From the time I got into role-playing games, the selling point was well-established: the games allowed players to create stories in which they were the heroes. But what kind of stories? The RPG set-up requires a group of characters (4-6, on average) […]

…is the Sea Findings Museum in Vilchadia, on Kalymnos.* Vilchadia is a ten minute taxi ride from Pothia, the main port of Kalymnos, and it’s very easy to find the Sea Findings Museum because there isn’t anything else there (bar two […]

Cruel experiments on ants in fiction are generally a sign of incipient serial killing.
In REAL LIFE though they are a sign of science fulfilling its noble purpose to push forward the frontiers of knowledge. In this case the question purports to be &#[…]

Miniature brontosauri! The size of horses! CLONERS TO WORK!
(Good headline too, cheers BBC)[…]

Cristiano Ronaldo’s sister has made a pop record to support Portugal at the world cup – click the link to hear it (and see her).
(It’s not that bad actually – good shouting and guitar “licks” I think – howeve[…]

Marketing magazine has released its annual Top 50 Most Loved Brands in the UK, and the related Top 50 Most Hated Brands. There’s also a separate survey covering the Top 5 most loved and most hated football clubs, both based on a random sample o[…]

World Cup mascot firm goes bust
Reports also suggest that consumers are puzzled by the lion’s state of undress – although it wears a number 6 shirt, Goleo does not sport a pair of shorts.[…]

– Defender
– Midfielder
– Striker
How do these words help our understanding of how ‘genre’ works?[…]

A really common trope in sci-fi and comics is where a huge alium/evil computer is befuddled by a random element the heroes have introduced, i.e. the Sentinels are fighting the X-Men, and Wolverine et al. have been nobbled by amazingly planned counter[…]

Some discussion on LiveJournal about the best pop videos and Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” stuck out as ever like a sore thumb. I don’t particularly like the video or the song, though I’ve no probs w/Mr Cash in general, but how c[…]