Tag: the solitary bee

apres moi, le deluge

On By brosencrantzIn Uncategorised7 Comments

I have a new phone!

It’s an HTC Tytn II, aka HTC Kaiser, running a custom light ROM of Windows Mobile 6.1, none of which means anything to me. Olly SIM- and ROM-unlocked it for me, besides flashing the custom ROM onto it to replace the crappy 3 bloatware that was on it before (this makes marginally more sense). It’s like my previous HTC Alpine, smaller but chunkier, and without the volatile memory, mayfly battery life, dark screen, broken speaker, and incapable wireless.

Features include a radio transceiver that runs every form of wireless ever, a resistive screen (ie, uses a stylus and fingernail jabs, rather than the fingertip-smeared capacitive nonsense that everything uses now), micro SD card slot, and best of all a flip-out tactile response hardware keyboard. With the ROM Olly loaded for me, it runs wicked fast. I am very pleased with it. Now it just needs a name.

Thanks in part to playing a weird, very good Age of Empires knockoff called Fate of the Dragon, in part to then playing AoE3: The Weeaboo Dynasties, and in part to becoming aware of the South-Pointing Chariot, I’m getting more and more obsessed with ancient Chinese history, particularly the Three Kingdoms period. I rather want to read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but it’s an intimidating 800,000 words long. (For those who aren’t sure what this means, a nice thick novel is 60-70k.)

Off to Scotland tomorrow, a week in Elgin and a week in Edinburgh; hopefully there’ll be internet at both, though no promises. Travelogues to follow.

Also, I reviewed Alien Swarm for The Solitary Bee. There’s plenty of good non-me stuff there, including pics of a weird, massive firing range up on Dartmoor, so give it a visit.

the phosphorescence of the skid marks lighting the the M5 all the way from Exeter to Damascus

On By brosencrantzIn UncategorisedLeave a comment

Dear Esther musings/review on The Solitary Bee! Though of course you’ve all already played it, right? Right? (Rake, Evangelion is downloading, it’ll get the treatment in due course. Stop torturing me long enough to prepare some bribes.)

Tom and I are making good progress with our current project, which is a pistol styled after the Rotovolver (a weird, obscure, mid-19th-century attempt at an early repeating pistols by the French gunsmiths Gouery and Noel) which is an important item in one of my planned stories, (the probably-never-to-be-finished Ten Ways to Keep from Growing Old). We’ve got a nearly finished 3d model and the foamboard to make a mould, after which we’ll need casting, painting, wood grips, pipe cutoffs for the trigger guards and ghost rings… But we should really talk about that on his blog, so I’ll take some pictures and Sketchup screenshots and post them on there with a proper writeup later.

Continue reading “the phosphorescence of the skid marks lighting the the M5 all the way from Exeter to Damascus” →

the hummel has landed

On By brosencrantzIn Uncategorised1 Comment

Mr Reeve has launched his new reviews-and-commentary-of-fun-stuff blog, The Solitary Bee. In his own words: Welcome to The Solitary Bee. This is a blog where I and a few others will be banging on about stuff we like, and, occasionally, stuff we don’t…

It’s currently starring, besides Reevian pieces, my Robin Hood review (slightly edited for swearing) and some proper OC should be joining it shortly. Also (as I should probably have guessed) he likes John Wyndham as much as me! /o/ \o\

http://the-solitary-bee.blogspot.com