2019 non-fiction. Honoré looks at the practicalities and possibilities of ageing.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about recovering a corrupted message and solving an iterative problem.
1942 autobiography of the first person to fly the Atlantic solo non-stop from east to west.
After having enjoyed the recent radio plays based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Whisperer in Darkness, I sought out earlier audio drama written and directed by Julian Simpson.
The 1 Player Guild is a group of solo game players, communicating through BoardGameGeek. This was the fifth get-together for the UK contingent, and we were back in the upstairs room of a pub in Silverstone.
With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
1989 thriller, first in the long series dealing with police detective Lucas Davenport. Someone is raping and murdering women in Minneapolis, but unlike your typical serial killer this one is smart…
2018 cooking story, shounen manga adaptation in 12 episodes: AniDB, vt "Food Wars: The Third Plate: Totsuki Train Arc". Yukihira Sōma fights cooking duels to try to let himself and his friends be allowed to stay in the élite Totsuki cooking school.
2011 urban fantasy, short stories in the world of Kitty Norville – which means werewolves, vampires, and other odder things.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about a bad encoding scheme and producing the source of a program.
2011 cosy mystery, second in the Mac Faraday series. Police detective turned heir Faraday finds his ex-wife importuning him to let them get back together… but soon enough she's dead, and so's her new husband.
My copy of Rallyman GT has arrived; I backed the Kickstarter in 2018, it was originally expected last November, and it finally made it to me on 30 January.
2019 science fiction. There have always been the Machines: nobody knows how they work or where they came from, but they let people travel back in time, and return. Tess is a traveller from 2022, studying history and making illicit changes to it. In 1992, Beth is trying to work out the right thing to do as her life goes out of control.
The second issue of the GURPS fanzine The Path of Cunning is out.
Guendelsberger worked as a reporter at a local newspaper; it was closed down. Through a combination of poverty and journalistic curiosity, she took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon warehouse ("fulfillment center"), then later worked at a call centre and in a fast-food outlet.
2015 animation, dir. Mark Burton, Richard Starzak; IMDb / allmovie.
When the sheep get bored with the hard work of life on the farm, they lock the farmer in a caravan for a day off. Chaos ensues.
2011 urban fantasy, ninth in the series. Kitty Norville, the late-night DJ who has become the world's most famous werewolf, goes to San Francisco to help out a friend. Who happens to be a vampire…
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about arranging numbers and arithmetical operations.
2016 non-fiction. Doyle examines the history and the anatomy of the celebrity trainwreck, the (female) figure who is deemed to have fallen from grace and behaved badly.
This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet at the Marlow Donkey.
1984 science fiction, re-read. For the Fuzzies to be able to testify against the people who kidnapped and enslaved them, they need to be veridicated… which means they need to be able to lie. But that's not a thing that Fuzzies do…
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about allocating numbers to rings and generating self-descriptive numbers.
2018 romance. Naledi Smith is studying epidemiology in New York while waitressing to pay the bills, and really doesn't have time for those emails claiming to be from an African prince to whom she was betrothed as a child. But Prince Thabiso is real…
This boardgame convention was still at the larger venue in Maidenhead, but with more people booked in and much more of a crush, especially on Saturday.
2019 non-fiction. Morton considers the history of human interaction with the Moon.
I went over to a friend's place for boardgames.
2009 romance. Mackenzie Elliott and three of her childhood friends run a wedding business, everything from engagement photos to the Big Day. But, inspired by the example of her mother, Mac thinks true love can't be for her…
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about printing in octal and detecting balanced brackets.
2010 urban fantasy, eighth in the series. Kitty Norville, the late-night DJ who has become the world's most famous werewolf, is still post-traumatic from the events of the last book, but has to face two new problems.
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal. Calibration: It was his love of hatred that kept him going.)