Surgeon-Commander Rick Jolly commanded the Medical Squadron of the Royal Marines' Commando Logistic Regiment during the Falklands War, in charge of the joint Army, Navy and Marine field hospital at Ajax Bay. This is his memoir of the conflict and the years afterwards. An earlier edition was published as The Red and Green Life Machine.
More gaming with nearby friends.
2014-2016 fiction, fanfic connected to the Narnia books. Having avoided the fateful railway accident of The Last Battle, Susan tries to carry on her life.
2024 science fiction, sequel to Space Opera. What does a post-famous musician do after their performance at Space Eurovision has unexpectedly saved the world?
Ruslan Koryov is an aspiring street racer in Grim Cyberpunk World. But after a major accident, it looks as though his career and life are over… until he meets a mysterious benefactor who wants him to train as a pilot…
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various list analyses. (Note that this ends today.)
2024 romance. Celeste St. Pierre is an art thief; so is Magnus Larsson. They used to run with a crew, until five years ago things went bad, Magnus bailed, and the crew fell apart. Now their mentor has died, and had one last wish…
2018 historical thriller, third of its series. After the artist on an archaeological expedition disappears, as does a valuable relic, the newspapers are keen to dig up scandal; and his wife used to be married to Stoker, Veronica Speedwell's undeclared beau. So really they can't do anything but investigate.
2023 fantasy-romance, first of a series. The world is much like our own, only it has witches in it. Kay had a teenage crush on Harry Ashworth, but he dropped her with an unfriendly note. Now they're thrown together on a journey across Europe.
1995 SF, third and last of its series. "Star" Svensdotter and her children are sent off to assist the expedition that's looking into alien ruins on Mars.
I went back and did Advent of Code 2015. Spoilers.
2020 urban fantasy, fifth of its series. Lydia Crow has taken over the Family. This has not made her life noticeably better.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved string intersections and serial XOR. (Note that this ends today.)
2020 science fiction, twelfth in the Chronicles of St Mary's series (time travel). There's a new head of St Mary's, and things are going wrong faster than ever.
2023 paranormal fantasy, first novel of a nine-book series. Lorelei Clay is returning to small-town America, but the ghosts still won't leave her alone.
Back to the boardgame café.
2022 romantic fantasy novella. In 1882, Arthur has been posted as an aide to the British Viceroy in Calcutta; Melusina is a warding specialist whose services have been called on.
It is my belief that this blog is not covered by the new Online Safety Act.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved array evaluation and anagrams. (Note that this ends today.)
I've been making a little more progress with text parsing in Rust using the winnow library. Today I will parse the input format (and thus provide a very limited spoiler) for Advent of Code 2015 day 16.
winnow
2012 collection of two police procedural stories, tartan noir, in the Logan McRae series. Life goes from bad to worse in Police Scotland.
The Oxford Meeples had another quarterly games day, and I had a great time again.
2017 novelette, prequel to the Fiona Griffiths series. A very new constable Griffiths goes out on her first patrol.
For Advent of Code 2023 I tried out the nom parsing library and then switched to winnow, but I found it quite hard work and did a lot of cargo-culting of my own code. I went back to the library for a recent problem and think I've got more of a handle on it now. Since there seem to be very few worked examples, here's mine. Note that this is a partial spoiler for Advent of Code 2015 day 7.
nom
2020 horror. Post-divorce, Kara finds herself living at her uncle's eclectic Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy. Which is fine, until something makes a hole in the wall…
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved exhaustive searching and an iterative process. (Note that this ends today.)
2024 paranormal fantasy, second novel of its series. Bunny Barrington, involuntary vampire and new-made police in a tiny supernatural town in Alaska, works to track down the source of a strange new drug.