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 or [...]

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 interview [...]

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.
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Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Like David Devereux’s Hunter’s Moon, which I’m writing about below, [...]

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 did [...]

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 society [...]

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 artist, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 Mark [...]

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. I’m [...]