OK I'm determined to start posting to this more often... There's probably nobody reading this but quite frankly I don't care.

I'm a huge fan of roleplaying games (the book/dice variety, not the computer variety) and recently had occasion to buy some pretty amazing software which I thought I'd share here. Campaign Cartographer is basically a full suite of mapping products for creating maps from continent to dungeon level and after a bit of experimenting it is actually really easy to use and incredibly powerful.

The above map is "Willow Creek" which I have just completed for a game my friend Jeff is running. After a few false starts I'd say I managed to do this in about 3 hours or so (plus a bit of mucking around time at the end to get it exported). I think it looks really good and thought I'd share it, not to blow my own trumpet about how great a map I've drawn but to show how easy it is for someone with very little artisitic talent to create something quite professional looking. Here's a link to a bigger version.

If you're interested in having a go yourself I suggest you high tail it over to Profantasy's website and buy the software. The basic mapping version is only 30 quid but there are a few nice add ons that allow you to do more in depth dungeon and city mapping.

I recommend watching some of the YouTube tutorials before buying it though as it'll give you a much better idea as to how it works.

Enjoy!

I think Spotify may be the greatest online service ever created. As a lover of music finding new stuff that was any good used to be a bit of a chore. It was either a dodgy stream from MySpace, an illegal download or a speculative order from Amazon. Don't get me wrong I've found some great stuff due to speculative purchases from Amazon. I discovered Modest Mouse in 2000 after a bored search for “Mouse” while waiting for some code to compile or something.

But Spotify has changed all that. Now in just a few mouse clicks I can have the full album playing on my computer. So, in no particular order, here are 5 great finds that I'd never have discovered without Spotify.

1. “Don't Dissapoint Us Now” by Decoration.
   A touch of the Wedding Present from this Bolton band but a little more rocky. Dry, witty songs with a very distinctive, northern, vocal. “Fly North” is my favourite track. Can't remember where I actually first read about them but I now own all three of their albums.
2. “Sisterworld” by Liars.
   Some quality New York synth/punk with blistering beats and awesome vocals. The opening track “Scissor” starts slow and then blows you away and “Scarecrows On A Killer Slant” is just fantastic.
3. “Lisbon” by The Walkmen.
   This gets better on every listen. Contemporary garage rock with a unique, 60s style sound that comes from, by all accounts, their habit of playing old instruments. Although this album is superb, my favourite track by these guys is “The Rat” from their earlier album “Bows + Arrows”. It's almost perfect.
4. “Greatest Hits” by Bruce Springsteen.
   OK so I'm a little slow off the starting blocks here but after years of assuming I didn't like The Boss I finally decided I should actually listen to some of his music. Apologies to all those to whom I've dissed him, especially my brother who probably got the brunt of it.
5. “Micah P. Hinson And The Red Empire Orchestra” by (unsurprisingly) Micah P. Hinson.
   This is brilliant. Another of those scary country singers who sounds like he's in his 70s and is actually under 30. His biography includes fundamentalist Christian parents, drug abuse, jail, homelessness and all the other ingredients of a wonderfully bitter-sweet sound that is reminiscent of the best of Jonny Cash.

It's probably also worth mentioning at this point that I have gone out and bought all of the above albums on CD with the exception of Bruce Springsteen. Also, apologies to anyone in the USA who can't get this service yet. One day you may also be blessed as we have been.

OK, over 6 months... that's not really what I was aiming for when I set this blog up. From now on I'll post more regularly.

I have been prompted into writing this blog again for two reasons:

1. I saw this article on the BBC website (thanks to Adam for sending it on) which reminded indirectly of one of the greatest football matches I've ever been to and...
2. Christopher Caleb basically shamed me into putting up a new post by continuously reminding me that I hadn't posted in months.

So what's the BBC story got to do with the greatest football match I've ever been to I hear you ask? The BBC story concerns the St. Helena shooting team at the Commonwealth Games and anyone who knows me will be aware that I spent a part of my childhood living on St. Helena. St. Helena is a rock surrounded by sea sitting about as far away from land as it is possible to get in the South Atlantic. Having no airport; it is considered to be one of the remotest islands in the world, taking at least 4 days to get to from the UK.

It is so remote, in fact, that after the battle of Waterloo, the British sent Napoleon there.

I have many fond memories of the island and one that sprung to mind on reading the BBC story was the time the St. Helena national team took on Brazil in a once in a lifetime, free, football match on Francis Plain (the only bit of the island flat enough to have a football pitch on it).

