Four nominees in this category that conform to my criteria. I'm not much of a comics reader as a rule, but there's a pleasing diversity of styles.
2015, 13 episodes: AniDB
Parody of contemporary slice-of-life and romance. Aki Tomoya tries to create a computer game (in one of the standard Japanese models, with good art and multiple-choice gameplay) with the assistance of various schoolmates.
2011; thirteenth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Jude and Carole go to a private viewing by a consciously controversial artist at a local gallery, but the evening ends in violent death. The police reckon it's suicide, but…
2012 horror, dir. Brad Parker, Jesse McCartney, Jonathan Sadowski: IMDb / allmovie
A tourist trip into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone goes horribly wrong.
For this year's Hugo awards there are three semiprozines in contention that satisfy my voting criteria. One didn't bother to provide a sample in the Hugo packet. This is one of the other two.
There's a certain mentality in games (particularly wargames, but others too) which seems to be associated with tournament play.
2011 SF, first of a five-book series. Ia is a precognitive who foresees the collapse of human civilisation… unless she takes a specific path, which starts with becoming a space marine.
2015 science fiction. On an island off the Washington coast, there's a disease outbreak, but a religious community living there doesn't seem to be worried about it. And it all has something to do with the immortals.
Summer barbecue, on the day before the solstice. Images follow: cc-by-sa on everything; some photos are by Owen Smith.
A game-related post for Free RPG Day. These are not "campaigns I plan to run", just ideas that someone could do the hard work on to turn into a game. I might run them at some point if the players are enthused; I would be nearly as happy if someone else took inspiration from them and ran something related that I could play in.
2004 SF, second in a five-book series. Kylara Vatta survived her first solo trading venture, but now someone's taking on the family firm. UK vt Moving Target.
Dynamic Mongoose is an ongoing series of naval exercises in anti-submarine warfare, taking place off the coast of Norway. This year's exercise was rather more multinational than recent years' have been, perhaps inspired by recent reports of possibly-Russian submarines inside other nations' territorial waters. The most blatant sign that it is being taken seriously is that it happened in May rather than the usual February in the North Sea. (Still cold, but rather less horrible.)
2001 espionage thriller. Caroline Carmichael, CIA intelligence analyst, thought she'd lost her husband in a plane bombing. Until he showed up in a photo of the people who had just kidnapped the Vice-President of the USA during a terrorist attack in Berlin.
The meadow last year was a riot of various wildflowers. This year it's been mostly oxeye daisies. Images follow: cc-by-sa on everything.
There's only one non-slate novelette on the ballot this year, so that's what I'm reviewing here: The Day The World Turned Upside Down, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt.
Yesterday RAF Northolt had its Centenary Open day. Yes, it was first used as a flying-field in May 1915. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
Pyramid is the monthly GURPS supplement containing short articles with a loose linking theme. "Space Atlas" covers places to take a campaign… in space.
2003 SF, first in a five-book series. Kylara Vatta is thrown out of space navy academy, then gets a job taking one of the family firm's oldest ships on its final voyage to the scrapyard. Of course it all gets more complicated than that.
The obvious story of woe of the recent General Election in the UK is that of the Liberal Democrats, who lost 66% of their vote share and 85% of their parliamentary seats compared with five years ago, leaving them about as much of a political force as the DUP. What went wrong?
2013 cosy mystery, fifth in Bradley's series set in the early 1950s about child detective Flavia de Luce. The corpse of the angelic-looking young organist has been hidden in a saint's tomb that hasn't been opened for years. But how and why did he die?
2015 contemporary slice of life, 12 episodes: AniDB. A middle school girl with a knack for cooking learns that everything tastes better if you share it with someone special. vt Gourmet Girl Graffiti.
1937 children's fantasy. Six stories of wonder, three of them dealing with the modern magician Mr Leakey.
This supplementary volume in the Monster Hunters series tweaks the game to allow the foes to be aliens rather than supernatural monsters.
2014 urban fantasy, sequel to London Falling. As protests brew into riots during a hot summer, important people are being murdered in a bizarre and impossible way. Fortunately, the Met has four officers who specialise in the impossible.
1979 drama, dir. James Bridges, Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon: IMDb / allmovie
A TV news reporter uncovers dirty secrets at a nuclear power plant.
1994 alternate-world military fiction; sixth in the Carrier series. "Tombstone" Magruder is still CAG aboard USS Thomas Jefferson, which now gets involved in the Russian civil war of 1994+4.
Back to the boardgame café. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
Pyramid is the monthly GURPS supplement containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's religion, particularly of the actively supernatural sort. This isn't something that tends to come up much in my games, so the applicability of this issue is relatively low for me.
This weekend I was at UK Games Expo, for the third year at the Hilton Metropole near the NEC – though next year it's mostly going to be in the NEC itself. Images follow: cc-by-sa on everything, and click the image for the full-size version.