Jonny Nexus

Category: Life

  • 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…

  • It Appears I Am Indeed Sexist

    There’s a theory that we inadvertently raise our children in sexist ways, treating our boys differently than our girls. Boys are praised for displaying physical prowess and courage; girls are praised for displaying delicacy and fragility, and for being good. Boys are raised to become aggressive go-getters as men, and when they indeed aggressively go-get…

  • Art or Memorabilia: A Case Against Modern Art

    A lot of people are quite dismissive about modern art, typically arguing that artists should produce “paintings” of actual things: portraits, landscapes, still lives. When it comes to people like Michael Landy, who has just installed his Art Bin at the South London Gallery, public reaction is often quite dismissive. So is Michael Landy an…

  • Why Snow Buggers Up 21st Century UK: A Theory

    We (the UK) are currently in the grip of a meteorological disaster that has paralysed our entire country. Or to put it another way, a few inches of snow has fallen and everything’s consequently turned to shit. Roads are blocked, buses are cancelled, trains are delayed, and schools and businesses are closed – often because…

  • On When The Old And The New Collide

    I think that one of the most fascinating things about the ongoing change from old, analogue/physical business models to their new digital/virtual replacements, is the way we’re moving through a sort of middle, mash-up period, in which legecy businesses are desperately trying to hammer their old models into a shape that might perhaps work in…

  • A Brief (And Late) Dragonmeet Report

    I had a really good time at Dragonmeet. The last two years I’ve been stuck behind a stand selling Game Night, and the problem with that is that you basically miss the actual con. This year, I didn’t have a stand, so it was really nice to get out and about. I went down with…

  • Why These Days Now Are Better Than The “Good Old Days”

    Something happened the other day that reminded me that despite what legions of Daily Mail readers might think, our society now is not intrinsically worse that it was back in, say, the 1950s, and is in many ways far better. I was heading home, by train, to Brighton, after a day at work in London.…

  • NASA’s Groundhog Day

    On October 27th 1961, 48 years ago, the first Saturn 1 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral. This mission, SA-1, was not a complete rocket, and it did not go into orbit. Only the first stage was live, with the upper stages being merely dummies, and it performed only a sub-orbital loop. It was not…

  • Never Give Up

    I think there’s a lot to be said in life for never giving up, and fighting on to the bitter end. Take Manchester United. They’ve been pretty much at the top of English football for nearly twenty years now, and a lot of that is due to them never giving up. I don’t think any…

  • Enough With The Spoilers!

    How many of you guys reading this remember the now infamous cover of Starlog #35 (right) in which, just ahead of the UK release of The Empire Strikes Back, they totally blew the main revelation of the story (that Vader was Luke’s father), thus totally ruining the film for anyone unlucky enough to catch a…