Recently updated blogs

I don't know if there's anything that can be added to what Kelvin posted. I can only repeat it.

Real-world testing!

We aren't coming back just temporarily sharing posts the have been repeatedly requested by chagrined former readers. See the previous post for details and the address of a fresh blog. Hope you had a great Summer.

Looking back on the month, it was more eventful than Augusts are reputed to be. In the UK we are getting used to our new government. And, in some cases, violently testing its boundaries with some summer rioting. We’ve seen some dreadful street behaviour, frequently of a racist / anti-Muslim nature. Thankfully it hasn’t really impacted London, where racism is mercifully rare. The street protests closest to me were jubilant …

There is some racist language in the place names below. The article is from 1892. - MF STICKING LABELS ON TOWNS. A Queer Mixture of Languages in Alameda County Names. SPANISH, INDIAN, ENGLISH AND IMPROPRIETY. Combining in One Name a Row of Poplars and a Grove of Live Oaks - Robbing Old Associations of the Soft Spanish Titles That Belong to Them - Railroad and Postal Sponsors. Contra Costa was …

Job title: Editor Established in 2016, From Balloons to Drones has successfully developed into a well-regarded online scholarly platform dedicated to analysing and debating air power history, theory, and contemporary operations in their broadest sense, including space and cyber power. Our outputs include articles ranging from scholarly pieces to book reviews and a successful podcast … Continue reading Expression of Interest – Editor, From Balloons to Drones →

Photographs of birds taken in East Lyme, CT, in early May.

The website Classical Music, part of BBC Music Magazine, presents an article titled: “Charles-Valentin Alkan: the hermit who composed devilishly difficult piano works,” about French composer and musician Charles-Valentin Alkan ( 1813-1888). From the article: “Very unusually among the virtuoso composer-pianists of the 19th century, Charles-Valentin Alkan spent much of his life as an apparent … Continue reading "French hermit: Charles-Valentin Alkan"

I think it’s a good thing for people to have side quests in their lives to keep things interesting. They don’t have to be anything particularly grand, like finding The Antidote or something, but just a passive side hobby of sorts. I have had various side quests in my adult life, and my two longest-running ones are: To find the perfect Bloody Mary cocktail To find the perfect rendition of …

Let me say up front that I love everything Magpie Games has ever put out. I go out of my way to play their stuff, and I’ve run nearly everything they’ve ever put out. Starting with Epyllion way back in the day, through Urban Shadows, Bluebeard’s Bride, Cartel, Zombie World, Pasión de las Pasiones, all just terrific, eminently playable games. But somehow, despite having played maybe six one-shots of it, …

Reflecting on something that should have happened a lot to me, while it never did. I've been reading several posts as of recently about awful experiences with bullies during school years, or even earlier. Once again, I'm confronted with the baffling fact that I have never had this in my life, even though I should have. Everything was perfectly aligned for me to be a perfect target. I was a …

The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War is a fascinating look into government funded gaming by the folks at People Make Games. In the video, People Make Games was invited to The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) to discuss how gaming is used to simulate conflicts. It’s intersting to see how board games, video games, tabletop RPGs, and even LARPing can be useful tools in a military context. The …

“Next: the Festival…” I wrote at the end of my previous post, trailing a planned post about the Stockport Beer and Cider Festival. What happened then I’m not entirely sure, but it’s now a good two months since such a post would be in any way timely. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed this year’s festival, and it seems a shame to let it go by without any form of comment, so …

Once again it’s time to continue with my slow-burn zoo review series. I’ve just returned from a trip to Tokyo, you see, and while there I visited two zoos. Today we look at the first of them: Ueno Zoological Gardens (usually just called Ueno Zoo), located in Ueno Park in Taito City, central Toyko… Caption: some zoos have awesome, attractive entrances. Ueno Zoo... maybe not so much. Having said that, …

This week I designed & built a new 11ty site to support an advocacy effort among primarily Canadian zine creators opting out of a major Canadian zine festival due to the founder's genocide denial. It's called Can't Zine. This is the first Eleventy site I've hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and there were a couple small hiccups to work out. Overall though, the setup process was pretty painless, and now that …