So, Dragonmeet went off swimmingly yesterday; lots and lots and lots of autographing at the Pelgrane booth, chances to catch up with British friends from pwca to ffutures to timgray, some fine review-game swag for the column (which I hope to update while I'm out here with a Con Report), and plenty of people playing plenty of games ( Read more... )

As is traditional, I shall endeavor to post regularly while in London, as a service to mollpeartree.

As may be obvious, I have arrived in London, in scenic Clapham, which is home to such luminaries as simonjrogers and yojimbo_ukAs it could be helpful to others, I can affirm that a tryptophan coma helps you sleep even in American Airlines' best cattle-car accomodations ( Read more... )

* I know it's been forever and long since we've had a single substantive post here, but post-GenCon creates almost as much rush-and-bustle as pre-GenCon does.

* Especially because this is also pre-ConQuest; I'll be a guest at ConQuest SF (which will be in San Jose, or rather Santa Clara, this year) next weekend. The Guest of Honor will be John ( Read more... )

Mine excellent host was not feeling up to full snuff this morning, so Nottingham was off. Instead, I went on a pilgrimage of my own, to the National Gallery to visit the greatest painting of the nineteenth century.

James and I had stopped off in front of the Gallery yesterday so that I could see the statue of George Washington in front of it (he'd ( Read more... )

Arrived at London (well, at Stansted) yesterday, and thence to the stately flat of Mr. James Wallis, good friend of this blog.

As always, we went in search of Hawksmoor churches, this time hitting both the extremely effective St. George-in-the-East and the not quite as overwhelming St. Anne's, Limehouse. On a thorough circumnavigation, we did ( Read more... )

I'm in Las Vegas again, for those tracking my peregrinations with white markers on the giant Lexan map in the basement of NORAD; I'll be here until the GAMA Trade Show ends next Thursday, and fly back Far Too Late Friday night.

My book to read while here was Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees, recently gifted to me from out of the blue by the ( Read more... )

Well, all of the shows James mentioned Friday were already sold out for the weekend by Saturday morning, because of how good they no doubt were. So, nothing daunted, we went to the Tate Britain, bypassed their "Turner Whistler Monet" exhibit and merely drank in a few small glories of the permanent collection, notably Blake and Turner, to say ( Read more... )

Blake is my newest major freakout. I avoided Blake for years (except the lyric poetry) because I knew this would happen ( Read more... )

The British Museum is everything it's supposed to be (except air-conditioned), including far too big to see adequately in a couple of hours. I did see the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles (which are absolutely amazing) and the Sutton Hoo helmet and some other fine things ( Read more... )

This was, officially, the hottest day in the history of London's 350 years or so of record keeping -- it broke 100 F at Heathrow ( Read more... )