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Eastercon: The Inevitable Blog Write-Up
I spent last weekend at Odyssey 2010, this year’s Eastercon. And in the tradition of previous trip reports, I thought I’d write it up. So here it is. What is Eastercon? Well there’s the obvious answer: it’s a convention held every Easter. There’s the slightly more informative, but still straightforward answer: it’s the British national…
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Three Minute Chocolate Cake
How cool would it be if you had some mates around (possibly after the consumption of some alcohol), and you asked them if they fancied some pudding, and less than ten minutes later you returned with some delicious chocolate sponge pudding cooked there and then from scratch? It would be cool right? Well it’s possible,…
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What Does It Actually Mean To Be British?
Canadian author, journalist, blogger, Internet freedom fighter and general all-round good guy Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) is apparently having a bit of a rough time at the moment. As he reports via Twitter: Hired a temp flat through #Foxtons; loo ceiling is leaking and water is ELECTRIFIED. Foxtons claims this isn’t their problem [link] As you…
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Amazon Author Pages
I’ve just discovered a rather cool new feature that Amazon have introduced: Author Pages. Basically, it’s a page for each author which can customised with the author’s picture and a biography. You can get to the author’s page by simply typing the author’s name into the search box. The author page should then appear as…
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On Reviews, Genre, And Why Game Night Is Like The Plague
At some point in this post I’m going to talk about Game Night sales and vaccinations, but I’m going to start off about talking about one of the pitfalls of reviewing, which is that a review is not so much a description of how much you enjoyed the book as a prediction as to how…
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There Are Two Kinds Of People In The World…
That there are two kinds of people in this world is a truth universally acknowledged; what exactly it is that divides the world is where the disagreements arise. Extroverts and Introverts? Optimists and Pessimists? (Or as famed fictional pessimist Sir Humphrey Appleby would have it, Idealists and Realists?) Left-wing or right-wing? Liberal or Conservative? North…
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Ian Sturrock’s Game Night Drabble Competition
A few weeks ago, I made the latest stop on the Game Night on the Web blog tour, at Ian Sturrock’s Live Journal. Ian’s a roleplaying writer of some repute, with the works on his CV including the Conan RPG from Mongoose Publishing, so I was very pleased to stop there. Ian did first an…
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Thoughts On Recently Read Books
In no particular order, and in no way a complete list, here are some thoughts on some books I’ve read recently. These aren’t quite reviews, and I’m not therefore going to be scoring them. * * * * * Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Ayikwei Parkes Like David Devereux’s Hunter’s Moon, which I’m…
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Last Night’s Game
We started last night off with a discussion about General Tangent’s plans for when we next pause our Masks of Nyarlathotep Call of Cthulhu campaign. He’s thinking of running the old classic Traveller campaign, The Traveller Adventure, using Mongoose Publishing’s new Traveller rules. (I’m very much up for this, as I love Traveller, and I…
Jonny Nexus 