2015 humorous science fiction, third and to date last of its series. Lord Thomas Kinago, foppish distant cousin of the Emperor, is travelling to watch the enigmatic alien Zang bonsai a star system. Meanwhile the rocky Kail may be trying to open diplomatic relations with the Imperium.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved filtering strings and lists. (Note that this is open until 4 September 2022.)
2011 urban fantasy, second of its series. Nola O'Grady, high-grade psychic, continues to work for no-such-agency tracking down supernatural threats to the people of San Francisco.
2003 romantic comedy/drama, dir. Sofia Coppola, Bill Murray, Scarlett Johanson; IMDb / allmovie. Two people in Tokyo find themselves isolated and rootless.
1982 detective fiction, second and last of James's novels of Cordelia Gray, private investigator. The fading actress Clarissa Lisle has been getting subtle threats against her life; Cordelia's employed by her (fourth) husband to look into it. This will not end well.
2012 fantasy. The war in Faerie is over. But not everyone will accept the rule of the new Prince, and some of them are causing trouble back on Earth.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved ordinal numbers and Unicode generation. (Note that this is open until 28 August 2022.)
1956 police procedural, second in the 87th Precinct series. A mugger's attacking women in the city, with a distinctive pattern to his crimes.
This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet in the Britannia. (We've been going there for three months now, and it hasn't yet been cold enough for us to want to move inside.)
1993 fantasy. King Roland of Ile-Rien is a weakling controlled by his favourite; only his mother, the ageing Dowager Queen Ravenna, is holding the kingdom together. Meanwhile the sorcerer Urbain Grandier has fled from the Inquisition and kidnapped the one magician left at court. For Thomas Boniface, captain of the Queen's Guard, all it needs is the king's half-fey bastard sister Kade Carrion to be up to her old tricks…
2002 science fiction, dir. Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Max von Sydow: IMDb / allmovie. Precrime stops murders before they happen. But what happens when its boss is named as a future murderer?
2014 urban fantasy, self-published, sixth of its series. A mysterious Something comes to Singapore Three and makes its home in a largely-disused temple. And the Emperors of Heaven and Hell have both gone missing…
In the Thames Water area, we are to have a "hosepipe ban" from 24 August. This strikes me as the wrong way to reduce water consumption.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved an unusual base representation and date calculations. (Note that this is open until 21 August 2022.)
I've been wanting to rent the Bourne End library room again since I ran the second 1 Player Guild get-together back in 2018. So I invited along the community from discussion.tekeli.li, the forum that had a large influx of exiles from Shut Up and Sit Down when their own forum was closed, as well as local gamers.
2015 action/mystery, third and last in the Miranda Vaughn series. Miranda's asked to help with an audit at a resort, complicated by a film production and an FBI operation led by her potential boyfriend…
2002 drama, dir. Roman Polanski, Adrien Brody: IMDb / allmovie. As the Jews of Krakow are rounded up into the ghetto, one pianist finds out that he's a survivor.
2010 military SF, eighth of the Kris Longknife books. Kris is hunting pirates and slavers beyond the edge of human-claimed space.
1998 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1962 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. Someone drops dead after drinking the famous actress's drink…
1941 murder mystery. The famous botanist Edgar Prees tried to hurl himself off a cliff and was prevented; the next morning he went into work as usual. Where he was promptly found dead. US vt Murder of a Suicide.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a check-digit function and more number reversals. (Note that this is open until 14 August 2022.)
2021 fantasy, first of a trilogy, linked to the earlier Crown of Shards series. Gemma's public image is of a spoiled princess; so nobody expects her to be working undercover. But it seems that she's not the only one.
2001 science fiction horror, dir. John Carpenter, Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube: IMDb / allmovie. It's just a routine prisoner transfer.
2014 space-navy SF, second of its series. Tensions are rising between Archangel's government and the corporations of the interstellar Union of which it's a member. Which doesn't bode well for Tanner Malone's wish just to put in his time and then get out of the Navy.
1998 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1971 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes.
2009 mystery. Ruth Galloway is an archaeologist specialising in bones, living on the edge of a salt marsh in Norfolk. Ten years ago a child went missing; now another one has vanished…
2016 SF, third of its series. Kyle Roberts commands the new carrier Avalon as the war against the Terran Commonwealth continues.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved lots of number-string conversions. (Note that this is open until 7 August 2022.)
After time off for holidays and excessive heat, this Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet in the new pub.
1997 mystery, seventh in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). Twenty-four years ago, Thea Janis was a teenage prodigy, who vanished and was believed dead. Now a client comes to Carlotta with a new chapter in her writing style…
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…)