This is where, in properly regulated home pages of the old school (and this is very much an old-school home page), you'd expect to find a picture of me. What you find on this home page is a picture of a badger...
![[A fuzzy video still of a badger]](images/badger3.jpg)
I work on the Network Abuse Team at Demon Internet. Fighting for Truth, Justice and a Spam-Free Net. (Well, the last one, mainly.)
These are some of my interests...
Board games. I'm a board game nut. The fluffy German sort, mainly; more complex than Monopoly or Risk, not as complex as War in the Pacific or Advanced Third Reich. Die Siedler von Catan or El Grande is more my mark. I host the website for my local gaming group, the Finchley Games Club. (I've finished my five-year stint as chairman there, though. Which I expect we're both happy about.)
NetHack. A wonderful computer game. A wonderful, free computer game that's deeper, more developed and requires more strategic thought than any of the games in big colourful boxes that you'll find on the shelves of Electronic Boutique or Virgin. The graphics aren't pretty, but who cares when there's this much gameplay? (I maintain a collection of spoiler files for it, and the FAQ for the rec.games.roguelike.nethack newsgroup.)
Crawl. (Or, to give it its full title, Linley's Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.) I actually play this more than NetHack these days; I've more or less mastered NetHack's challenges, and can be reasonably confident that the only thing stopping any character who survives early-game bad luck from ascending will be my own inattentiveness or tiring of them. Crawl still has learning curve for me to climb. (I'll likely go back to NH when the new version comes out; in the meantime, Crawl it is.)
World of Warcraft. Yes, I have succumbed to the Dread Vortex of Timesink. Currently playing a dwarven priest (healing is fun!) by the name of Tamsk, with a decent bunch called the Knights of Sparta. I had a life around here once, where did I put it?
Books... a lot of different authors, but I'll make particular mention of P.G. Wodehouse.
Text adventures. Or interactive fiction, to give them a posh name. If you thought these had stopped being written since 1989, you might be surprised; there are two active newsgroups (rec.games.int-fiction for players, rec.arts.int-fiction for authors) devoted to them, and an annual competition. I've even written one myself, though it's just a short one-room one-joke parody game. On the other hand, it was nominated in the Best Player Character category in the 1998 XYZZY awards, so there must be something to it. I also spend a fair amount of time at the virtual gathering place of IF aficionados, ifMUD (I'm Psmith there).
I don't watch much TV, but I do watch some of the geek favourites: Dr Who, Babylon 5, Red Dwarf, Buffy, Fawlty Towers, Sapphire and Steel, Blake's 7, etc, etc.
Other People's Pages. Links elsewhere.