So, I'm back from my holiday in Brisbane, and yesterday had reason to drive around Melbourne a bit. Despite the rain and this taking place pretty close to peak hours, the traffic was light and the other drivers fairly sensible and polite.

What happened while I was gone? Did aliens invade and replace all the motorists with pod people?

Smokers are really bothering me at the moment. Not just cigarette smoke, the smell of the people themselves.

I have always been very sensitive to cigarette smoke, with it setting off my asthma if I inhale only a little. If I get doused in smoke, the asthma keeps getting worse until I take a shower and change my clothes. (I don't know if I would ( Read more... )

Conquest has seriously pissed me off this year. I've been right on the edge of cancelling my games (which would seem to hardly matter at the moment, as so few people are signed up, but I really don't like the idea of cancelling).

Anybody notice that there was no sign of one of my blurbs on the website until a week after all the others went up? That' ( Read more... )

This evening I went to the BBQ finishing off Caligo Mundi's Weekend of Gaming (which I attended to play or help run everything that wasn't World of Darkness -WoD being Caligo Mundi's staple and the one form of LARP they do which does not interest me at all). They had a gift for me, a thank you for helping to run an event (the Firefly LARP) which ( Read more... )

I've just gotten around to watching the first episode of Games of Thrones. For those who have commented to me on the scene that last shows Khal Drogo and Daenerys (a scene I have been most interested in seeing due to said comments), the novel version of that scene continues past what the TV version does, and the additional material casts the ( Read more... )

I'm sitting around in my parents' living room with my mother. Half an hour ago, the phone rang, and my father took it in another room. Fifteen minutes ago, he walked through to the stairs, simply saying, "I've gotta go." It's just like the first quarter-century of my life.

For most families, having Dad called away suddenly on Christmas Night would ( Read more... )

I got an email from Days of Wonder this morning advising me of a special offer they have going at the moment. If I spend US$50 at the Days of Wonder online store, I can get Cargo Noir, which normally sells for US$50, for free. Also, they suggested a few games that could be bought to get to that US$50 mark, including Ticket To Ride Asia.

Fair enough ( Read more... )

It's a bit late for this year, but while building blurbs and such for the Arcanacon website, I discovered Fontsquirrel. It has a large repository of fonts that can be safely used on the web (by a webmaster who knows the correct techniques for embedding fonts in a web page). Arcanacon uses a one-blurb-to-a-page style so that writers can make ( Read more... )

I've just written a class called UnreliableChangeMonitor. See, it's for those times when I want to monitor for changes to a resource, but the monitoring process itself can't be relied upon. The things we do.

Has anybody else been noticing a recent trend to redefine already-known, well-understood words to mean something completely different (usually on the fly and without any contextual clues suggesting an altered meaning)? I don't know whether it is just coincidence that I've encountered it several times recently or whether it is a general rise of poor ( Read more... )