I saw her playing on Brick Lane last Sunday on my way to St John's. She was playing her skifflesque mixture of Leadbelly and PJ Harvey accompanied by her guitar. I didn't have time to hang around to I shelled out £5 for the disk, 10 songs in 22 minutes, all good stuff.

Check it out here.

Golobalisation n., the appearance of lumps in badly made gravy.

Giant robots invades Montevideo! A 5min short movie directed and animated by Fede Alvarez.

Great deviantart of some children's drawings of Cthuhlu, click and click again for a larger version.

I'd probably get more out of this.



It's a little story and there are loads of them on the LJ (click image for link) including one set in London.

Any Russophones prepared to tell me what it's all about?

From today's Guardian, Jonas Bendiksen's photograph of two men standing on a Soyuz rockect stage.

Nice picture from a gamer called Adam Lewis on BBC's pictures of the week.



Looks a bit photoshopped though, shouldn't the 7 be more elongated? And what about the number opposite the 7?

Nuff said.

Yesterday's Indie had a big two page spread on Essen, the enormous games convention in Germany that happened recently, and on Saturday they've got a piece on the best 50 boardgames. D&D even gets a mention but the picture doesn't look much like our games.

From richgreen01
• Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
• I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions

1. What was it like going to school in France?
It's hard because I did all my secondary schooling in France so I have no point of comparison. We had no uniforms but it was generally more formal. I once accidentally said "tu" to a teacher and the whole class collectively drew in its breath. But he was the trendy physics teacher and insisted I call him that from then on. So generally it was just school, although the days were long 8-12 and 1:30-5:30 with half days Wednesday, so I was often tired, especially as I had to get up at 6 to meet the bus. And then there was the racism. Most people were fine but there was the occasional idiot who wanted to make something of it, and more so away from the main town (by which I mean 6,000 inhabitants). It was like living in 50s in many respects.

2. What is the most unjustly overlooked indie rpg?
That's a hard one, partly because it hard to say what overlooked means in terms of indie rpgs. There are lots of games and lots of them have good things in them but only few are played with any regularity by more than a few die hard groups. It's still a micro market on the whole with the games being bought to a large extent by other indie game designers. So there are games which you don't hear about this month like say octaNe or Enemy Gods or Paladin, but I think people are probably playing them. Of those three, Enemy Gods had some good stuff but ultimately the combat rules didn't work, octaNe worked if the players played it same spirit but could go horribly wrong if you weren't all the on the same page, a bit like a game of Polaris we played last week. So that leaves Paladin, there's a lot of good stuff about opposing duty and the law, power and responsibility. And it's now free too.

There are also some French games which don't get much press outside of France, for the obvious reason. There's one called StarDrakar by Eric Nieudan that I rate highly. It's a Space Opera game in a Star Trek universe mostly at peace, except for the Space Vikings, and that's who you play. Each PC has two stats obstinacy and brutality and some shticks. Each character also has a gauge on their arm on which they set their stat levels before a scene. The two stats add to 6, one is for social and intelligence skills, the other for fighting and athletics. It's got great illustrations too and it's also free.

3. If you could go and see a concert by any band, singer or recording artist, living or dead, who would you choose?
It would have to be Nirvana. I had a ticket but Cobain died before we could see them. The minute I hear those songs, I'm right back there in the 90s.

4. What is the best RPG campaign you've run or played in?
The best campaign I've played in was davidt3001's RQ3 Viking campaign. We all gelled as a group, the adventures and the history were fantastic, fighting other Vikings, raiding England, going to Byzantium, doing the whole wolf thing. It was the kind of game, like Flaming Taft, that creates its own myth.

5. You have to leave Britain and go and live on a different island. Where would you go?
I quite liked Iceland but it's very small and I'm a city boy at heart. So either Manhattan or Long Island count? If not, Ireland or Japan. The first because I'm half-Irish and I think I could live there. I know quite a few Dubliners (now including Eric mentioned above) and it's got countryside and long barrows for chilledchimp and Japan because it is just so different not just from the West but it's also internally very contrasted, conservative and traditional yet hyper modern.

There was a knock at the door an hour ago and chilledchimp took some sweets out to the witches, ghosts and monsters there assembled. "Where's the Wolfman?" they said so I duly performed, chasing after them whilst they were knocking on a neighbour's door. It seems like I've become something of a local institution.