The knight's tour guide

A shy, insecure NEET learns how to move forward in life after joining a baking club full of thoroughly nice chaps and chapettes. On a deeper level, this manga-ish GN is about mental hardship, the difficulty of sharing your feelings and the importance of emotional support. It's sweet and sad, but mostly sweet. Contains baking recipes with instructions. Packs a lot into its 132 pages. There's a long wordless sequence that works very well. Deserves to be mentioned alongside other worthy UK titles like "The Nao Of Brown".

Bottle frog

Picked up this dice-rolling game for cheap. 2-4 Hobbits race to reach Mordor and chuck the One Ring into the volcano-bin. Orcs may - probably will - slow 'em down. The Nazgul might - again, probably will - outright stop them. Good ol' Gandalf could provide help along the way. There are a couple of other variables and a few optional advanced rules (which I like), but that's the gist. There's only a small amount of skill involved, with things mainly hinging on the luck of the re/rolls. My friend SC would hate it. Indeed, I don't love it as, in 2P mode at least, it feels unfair. Perhaps I'm just unlucky! "Journey" clearly has its fans online, and I've seen photos where peeps have enhanced the play experience with fancy counters or appropriate miniatures.

Space corridors

"You needed them coming out of the waves, or out of the caves. You didn't need them walking slowly down a white, futuristic corridor."

"The [Nabataean] king holds many drinking bouts in magnificent style, but no-one drinks more than 11 cupfuls, each time using a different golden cup. The king is so democratic that, in addition to serving himself, he sometimes even serves the rest."

"Unless you have a viral short story in 'The New Yorker', you don't get to do a short-story collection."

"In 1888, in the period when the Ripper Murders took place, there was another series of killings in London known as the Thames Torso Murders or the Thames Torso Mystery and that's not been solved, either."

"You look at them now and they're really quite dull. You've got silly character classes that you'd never use, and quite staid dungeons and monsters."

Who opened their coat?

COMIC COVER OF THE WEEK

"Vampyrates! #2" by Rebeca Puebla (with one "c"). Can't resist a female pirate. Simple as that.

SONG OF THE WEEK

"4.3 Forty" by Knox. Earworm warning! Ultra-catchy pop-rock. He falls for a track star, she runs from commitment. (Or from over-commitment, depending on your perspective.) BTW, a 4.3-second 40-yard sprint would be close to record pace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQMX92qh7U0

RANDOM TRPG REMINISCENCE

Our DM wanted to try running "Call Of Cthulhu" for a subset of our large "D&D" group. I was among the chosen. Instead of meeting at his place, the venue was the family home of one of the gals. My abiding memory is of how rich the house felt. One or both of her parents were doctors. Lovely furniture and art. The coffee table sported hardcovers about Hieronymus Bosch and whatnot (a cliche, I know). Couldn't tell you what happened in the "C/O/C" adventure...although I do recall playing a Roman Catholic priest named Father Nick Scathe. Was unduly proud of that character.

Yesterday was a completely ordinary Wednesday

I ate a bakery vanilla slice that was beyond compare, admired an immaculate dark-red Triumph TR7 in the wild, narrowly avoided being caught in a hailstorm, seriously researched/discussed doing a Master's Degree, and finished that JNT biography, moving on to new prequel "Red Dwarf: Titan". Also started watching Season 34 of "The Ultimate Fighter".

Today was a completely ordinary Thursday.

Tear your breadroll

I'd like to report a murder. It's not often you witness a team score three hungee. Warwick's curious foursome didn't even seem to be trying that hard. Your hero answered 19 right while playing along at home, drinking red wine. I know a fair amount of trivia, but the only thing I know about Warwick Uni is that its female rowing squad used to produce "shy nude" (naughty bits hidden) calendars to raise money for charity. I even bought a couple.

When I began my BA in 1991, there were two ladies in their 60s in our first-year cohort. They were friends and went all the way through the degree together. How cool is that? A mate who's semi-retired told me he wouldn't mind going to TAFE and studying electrical engineering, just to be able to apply the knowledge and expertise to his own projects (he's always making rad stuff). I'd offer to join him, but it's not an area of interest to me.

I'll be at my original home-town university tomorrow. Our car gets its annual service at a garage within walking distance of the campus, so as in past years, I'll wander over there, eat lunch from a cafe or food truck, then read a book in the library until a mechanic messages me to say the Ford is ready. I've missed the place ever since I left. Happiest time of my life. Shoulda done a PhD and gone into academia, except I was sick of being poor.

Portal to transcendent meaning

BEER OF THE WEEK

Nice. Need more info? It's NOT not nice. "Nomikai" means drinking party, which I'm sure is just as much of a thing in Hawthorn (from where it originates) as Tokyo.

DOCUMENTARY DU JOUR

Despite having lived through nearly the whole history of "MTG" from late '93 - we even played for ante for a while - it was good to have some stories clarified and see archival material I never had before. The doco grew less interesting as it travelled towards the present day, though. Could probs have been cut down to 90 minutes.

Elemental plane of paper

What about that Wallabies vs Japan match?! I'm curious to see how the "Brave Blossoms" do in the return fixture here next weekend.

PG gifted me this 376-page (15-issue) HC GN about the relationship between a male human and a female android. It's an atypical "sexbot" yarn in that he doesn't seek her out, and there are no moments of cringe comedy or gross titillation. Barely any action sequences, either. In fact, it's almost entirely mature, believable conversations. It isn't about what Ada is like in bed; it's about what she's like in her head. Quite the best comics I have read in years.

The Rotten Tomatoes score for this flick of 31% is way too low. Even the IMDb average of 5.6 is probably unfair. If you can accept the "Twilight Zone"-style setup of occupants being magically sealed into their homes (while still having fresh air, water and power), then committed performances from a likeable cast make it an engrossing survival tale that goes further than you might anticipate. There is the odd cliche, e.g. Why is it always the young daughter of the family who spots the beasties when no-one else can? I'd have ditched the intrusive narration. And I couldn't fully buy the ending or the epilogue. But all of those criticisms aside, I don't regret taking the journey. It's definitely one of those crazy crisis scenarios that makes you stop and ponder, "What would *I* do?"