2014 humorous science fiction, second of its series. Lord Thomas Kinago, professional fop, is sent on another mission for his cousin the Emperor: this time a neighbouring power, defeated in the big war a few years back, is putting unreasonable restrictions on trade, not to mention arresting a whole host of merchants as smugglers.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved missing numbers and more ranking of neighbours. (Note that this is open until 4 October 2020.)
2005 detection, second in Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series. Someone's sabotaging the local chocolate shop, the self-made messiah is angry that his latest handmaiden has been rescued, and someone's criminally annoyed with the new tenant.
2010 fantasy. Hazel's mother told her never to give up on her dreams… but turns out she didn't quite mean it in the usual way. Hazel is a Grand Champion Dreamer, and when she wakes up in the Night she's going to have to prove it.
There is at long last an "official NHS contact-tracing app". Should one use it?
This Meetup-based boardgames group remains on-line for the moment; as usual we got together on Jitsi and then played some games on BoardGameArena.
1991 SF, first of a trilogy. Saint Butterflies-are-free Peace Sincere was happy as a smuggler pilot, but she had to go and save an inexperienced mercenary from the local lowlife, and then things just got complicated.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more bit counts and an innovative use of histograms.
2015 collection of new SF stories set on pre-space-probe ideas of the planet Venus.
2013 historical fantasy, third in the Order of the Air series. In the winter of 1932, planes are crashing in the Rockies, and a Greek medallion being valued in New York may be worth vastly more than it seems.
2014 military SF, first of a trilogy. Ben Mason tried to kill himself when the PTSD got too much for him… but instead, They recruited him to go up against an alien invasion that most of humanity doesn't even know about.
More boardgames played from home.
2017 fantasy romance, first of its series. The Hokkaran Empire rules practically everyone, including the Qorin horse nomads whom it conquered half a generation ago. But plagues and demons are rising, and two young warriors will have to save the world.
More boardgames in the garden, warmer than last time in a minor heat wave.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching array values and rotating lists.
2018 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, eighth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. A truck driver loses control of his vehicle in the middle of Edinburgh, killing twenty people as it turns out that his cargo really wasn't what it said on the manifest.
On 14 September 2015 I created the storage zpool that I'm still using.
2018 young adult/crossover SF, first of its series. The aliens arrived, brain-clamped all the adults, and implanted some kind of parasite in the children. Then things got bad.
1970 Arthurian fantasy, first of its series. The young Myrddin is haunted by portents and visions, and is the plaything of gods.
2016 Lovecraftian SF, first of a series. Owen Merrill is a student at Miskatonic, doing his thesis on Rhetorics of Otherness in the Horror Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft…
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved summing Fibonacci numbers and looking through a grid for neighbours.
Clarkesworld is a monthly on-line magazine edited by Neil Clarke.
I've been playing with Flightgear again, now with a decent joystick and rudder pedals.
1977 detective fiction, sixth of James's novels of Inspector Adam Dalgliesh. At a forensic lab in the depths of Cambridgeshire, one of the senior scientists spends the day making himself as objectionable as possible… and is found dead the next morning.
2020 fantasy novelette, prequel to the rest of the Locked Tomb series. When a study sealed for 400 years is to be opened, the young Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect are part of the investigating team. But someone has been in there since it was sealed.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved summing primes and performing a word search.
More boardgames in the garden, almost in traditional British bank holiday weather (a little chilly, but not actually raining).
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal. Calibration: The experiments that the Payne Fund carried out concentrated on such issues as the extent to which children learnt from film and how well they retained what they learnt; the possibility that exposure to film affected attitudes; and how moral standards might be affected by what was viewed. The findings of these studies showed that the human mind could be shaped and moulded by persons in positions of influence; and, in this context, the film maker was in an almost unique position of influence.)