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Is Themself a word?
I am a civil servant and in the course of my work I was writing a document for publication (a Fire & Rescue Service circular). In that draft I used the word 'themself' because it was a gender neutral third person singular. I got back an e-mail from a colleague informing me that I couldn't use 'themself' because it wasn't a word. Here's an edited highlight of the e-mail (names removed to protect the guilty and innocent alike). >>> Someone 14:47 04 Jul 06 >>> There is no such word as "themself" >>> Themself 04/07/06 15:43:10 >>> I disagree on the existence of 'themself' I use it all the time. Perhaps it is a Scottish word. >>> Someone 16:07 04 Jul 06 >>> "Themself" is not in the Oxford English Dictionary. The Chambers Dictionary says it is best avoided. And Fowler's Modern…
Another Short Lived Blog?
OK. Playing about with various bits of blog software because I want to try it out and figure that this has got to be a better way to do things than creating static web pages and also having to edit stuff lots. I can write html using nothing more than a text editor, but that's so last
Hot Blood & Cold Steel – onside Report
This was a design session on how to do a WW1 skirmish game, focusing mainly delivering a participation game for Jerry Elsmore’s 50th Birthday con. I’d already done a first darft of the rules but wanted to talk through some of the principles about what I wanted to achieve. I found the discussion particularly useful in clarifying my methods for running a participation game at a show. Gone is the idea of having all the action in a static circle of squares that represented all that could be seen (I may do this at CLWG sometime as I still like the idea, although it would be too time-consuming for being run at a show). I did get some ideas for making changes to the terrain though so that it would only become clear when figures entered the square in question.…
Revolutionary Warfare – onside report
When I played Andy Grainger’s A Month in Country I immediately thought of some of the parallels with my Revolutionary Warfare game. I have run this at CLWG couple of times, although with only a few players. I would particularly like to re-do the Palestine game as one player in particular couldn’t cope with the concept of the role that they were given. (I won’t name names, but those that were there know who I am talking about – the British Governor wanted a PR power sharing assembly between the Palestinians and the Jews). Revolutionary Warfare The concept I was playing with was similar to Andy’s but on a slightly larger scale. At the time of design I was considering producing ‘Lion Comes Home’ as a megagame. So the Revolutionary Warfare module had to work very smoothly. It is essentially one sided. A small group of…
What you missed at the January meeting of CLWG
The Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group (CLWG) January meeting (Sunday 9th January) was in Jim's office near Holborn. This one had 14 members in attendance. When I turned up there was a promotion board going on for one of the characters in our long-running Starship Marine campaign (details of the campaign and a history of the 130th Regiment). To make this more interesting for the players who were on the board ( the interviewers) there were a couple of candidates for promotion, including one marine Captain who brought a bomb in with him to prove how easy they were to defuse. A nice piece of live role-play from Jerry (who improvised the bombs immediately beforehand.) I was called upon to defuse the device which consisted of an ice-cream box with an anti-tilt device on it and a fuse inside which had…