I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved findind odd abundant numbers and first-class functions. (Note that this is open until 3 July 2022.)
1998 crime/comedy, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, Jeff Bridges; IMDb / allmovie. That rug really tied the room together.
2009 mystery-adjacent; the Spellmans are a dysfunctional family of private investigators, but narrator Izzy is trying to get away from that. Of course it won't last.
1995 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1965 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes.
2010 urban fantasy. Nola O'Grady works for a government agency that doesn't exist, to preserve Harmony in the face of Order and Chaos. Back in her home town of San Francisco, she's looking into portents of doom. She tries to keep this separate from her family, but, well, many of them have magic talents too…
We went out scouting for a pub for the local Meetup group, and found one: and it's a McMullen house, which means the AK mild is a regular thing.
2005 non-fiction. Using mostly primary sources, the author attempts to determine just what pirates, privateers, and other ne'er-do-wells of the sea got up to in the Golden Age of Piracy.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved primes and an unusual form of matrix multiplication. (Note that this is open until 26 June 2022.)
2019 historical fantasy, third and probably last of its series. The various monstrous ladies – Mary Jekyll and Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappacini, Catherine Moreau, Justine Frankenstein, and Lucinda Van Helsing – return from Budapest to find both Alice their housemaid and Sherlock Holmes missing.
1997 crime drama and romantic comedy, dir. George Armitage, John Cusack, Minnie Driver; IMDb / allmovie. What could go wrong with combining an assassination job with your high school reunion?
1978 autobiography. Keith Simpson was one of the successors of Spilsbury, and one of the first people in England to turn forensic pathology from an act of drama into a science.
I've changed the way I carry things around with me, to a flexible system for attaching pouches.
2020 fantasy, last of its trilogy. Queen Everleigh Blair decides to take the fight to the enemy: the king of neighbouring Morta, who with his sister orchestrated the massacre that put her on the throne and continues to try to assassinate her.
This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet twice a month. (But the pub has started to have a quiz every Monday night, so we're moving to a new venue nearby.)
1984 SF, second of its series. The Timekeepers are terrorists who are trying to prevent time travel – by threatening to cause a catastrophic split in the timestream. In France in 1625?
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more numerical series. (Note that this is open until 19 June 2022.)
1990 gothic: Mary Reilly is a maid-of-all-work in the establishment of Doctor Henry Jekyll. This will not end well.
1997 police/crime drama, dir. Curtis Hanson, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce: IMDb / allmovie. In 1950s Los Angeles, even the straight cops are bent.
1973 children's fantasy. It's the summer holidays; Frank and Jess need money after a chair got broken, and set up Own Back Limited, a revenge-for-hire service. But things get far too complicated far too quickly. US vt Witch's Business.
Some friends live nearby, and I visited them for gaming.
2015 SF, second of its series. Damien Montgomery and Alaura Stealey, two of the most powerful mages in human space, are sent to the planet Ardennes to deal with its escalating rebellion…
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more furkling about with prime numbers. (Note that this is open until 12 June 2022.)
2002 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1936 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. The sinister Mr Shaitana invites four detectives to a party with his "collection" of undetected murderers. By the end of the evening, he's been stabbed…
2019 romantic mystery, sixth and last in the Mercy Kilpatrick series. Mercy's hastily dropped into an undercover job, while her police chief fiancé conducts a separate investigation.
1996 romantic horror, dir. Stephen Frears, Julia Roberts, John Malkovich: IMDb / allmovie. Mary is a maid of all work in the household of one Dr Jekyll…
2017 science fiction, sixth of its series. "Boss" is leading dives in the Boneyard, the stockpile of abandoned Fleet ships, in the hope of recovering hardware and learning more.
Back in the Usual Pub with nine of us playing various games.
2010 fantasy, fourth in the Dhulyn and Parno series. Our mercenary heroes escort a princess to her wedding; but they're also sent to find out what happened to the last two mercenaries sent to that court…
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved circular primes and the Lanczos approximation. (Note that this is open until 5 June 2022.)
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…)