The World Of Darkness series of RPGs, beginning with Vampire: The Masquerade, were nineties gaming’s great success story. They appealed to an older audience than D&D and its imitators; they brought new gamers, including a lot of women, into the[…]

As the eighties progressed, one-size-fits-all patchwork “campaign worlds” fell from fashion in the RPG world. They didn’t initially lose their market dominance – most Dungeons and Dragons products, for instance, were set in its smorgasbord Fo[…]

I am a poor judge of whether or not a bit of PR work will lead to press coverage or not. Take the Agatha Christie comic adaptations story that’s been doing the rounds – this looks like a non-starter to me but everywhere has covered it. I […]

Via I Love Comics comes this link to a remarkable collection of pictures from a 1982 comics convention. It’s a parade of earnest men – mostly men – in polyester suits, from a time when even respectability was an aspirational dream f[…]

Our future monarch’s Duchy Originals brand has done very well out of the organic food boom – in fact you have to (perhaps grudgingly) admit that the Prince showed a bit of entrepreneurial vision on this one, since his Highgrove Farm oatca[…]

Every now and then reading the marketing press you see a story and you think, surely the wider media has picked up on this. And apparently it hasn’t. In this case the story that caught my eye was: DOVE TO SHOWCASE EATING DISORDERS IN AD CAMPAIG[…]

A question just occurred to me: does the phrase “traditional curtain raiser” get used AT ALL outside of a sporting context?
Actually I wondered if it even got used outside of the Community Shield context, but apparently it does – th[…]

It Walks By Night was the very first book published by Dickson Carr, master of the locked room mystery. I didn’t know this while reading it, but it makes sense: the style is rambling and florid, it feels like a book by someone pleased to b[…]

My adopted* Veikkausliiga (Finnish Premiership) team, FC Honka, seem to be suffering a touch of ‘second season syndrome’, but I don’t mind, as one of my most enjoyable discoveries this summer has been the Football In Finland blog, w[…]

 Bonus beats! Here’s a selection of the best discussions from the Poptimists LiveJournal community last month:
 
The ethics of music listing on social networking sites
Where R UK female musicians plz?
Sinatra canon – “Does Poptimi[…]