1987 Cold War espionage thriller. The upgrade to Polaris warheads, to get them through a new generation of Soviet defences, is one of the most closely-guarded of British secrets. Then one of the pages is found in a rubbish bin on Parliament Hill…
The 1 Player Guild is a group of solo game players, communicating through BoardGameGeek. Not counting the on-line birthday party last year with many of the same people, this was the sixth get-together for the UK contingent – on-line, alas but necessarily.
With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
2007 mystery or at least mystery-adjacent; first in the Spellmans series. Izzy Spellman is a private investigator, from a family of the same. This does not make things simpler when her younger sister goes missing.
2005 audio adaptation of Christie's 1920 mystery, in 5 half-hour episodes. Captain Hastings, home on leave from the front, is staying with friends at Styles Court when the elderly owner dies suddenly. He enlists his old friend Hercule Poirot to help investigate.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved implementing the Caesar cipher and breaking up binary strings. (Note that this is open until 31 January 2021.)
2015 fantasy/horror anthology on the theme of modern Lovecraftian stories, sampling stories published between 2010 and 2014.
This Meetup-based boardgames group remains on-line for the moment; as usual we got together on Jitsi and then played some games online.
2019 non-fiction. On 17 April 2018, the Boeing 737-7H4 registered N772SW suffered a catastrophic engine failure at 32,000 feet over Pennsylvania. Only one person died. This is the story of the captain's life.
More boardgames played from home.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved reversing words in a string and calculating Levenshtein distance. (Note that this is open until 24 January 2021.)
Here are the answers to last year's quiz. (Gosh, that seems like a long time ago now.)
2019 non-fiction, popular science; short treatments of scientific aspects of human existence.
After last year's GURPS PDF Challenge, there's more of my stuff now being funded on Kickstarter.
There is obvious a certain Schadenfreude to be had in observing the flailings of the people who got caught during and after the failed coup in the USA. But I think one should go beyond that.
Letter Tycoon, by Brad Brooks, was published in 2015 and is now quite hard to find. But I was recently introduced to it on BoardGameArena, and it turns out I'm quite good at it.
I recently ran the vote for the Pearple's Choice Awards, which used to happen on the old Shut Up & Sit Down forum and now happen on discussion.tekeli.li.
2019 short fantasy novel in the World of the Five Gods (formerly known as Chalion). On his way home from a pointless job, Penric's ship is captured by pirates, and he finds himself responsible for two orphaned girls.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved testing for palindromic numbers and building a stack class. (Note that this is open until 17 January 2021.)
I've been playing a lot of Letter Tycoon on BoardGameArena (it seems that losing at Scrabble to my wife is good training for this). I wanted a practice opponent. So I wrote one.
2020 non-fiction. In 2004, Libertarians started moving to Grafton, New Hampshire, in an effort to "free the town". The bears soon followed.
2011 fantasy/horror anthology on the theme of modern Lovecraftian stories.
2012 fantasy/horror anthology, consisting of more stories inspired by Lovecraft.
I did Advent of Code again, and had a good time. Spoilers.
1990 audio adaptation of Christie's 1931 mystery, in 5 half-hour episodes. At a table-turning session in a near-snowbound house on the edge of Dartmoor, the spirit claims that Captain Trevelyan has been murdered. When the party gets down to his house later, so he has. The fiancée of the prime suspect works to clear his name.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved grouping anagrams and more furkling with binary trees. (Note that this is open until 10 January 2021.)
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal.)
2020 was another very boardgame-ful year, in patches.
In 2020 I read 141 books, very slightly up from last year.
A friend likes to sum up his year in a set number of words, and I copy this fine idea. "Think of it as a short and un-boastful summary of the year, which nobody is expected to understand all of."