"V"

A man goes into a bakery in Edinburgh and asks "How much are your cakes?" "They're all a pound each," says the baker, "except for that one, which is two pounds." "Why is that one two pounds?" asks the customer "That's ma dearer cake."

Hey MarkDoc! Nice to see you again. I still have a lingering scent in my nostrils from when we visited Lush in London together. Hope all is well.

I'm currently running a Blades in the Dark game, and of the baked into the setting gang bosses, Baszo Baz, always comes out like Alfie Solomons from Peaky Blinders.

Oh and three quarters of the way through the movie a shoe-horned in moment of trite reflection, usually at night or at a camp fire as the protagonist in an astonishingly out of character moment expresses some measure of doubt or compassion or a vulnerable side which has not been present before and will not have any bearing on the rest of the movie except perhaps in some call-back at the very end of the talkie.

"The feds are calling the shots on this one, my hands are tied" - followed by maverick cop solving the whole case without backup "You and I are not so different" - by villain to hero even when this isn't remotely true Vehicles exploding with very little provocation. Guys being kicked in the balls presented as funny Characters from outside the US all conforming to a single "type" except possibly for one exception either as a bad guy or good guy.

I know I am probably very late to the party on this one but I recently binge-watched Peaky Blinders series 1 through 4. Utterly brilliant. Compelling storytelling and a superb soundtrack, with cinematography that I swear was so good you could freezeframe at any point and talk about just why everything in the shot was perfectly composed. For those not in the know - it's a drama series about a family of illegal bookmakers and their rise through the underworld set immediately after World War I, and it is tremendous.

2000AD Flesh strip? If I remember rightly the spiders were attracted to sound and someone managed to lure them into a trap with a radio playing "Yellow Rose of Texas." A week later in a school singing lesson that very song came up and I whispered to my pal "Careful the spiders don't get you!" - he exclaimed "What spiders?" at the top of his voice and the teacher made me explain. Ah, memories.

While I've never had any pretensions of being cool, I am very happy to be back my Lord. And thanks for the news updates - I must say that Strike Force was one of my favourite supplements back in the day and it sounds crazy but I'd always wanted to run games like Aaron described... but it wasn't until seeing in print (which made it official) how he did it that I felt I could. Massively influential supplement for me. I must pick up the new version.

"Yes, Sam, I can! I've been working on my abs for a year and now every Ork from here to Barad Dur is going to get the benefit!" *STRUTS*

Oh lord the nostalgia feels. The whole Kara Zor-El thing was kind of odd and sticks in the mind, but just mentioning the other names makes me feel slightly disconnected in time.

Full of memes and in-jokes and signifying nothing. Must have been a good 2 or 3 years ago - I lose track. Good to be back. There are threads still running from when I was here last which gives me a feeling of enormous well being.

...well I'm back. Now get those snot nosed hobbit brats off my favourite chair, Rosie. Having been absent from the world of RPG for some time I'm now in the middle of somewhat of a roleplaying revival and seem to be busier than ever with it so naturally I need more excuses to eat up time that I should be better spending elsewhere, hence my reappearance here. What did I miss?

I enjoyed the scene she did with Dungeons Deep and Caverns Cold.

I was indeed too shy to appear in public being a shill for my own work so asked DT if he'd be kind enough to see if there was a socially acceptable way of doing this. And many thanks to DT for raising it! If anyone does want to read a novel that combines Regency sensibilities with cyberpunk thriller in a novel of dynastic intrigue that isn't quite the gumbo it sounds like... then please do check it out Linky Here

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Just finished the audiobook of Neil Gaiman's "Anansi Boys" - read by British actor/comedian Lenny Henry. Young man discovers that his late father was Anansi the trickster god of West African tradition. Magical and supernatural fun ensues. Excellent book with some memorable characters. One thing I noticed, which was not spotlighted at all, but when I noticed it made me grin, was that the only time a character is described by their skin colour is if they are caucasian - a nice reversal of the usual assumptions in most literature.