Whether it’s a boardgame, a wargame, an rpg, or a makeshift operating space for harvesting the internal organs of drifters a good tabletop is important. Back at the beginning of the year when 2015 seemed bright and new I returned to a perennial issue. Finding or making a good playing surface. There’s a lot of options and they all have their pro’s and cons. Continue reading…
Category: life
This covers the general events of my life and my thoughts upon it. Its probably going to be the most generally downbeat category (feel that angst).
In search of a clever title – 01 – 13/04/15 – 19/04/15
I honestly couldn’t think of a snappy title, which I wanted, for this (hopefully series of) post(s). So I fell back on the old reliable “ironically self depreciating” brand of “humour” so loved by ersatz comedians the world over. So what is this? Well after deciding to take forty days “off” from my biggest sources of online procrastination the amount of posts on my blog for 2015 showed something like a 500% increase. Clearly posting on social media platforms and various forums was working as a relief valve of sorts for whatever random thoughts flowed through me from the great beyond. (Apprently one of those thoughts was the incorrect idea I mastered how to queue stuff to post automatically, a day late and a doller short here we are) Continue reading…
Man Vs Belly – Fatchelor Life (I get up when I want)
A little over a year ago I wrote the following, “I don’t want to shock you gentle reader, but I’m overweight. Not as overweight as I was in the past but nowhere near my “proper” weight either. Over the years I’ve tried various diets and eating plans, with the results ranging from excellent to disastrous.” It mildly saddens me to say that this statement still holds true today. Though again, a little less than when I wrote it. Back at the beginning of March I entered into a diet pact with someone. Nothing outrageous, we’d try to lose two pounds a week from the first week in March till the last week in June, specifically June 26th (the significance of that date should of course be obvious to our more devoted readers). Continue reading…
Paper placebo’s
I, regularly, mock Sean about watching people play computer games rather than playing them himself. So it is with some chagrin that I reveal that over the last day or two I have watched a lot of YouTube videos of people playing boardgames. Of course the difference being that if I had the opportunity to play boardgames I would, so I feel my moral superiority over Sean is still intact. Which is the most important takeaway. Continue reading…
Best of 2014 – Anime
Now you might be thinking upon seeing that title, “Hey isn’t this about three months late?”, maybe you should instead be thinking “It sure would be a shame if asking all these questions forced Mick to mess up my pretty face”. Just a friendly suggestion. Indeed it is a little late, due in part to laziness but also due to an inevitability outlined below. Continue reading…
Organisational imperatives
Just spent about two hours searching every online repository I use, every writing program I use, every text file (all of which have bizarrely cryptic names) that might contain it, five different notebooks and even random scraps of paper. All to try to find an overly complete biography for a character I decided I didn’t want to use but have now changed my mind about. Of course I can’t find it. I did find a four line biography which now makes me suspect whether I actually wrote this thing in the first place. The real problem of course is that I probably shouldnt be checking around fifteen different places for material related to one project. So I bit the bullet and finally bought a copy of Scrivener. I’ve been half using demo versions on and off for the last three or four years but it feels like time I use something, anything, to keep everything related to individual projects in one place (of course I’m saving my files in my Dropbox folder, have to keep the glorious work safe for future generations). I’ll probably still use WriteMonkey for the actual writing as I really love its super minimalist approach. But at least now I know that organisational nirvana is only a quick copy and paste away. Continue reading…
Slammin’
I forgot to mention it in my last post but I read my first American comic in literally years. The recent IDW re-issue of the classic Star Slammers. I first came across Star Slammers in one of those compilation magazines Marvel UK used to put out, I don’t think it was Overkill which means it was the earlier one who’s name escapes me. Anyway, the relevant part of that memory is that I only ever read the first issue, which I really enjoyed but completely forgot about it until I came across the IDW re-issue last week (despite not reading American comics these days I like to keep up to date with the larger publishers, but I’d a year of unsorted shit to get through).
This desert life
My faux-Lenten retreat from the insidious snares of the online world has run into a few snags. Nothing apocalyptic but enough to besmirch the pure wall of restraint I was hoping to build. At least my few small indulgences were so replete with vestigial Catholic guilt that they didn’t absorb too much time. Which was the main thing I wanted to avoid. Continue reading…
The trials and tribulations of book buying
Nearly two months ago I decided to complete my collection of Excel Saga which I’d been buying random volumes off every now and then as I’d heard very good things about it but never really fancied giving it a serious read. So I hunted down the volumes I was missing and ordered them. Eventually over the next month or so all of them arrived. I was only missing volume two and thirteen. I emailed the seller who said they couldnt/wouldnt do anything until forty-five business days had elapsed. Volume two eventually arrived but volume thirteen never did. I gave it an extra day or two to arrive and a full fifty days after I ordered it I got a refund for it. I waited before ordering a replacement copy. Till this bank holiday Monday evening in fact. So of course volume thirteen arrived in the post the next morning. Fair enough, it happens, it was an inconvenience but it just meant I had to send back the replacement. Continue reading…
The desert is full of sand
I presumed that once I had given up my main source of idle distraction that I would become some kind of creative powerhouse, pumping out dem phat words yo! Despite my obvious mastery of street patois that has yet to happen. I’m not sure I know how to live my life without making snide comments on it across various social media websites. I find myself constructing tweets in my head, tweets the world will never see, surely the saddest of tweets. Then again, what was really going to change over a long weekend? Continue reading…