Inspired by the beautiful maps Dyson Logos (rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/) creates, I took a stab at drawing a side-view dungeon at the weekend.

It needs more tidying up and could really do with some shading or cross-hatching to bring out the edges, but I'm pleased with it as a first effort.

Anyone fancy stocking the caverns and rooms? Who or what dwells in the various catacombs and crevices?

I read this interview with David Graeber and was fascinated by the history of debt, debt forgiveness and how money entwined itself in society from the earliest settled times.

Brenda Brathwaite makes thought-provoking games.

(Thanks to Two Scooters Press for reminding me of this and pointing to this new article.)

Prompted by a Boing Boing post, I spent a few minutes (okay, nearly 20 minutes) reading a thread on Reddit of "culturally untranslateable phrases". My favourite so far: "Jou mammie naai vir bakstene om jou sissie se hoerhuis te bou," translated beautifully as "your mother engages in prostitution in order to raise funds for the building materials necessary to construct a brothel from which your sister will operate."

"Dulce et Decorum Est"

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

I'm sure you'll have seen this elsewhere, but Mapcrunch's webpage let's you teleport around the world. It's fascinating.

A couple of recent games I forgot to post about. The first was Glory to Rome, the building Rome from hands of Whist game, which I won nicely with Myles 10, IK 7, Sam 6 and Alai 3. Not a lot in the vaults in this game, probably because a couple of stone buildings went up in the first turn and absorbed the blue cards for the first half of the game.

The other game was that old reliable Ticket to Ride: Europe. Sam had the hardest time in this, with a combination of short, cramped routes that meant a lot of low scoring lines. Alai did nicely with the longer lines and lucked out on his tickets, keeping and making all three from his only extra tickets draw. I didn't do so well, drawing three useless tickets, keeping one and failing to make even that. Final scores were Alai 66 + 59 = 125, Myles 54+10+40 = 104, and Sam 53 + 50 = 103.

THE RULES: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. [Silly Facebook tagging stuff deleted. Recycle as desired.] No particular order...

Stan Getz - Captain Marvel
Queen - Jazz
The Police - Synchronicity
Tom Lehrer - That Was the Year That Was
The Consort of St. Sepulchre - The Consort of St. Sepulchre
Rush - Moving Pictures
Kate Bush - The Dreaming
Eurythmics - Be Yourself Tonight
The Sundays - Reading, Writing and Arithmetic
Cocteau Twins - Blue Bell Knoll
Dead Can Dance - Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
Morrissey - Viva Hate
The Cure - Disintegration
Belle and Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister
Apparat - Walls

Well, mine are in a roughly chronological order as best my memory supplies. Heavily weighted towards formative years it seems.

(as inspired by http://www.facebook.com/ecryder)

Best birthday wishes, purpletigron. I hope it's a good day.

I went to Dara O'Brian's 95th gig of his current tour on Friday night. His second night in Cork, and apparently his biggest crowd of the tour. Go Cork!

Sam and Irishkate and I arrived together and were surprised to find our seats didn't exist. It seems that the row we'd bought had got lost in one shuffle or other. The confusion was sorted out easily enough, and with an upside. We got much better seats.

My workmate Anthony arrived a little later, warned in advance of the cock-up, and we settled into the painfully small seats.

The seats didn't matter; Dara rocked the tent.

It was an excellent gig, with a good mix of Dara working from the audience call outs in the first half and longer, prepared stuff in the second half. I'm damned if I can remember many of the jokes, and a lot of it really was 'you had to be there' stuff, but I'm pleased to say that I did get to contribute my Heimlich manoeuvre story to the tapestry of Dara's show.

Great stuff, in short. If you ever have a chance to see O'Briain live grab it. He's ace.

Also: a night out! When was the last time I had one of those?