Our pond has, apparently spontaneously, generated two goldfish. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
This scenario is set in 1975; it deals with a British carrier group, heading home across the Atlantic at the outbreak of war, attacked by Soviet submarine and air forces. Total play time has been nearly two months, my goodness.
This small one-day boardgaming event happens twice a year in a village hall in Deepest Buckinghamshire, and has been going for quite a few years. This was my third visit.
2012 mystery, second in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. Twelve years ago Tony McLean caught the Christmas Killer, whose last victim was McLean's fiancée. Now that man's been killed in prison, but another young woman's corpse has just turned up, killed in the same way. A copycat? Or did McLean get the wrong man?
Last night I was out in London at the Camden Town Brewery. (Images follow; all are cc-by-sa.)
2015 SF/mystery; fiftieth (roughly) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. At the end of 2060, Homicide Lieutenant Eve Dallas comes up against a new threat: a murderer who's such a fan that he's killing people who've offended Dallas. And there are a lot of them.
About eleven people, at the Abbot Cook (formerly Jack of Both Sides) in Reading.
2014, 12 episodes: AniDB
Modern magic. After the sun turns black and Arata's girlfriend disintegrates before his eyes, he now has to go to magician school.
2003 mystery, the eighth book in Lovesey's Peter Diamond series. Is a killing on a beach connected with the murder of a celebrity film director?
A barbecue on a chilly spring day. Images follow: cc-by-sa on everything.
This specialised GURPS supplement deals with unusual sensory powers, from the reasonable to the cinematic.
2010, dir. Chris Morris, Riz Ahmed, Kayvan Novak; IMDb / allmovie
Four Muslim men from Sheffield aspire to be suicide bombers. Black comedy ensues.
During my recent reading of London Falling, I wondered how quickly someone might get from the Boleyn Ground at Upton Park to the M25.
2012 urban fantasy. The big crime boss is finally arrested, curiously easily, but explodes in a shower of blood while he's being interviewed. In trying to work out what happened, four coppers accidentally step into a much larger world.
2014-2015: Ichabod Crane, survivor from the American Revolutionary War, continues to fight in the modern day against the imminent Apocalypse.
1990 SF. On a passenger liner in hyperspace, the speed of light is a mere ten metres per second. But humans are still humans.
Yesterday I took part in my first X-Wing tournament. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
1980, cosy American detective fiction; first of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Madoc and Janet Rhys. In a small Canadian town, the local old biddy has died of eating her own contaminated preserves. But was she really that careless?
More X-Wing at Wycombe Warband. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
2013 Florida Weird. On Key West, former Miami cop Andrew Yancy has a human arm in his freezer. But there's a reason for that. Yancy thinks the story about the arm's owner dying in a boating accident is full of holes, and sets off on an unofficial investigation.
It has become fashionable to claim that a remake or reinvention of a favourite book, film or whatever from when one was young "ruined my childhood". And inevitably it has also become fashionable to dismiss such overblown nonsense. I think there is potential for a useful middle way.
2014, dir. Eric Darnell and Simon J. Smith; IMDb / allmovie
In this spin-off from the Madagascar series, four penguin secret agents attempt to foil the plot of the sinister Dr Octavius Brine. Or at least to find Cheesy Dibbles to eat.
2013 SF, seventh in the Academy series and a prequel. Priscilla Hutchins is just completing interstellar pilot training, but already demand for pilots is dropping. And terrorists are threatening the terraforming project. Spoilers.
2014-2015 superheroic fantasy. In 1946, after the presumed death of Captain America, his girlfriend Peggy Carter works for a secret government agency.
I don't like network-manager. It's too big and complicated and hard to persuade to do the things I want. Fortunately it's not too hard to do without it.
2014, 12 episodes: AniDB; also known as "Electric Town Bookstore".
Workplace sitcom based in a manga/DVD/game/etc. shop, poking fun at the fandom and conventions of the genre.
1978, popular history. Tuchman recounts the history of France and some nearby countries in the latter part of the Fourteenth Century, with particular focus on the nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy.
Back to the boardgame café. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
I've recently switched back to using contact lenses.
1897: the spoiled son of a millionaire, washed overboard from a steamer, is rescued and put to work by the crew of a Grand Banks cod-boat.
Back to this this small quarterly boardgames convention in Watford, and I kept up my pattern of not winning any game I play.