Imbricated Interests of a Ludic Ghoul

 Asterisks indicate re-reads - # asterisks = # rereads. * indicates comics. ## Book of the New Sun Vol 1: Shadow & Claw - Gene Wolfe Swift to Chase - Laird Barron *The Complete Nemesis Vol 1 - Pat Mills, Kev O Neill, Bryan Talbot Design as Art - Bruno Munari *Smashed - Junji Ito Hyperion - Dan Brown The Dangers of Smoking In Bed - Mariana Enriquez The Wide Carnivorous Sky - John Langan London, The Biography - Peter Ackroyd Slime: A Natural History - Susanne Wedlich Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry Think - Simon Blackburn Flashing Swords #1 - Vance, Carter, Anderson, Lieber Surrealism and the Occult - Nadia Choucha The Complete Fantasies Vol 2 - Clark Ashton Smith Get Shorty - Elmore Leonard *But You Have Friends - Emilia McKenzie *Collected Britney & Tina comics - Jade King *Sour Pickles - Clio Isidora Object Oriented Ontology - Graham Harman The Shores of Death   - Michael Moorcock Mr Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters - John Langan King Kull - Robert ...

Memory fails me - this was either my fourth or fifth time attending Dragonmeet, the UK’s largest RPG focussed gaming convention. If there was ever a reminder that the actual experience of the roleplaying game scene - in person, away from jaded ironic scrawls on computer screens or the sickly glow of pathetic social media beef seeping out of your phone – is a very different and far more reasonable and friendly world than the one on the internet, Dragonmeet is (mostly) it, so I’d been looking forward to this for a while. I bucked my usual trend of waking up too late for gaming conventions and marched through the freezing morning to get an even earlier train than planned, and was soon inside the grim concrete and carpet edifice that is Hammersmith Novotel West, coffee in hand and half an hour earlier than I needed to be (8.30am) . I visited the trade hall pre-opening hours to meet Dan, Other Dan and Shuyi at the Melsonia and Iglootree stalls where they were setting up shop. Wares ...