Wood Cubes and Cardboard is Greg Aleknevicus' boardgame site. Highlight is the articles he has written for Counter magazine. (via Terminal City Gamers)

This is challenging stuff: buynothingchristmas.org (thanks Burnt Toast)

Actually, it's probably not very challenging for a closet-Scrooge like me - secretly I would love to forget the whole business and not bother with cards or presents for anyone. Not from a desire to change the world, sadly, just from selfish idleness.

Guardian guide to Thanksgiving:

Every year the US president pardons a single turkey, a tradition begun by former president Harry Truman in 1947. This year George Bush pardoned a "fine looking turkey" named Katie.

Confession. Blogging seemed a bit tame after kayaking with wild dolphins, or enjoying wine and a cold buffet served off the bonnet of a safari truck, with two black rhinos strolling by, or climbing Table Mountain in blazing sunshine, or tubing down the Storms River. And I returned from holiday to a full-on panic at work, where I was seen as The Guru who could miraculously save our systems from grinding to a halt. It's taken over a week to disabuse them of that illusion. So I've been a bit too tired and fraught for gaming or blogging.

But I finally got round to some wargaming with Dave last night. Battle Cry: set them up, charge them forwards, shoot them down, great fun! And ideal for someone who's feeling a bit tired and fraught. We played Brawner's Farm, which is slightly biassed towards the Confederates, but Dave's Federals came very close to beating me before attrition started to tell. Battle Cry is great, can't understand why it has been gathering dust on my shelf for so long. I'm going to download some extra scenarios from John Foley's excellent website and have me some more good old-fashioned wargaming fun.

South Africa was fantastic.

I got back a week ago - standing in the concrete hell of Heathrow waiting for my bus, with cold rain sheeting down from a dark sky, I wondered why on earth I had come back. A week of driving up and down the M4 to Newport to struggle with database performance issues has done nothing to dispel this feeling......

Oh, and have a look at The Bible in Five Words! (via Baraita)

Well I'm off to Cape Town tomorrow. I'll be back on 15th November, until then go to Terminal City Gamers for nimrod-related blogging. It's what this blog wanted to be but never quite achieved it.

I was in London over the weekend for Workshop. Visited Gavin on Saturday evening - he intercepted me on Tooley Road before I got to his flat. Weird feeling, meeting your own flesh and blood in the middle of this dark, howling, urban wilderness. We wandered over to this pub in Bermondsey, sat in an otherwise empty upstairs room with Gavin's studenty friends John and James, with this fantastic view over the river, listening to increasingly improbable drinking stories. Then back to the flat with a Chinese takeaway. Nice flat on Jacob Street, in a sort of 80's conservation area, all yuppy warehouse conversion effect. Nice flat only saved from descending into squalid undergraduate hell by presence of Ruth, Steve's nice girlfriend. At this point the 20-odd years Gavin has got on me started to tell. The boys all went off to the pub again while I deflected a guilt-trip from Gavin's flat-mate Steve about not entertaining me (not your problem Steve, this is between me and my so-called son) before going to bed. In Gavin's bed - allegedly clean sheets but not convinced. Eventually nearby generator stopped, enabling sleep until woken in small hours by sound of retching from bathroom. Ah, they're back, I thought......

Michael Barrish has resolved to join the rest of us bloggers, and write only garbage.

I knew I should have done something about that wasp nest under the kitchen roof.

Now they have found their way indoors, and my life is sliding towards some sort of Hitchcockian nightmare. Every morning when I come downstairs there are one or more groggy wasps staggering around or angrily dying somewhere. And every morning there are more of them....

It's always exciting to discover a completely new kind of nimrod. So I'm proud to present - previously unknown to science - the pylon nimrods! Have a look at their Pylon of the Month website, with such glorious photo captions as this:

Midland Electricity Plc's PKW 77 provides an oasis of beauty in an otherwise rather charmless Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire industrial estate.

Sixty years ago this evening, the massive artillery bombardment that heralded the battle of El Alamein began. There's a good account by Richard Holmes at BBCi.

El Alamein was the culmination of two years of desperate and not very successful fighting, when Britain and the Commonwealth, alone in Europe, and for a time alone in the World, with sheer bloody-minded obstinacy stood against the evil of fascism. I'm proud of our record in the early years of World War 2, even though I wasn't born at the time. And I'm proud too that Britain is standing alongside America in the current crisis, when again there is an evil death-cult, armed and determined to snuff out our civilization, to resist.

Weird and slightly demoralizing day at work yesterday. About a year after the division that I work for was created, we were finally moved to our new location where we could all sit together and start functioning as a team. The same day - the very same day! - we were summoned to a special meeting to be told that our division is be split up and downsized in a big company-wide reorganisation.

I've spent more than 20 years working for big organizations - why am I still surprised when this sort of thing happens?

Considering James claims to be so keen on ASL, he is very excited by this opportunity to escape to something more playable:

Born of thirty years of gaming experience and an equal amount of frustration with dry-as-dust rules, Lock ‘n Load is all about fun, all about the experience.

Tired of games with books of rules? Sure you are; you have a life and so do we. Most of us aren’t college kids anymore. We’ve grown up and we have grownup responsibilities: a family, a career, a life. There just isn’t the time to wade through a bible of instructions before we play. Neither is it fun to spend huge hunks of your time researching an obscure rule.

Where do I sign? Eric Raymond's Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto:

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative of ceding to the world's barbarians the exclusive privilege of force.

(via Steven den Beste)

In a couple of weeks or so I will be here, or possibly here. Fantastic. It will be great to leave the British autumn (and the Internet) behind for a while.....

Several negative comments about the new layout, so back to the old look (for now). William missed the little dice, and James got confused about which day was which. I should have remembered that nimrods are a naturally conservative bunch. Here is what the new look looked like if you are curious.

Time to try a new look. It's one of Blogger's built-in templates, so it feels like a capitulation somehow - the old layout may have been lack-lustre, but at least it was mine. I'll see how this feels for a few days, then maybe tinker with it some more. Feedback requested.

Having coffee on Saturday morning with Nick and Ann his girlfriend. Nick and I are explaining to Ann what a weblog is - it's like an online journal where you talk about things that interest you or what's going on in your life.

Ann is slightly horrified. All straight-faced and innocent, she says, "Oh! I don't think I would like to expose myself on the Internet."

Aaaah! Isn't it cute! I have been wondering if there are any good travel games I could take to play with my friend Fiona on the plane to Cape Town in a couple of weeks time. Would have to fit on those little tables in Economy Class. Thanks to rec.games.board I have been made aware of Travel Settlers. Doesn't it look great? Unfortunately Settlers is not much fun with only two players.