Where Worlds Collide

The Book of Ratings rates some classic D&D monsters. Take the entry for everyone’s favourite, the Gelatinous Cube:

Here we have yet another monster with no reason to exist in a dungeon-free ecosystem. It’s genetically adapted to graph paper, for God’s sake! Plus it conveniently fails to either digest or excrete metal, giving an adventurers a reason to kill it and scoop coins from its corpse. It’s like some sort of living, deadly, mall fountain

Somehow I get a vision of Crozier Rail employing these things as security guards.

BBC NEWS | UK | Terrorism fear derails train-spotters

First they came for the fox hunters.
But because I didn’t hunt foxes, I did nothing.

Then they came for the trainspotters

Who will be next?

Train-spotters are being told to leave stations as rail bosses tighten anti-terror security, BBC News Online can reveal.

To many people, train-spotters are a joke.

To Network Rail, the company which now runs the UK’s train network, they are potential terrorists.

One suspects this is an excuse. I suspect overzealous private security guards (and the dreaded British Transport Police) would rather harass a harmless and innocent group rather than, say, deal with drunken football supporters who might actually fight back.

Perhaps they think trainspotters are a “bad image”, having listened to too many third rate comedians that pick on train enthusiasts because they’re not allowed pick on racial minorities any more.

Or, as in the last paragraph, it’s the latest paranoia coming over from America.

But a meeting of US security officials in Washington in March reportedly classified “people sitting on train platforms who appear to be monitoring the timing of arrivals and departures” as suspicious behaviour.

Perhaps it’s time for rail enthusiasts to fight back? I’m thinking along the lines of the Kinder Scout mass trespass by ramblers a few decades back. What about a mass trainspot at one of the “Forbidden” stations?

Not that I’m advocating trespass on the actual tracks, of course. Just a large number of people descending onto the publically accessible parts of a big station, all holding the valid train tickets they used to get there. Perhaps some Network Rail accountant might like to add up the value of all those tickets?

There’s been some discussion of this on the DEModellers mailing list. One poster noted that regular Railfans could be a significant resource in combating terrorism and vandalism. Since almost all of us have cameras and most of us have mobile phones, we can report those trespassing on the tracks, vandalising stations, or acting suspiciously.

Update: I Like Adam Warr’s take on the issue.

I’m off this morning for a well earned holiday! See you all (both?) in about ten days!

I am privileged to be a player in David Edelstein’s message board game based on Steven King’s The Stand, running on the message boards of Dreamlyrics.

Currently the game has reached the stage where everyone is dying, and civilisation is collapsing. Despite all this doom and gloom, the last line of the most recent GM post I received. My character, Ivor Tregonning, decided to spend the last hours of civilisation reading usenet. But read the last paragraph!!

The newsgroups are now full of desperation, prayers, and raving. Someone is suggesting Britain should launch its nuclear warheads at America, in an act of dying vengeance. As lunatical as that sounds, a lot of people seem to think it’s a good idea. But most are just terrified and grief-stricken as the “American Flu” works its way through Britain, the Reaper’s swath cutting people down by the thousands, soon to be millions.

There are rumors the government has a vaccine. There are rumors spreading that all manner of things — high dosages of antibiotics, ultraviolet rays, crystals, freezing temperatures, heroin — will protect you from death by flu virus. There are rumors that China has detonated nuclear warheads over its own cities trying to burn away the epidemic. There are rumors that the Queen is already dead, and that Tony Blair and George Bush have been whisked away to a secret flu-free base in Antarctica.

And through it all, spambots continue posting messages about penis enlargement pills and a chance to help pilfer the coffers of third world nations with the help of former heads of state.

Yes, if a virus really did wipe out mankind, I can still imagine spammers send out their bottom feeding sales pitches right up to the bitter end. Spam and cockroaches will inherit the earth!

It’s sad when a online community dies. Sometimes a thriving community is broken up when the online service that hosts it decides one day to close it down. Sometimes communities die a long drawn out death as the membership of the online service that hosts it declines. I’ve seen both of these happen.

And sometimes it self-destructs because the membership just can’t get along.

Or worse still, a group is destroyed through a moment of madness from some of the people that are supposed to be the moderators of the group.

Let’s hope the enough of the former membership regroups in a new place, and spirit of the group survives in some form, somewhere.

Update: Looks like that’s happened, as can be seen here.

Update 2: Look at the modified “Net Communities” blogroll, which I have now updated to reflect the new reality.

19 minutes late yesterday.

A full Reginald Perrin-syle 22 minutes late today

I’m getting fed up with this. The 8:24 from Cheadle Hulme (8:04 from Manchester) had been quite reliable up to a couple of weeks ago, but has gone badly pear-shaped in the last few weeks. Every other day nowadays it seems to be late.

Part of the problem seems to be the ‘efficient’ (from an operator’s point of view) use of stock. The class 323 set used on this train previously works a Stoke-on-Trent to Manchester working, due in at 8:00. Yes, folks, that’s just a four minute turnaround. Wonder why it often runs late?

I have no way of telling if things will get better or worse after the timetable change at the end of the month. During the summer the Stoke line will be closed for rebuilding, and all Virgin Trains services to Manchester to London and Birmingham will run via Crewe. Will congestion on that route cause even more delays?

Still, only four more days till I go to Switzerland, where trains run on time, and seem to run for the benefit of passengers (not ‘customers’) rather than accountants.

