1996 crime drama/black comedy, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, Frances McDormand: IMDb / allmovie. Jerry just wants his wife kidnapped so that her rich father will pay a ransom, that he'll then split with the kidnappers. But subcontracting crime rarely pays.
1954 non-fiction. Molly Lefebure was a junior reporter who took a job as secretary to Keith Simpson, the Supervisor of Medico-Legal Post-Mortems and the forensic pathologist most often consulted by the Metropolitan Police. Reissued in 1990 as Murder on the Home Front.
1996 romantic drama, dir. Anthony Minghella, Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas: IMDb / allmovie. As the final victory over Axis forces in Italy approaches, a nurse looks after a badly-burned mystery man in an abandoned monastery.
2019 SF/romance. Bianca von Hasenberg, a rich widow (rumour has it, by her own hand), spends her resources trying to save other women from the grinder that is Consortium social life. But when she's attacked and the heir to von Hasenberg is kidnapped…
UK Games Expo is happening on the first weekend of June. I'd hoped to go, but having thought it over, I shan't be there.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved word searching and directory mangling. (Note that this is open until 29 May 2022.)
1998 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1941 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. The (in)famous actress is brazenly conducting an affair, and it's not really a surprised when she turns up strangled, but everyone has an alibi…
2021 fantasy novella in the World of the Five Gods (formerly known as Chalion). A corpse found floating in the harbour is not unusual… but this one, while clearly dead, is still moving. Penric digs into what happened, and why.
This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet twice a month.
2013 space-navy SF, first of a series. On Archangel, your final exam determines how much you owe the company for your education. Tanner Malone messed that up, but joining the Navy will help pay the debt back faster. Meanwhile the local pirates are getting bolder…
1995 SF noir, dir. Kathryn Bigelow, Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett; IMDb / AllMovie. Paranoia's just reality on a finer scale.
2003 fantasy/SF, third of its series. Rowan the Steerswoman comes to the seaside town of Alemeth, searching the Annex for evidence of a wizard who doesn't seem to exist…
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved generating SVG and fitting lines to points. (Note that this is open until 22 May 2022.)
2020 young adult SF, last volume of its trilogy. Maseo Kaytu and Anvil Squad are being sent into space, and nobody's even telling them why…
Still not really "my" sort of music, and nor should it be, but I enjoyed several of these…
2021 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, eleventh in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. An old woman's found burned to death in her isolated home; not an accident, not with the beating first, but with a week before the body was even discovered this is going to be a tough one. Then men start dying mysteriously, and the only connection seems to be that they've recently got divorced…
Yes, I'm still programming in PostScript. Why? Because I enjoy it.
This small one-day boardgaming event has been carrying on, mostly without me. I think it was about 30 people this time, with the organisers and the people I was playing with the only mask-wearers.
1930 thriller. The Saint and Roger Conway work again to prevent Rayt Marius from plunging Europe into (highly profitable for him) war. Vt The Avenging Saint.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved two number-sequence tasks. (Note that this is open until 15 May 2022.)
1995 space history, dir. Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton; IMDb / AllMovie. Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here.
2016 space-navy SF, first of an 18-book series. Everybody knows that another war is coming, and Captain Barron and the battleship Dauntless are getting a refit a long way from the front lines. Until a third power gets involved.
A trip to Silverstone for a small games day with a couple of friends and fellow-podcasters.
2004 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1940 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. Poirot leaves his dentist, passing a lady who loses the buckle of her shoe while getting out of a taxi. Later, it turns out that the dentist is dead. Suicide? Of course not.
1938 Napoleonic naval fiction, second written but seventh by internal chronology. After his triumphs in the Lydia, Hornblower gets command of a ship of the line, if an ugly and unseaworthy one, not to mention short of crew.
2001 horror, dir. Stuart Gordon, Ezra Godden, Francisco Rabal: IMDb / allmovie. No one leave Imboca. People come, but no one leave.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various summation-like operations. (Note that this is open until 8 May 2022.)
2006 alternate-history war story, last of six books. The Malwa have been pushed back but still hold their home territory; Belisarius and allies must finish the job.
2014 urban fantasy, fourth of its series. Angel Crawford is still a zombie (subtype conscious and super-strong, though still cerebrivorous), and things seem to be going all right, but several of her allies get kidnapped by the evil corporation…
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal. Calibration: I want a trailer to tell me what's different about this film; the marketers want it to tell me why it's like all the others…)