My first adventure for Reign of Steel is now available – at least to Kickstarter backers.
2004 fantasy. In Regency England, magic is much more an historical curiosity than an occupation for gentlemen… until Mr Norrell of Hurtfew Abbey starts actually doing it again.
People have finally started wearing masks in the shops round here.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding peak elements and more mucking about with linked lists.
You can't buy this game any more. So why on Earth would I play it?
2017 Lovecraftian horror. Dan Carter, ex-cop, and Emily Lovecraft, librarian with a shotgun, are trying to come to terms with their new world. But threats to reality haven't gone away.
2019 non-fiction. Nott is a general and vascular surgeon who uses his leave to volunteer with MSF in combat and disaster zones.
This Meetup-based boardgames group remains on-line for the moment; we got together on Jitsi and then played some games on BoardGameArena.
2004 young adult steampunk fantasy, first of a trilogy. Matt Cruse is a cabin boy aboard the airship Aurora.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved swapping characters, and generating Gray code.
2010 science fiction, first of a trilogy. Jean le Flambeur is a thief, broken out of prison to steal something very special. But first he must steal back his own history…
More boardgames played from home, though the pace has slackened a bit.
2012 fantasy, first of a tetralogy. As far as the court is concerned, Princess Katya spends her time at (both sorts of) venery; in fact she leads a secret band that hunts magic-using enemies of the king. Starbride is a foreigner sent to court to snare a rich lover, but she'd much rather spend her time studying law…
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding numbers that looked the same inverted, and generating a very long string.
1998 military SF, first of an ongoing series. Lt Daniel Leary of the Republic of Cinnabar (space) Navy is the impoverished fifth wheel on a diplomatic mission to the new government of Kostroma. Adele Mundy's family on Cinnabar was disgraced and put to death, largely by Leary's father, and now she's working as librarian to the new Kostroman ruler. Neither of them is expecting a revolution fomented by the Alliance of Free Stars.
Haven't you heard? Masks are last month's thing.
2010 urban fantasy. Evie Scelan was a big part of what happened to the previous magical rulers of Boston. Which means that everyone's looking to her to see what she's going to do about the power vacuum that's been left behind.
This Meetup-based boardgames group has moved on-line for the moment; we got together on Jitsi and then played some games on BoardGameArena.
Clarkesworld is a monthly on-line magazine edited by Neil Clarke.
Now I have a chainsaw. They'll sell them to anybody…
2014 military SF, second of the trilogy. After the illicit mission in the last book, James Shelley and his squad are on trial. So, elsewhere, is the person they winkled out of their bunker. But other factions are still out there.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved zeroing parts of a matrix and reordering a list.
1929 detective fiction; first of Tey's novels of Inspector Alan Grant. There's a long queue for the last night of a hugely popular musical; as the doors open, a man falls to the ground, dead, with a dagger in his back.
One huge advantage of living outside London is that my local pub does not need to be hugely crowded at all times to stay in business. So when it reopened on Saturday I went along.
Something of mine is on Kickstarter. (Well, sort of.) Gosh.
2011 urban fantasy, first of a series. Angel Crawford is a pill-popping loser living with her deadbeat alcoholic father in rural Louisiana. Until the night she blacks out and wakes up in hospital, with memories of a car crash but no injuries…
1991 cyberpunk science fiction. In a future California recovering from the Semi-Medium One (the Big One is still waiting to happen), music video creators, VR artists and corporate greed collide.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved generating combinations of numbers and expanding telephone keypad letters.
2009 fantasy, first of a trilogy. For centuries, humanity has been divided into the Darkborn, to whom light is fatal, and the Lightborn, who cannot live in darkness. Mostly they keep to their own communities, but Minhorne is a city shared uneasily between them. Balthasar Hearne, Darkborn doctor, takes in the pregnant fugitive who turns up on his doorstep just before sunrise… but it seems that her children are born with sight…
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal. Calibration: a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries, … a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence,… which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a "star" in Los Angeles…)