OK so this is a slight exaggeration. What happened was: a Brazilian naval ship docked in Jamestown Bay and the sailors offered to put a team together to take on the local team. It did have one thing in common with watching Brazil play though: They were really good! I seem to remember it ending something like 4-1 but it really was a strange wee micro version of the real experience of watching Brazil hump your local team. Those of the crew who weren't playing pitched up with drums and some exuberant Samba beats and to the credit of the locals most of them joined in.

What isn't an exaggeration is that most of the population turned out to watch. I'd be lying if I said I could remember it well enough to judge the size of the crowd exactly but it was pretty big, and with only slightly over 4,000 people on the island it didn't take much for the majority to be there.

It was a really cool wee event and in these days of commercialism and massive sponsorships it was nice that this game was all about the football... or at least I assume it was, to be honest I can't remember it that well and probably spent most of the time playing with my mates. I was only 9 after all.

Ahh good times... I'll see if I can find a photo and post it later.

As a slight addendum, I just looked up Francis Plain on Wikipedia and was amazed to find that it had an (albeit small) entry. It is apparently a multi-use stadium that holds around 2,000 people. I'm not sure you can really describe a piece of flat ground with a slight raised area of grass at one side that you can sit on as a multi-use stadium but it does at least confirm that it was possible for half the population of the island to have been there. I found a picture of Francis Plain on the thrilling sounding world stadiums website so you can judge for yourself. It is very much as I remember it.

OK maybe I was being a bit ambitious with my "One post every day" plan but I'll try to do better.

Brian Cox is a name most will associate with the famous Scottish actor of such films as "Manhunter", etc but a large number of people in the UK are now beginning to associate the name with another discipline. Professor Brian Cox's recent series "Wonders of the Solar System" has just finished on BBC2 and was truly awe inspiring at points.

Sure it had it's flaws. There was a lot of repetition and sometimes Professor Cox's enthusiasms seemed to be getting in the way of progressing the actual programme but I doubt anyone who watched it hasn't come away somewhat blown away by at least one or two of the episodes. I know I now have a much greater appreciation for not only how amazing our solar system is but more so, how precarious our very existence on planet Earth is.

The episodes that focussed on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn were the most interesting, suggesting that out there somewhere the conditions required for life may exist, if not in our own solar system then surely somewhere else in the universe but you do really get the impression from the programme that we are incredibly lucky to have evolved as we have done. I for one won't look up into the sky at night again without a new-found understanding of what amazing wonders are out there.

Professor Cox himself has divided opinion amongst my friends but I really enjoyed his obvious enthusiasm and excitement about his subject (although you do occasionally get the feeling it's a little put on for the camera). I'm not certain he necessarily needed to go to some of the more exotic locations to make his points but I can forgive him for this and just hope he hasn't used up too much of my licence fee in doing so. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more programs from him in this vein in the future which can only be a good thing.

If you missed it I urge you to buy the DVD when it surely comes out. Ideally a DVD release would be in the form of one or two longer programmes that maybe cut an hour or so from the total running time and tighten it up a bit but I assume that is unlikely to happen. Either way it's excellent.

So I failed... I meant to review something new every day but today all I've done is go to work, conduct some yearly appraisals, come home, go round to some friends flat and have dinner. Thanks though to Sunain and Laura for providing food. It was delicious. Does that count as a review? Does a shaved monkey wearing a dinner jacket and one of those comedy bowler hats count as a city gent? No. There's a difference between a monkey and a city gent... one spends most of it's day hooting, shouting and throwing it's shit around and the other is a lesser primate commonly found in Africa, South America and Asia.

Boom Boom!

When I was 8 my family moved from the rugby heartland of Hawick in the borders, where I had been taught P.E. By the legendary, sadly missed Bill McLaren, to the tiny, isolated island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean. Those history buffs amongst you will know that that is where Napoleon was dispatched to after his defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and where he subsequently died in 1821. The reason Napoleon was sent there was twofold. One, it was part of the British empire and two, it was one of the most isolated spots on earth.

In 1985 it was still British (as it still is to this day) and it was still by far one of the remotest places on earth. It took 16 days to get there by boat from the UK (that could be cut to about 4 if you flew to Ascension Island first), had no airport, very few people and, horror of horrors, no television.

To most people my age their first memory of a big sporting event is either the 1982 or 1986 World Cup. '82 passed me by (I was 5 at the time and living in a town obsessed by rugby) and in '86 I was thousands of miles away from the ability to watch any of the action. I didn't even know it was happening. My first football related memory is returning home from school on the 11^th of June 1990 just in time to see Costa Rica score the only goal in their 1-0 victory over Scotland. Seeing Scotland lose to teams that they should have beaten has since then become a regular occurrence.

