2011 steampunk fantasy. The misfit crew of the Ketty Jay has fame, at least a bit of fortune, and a new and exciting job… oh dear.
2020 thriller/mystery, dir. Harry Bradbeer, Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill; IMDb / allmovie.
On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Enola Holmes finds that her mother has disappeared without a word. But since she's the younger sister of Mycroft and Sherlock, she doesn't wait to see what will happen next. On the way to London, she runs into someone fleeing from his own problems…
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved multiplications and spirals. (Note that this is open until 29 November 2020.)
Nominations are now open for the Pearple's Choice Awards for 2019-2020.
2012 collection of mildly Lovecraftian fantasy/horror stories, loosely connected by reference to the Calipash family.
2019 audio drama, adapted in eight parts by Julian Simpson from the story by H. P. Lovecraft.
Coole Swan has a very simple concept: Bailey's, done right.
Rust is a compiled language. How can I run a program directly from the shell?
1988 SF. The survey team on the planet Lassti is under pressure to declare it free of native sentients so that the colonisers can move in. The "sprookjes" mimic human speech, but that alone is not enough. One of the surveyors dies in what's probably an accident. And then the Hellspark arrives…
I think people just don't have the attention span to cope with something that goes on for months.
2011 fantasy/horror anthology, consisting of stories inspired by Lovecraft.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list searches and matrices. (Note that this is open until 22 November 2020.)
More boardgames played from home.
The third issue of the GURPS fanzine The Path of Cunning is out.
1928 Georgian romance. As the consequences of the rebellion of '45 are still being felt, two fugitives from the losing side set off for London – disguised as the opposite sexes.
I have noticed a paradox in the design of competitive games.
2019 mystery story, fourth of the Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes continues to act as a consulting detective, this time acting to recover some blackmail-grade letters from an old flame of Mrs Watson. But of course there's much more going on than that.
2009 science fiction, second of a trilogy. Ariane Kedros was involved in finding an alien artefact that lots of people want a look at. Some of them aren't planning to be polite.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list searches and combinatorial explosions. (Note that this is open until 15 November 2020.)
2017 cosy mystery, first in the Morgan Dane series. Morgan, widowed with three small daughters, is getting back into her career as an ADA; but when the daughters' former babysitter is murdered and the neighbour kid is accused, she offers to defend him.
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.
2017 Lovecraftian horror. In 1920s London, ex-boxer Harry Stubbs is employed to track down a mysterious thing. But it seems to be leaving corpses in its wake.
More boardgames played from home. (No, you didn't miss an October part 1; I played very little in the first half of the month, mostly because of a secret RPG-writing project taking up my time.)
When the V-22 Osprey was still in development, one of the major roles it was expected to fill was that of submarine hunting. But this never happened, to the point that it's now largely been forgotten that it was ever contemplated. Why?
2020 non-fiction. In 2019, Facebook announced that it was planning to revolutionise money. How did it fail?
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching combinations and integer powers. (Note that this is open until 8 November 2020.)
So it's to be a "lockdown" again. Only not.
This 1990 RPG supplement by Peter Phillipps portrays a Britain after World War III. Well. Up to a point. It is a famously bad book.
Last year I bought a copy of Thunderbolt Apache Leader. This year I played it.
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal.)