I have just spent the best part of my afternoon watching the 2010 Peter Weir movie The Way Back, and a might fine way to spend my time it was.
The movie is two hours and a quarter, but does not drag, and has a wonderful cast.
The Way Back chronicles the journey of a group of escaped gulag prisoners, from Siberia to India, in 1941.
The story is inspired by actual events, and is highly on topic here on Karavansara. Continue reading
This is con season – and after crawling to Milan for the local con, I’ll be taking part in a virtual, online con… Aethercon VI, on the 10th, 11th and 12th of November.
The Aethercon is an online gaming convention – you get to meet game designers and publishers, you get to try new games, you can attend panels and burn a few bucks in the virtual vendor area.
Isn’t this internet thing great? Continue reading
I mentioned Masks of Nyarlathotep a few days back, talking about the Pulp Cthulhu handbook.
Now, for the uninitiated, Mask of Nyarlathotep is probably the War & Peace of Call of Cthulhu, if not of the whole horror gaming genre.
Granted, Beyond the Mountains of Madness is bigger, and Horror on the Orient Express is probably creepier, but for globe-trotting variety, implied menace, cast of characters and locations, plot intricacies and sheer gaming goodness, Mask of Nyarlathotep remains a classic, sort of the standard against which Call of Cthulhu scenarios are evaluated. Continue reading
The snippet above is the opening of Shanghai Under Fire: July 1937 – March 1938, a 120-pages book published by the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury that provides a day-by-day breakdown of what came to be known as The Battle of Shanghai.
You can find relatively cheap reprints on Amazon, or a digitized copy in the Internet Archive, which is the one I am using right now. Continue reading
Pulp Cthulhu – where has this thing been all my life?
Now, the answer is simple – it was in a folder filled with notes on my gaming table, sitting underneath my copy of Call of Cthulhu, 3th edition.
Meaning, we always played Call of Cthulhu as a pulp game.
I played with other keepers, that were more “lovecraftian”, or maybe just more depressed, or more sadistic – in the end, adventures lost their meaning as character after character died horribly and in the end nothing hung together anymore.
Boring.
I was chatting with a friend, a few minutes back – he’s a good writer, earning a fair share of his income with his books.
Lucky guy.
He told me he had cooked dinner, done some chores, put the dog back to sleep, and now was about to watch some telly.
I was perfectly able to relate with that – I had just cooked a quick-and-easy pasta for me and my brother, done some chores like taking out the rubbish, and now was about to settle down with a few podcasts and a virtual billiard game.
Hi-octane life of the modern pulp writers. Continue reading
I often write about the joys of doing research for what we are writing.
In general, I tend to do a lot of research “on the fly” when writing short fiction – like using Google to find out what’s the most popular brand of beer in Arkansas or the timetables of trains to and from Paris.
So, when I am writing short fiction – or when I get major doubts while cleaning up a first draft – my first stops are, unsurprisingly, Google and Wikipedia, with Pinterest (now that I can access it again) as the go-to place for visual references, and YouTube for action-related info.
For longer works, I still rely on books, and as far as online resources are concerned, I go for a MOOC whenever possible.
I think it was Mary Gentle (wonderful writer – her Rats and Gargoyles is highly recommended) that said that university courses are the best way to do all the research you need on a subject with the minimum of fuss. Continue reading
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