That's not my first memory of seeing Scotland play sport though. That would be in the early months of 1989, just weeks after we had returned to Edinburgh, watching Scotland and England draw 12 each at Twickenham on the telly. It was the second match of the rugby 5 nations championship and that year Scotland finished 3^rd behind France and England. To be honest I vaguely remember the Wales match two weeks earlier but the match that stuck out was the England one. Even then, newly back in the country I knew that beating England was more important than beating any of the other teams.

I was only 13 a year and bit later when Scotland lined up against England to decide the Grand Slam at Murrayfield. A lot of the politics around that match, and a lot of the history were probably over my head. Obviously now I know how important it was and it brings a lump to the throat watching some of the footage but when that final whistle blew in 1990, and Scotland had won by 13 points to 7, I don't really think I appreciated the full importance of what I'd just seen.

Thanks then to Tom English who has just written a book called “The Grudge” about that fateful match. I started reading it yesterday and hardly put it down until I finished it this evening.

For a start it is incredibly unbiased with contributions from both the English and Scottish players so you get the feeling that the story is pretty straight and as it happens. A lot of the emotion is hyped up a bit but that's fitting with the story and is the case for both sides. It also sheds some interesting light on the politics of the period. I didn't get the political thing really either in 1990.

Thatcher had just used Scotland as her poll tax testing ground and Scotland was angry. The usual mechanism for getting stuck into the English, the annual football home international, had been cancelled less than a year ago and this was finally Scotland's chance for a bit of vengeance. The English team were (unfairly) tarred as representatives of Thatcher, coming up to Edinburgh to stamp her authority on Scotland. As far as Scotland was concerned this was war.

All this is in the book and it makes a really interesting read. It's audience isn't as narrow as would initially seem as this will appeal to lovers of rugby, of Scotland and mainly and most interestingly, to lovers of great sporting rivalries.

I've never understood people who don't like sport. The raw emotion when your team scores against it's rivals is unbeatable and wondrous and that has never felt stronger to me than on those rare occasions where Scotland manage to pull off some sort of unbelievable victory against all odds. It doesn't happen often but it happened in spades in 1990 and it's worth revisiting...

Especially because I won 50p from my mate Jason who reckoned England would win.

There was a moment at the start of tonight's episode of Flashforward where the ever frowning Joseph Feinnes, freshy drummed out of the FBI for being about as unprofessional as it's possible to be, is handed the business card of a psychiatrist. I mentally added the Sopranos to the list of 24, Lost, Heroes, The X Files, The Wire, etc that this series has "borrowed" from. It's almost as if the writers were given a crib sheet and asked to incorporate elements of all the above shows in order to maximise viewing figures.

Tonight's double episode concentrated a lot more on the Mancunian Hobbit himself, Dominic Moneghan who introduced us to his family of typical British folk such as we're used to from Lost and Heroes. I'm sure some of the actors involved were British but dear God it was more cringeworthy than what's her name off Frasier. The episodes also managed to be completely and utterly predictable from start to finish. I genuinely never figured out that Bruce Willis was dead until it was revealed at the end of the Sixth Sense but the plot in Flashforward for all it's complexity is easier to read than the big print version of "Learn to read easy words with few letters".

I still don't really know why I persist with this travesty of a show, returning tonight after a 3 or 4 month break. Maybe I was kinda hoping that in the intervening period they might have managed to fix it. I think I watch though because they somehow manage to put some kind of moment of extreme excitment at the end of each episode dragging me back next week to find out which wholly inappropriate piece of music they're going to use randomly over which piece of cringeworthy action. Maybe I'm interested to find out how many more random British actors will appear in it (James Cosmo tonight in a very small cameo, getting about 5 lines before being strangled). Or maybe I just secretly like it but can't justify it in any way.

Who knows. All I know is I'll be watching again next week.

The objective of this is for me to get a bit better at writing and to hopefully inform and educate people coming here about stuff that's good, stuff that's bad, stuff that's worthwhile and stuff that isn't. To that end I'm going to write a review of something here every day until I get bored or forget to do it. Knowing me I give myself about a week tops before that happens.

Anyway, I reckon I must do, watch, eat, read, play something completely new about once or twice a day so there shouldn't be any shortage of stuff up here. Writing this blog should also hopefully help push me to do interesting things and thus give me stuff to write about. If there are no more posts beyond today you will know that I have failed.

So anyway, enjoy.