Strategy Games Sale at Good Old Games
Good Old Games is having a sale of strategy games over this weekend. All of the Age of Wonders games and several of the Heroes of Might and Magic games along with many good city management games and King of Dragon Pass are available at 50% off. None of them cost more than a few dollars. Just thought some of you might like to know!
Anatomy of an E-Book Sale
I just bought an e-book, Yesterday’s Spy, by Len Deighton. So what, Bill, I hear you cry– you buy ebooks every day. Most of us do. What’s there worth writing a blog post about in that? Well, it’s a process I usually do unthinkingly and today I actually analysed it on the level of both my intellectual processes and the mechanisms of sale. (Forgive me if what I am going to say sounds entirely obvious, but sometimes it’s worth thinking about the obvious.) Here’s what happened. This morning I was reading an article on Slate about how Len Deighton wrote Read more…
In Praise of Good Old Games
It all started a few years back when I bought a new notebook computer, one without a disk drive, as is becoming more and more the fashion these days. I had a sudden hankering to play Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, my favourite ever turn-based computer strategy game. I did not fancy carrying around an external disk drive just so I could play a very old game that used its disk as a security measure. (You could not play at all without the CD in your computer’s drive.) I can’t remember how I found myself at Good Old Games but Read more…
Author’s Notes: Weaver of Shadow
Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilisation is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph. That quote, as you probably well know, comes from Robert E. Howard. More specifically it comes from his 1935 story Beyond the Black River, one of my two all-time favourite Conan tales. (It’s a toss up with Red Nails. I can’t choose between them.) Beyond the Black River illustrates Howard’s theme all too well. It’s a tale of violence along the border between the civilised land of Aquilonia and the Pictish Wilderness. It was written late in Howard’s Read more…
Fun Atelier, Hong Kong
I meant to put this up a month ago but with my usual sloth-like speed I have somehow managed to delay doing so. After a couple of establishing shots of Hong Kong, specifically of the harbour as seen from the Star Ferry taken on my phone camera, these are pictures from my signing at Fun Atelier. This is a great hobby store reached by its own elevator –how cool is that?– on Hong Kong Island. As you can see if you look closely I was sporting my wino beard but somehow this did not discourage numerous people from approaching me Read more…
Back!
My apologies — six weeks have passed without a post, which is my longest period of radio silence since I started this blog. In my defence I will say I have both been busy and on holiday. I was travelling in Asia– Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia to be specific. My original plan was to write about my trip as it happened. If you follow this blog you’ll have noticed how successful that was. I blame this on the fact that I was having a good time and to the fact that I quite frankly prefer wandering around interesting, exotic Read more…
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