Stuart Ellis-Gorman

@drcrossbows.bsky.social

Medieval historian, crossbows and the Hundred Years War. Author of The Medieval Crossbow (2022) and Castillon (2025). Freelance writer/editor/proofreader, occasional game designer. Reviewer of books and games. Website: www.stuartellisgorman.com

I got a Mangmi Air earlier this year and I've been playing some old games, often for the first time. That's been great, but it's also been great to look things up on Gamefaqs again. In the midst of an internet that gets steadily worse, Gamefaqs remains a constant. Never change old friend.

I am being asked for advice on running a kickstarter and I have ZERO knowledge of that world or the business involved behind it. Does anyone in my circles have expertise or knows someone who knows the ins and outs of running one?

And I'm not saying you can't mourn him. I'm not wading in on people's posts talking about how important his music was to them and how much they loved him. You do you. But I'm also not going to pretend like he wasn't a known child groomer. I'm not going to concede that it's disrespectful to say so.

Rose 🇮🇪🤝🇵🇸@anaemicroyalty.bsky.social · 4d ago

Fuck it. I am sick to the back teeth of people today saying they never heard Glen Hansard was a groomer so therefore those of us who did hear it shouldn't talk about it. He groomed teenage girls. He was well known for it in certain circles. He would give out burner phones for them to text him from.

This feels like a perfect encapsulation of how while Irish people are broadly pro-Palestine, their support is routinely failed by the actions of Irish politicians and the Irish state. See also, cowardice from the FAI and the slowboating of the Occupied Territories bill. www.rte.ie/news/2026/07...

Concern over study visa refusal rate for Gazan students

Concern is growing in Irish universities over a high rate of refusal of study visas to students in Gaza who are due to take up college scholarships in Ireland this September.

rte.ie

Okay, so this is a claim I have come across a few times on this site and I feel the need to say something about it. Namely, snake oil was an effective Chinese medicine that was unsuccessfully imitated by white Americans because they used rattlesnakes with worse oil. This is false. 1/

We're moving back to Ireland from Korea next month, and I've been trying to find somewhere for us to live for several months now with no success. Not for the first time it has me wondering why we decided to move back...

Got a copy of Strat-o-matic baseball from 1980. That copy of the game didn’t originally come with a d20, so for some resolutions you would need to generate a number between 1-20 shuffling the 20 included pink cards. The previous owner instead made this chart, which has a perfect 10/216 distribution!

BildBildBild

Only one other person was free for the monthly game meet up so we blitzed through a decent pile of 2 player games: General Orders WWII, Orapa Space, Air Land & Sea (not pictured), and Compile. Air, Land, & Sea was the stand out (so much that I forgot to take a picture). Such a good game.

General Orders by Osprey Games. It's a small board covered in hexagons with wooden colored disks and cylinders as playing pieces.Picture of Orapa Space, showing my board with the planets arranged on the grid and my notes sheet with my terrible notes. A pretty poor photo of Compile. You can see the lines were fighting over, and my hand, but I somehow took a photo without any cards in play. Like an idiot.

"By 400 C.E., the library [of Alexandria] had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages." Nooooooooo c'mon 🤦‍♀️ How can I take this seriously after that opener?

Sam Byers@sambyers.bsky.social · 4w ago

Obviously this is excellent, detailed, and in many ways pretty terrifying - essential reading for anyone with even a passing concern for literature, thought, learning etc. I would only add that there is an even broader crisis here around attention. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

It took me almost a year, but I finally wrote a Part 2 for my tier list of Playte games (my current favorite hobby board game publisher). I'm still obsessed with these games, and I wanted to write about them even as I struggle with traditional game reviews: www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/the-pla...

The Playte Tier List (Part 2) — Stuart Ellis-Gorman

I have something of an obsession with Korean publisher Playte Games. I currently live in Korea, so it is very easy for me to buy their games every month thanks to their low price point, but even beyon...

stuartellisgorman.com

It took me almost a year, but I finally wrote a Part 2 for my tier list of Playte games (my current favorite hobby board game publisher). I'm still obsessed with these games, and I wanted to write about them even as I struggle with traditional game reviews: www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/the-pla...

The Playte Tier List (Part 2) — Stuart Ellis-Gorman

I have something of an obsession with Korean publisher Playte Games. I currently live in Korea, so it is very easy for me to buy their games every month thanks to their low price point, but even beyon...

stuartellisgorman.com

Check out our latest YouTube video: “ Ermine || Pierre Vagneur-Jones Interview at PunchedCon '26 || GMT Talk” zurl.co/VXY4O In this video, Candice introduces us to game designer Pierre Vagneur-Jones via a quick interview at PunchedCon 2026. Enjoy!

Ermine || Pierre Vagneur-Jones Interview at PunchedCon '26 || GMT Talk

Meet game designer Pierre Vagneur-Jones via a quick interview at PunchedCon 2026. Pierre shares his insight on his upcoming, debut GMT Games release in the M...

zurl.co

It took me months to figure out how to extract 30,000 careers from the Colonial Office List; it took a little over a day to repeat the full process for the Indian Office List. The visualization now shows the very different global geography of these two bureaucracies in the British Empire.

every old Spanish document is like "the aforementioned Juan, aforementioned, was sworn in in the correct form, aforementioned" and every property inventory is like 1. [specific kind of wool fabric from Belgium] 2. [specific kind of linen from part of Greece you were unaware of] 3. old box, shitty