All quiet; well an accident, a bit on the PS3, and some more digging in the attic.

An accident happened opposite the house on Sunday, someone drove round a corner to fast and clipped a car that shouldn't have been parked there, ambulance car turned up, followed by a fire engine, followed by the police. Basically everyone's to blame. One of the stupidities is that the house(s) to which the parked car(s) belong want to park them on their own front gardens, but don't have road access and have been denied permission to put any in. The only other place they can park is a lot further up the street in a special 'car-park' type area which funnily enough is used by the people who live next to it. Even more stupidity is evident in that just before where these cars park is a bus-stop, which is in an even more dangerous position.


Reports back on the PS3 declared "It's complicated". Casino Royale on Blu-Ray is in 2.4:1 and, of course, displays with black bars top and bottom on a widescreen television. Results in yet another explanation as to the fact there are three 'standards' "Well that's stupid" I can't agree more.

Sonic the Hedgehog was described as "odd". "You'd get bits where they were talking, then they'd stop and you'd have to read the bubbles" Yep otherwise known as 'el-cheapo productions'. Record major bits of dialogue for each language, then leave the rest as type; difficult to blame on storage constraints nowadays. The sparsity of launch titles was highlighted when the owner was looking for some other games suitability for his young-ish children. The wide choice of racing or sport was up for offer. I thought they might like Marvel Ultimate Alliance, though it might be a bit too violent for them.


Another little spate of rummaging through the attic. Linking through Wikipedia on a completely unrelated manner led me to "Slaves to Darkness" I knew I'd never owned "The Lost and the Damned", but I did have the first one; but had I sold it?

It was all a bit of a mess at the time; I'd won some sort of free/money-off voucher, I don't recall which now, the joke was that it expired before the book was even published. Games Workshop said they'd still honour it though and so I waited... and waited. It was a good book when it finally came out a little heavy on the miniatures-rules side though. Two years later the next one came out and by that time I was heavy into "Call of Cthulhu" instead.

Anyway back to the attic. I located the box and started going through it. Yep there was "Slaves to Darkness". I checked through the others -

A 1986 first edition of the Rulebook
The entire "The Enemy Within" campaign with the first two collected in one, the original boxed "Death on the Reik" and the separate "Power behind the Throne" (the best campaign ever) and "City of the White Wolf" (damn fine read on it's own). "Empire in Flames" was a last gasp by the company and it showed, the binding was terrible and pages would fall out. That part of the campaign itself was much the same.
Couldn't find my 40k rulebook so it must have been that I sold.
A few (20+?) old copies of White Dwarf with rule variants and campaigns.

and a lot of Cthulhu books, I'd forgotten I had so many; some so old they no longer even feature on the Chaosium website. Luckily you can always thank the fans for a complete database of them, 1989-1991 sounds about right.

Happy memories of CoC - one suicide, one investigator ripped to shreds by creatures, one in traction after being thrown through a window, and one digested alive; and that was only the second time playing - they were a lot more cautious after that.

Ah nostalgia. If I get time I'll drag them out and flick through them, just to refresh my memory of their contents.


One tiny addendum. The Royal Mail have put the prices for stamps up again, I'm sure you've all heard about it - very well advertised... yeah right. I popped on to their site to get them to send me the latest poster and was filling out my address for them when I realised what I was doing. I was filling out my address on the Royal Mail site... the Royal Mail who allow postcode and address searches and who it appears were forcing me to type out my full address for them. Joined-up thinking at its peak.