2013 zombie romance, dir. Jonathan Levine, Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer; IMDb / allmovie. After the zombie apocalypse, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy is still dead.
2011 modern fantasy novella, side story between fourth and fifth in the Kate Daniels series. Dali Harimau, vegetarian weretiger, finds her pack leader (and crush) passed out in her house. A new magical threat needs a competent magician not only to handle it but to work out what's going on.
2018 SF-horror, dir. Jon Turteltaub, Jason Statham, Li Bingbing: IMDb / allmovie. Five years ago, submarine rescue expert Jonas Taylor had to make a hard decision and leave some of his men behind to save the rest. Now, not only is there another submarine lost, his ex-wife is aboard. (A giant shark will also feature.)
2018 science fiction, stand-alone continuation of the Wayfarers series. Five inhabitants of the Exodus Fleet live parts of their lives.
2018 SF-horror, dir. Darin Scott, Danielle Savre, Rob Mayes: IMDb / allmovie. Another offshore research station, another giant shark. Must be Thursday.
2007 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, third in the Logan McRae series. McRae continues to be bounced between Inspectors Insch and Steel, and to try to have a personal life too.
2018 mystery show, 10 episodes. Frankie Drake and Trudy Clarke continue to be private detectives in 1920s Toronto.
1988 romantic suspense. After a lonely childhood, Geillis Ramsay finds herself orphaned and the heir to her mother's cousin's house in rural Wiltshire. And perhaps to her magic too.
This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet at the Marlow Donkey.
Apex is a monthly on-line magazine edited by Jason Sizemore among others.
1999 science fiction horror, dir. Renny Harlin, Saffron Burrows, Thomas Jane: IMDb / allmovie. On a remote floating shark research station, things are going to go very badly wrong.
Clarkesworld is a monthly on-line magazine edited by Neil Clarke.
2018 Scottish zombie Christmas musical, dir. John McPhail, Ella Hunt, Malcolm Cumming; IMDb / allmovie. Zombies have risen, and we're all going to die. In a small Scottish town just before Christmas.
1994 mystery, fifth in Perry's William Monk series (Victorian investigation). Hester Latterly takes a job escorting an elderly lady by the overnight train from Edinburgh to London, making sure she takes her medicine on time. In the morning, her charge is dead, and soon enough Hester is charged with her murder.
Back to the boardgame café. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
2013 horror/comedy, dir. John V. Knowles, Allison Scagliotti, Francia Raisa: IMDb / allmovie. Leah is a blue-state girl in a red-state town, trying to get into a good college by breaking a really big story in the school paper. But when a new "abstinence educator" comes to town it may be a bigger story than she can handle.
1990, cosy American detective fiction; fourth of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Dittany Henbit and the Lobelia Falls Grub-and-Stakers Gardening & Roving Club. Industrial espionage comes to town, and the local mincemeat magnate is under attack.
The revived show continues, with a shorter six-episode season.
2006 mystery, first in Nadel's series about Francis Hancock, East End undertaker during the Blitz. During an air raid, a man claims that he's been stabbed, then runs off; later he shows up on Hancock's slab, apparently dead of blast, but Hancock isn't satisfied.
2017 slice of life, 4-koma manga adaptation in 12 episodes: AniDB. Suzukaze Aoba continues to work as a character designer at a computer game studio.
I've been renaming my large music collection into UTF-8.
2018 Hugo-nominated science fiction, third in a trilogy. The last thing Shuos Jedao remembers is being seventeen… but now he's been woken into a much older body, and apparently the Hexarch Nirai Kujen is relying on his military skills to reassemble the shattered empire. But Kujen, as always, is playing a very deep game…
This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet at the Marlow Donkey. (Pictures from new shinyphone in "HDR" mode.)
2003 mystery, third in the Berger and Mitry series. It's tourist season in the small town of Dorset, and a film star couple is among them (she grew up in the area). But soon enough someone is going to plummet to his death.
2015 action comedy, dir. Paul Feig, Melissa McCarthy, Jason Statham; IMDb / allmovie. In a James Bond-style world, when all the CIA's field agents are compromised, it's up to an analyst to go undercover and look for a missing nuclear weapon.
2010 modern fantasy novelette, prequel to the Kate Daniels series. Kate the mercenary gets a short-notice, high-paying bodyguard job, for a particularly repulsive client.
I have spent much of my life hanging about with people a little older than me; I'm used to it. But there is occasionally some need for translation. Here are some things I have never experienced, by virtue of not having been born until just before the Unix epoch, which for many people I know were simply part of life when they were young.
2017 SF, 10 episodes. The civilisation-ending plague was just part of the bigger plot, and nobody's loyalties are clear even before time travel comes into the picture.
I've been improving the ways people can get access to the local music server during my barbecues and similar events.
2018 non-fiction, an informal look at the history, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, of fraud.
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal. Calibration: Burn it. Burn it all.)