Library
I have far too many hobbies and interests, and not enough spare time to devote to them all. On this page you will find links to web-pages that are related to some of my interests, along with a brief comment about each site.
Quick Index
H P Lovecraft
This century's most influential horror author. An acquired taste, unfortunately, and some people find him quite unpalatable. If you are in to Stephen King and his ilk, you probably won't like Lovecraft, but Lovecraft had more original ideas than any horror writer who has followed.
The Yahoo! H P Lovecraft club. View it, then join it!
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Ray-traced Graphics / 3D Graphics
Ray-tracing produces photo-realistic scenes (check out my Gallery) and animations, and is a quite fascinating pursuit. One of the top ray-tracing packages is called POV-Ray, and it is available completely free! To use it, you write a 'script' file that describes your scene, building the objects from simple primitives (spheres, boxes, etc), then POV-Ray takes that script and creates a ray-tracing from it.
- Visit my gallery for some examples.
- POV-Ray - the Persistence of Vision Raytracer
The official and indispensible POV-Ray site. No others required!
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The world's longest running science-fiction series, and a cultural icon in the UK -- 'Dr Who' is to the British what 'Star Trek' is to Americans. Its central character, the eccentric Doctor, a traveller in time and space, has been played by ten actors to date (eleven if you include Peter Cushing who played him in two films). It recently -- and very successfully -- returned to our screens after a gap of several years.
I have created a Dr Who screen-saver, which you can download from this site.
The BBC's own homepage for the series, and an ideal place to start.
Ostensibly a forum for Dr Who fan fiction, this is actually is a very wide-ranging and lively group that discusses all things to do with the series and related (or sometimes completely unrelated!) topics.
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Role-Playing Games
Dungeons and Dragons and the hundreds of subsequent offshoots. I was one of the first people in Britain to play D&D, but I haven't played for years now. I still keep an eye on the hobby, though, and hope to get back into it at some time, perhaps via an e-mail campaign.
The official home-page of Dungeons & Dragons.
A free RPG system. Bizarrely named, but slick and simple and very customisable.
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Space -- the Final Frontier
We were on holiday that week -- I was ten -- and Dad woke me up at three in the morning to come in and watch on the telly as Neil Armstrong came down the ladder, put his foot onto the grey dust, and messed up his historic line. We have now virtually turned our back on it, too wrapped up in our problems here on Earth to realise that most of our problems are because we are still here on Earth, a planet which we are rapidly out-growing. Some of us still dream though, and others are trying to do something about it.
Where do you want to go today ?
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Languages & Linguistics
I have always been fascinated by languages, but have never managed to learn another language. Perhaps this partly because it is linguistics that I am interested in, rather than specific languages. I'd love to learn Latin (I've tried to teach myself a few times), and have finally got round to doing something about it by joining an adult learning course.
-- Links to a multitude of on-line grammars and dictionaries.
-- A Latin Grammar book on-line.
-- If you're still not satisfied, you could go here and invent your own -
-- or go here to see what other people have invented.
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