RogerBW's Blog

Rivethead, Ben Hamper 30 November 2016 - 1 comment

1991 autobiography. Hamper writes about his life working on the GM factory floor in Flint, Michigan.

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Blindspot, season 1 29 November 2016 - 3 comments

2015-2016 police procedural, 23 episodes. A woman is found in a bag in Times Square: she's alive, naked, totally amnesiac, and covered with tattoos. The FBI investigates.

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Overture to Death, Ngaio Marsh 28 November 2016

1939 classic English detective fiction; eighth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Miss Campanula was killed by a booby-trapped piano, but was she really the intended victim?

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Pyramid 95: Overland Adventures 27 November 2016 - 4 comments

Pyramid, edited by Steven Marsh, is the monthly GURPS supplement containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's wilderness adventures and travel in a fantasy, or at least low-tech, setting.

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A Case of Spirits, Peter Lovesey 26 November 2016

1975 historical detective fiction; sixth of Lovesey's novels of Sergeant Cribb, policeman in Victorian London. Two thefts during séances conducted by the latest fashionable medium attract the attention of the police, but when the next séance ends in a death, mere spiritualism is clearly not the only deception going on.

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Thirsty Meeples November 2016 25 November 2016

Back to the boardgame café. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

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Project Orion, George Dyson 24 November 2016

2002 non-fiction: George Dyson, son of Freeman, recounts what can be told of the history of Project Orion, a plan to propel spacecraft with nuclear explosions.

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The Longest Day 23 November 2016 - 5 comments

1962 war, dir. Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki and others: IMDb / allmovie

The tale of the D-Day invasion in 1944, with a literal cast of thousands.

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Slight Mourning, Catherine Aird 22 November 2016

1975 detective fiction; sixth of Aird's novels of Inspector Sloan and Constable Crosby. Bill Fent, local landowner, died when his car hit another at a notorious corner… but he'd have been dead before morning anyway, from the poison in his system.

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Steampunk Rally 21 November 2016

Steampunk Rally, designed by Orin Bishop, is a game of racing bizarre inventions… or a card-drafting, engine-building game that uses a racetrack merely as a way of keeping score.

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Mr Campion and Others, Margery Allingham 20 November 2016

1939/1950 collection of short mystery stories featuring Albert Campion.

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MythBusters 2016 season 19 November 2016

2016, 10+2 episodes. If you're reading this you probably know what MythBusters was about, or you can go and find out.

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Last Bus to Woodstock, Colin Dexter 18 November 2016 - 3 comments

1975 detective fiction; first of Dexter's novels of Inspector Morse. Two young women wait for the bus out of Oxford one night; one goes to hitch a ride, and her dead body is found the next day.

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Grifters 17 November 2016

Grifters, designed by Jake Tlapek and David Fulton, is a hand-building game of crime syndicates for 2-4 players.

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Dying Fall, Judith Cutler 16 November 2016 - 2 comments

1995 mystery; first of Cutler's novels of Sophie Rivers, a teacher in a sixth-form college in Birmingham. Finding one of her students stabbed to death in the lift is bad enough; when her best friend dies in a way that seems plausibly accidental except to people who knew him well, Sophie knows she'll have to look into the situation herself.

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Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku o 15 November 2016

2016 comedic fantasy manga adaptation in 10 episodes: Anidb, vt "Konosuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World!". Kazuma the shut-in dies in a traffic accident, but a goddess allows him to return to life in another world.

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Enter the Saint, Leslie Charteris 14 November 2016

1930 thriller, second of the Saint series. In three loosely-linked novellas, the Saint takes on a succession of criminals.

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GURPS Steampunk 1: Settings and Style, Phil Masters 13 November 2016 - 2 comments

The original GURPS Steampunk was published in 2000: both GURPS and steampunk have moved on since then. This first of what's planned to be a new series of PDF supplements does not replace that book, but "updates and extends" the GURPS treatment of this genre.

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Cast in Order of Disappearance, Simon Brett 12 November 2016 - 2 comments

1975 detective fiction; first of Brett's novels of Charles Paris, ageing actor. A friend and occasional lover of Charles's has been dumped by her current sugar daddy, and she asks him to return some compromising photographs. But getting in touch is going to be something of a challenge.

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World Service Pi 11 November 2016 - 2 comments

My wife likes to listen to the radio at night. But Radio 4 is getting increasingly annoying (even I notice this; I don't listen to the speech, but I do pick up the vocal intonations, which over the last couple of years have become increasingly aggressive even when the subject is not one that would seem to deserve it) and the World Service is preferred.

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Earth Flight, Janet Edwards 10 November 2016

2014 young adult science fiction, third in the Earth Girl trilogy. Jarra is Handicapped, unable to leave Earth for any of the colony worlds where most of society now happens, but she's also a famous hero. Which means she's now become a symbol, both for those who want to bring the Handicapped more into society and for those who resist that trend.

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SpringCon 22 October 2016 09 November 2016

Back to this small quarterly boardgames convention in Watford. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

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My Drunk Kitchen, Hannah Hart 08 November 2016

2014 non-fiction. Hannah Hart, youtuber, shares recipes and her philosophy of life.

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The X-Files season 10 07 November 2016

2016, 6 episodes. FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully continue to look into strange occurrences.

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Death in a White Tie, Ngaio Marsh 06 November 2016

1938 classic English detective fiction; seventh of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Someone's blackmailing London's high society as the Season begins, and Alleyn asks a friend who moves in those circles to look into it; murder will be done.

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GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 3: Born of Myth & Magic, Peter dell'Orto 05 November 2016 - 7 comments

This third Dungeon Fantasy Monsters book deal with monsters of known mythic origins, and expands on the popular "magical mistakes" category of monster.

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I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Alan Bradley 04 November 2016

2011 historical mystery; fourth in Bradley's series about Flavia de Luce, young amateur sleuth in 1950s Britain. As Christmas approaches, Buckshaw is let to a film crew who'll be making The Cry of the Raven, starring the famous Phyllis Wyvern. But not all of the company will be leaving again.

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Essen 2016 03 November 2016 - 4 comments

In mid-October I went once more to Internationale Spieltage SPIEL, or "Essen" as it's generally known in the boardgaming world.

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The Collapse of Western Civilization, Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes 02 November 2016

2014 science fiction. A nameless scholar of the Second Chinese Republic looks back from the year 2393 on the Penumbral Age that brought western civilisation to its close.

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October 2016 Trailers 01 November 2016 - 2 comments

Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal.)

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