Shortly after Christmas I went to the Wallace Collection for the first time. I could spend days there. Images follow: cc-by-sa on everything.
1996 SF/fantasy short story collection of some of Drake's more humorous short stories.
ExoPlanets, designed by Przemysław Świerczyński, is a tile-placement game of developing life on alien planets for 2-4 players.
2015 modern fantasy, 4-koma manga adaptation in 12 episodes: AniDB, vt "Castle Town Dandelion". The king announces that he'll retire in a year; his children campaign to be elected in his place.
I had an article in Pyramid #3/88 dealing with abandoned nuclear reactors and other sources of radioactive fun.
2011 detective fiction parody, collection of seven short stories. Colonel Sebastian Moran, a cad and a bounder, works for Professor Moriarty the consulting criminal.
2015 modern fantasy, shounen manga adaptation in 25 episodes: AniDB, vt "Circle of Reincarnation". High school student Mamiya Sakura can see spirits. It turns out that her classmate Rokudō Rinne is also working as a shinigami, helping lost spirits reach the wheel of reincarnation. But she's entered a dangerous world…
2015, 10 episodes. Space bounty hunters discover that being apolitical is really hard work if you have even the vestiges of a conscience.
2015 modern comedic fantasy, manga adaptation in 12 episodes: AniDB, vt "Everyday Life with Monster Girls". Various fantastic species suddenly exist, and some of them live with host families in Japan.
2011 science fiction, first in The Expanse series. With the asteroid belt colonised, tensions are rising between Belt, Mars and Earth. When ships start getting destroyed, war is inevitable; but who actually kicked it off, and why?
2015 fantasy romance, shoujo manga adaptation in 12 episodes: AniDB, vt "Snow White with the Red Hair". Shirayuki the herbalist flees the unwelcome attentions of the prince of her country, only to meet Zen, the junior prince of the next realm over.
I've been working with my new 3d printer. My first major design/construction project was a stand for charging vape batteries.
After a couple of shorter adventures, the campaign moved on to High Lord of Earth. Mostly it worked. Mostly… Spoilers for this adventure follow.
On Saturday I went to the fourth birthday party of the Beavertown Brewery in Tottenham Hale. (Images follow; all are cc-by-sa.)
1993 detective fiction; sixth of Cleeves's novels of amateur private detectives George and Molly Palmer-Jones. On a bird-watching boat trip, the sighting of a rare petrel is much more interesting than a birdwatcher who isn't where he should be. But then he turns out to have been murdered...
2015 modern fantasy, manga adaptation, 13 episodes: AniDB. Hibiki, who can see and talk with ghosts, goes to high school.
I tend to use the weather forecasts from the Met. Office as I find them more accurate than the BBC ones (even when the BBC is using Met. Office data). However, I find the Severe Weather Warnings rather less useful.
After a break thanks to Christmas scheduling clashes, back to the boardgame café. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
2015 science fiction. In the near future, helium-3 mining on the Moon is big business, but the shipments back to Earth are being hijacked.
2015 fantasy, 10 episodes. In a technomagical world, four heroes will hunt down the resurgent Prophet who was responsible for the last great war.
Many modern Linux systems assume that you will never have a root shell. Instead, you are expected to prepend "sudo" to every root-type command.
As always, spoilers abound.
1998, short pieces on the effects of Disney on Florida and other places.
As a role-player I often produce character sheets, which can run to three or six sides. I want to fasten them together, but I also don't want to dump metal staples into the paper recycling bin or the shredder, or to take the time to remove them.
Star Realms: Colony Wars, designed (like the original) by Darwin Kastle, is the first "big" expansion for Star Realms. On its own, it's for 2 players.
Pyramid is the monthly GURPS supplement containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's about organisations, following this year's releases of Boardroom and Curia and Dungeon Fantasy 17: Guilds.
1975 cosy detective fiction; first of Anderson's novels of the Earl of Burford and Inspector Wilkins. Some time in the 1930s, there's a house party at Alderley, including the Earl's political brother and the foreign dignitaries he's negotiating with, an American millionaire called Hiram, and various others. Nobody is quite what they seem, and that's even before jewels start going missing and guests start turning up dead.
2015 science fiction, 11 episodes. Kirsten Clark suffers from "temporal dysplasia" and can't feel the passage of time, but that makes her the ideal subject to be inserted into the memories of the recently dead.
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube.)