Dragonmeet 2014

Yes, it's December, which must mean that it's Dragonmeet again. It's been moved to a new venue from Kensington Town Hall to the Ibis Hotel in Earls Court ("more room" according to one of the volunteers).

To me it seemed smaller, or more compact. There weren't many vendors there, but perhaps more producers, including a new card game called Stak Bots:

I bought an RPG that I've had my eye on for a while, which seems to be a bit different from the usual character based games:

Unfortunately, I didn't get a game so, on my way back, I stopped off at Covent Garden to do a little more shopping and saw the lights:

Teach Your Kids to Game Week

DriveThruRPG, a download site for role playing game publishers, is promoting this:

There's lots of discounts and even free stuff, including FirstFable, a kind of D&D starter for 6-year olds.

The (Second) Long Weekend - Movies, RPGs and Luck

The second long weekend started, as the other, with movies. I finished watching Pandorum:



Not bad, but I've never been over-enamoured of horror/sci-fi. Whether it's just natural squeamishness or my rather Utopian view of the future, I don't know. I think Mr. Glitz might like it as a good pizza movie, but it wasn't to my taste. Dennis Quaid was in it, though, so it wasn't a bad movie and he is better than Nicolas Cage.

Next up was Inside Job:



Not a heist movie in the precise meaning of the word, but no bank robber ever got away with billions like these guys have. Thanks to this movie, I now know what CDSs and CDOs are and why the executives at Goldman Sachs are being asked awkward questions by the U.S. Congress (but not by the British Parliament it seems. Funny, that).

A Day Out in Northfields

I decided to go to the Shadow Warriors Role Playing Game club meeting in West London, which is the only one I know of that play on a Sunday. It took quite a while to get there from BasVegas, well over two hours, and I forgot my dice (the height of embarrassment: I had to borrow two D10's and a D6! Me!). We played a D&D type game of the GM's devising called UnBound (link is to a PDF). The people were very pleasant, mostly blokes with two women, one an American, who crocheted a lot, which seems to be in vogue. It was an entertaining few hours, if a little slow at times: six players is about the limit.

Luck

A new TV series has started in the States which seems to be a cut above the norm:



I won £75 at a dog track a few years ago, so I've got a bit of interest in this, plus it has Nick Nolte in it who is always worth the money. I look forward to it over here soon.

The Long Weekend and Dragonmeet 2011

I have some holiday left at the end of the year so, taking a tip from my erstwhile colleague Mr. Woodcock, I have used some of it to have one day off a week in the run up to Christmas, taking two long weekends.

I started by watching my film subscription which turned up Jonah Hex:



Not bad for a pizza movie, but all the action seems to take place in the dark for some reason, which does diminish the fun.

I also watched Hobo with a Shotgun, and immediately wished I hadn't (don't watch this if you're going to watch Blade Runner in the near future. It'll break you heart):



It's sad to see Rutger Hauer reduced to this rubbish. He wasn't half bad, but you can see he's at the fag-end of his career.

Dragonmeet 2011

Because I was able to do some shopping on Friday, I went to a games festival on Saturday at Kensington Town Hall. It was the usual fare, but I got to play a couple of games. The first was called, fittingly, Lancaster, run by the Phoenix Games Club from East London:

Based on Medieval England in the time of the 100 Years war, it takes an hour-and-a-half, five turns, and is a political, military and economic game for up to five players. There are no dice, but some cards, to simulate fortuna. There were three experienced players, one eight year old girl (the daughter of one) and me. I came third and I got a nice logo embossed dice for playing!

Next up was Wings of War run by the Shadow Warriors RPG Club:

The game was catch the pidgeon, shooting down your opponents. I flew an S.E.5a:

and got pretty banged up, but gave as good as I got. A half-hours fun and I enjoyed it!

Sunday: Deathwatch!!!

Deathwatch

As you may know, I have an interest in role playing games. It stems from when I was at University and was a member of the games club where I first played Traveller (I'm not a big fan of D&D). Recently, Games Workshop have collaborated with Fantasy Flight Games and produced a W40K series of role playing games, the latest of which is Deathwatch (it's best to pronounce the name with as much Gothic melodrama as you can muster: I do). Fantasy Flight have quite a good marketing strategy for these games. They produce a cut-down introductory adventure which can be played without the core rule book and just a set of percentile dice (two D10's, one for tens, the other for units). The Deathwatch adventures are called Final Sanction and Oblivion's Edge and are available as free PDF's.

Jobs

I've been a little busy recently coding in Delphi (?!?). The week before last, an agent rang me up and asked me for a copy of my most recent CV. The agent normally recruits payroll administrators, but one of his clients had asked for a Delphi programmer and he'd seen an old CV of mine on Planet Recuit. I sent him my latest CV and heard nothing more. The following week he phoned me back and asked me if I could attend an interview in London (Finsbury) on Thursday 2^nd September. I'll be given a technical test but also, unusually, they wanted a sample of my existing work. The only Delphi work I've done at home in the recent past was to sort out problems at work: I'd e-mail a fragment of code to home from work and then e-mail the solution back, but I don't have anything standalone. So I've set about creating a little cryptographic application using the RC4 algorithm I mentioned previously. I've got a nice little front-end with big buttons and nice icons:



and I've used TDD for most of the class work. I'll also do a little documentation to explain how it works and the design ideas behind it.