The Kickstarter for Car Wars 6th edition started yesterday and runs until 6 January. I'm not going to be joining it. Why not?
2019 non-fiction. A history of sewing and embroidery, trying to recover the stories of the people who did it.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. Last week's was about encoding and decoding to a binary representation of Morse code.
2009 urban fantasy, fifth in the series. Kitty Norville, the late-night DJ who has become the world's most famous werewolf, is going to get married… in Las Vegas. So naturally she has to do a live show there too. And that isn't even the problem…
It's election season again in the UK. These are the things I'd try to do if anyone were daft enough to put me in charge; they're also promises that would encourage me to vote for people who made them.
1994 comic mystery; ninth of MacLeod's novels of Professor Peter Shandy. Shandy is visiting a grower of remarkable lupines [sic, apparently American usage] when a fellow guest at the inn where he's staying collapses dead over the chicken pot pie.
Another Mansions of Madness session, this one with a published scenario (Ill-Fated Exhibit).
1991 mystery; second of Granger's novels of Chief Inspector Markby and non-detective Meredith Mitchell. Now in a home posting, Mitchell moves to a hamlet in Oxfordshire with plans to commute to London. But the new friend she makes there has a fatal "accident"…
I've recently made hardcopy books of some of my role-playing PDFs, using Lulu's print-on-demand service. Here are some tricks that might be helpful for anyone else doing the same thing.
1990 collection of SF stories and speculation about solar sails.
I went to Midcon, a long-running boardgame convention in Derby.
2015 police procedural mystery, fourth in the Fiona Griffiths series. Stuck with logging evidence, Fiona asks for some cold cases to look at, and is soon digging for details in her own distinctive style.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges Last week’s was about demonstrating specific coding techniques.
1962 science fiction, re-read. Zarathustra was an uninhabited planet when humanity arrived, so the Company owns it and everyone's happy. Until Jack Holloway the old sunstone prospector comes along with some crazy story about the animals he's found being intelligent natives…
It is a truism that retail shopping is dying – and another that journalism is also dying. In both cases, the Internet is blamed. But I think it's worth looking a little deeper than that.
2018 non-fiction, Michael Caine's (third) autobiography, shading into advice for aspiring actors.
This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet at the Marlow Donkey.
Clarkesworld is a monthly on-line magazine edited by Neil Clarke.
2017 action horror, dir. Alex Kurtzman, Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella; IMDb / allmovie. A treasure-hunter uncovers the tomb of a female pharaoh who’s been erased from the historical record; ignoring all the warnings, he lets her out.
1990 mystery, third in the John Sanders/Harriet Jeffries series. A series of high-value burglaries turns lethal; and an ageing actress is murdered at her soirée, having mentioned that she might be planning to change her will. Sanders investigates; Jeffries was a guest at the party…
The Lightless Beacon is an adventure by Leigh Carr with Lynne Hardy, released to commemorate the death of Greg Stafford. I recently ran it for Whartson Hall. Spoilers.
2019 collection of short science fiction stories featuring light sails.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges This week’s was about counting letters and generating a multiplication table.
2007 police procedural mystery/horror, fourth in the Bryant and May series. Someone is killing celebrities by various baroque means; the Peculiar Crimes Unit balances that investigation with an attempt to prevent the unit being shut down.
Aeon’s End is a cooperative deck-building game by Kevin Riley, in which players work together to fight a monster (the “nemesis”) and save their home.
1993, cosy American detective fiction; fifth and last of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Dittany Henbit and the Lobelia Falls Grub-and-Stakers Gardening & Roving Club. The ghost of a nineteenth-century mule-skinner turns up in town, and wants his bones found and properly buried… but doesn't much mind what happens to the chest of gold that should be near them.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges (I missed 31 because of getting ready for Essen, and didn’t have time to do this one in Perl6). This week’s was about counting entities and generating ASCII bar charts.
Adam Ant (born Stuart Leslie Goddard) was born on 3 November, 1954.
At the end of October I went back to Internationale Spieltage SPIEL, or "Essen" as it's generally known in the boardgaming world.
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal. Calibration: There is nothing like just indignation for fostering unreasoning hate.)