This week it was my birthday. I'm very old. At least, I feel it sometimes. And usually, when a birthday comes along, I'm kinda happy for the day to go by with as little fuss as possible.  However, this year my lovely wife insisted that (a) I took the day off from work, and (b) did 'something'. So, after four-plus years of not venturing to the cinema we finally made the effort and braved the public to take in the new Ghostbusters movie - Frozen Empire.  Okay, disclaimer time – I love Ghostbusters. I always have. I was obsessed with the first movie, saw it when it first came o ..read more

I had the notification come through from my domain host that the domain for this website had auto-renewed and I've paid for it for the next couple of years. Just as I was about to delete the whole thing and go into hiding.  So I'd better use it!  I had a moment of clarity a few days ago, wondering why I was in such a funk. I suddenly realised that it's the typical frustrations of a creative mind.  When I was working in retail, as I had for twenty years, a lot of it was okay, and there were some moments where it was absolutely horrific. But while I was there, I had the release i ..read more

Let's start this post with a little disclaimer. I don't play a lot of video games anymore. I've just found that (a) I don't have enough time, and (b) I'm rather terrible at them. I do still love video games, and I was obsessed enough with some games to actually 100% them - LA Noire, I'm looking at you. Fond memories of trying to sit in every type of car in the game to get that last achievement.  My problem is, I often get too involved in the story and empathise too much with the little character on the screen I'm controlling. I could just about handle Halo and its sequels, and the lead ch ..read more

After my recent post about how I was frustrated at my drawing and wanting to do something but it being a little... how's the best way to put it?... crap, I received a perfect message on Instagram from a good friend pointing me to a wonderful comic strip by @pascalcampionart (seriously, check out the art, it's lovely). In the strip (I won't post it here as I haven't asked for permission) the frustrated artist says that he has ideas, but doesn't like them.  The wonderfully drawn cat says that he should just do it, get them on paper - it may inspire something better. The strip closes ..read more

  A few months ago I posted about a couple of series I'd been watching, mostly South Korean series as I've been having difficulty focusing on things. A lot going on in my head at the moment, so I'm finding it hard to sit in front of a TV series and actually watch it, if you know what I mean, rather than having it on while sitting on my phone doomscrolling.  I found that watching a series that had subtitles meant that I had to concentrate on the screen, not get distracted by anything, and actually taking in the information. It meant that I had been watching some seriously amazing se ..read more

  The old Missing Comics from 1998-9 Many, many, many years ago, back in the very late 90's, I used to write, illustrate, and publish comics. This was back when Autocratik was "Autocratik for the Masses", a play on the REM album name, 'Automatic for the People'.  My main comic was called Missing, a planned 90+ issue series about a hotel on the Scottish border, after England had become the 51st US State, and after global warming at raised the water levels to the point where cars needed to be amphibian, and highwaymen used surfboards to attack unsuspecting travellers. There w ..read more

  Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the airing of the first episode of my favourite TV series - The X-Files. I've talked about The X-Files multiple times on this blog, and you know how obsessive I am, but as it's the anniversary I couldn't help but talk about it again. Bear in mind that it's not really the thirtieth anniversary for me. Over here in the UK we had to wait just over a year before that first episode aired on BBC2. However, to mark the anniversary I thought I'd do a series of posts about it, picking out my favourite episodes and memories of the series.  The best ..read more

Day Thirty of #RPGaDAY2023 changes things up a little. The first year, the question was 'rarest RPG you own' which kinda devolved down to lots of people saying that they had the Dune: Chronicles of the Imperium RPG. Maybe not as rare as I thought, at least not in the RPG circles I was frequenting. I switched this out to be less about owning something, and turning it into a great opportunity to talk about those games that don't get enough love online.  There are certainly a few. There's The Gaslight Club - a really cool game of Westworld style robot theme parks, but you play the 'hosts ..read more

 This one's a tricky one. Day Twenty-Nine asks about the most memorable encounter. Back when #RPGaDAY began I talked about our old Call of Cthulhu game where one of the player characters had been forceably retired, only to return as the big bad.  It's still a very memorable encounter, though my thoughts are drawn to that Tales from the Loop game again. After failing to stop the explosion of the Loop facility as teenagers (play progressing through Things from the Flood), there's nothing more memorable than your teenage character's mother appearing, mutated and evil, with crab-like ..read more

 Day Twenty-Eight of #RPGaDAY2023 returns to the question of the initial year, asking what is the SCARIEST game you've played.  I'm afraid that this answer is the same as the first year - Kult, most notably 2nd Edition Kult, is still the scariest thing I've played. Really cool and unsettling, without resorting to the extremes of its most recent edition.  ..read more