Shores of Night

As I'm on a break from gaming, I'm thinking a lot about what I want when I come back to it (I have at least determined there must be a 'come back to it', if only to see if it's still a hobby I want to be involved in). A thread over at RPG.net ( here ) made me think of what puts me off in terms of games, as things that are written or designed rather than things that are played. Of course there's behaviour at the gaming table that's off putting but here I'm focusing on things that designed into the games themselves rather than the annoying things players do. 1) Gear Porn As I get older, the more I just want to play, or create. I find that I don't really care about equipment, and that nothing really annoys like an equipment list that runs to several pages because you have descriptions, tables and so on. This is especially egregious where the differences between pieces of equipment are so slight that, arguably, the choices could be boiled down to lig...

The Guardian has been waxing lyrical (and fraught) over the resignation of Maria Miller from the cabinet. They're not overly bothered by the fact she's gone; she's a Conservative after all and the circumstances of her resignation are such that only a fool would support her now. It has just brought out the paper's usual anxiety over whether Britain has enough women MPs, doing enough to promote women, in enough key positions and so on. Plus la change, one might say. It feels as if the Guardian has been fretting about this sort of thing for most of my lifetime certainly. I started reading the paper about twenty years ago and if anything its coverage of women's issues has only become more strict over the years. This is not to say that women in politics do not matter; quite the reverse. Women in the UK have not even had a century of being able to vote, and women MPs are a vanishingly rare breed. Labour has the bulk of them, mostly thanks to implementing all women ...

Genre is a relatively young creation, one spawned in the early 20th Century with the birth of the literary canon and the development of the business of publishing as a result of cheaper paper and ink. Before this, there was certainly high and low fiction but they were personified by the novel, the romance and either Gothic or the penny dreadful (which grew into the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s). Genre came later when there more people with the leisure time to read and likely dates to the 1920s. Terms like Science Fiction (a bastardisation of the term 'Scientifiction' which was deemed so awful that nobody took it seriously)  come to us from people like Hugo Gernsback, the Belgian magazine proprietor who specialised in that sort of story. I believe, despite its use, genre has become effectively useless as a term because there are so many strands within genres that a flat 'Fantasy' or 'Science Fiction' or even 'Horror' (which arguably has been the mo...

I haven't blogged about comics for a while, so long that I don't remember the last time I did, to be honest.  As I've just successfully converted my housemate to the joys of Sleeper, I thought I'd throw something up about the series I actively follow. For the sake of my own sanity I'm going to avoid the bear pit that is superheroics as there's nothing I'm that invested in: though I am enjoying both Jonathan Hickman's Avengers and the Michael Bendis All New X-Men. Both are solid books with good writing (though I do worry that Bendis has done his usual make over job on the original five X-Men to a slight degree) and a solid Science Fiction core. Also, both books are taking risks, something that superhero books seldom do. My main interest lies outside of the world of spandex and capes these days, and has done since DC decided to reboot their universe and completely change what I knew in their quest to appeal to people who grew up in the Sixties (only grim...

The School of Media at Birmingham City University have decided to start having a monthly debate. The first, held last Friday was about the status of Birmingham and the view the outside world has of the city. The panelists were the Mark Rogers new Chief Executive and Director of Economy, Pauline Geoghegan from the PoliticsinBrum (which doesn't seem to have been updated for a while), David Harte from the Bournville News, a hyperlocal site focusing on a part of Birmingham that gets little press coverage and Beverley Nielsen,  the director of BCU's Birmingham Made Me, which celebrates the city's innovation. The discussion was chaired by Professor Diane Kemp, who was quick to explain that in some respects the topic had been chosen to reflect the recent coverage the city had received; all Peaky Blinders and Benefits Street. The question was, is that all Birmingham is? Is that the only way the city is seen? The panel put forward a disparate set of views, to the Chief Execu...

A lot of the songs I like were 'given' to me by friends or family. Some come from when I started going out with Eve, others from meeting people like Bert Wolverson. The music these people gave me was very different from what I'd found for myself and provided new directions to explore. I wouldn't have  discovered these by myself, I don't think; apart from possibly the James track as I was a teenager at the time when the Indie explosion happened. 1) Deliverance by the Mission (Eve Weaver) This is one of the songs that Eve gave me on a tape after we just started going out (it was after we'd played Mage, the songs were about magic, children and dreams - loosely modelled on the plot of the game). We were exchanging a lot of letters about all sorts of things. We were talking about if I was going to go Goth or not. The opening hit me in just the right place, electrifying me and I was hooked when the music spilled out. 2) Snake Dance by the March Violets (Cara...

In what seems like a moment... well more a few weeks of madness I've started to ponder launching a second blog, one that focuses on a single subject. The main reason for this is as a career move, I plan to try going freelance later this year, once the MA is done and I want something dedicated so that I can use it to hopefully get work; much as I love the Shores of Night blog it's become a bit of a dumping ground for everything and I think its probably best to start separating things out a bit. This is despite the fact that I deleted my supposedly dedicated gaming blog, Hastur's Hamster at the start of the year because I just wasn't updating it. Anyway, its something I'm considering and the next logical step is to ask 'what do I blog about?' I initially pondered doing something about politics, not necessarilly talking about Westminster and the Houses of Parliament because there's tons of blogs doing that. Instead I was pondering looking at a more gl...