I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list filtering and a perverse sort. (Note that this is open until tomorrow.)
2019 comic fantasy, first of the Inspector Paris series. Paris is a hard-drinking Mancunian detective, but he's not prepared for a beautiful woman crucified in a suburban garden. Or for her to be fifteen centimetres tall.
Boardgames at a friend's place again, on a frosty night.
2021 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, twelfth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. People are overdosing on a strange new drug, and long-buried bodies are being dug up on construction sites.
1997 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1957 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. A friend of Miss Marple's, travelling by train, sees a woman being strangled in another train running alongside; but nobody reports having found a body.
1942 mystery. On the eve of the USA joining the Second World War, self-important literary heir Hilary St. John Foulkes insists that someone is trying to murder him, and there's certainly no shortage of people who would profit by his death. Then he's found stabbed in the back in a locked room… Originally published as by "H. H. Holmes".
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved looking for patterns in arrays. (Note that this closes today. Merry Christmas!)
This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet in the Britannia.
2022 fantasy, third of what was going to be a trilogy but has now expanded. Nona is a child living in a city at war, but still just about managing to go to school, while Camilla and Pyrrha look after her.
Back to the boardgame café.
2019 romance. Meg Mackworth hand-letters journals and planners, and spots patterns in things; last year when Reid Sutherland and his fiancée came in for their wedding stationery, she got a Feeling, and couldn't resist working a hidden message of M-I-S-T-A-K-E into the invitation. Now he's back…
2009 war, dir. Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent: IMDb / allmovie. Dakka dakka dakka aieee for you Tommy ze var is over.
2013 fantasy novella. Goblins don't make very good soldiers, but there are lots of them. After an incident with a wizard, nine of them find themselves deep behind enemy lines. Fortunately, they run into a veterinarian…
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved integer filtering. (Note that this closes today.)
I recently got a Kobo Libra 2, after my Aura ONE died. And I've been looking into its series tagging features.
2011 comedic metafiction. Lacey and Paul are pot-growing siblings in rural California, who find a headless corpse on their property. "Lisa" and "David" are struggling authors who are alternating chapters of the mystery they're writing, but still have significant issues to work out from their former relationship…
Another gathering for Xia: Legends of a Drift System.
2019 romantic fantasy, third of its loose series. Proserpina Gates, widowed bookseller, is helping a client find a rumoured Roman treasure on her land. Ibis Ward is the scholar she engages to assist with the research…
2000 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1932 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. While "retired" and visiting a Cornish resort, Poirot finds a young woman who has already survived several murderous attacks.
1949 murder mystery. David came to a small seaside village to live with his sister after his nervous breakdown, only to find as his neighbour Professor Verinder, whom he holds responsible for the suicide of the girl he loved. Sure enough, the professor is soon murdered; but David's far from the only person with a motive.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved expanding a search space and running a character frequency test. (Note that this closes today.)
1938 Napoleonic naval fiction, third written but eighth by internal chronology. Captured at the end of the previous book, Hornblower is to be taken to Paris for a show trial and execution.
2008 war, dir. John Woo, Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro: IMDb 1 and 2 / allmovie 1 and 2. A true historical epic, based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
1985 SF, fourth of its series. After Rudolf Rassendyll gets poisoned on a train in Germany, our heroes have to provide a substitute double for Rudolf V of Ruritania.
The Oxford Meeples had another quarterly games day (I've missed a few thanks to clashing events).
2010 mystery, second in the series. After the events of the first book, Ruth Galloway is pregnant, and not quite sure how to tell anyone (particularly the father). Oh, and there's another archaeology-related crime to solve.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a binary expansion and string analysis. (Note that this closes today.)
2017 space-navy SF, sixth of its series. The Federation is doing a good job on the battlefield, but it's simply a smaller economy than the Commonwealth, and those numbers are starting to tell. So Admiral Kyle Roberts comes up with a plan to end the war now, win or lose…
In the spirit of the King William's College General Knowledge Paper, released each December for completion over the Christmas break, I offer my own set of questions for the holidays.
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…)