There was a book sale at my local community centre, and I had some good luck.

I don’t watch much TV these days, but I do watch A Game of Thrones. Which I find interesting as a show and as an adaptation. There’s a level of technical interest involved in seeing how the show creators deal with the various difficulties of translating Martin’s novels to the screen. I don’t just mean […]

I’ve been reading Fantasy Hero, a campaign supplement for the Hero game system. It’s about twenty years old, and in a lot of ways seems a decent look at where fantasy role-playing games were at back in the early 90s. There were things I didn’t like (the medieval-Arabic area is repeatedly said to tightly limit […]

I mentioned I’d been reading Gibbon lately. Here’s a great aside he had, after describing the convoluted attempts by the Byzantine Empire to smuggle silk worms out of China and develop a silk industry of their own: I am not insensible of the benefits of elegant luxury; yet I reflect with some pain that, if […]

I’ve been sluggish about updating my posts at Black Gate, but then, due in part to illness and in part to other work, I’ve been slow in putting them up, too. At any rate, here are three: about Minister Faust’s The Alchemists of Kush, about Marie Corelli and her Heliobas quasi-trilogy, and about Peter Milligan […]