Via the often excellent Grant Watson on Facebook:
Honestly, this is the most interested I’ve ever been in Kubrick’s work.
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx
Two Weekends, and the Reasons for my online absence
Two weekends back, we drove out to a rescue shelter a few hours out of Brisbane and adopted ourselves a cat. She’s going by the name Admiral Coco Marshmallow Flerkin-Wittingstall, and seems determined to win us over with the deployment of weaponised cuteness:
The week that followed was a mad dash to make the cat at home in our small flat, either accumulating new things for a feline co-resident or upgrading things we’d underestimated.
After nearly fifteen years of being pointed about not owning a cat in my long form author bio, it’s time to update and admit that I’m finally a pet person.
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The weekend just gone, I headed off to the State Library to volunteer for GoPlay, Brisbane’s resident Tabletop RPG and Board Game convention:
It was my first convention of any kind since the last GenreCon, and my first gamer-specific convention in over a decade. It was nice to catch up with a bunch of people, meet some new folks, and to see how these events have changed in recent years.
Almost all of these are for the better: the venue is definitely nicer, there’s a much greater focus on inclusion, and the vaguely awkward RPG-games-as-competetion thing that ended in awards ceremonies has largely fallen by wayside.
The downside, of course, is that I’ve been away from the gaming scene so long that I no longer recognise 90% of the games on offer once you move past “D&D” and “Feng Shui.”
My Next Life As A Spaceship
Over the weekend, Matt Farrer (AKA the Shira Calpurnia scribe and general literary bad-ass) did a small thing on twitter where he’d write a description of a spaceship named after you. It roughly coincided with one of those rare moments when I scanned my carefully curated twitter lists, so naturally, I signed on.
I am rather pleased with my star faring namesake.
Its official designation is "Human Lifepoint Pietro 47-R-Delta" but most Capellans refer to the spherical scaffold of O'Neill cylinders as "the Peter Ball". Famours for its libraries, festivals and zero-gee gardens, it is the only source of bio-grown coffee in the sector.
— Matthew Farrer (@FullyNocturnal) September 1, 2019
Naturally, about 30 seconds after I nabbed the embed code for this, Twitter started up the outrage engines and I retreated lest madness find me. On the other hand, Matt’s whole list of ships is spectacular, and worth following all the way to the end.
Fortunately, the nice thing about blogging it here is the ability to skip straight to his original post and follow the thread, therefore avoiding Twitter’s latest attempt to monetise my outrage.