swimming.
We got up to five with another newcomer, and mostly played Avalon.
Sequel to Ancillary Justice. Breq, now a Fleet Captain, travels to a backwater world to help assure its survival in the civil war.
Daryl of the Reading Boardgames Social organised a day of boardgaming at the Siren Craft Brewery, on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhere south of Reading.
Ross Baker is having a bad day. He'd just lain down for an experimental brain scan, and now he seems to be a cyborg soldier in an endless war. And it's going to get a lot stranger than that. If you plan to read this book, know that I thought it fairly good (I'd rate it with Pandæmonium as minor but worth reading, much better than When the Devil Drives) and stop reading now to avoid the spoilers.
Accounting rules have perverse effects on real life. Here's an example dear to my heart.
This third game went a lot faster than the last, taking about twelve days of real time to run.
In a small village by the Devon coast, a very strange fellow has moved into the old pill-box on the cliff. Excitement ensues.
I'm trying to learn more about practical multirotor design with a view to designing and building my own. A multirotor flies essentially by replacing mechanical complexity with software complexity, which is lighter. Here's a bit more detail.
Ben Goldacre explains at length how pretty much everything about drug research and selection is rotten.
2014, 12 episodes: AniDB
Mecha series. The Martians are invading Earth, and their technology is overpowering. But some Earthlings are able to fight back.
In an attempt to get details of the latest Chinese missile submarine, an American attack boat is sent in to shadow her. Spoilers.
2014, dir. Gabe Ibañez, Antonio Banderas, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen: IMDb / allmovie
After the vast majority of humanity has been killed by solar storms, robots keep the remainder alive in a small numer of cities. But some robots seem to be breaking their rules.
The Torg adventure The Possibility Chalice was published in the far-off days of 1990, when information about mysterious lands across the ocean was hard to come by, especially in a small town in Pennsylvania.
As always, spoilers abound. See Wikipedia for production details
The Doctor - Peter Davison Adric - Matthew Waterhouse Nyssa - Sarah Sutton Tegan Jovanka - Janet Fielding
After the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian Empire goes to war. Josef Švejk, a dealer in stolen dogs, does his best to get by.
The current American television season is in full swing, and while it's pretty lacklustre I've caught up with some new series that looked interesting.
Sixth mystery starring Meg Lanslow, contemporary blacksmith. Meg and her boyfriend have bought a huge old house very cheaply, on condition that they clear out and sell the accumulated junk left by the previous owner. But during the sale, a dubious dealer in antiquities turns up dead…
I run a lot of role-playing games set in the real world. (As Ken Hite points out, the background material is much richer and has had more people working on it, even if it's sometimes less plausible.) One surprisingly easy technique to add consistency and a sense of realism is being able to say what the moon is doing.
Tenth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. Back on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, a body's been found in an old plantation house, left in a manner suggestive of sexual homicide.
2014, 12 episodes: AniDB, also known as Blue Spring Ride.
Contemporary school story adapted from shōjo manga. Futaba reinvents herself as she enters high school, only to find that her middle-school crush Kou has also reinvented _him_self.
Tove Jansson's second book about the Moomins. Original title Kometjakten.
Back to the boardgame café. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
Revolution! Anarchy is the new 5-6 player expansion to Revolution!.
The author of the webcomic xkcd works out back-of-the-envelope answers to odd scientific questions.
For Halloween, or at least All Saints', a friend hosted a session of Mansions of Madness, a game I'd heard about but never played. All images are cc-by-sa.
When I'm driving, I may get caught in traffic or have to divert round roadworks. If that happens, I don't want to pull in to call whoever's at my destination; that'll just make me even later, and on the motorway there aren't many opportunities to stop. But the machinery that I'm already using to log my trips knows my position anyway…