Silflay Hraka links to this showing just what happens when your car GPFs. Yes, folks, there are BMWs running windows. And yes, they do perform the car equivalent of a Blue Screen of Death.

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 45: Accolades and Warm Fuzzies

Who are some gamers you admire and appreciate? Name three (or as many as you like) gamers you admire and/or appreciate right now, and explain why

First, Ash Haji, my very first GM in face to face gaming. I’ve played two very long campaigns run by him, “Vikings in Space”, an epic AD&D campaign that ran for something like five years, and another lengthy Gloranthan Runequest game. Both games folded when players dropped out, sadly in the second case I was the guilty party when I relocated to Manchester. Ash has an incredible imagination, and consistently conjured up incredible and exotic adventures, which remained challenging and entertaining even when the player characters reached munchkinoid power levels at the end of a five year campaign. I can still remember the fantasy city with a tube system run by earth elementals, with the player characters buying “all zones mooncards”.

Second, Maughn Matsuoka, my first on line GM. If Ash taught me much of what I know about face to face GMing, Maughn taught me all about online GMing. His GURPS Cyberpunk game “Hawaiian Vacation”, with it’s rich detailed background and roller coaster of a plot is for me the template of what a good game should be about. He routinely sent us detailed CAD drawings of the various locations our characters went to, including the infamous Frontier Hotel. He was always willing to give me advice when I started up my own game, and he was later to play two very different characters in that game to demonstrate that he’s as good a player as his is an GM.

Third, Jill Pincott, a.k.a. Gypsy, founder of Dreamlyrics. Jill was one of the sysops in the CompuServe role playing games forum, where played in the games mentioned above. When AOL closed the forum (in a messy way documented here), Jill and a few others created a brand new roleplaying site to replace it in the space of two weeks flat. Jill has a talent for community building, which has made Dreamlyrics such a great success. Not only that, she also hosts the annual Gypsycon, where more than two dozen gamers, mostly Dreamlyrics members, descend upon her house for the whole of the Easter weekend for four solid days (and sometimes nights) of solid gaming. Demonstrating that community building doesn’t stop at gaming, Gypsycon is responsible for three long term relationships (so far), including one upcoming wedding!

Of course, I can’t stop at just three.

If I had to pick just one player of the two dozen or so that have played in online games I’ve run, it would be Nicki Jett, currently playing the revolutuonary Hollis in my Kalyr game, and the cyborg Lizard in the space piracy game AEF, as well as two memorable characters in “Hawaiian Vacation”. A wonderful writer that gets under the skin of her characters, and has the talent for bringing out the best from the players around her.

Since most of my offline gaming nowadays is one shot convention style gaming, I’ll mention Steve “Abaddon” Morley and Mark “L’Ange” Baker as superlative gamesmasters. Steve runs games with seemingly no preparation, and conjures adventures almost out of thin air, the most extreme being something he called “Work in Progress”. There were no character sheets, and the PCs were dropped in a situation where we were in a bank, wearing ski masks and holding guns, and with no memories of how we got there. In total contrast, Mark Baker runs games with detailed, elaborate character backgrounds, loads of authentic looking player handouts, and frightening amounts of historical research, giving some very atmospheric games indeed. His In Nomine game run at last years summer Stabcon is typical, with some very strong imagery I ended up dreaming about that night.

Of course, I’ve got to mention Karen and Carl Cravens of phoenyx.net, who host one of my online games.

Honourable mentions, of course, to a host of other gamers, both on and offline; in no particular order, Michael Orton, Tony Cotterill, Derek Baker, Andy, David “Amadan” Edelstein, AJ Richardson, Marielle Harris, Hugh “War Dog” Foster, Pete Hat, Sasha, Sean “Pandemonium” Pagliarulo, Vince Togarelli and Maria “Fendahl” Whittaker, all of whom have excelled either as players, GMs, or generally cool people. Apologies to anyone I’ve missed!

Some good news. According to Times Online, the looting of the National Museum of Baghdad was not quite as bad as originally feared.

The investigators, made up of US customs agents working with coalition troops, refused to give a detailed inventory of the recovered items.

They would not say if the artefacts included any of the 38 high-value items that had been confirmed missing by the museum’s curators.

More than 39,400 ancient manuscripts have been found, but officials conceded that “certain high-value pieces” had been stolen from the vaults.

We might never know the full story, of course. Unfortunately the crowing rightwingers are using this as another platform to display their visceral hatred of all liberals, and are demanding apologies from anyone who’s only ‘crime’ was to take news reports at face value.

My anger when I originally posted this was prompted not so much by the looting itself, but by Donald Rumsfelds casual dismissal, and by the savage attacks by some rightwing blowhards in the comments section at Making Light.

When is any Anarcho-Fascist warblogger ever going to apologise for any of the hatred and venom spewed from their sites? Until they do (which they won’t), I have nothing to retract or apologise for.

Channel 4′s 100 Worst Britons, as selected by a poll of viewers, has nominated our Prime Minister as the worst Briton.

The criteria for the poll were that the people had to be alive, and neither in jail or awaiting trial, which, as Channel 4 pointed out, excludes Jeffrey Archer.

Naturally with polls of this type there was a surfeit of flavour-of-month celebrities, such as Jordan at #2 and Big Brother’s Jade Goody at #4, and several Spice Girls. Also listed were several members of the Royal family, most notably The Queen (10), and Prince Charles (24).

Tory leader Iain Duncan Who will be disappointed by only coming in a 99, between Craig David and Atomic Kitten. Not quite sure what this proves.