Where Worlds Collide

The Government’s shiny new Transport Direct website is intended to give you a route by public transport from anywhere to anywhere else. So I thought I’d give the website a try, with a journey I make regularly, from my parent’s house in Slough to my present home in Cheadle Hulme.

I’m not impressed. It begins by suggesting I get the No 43 bus to Windsor, then the train back to Slough! It gets the trunk haul section of the run right (one change at Oxford). But at the other end it’s even worse. Instead of getting off the Rail Replacement Bus five minutes from my home, it proposes continuing to Stockport, getting a train to Hazel Grove, then the 303 and finally the 157 bus. A huge ‘drunken walk’ type journey just to get to a bus stop 50yd nearer than the rail station!

This is nonsense.

It’s on a par with the 400 mile overnight round trip the Railtrack website used to give for the 50 mile journey from Ipswich to Cambridge if you entered a time just after the last direct train had left. It would get you to Cambridge a few minutes before the first train the next morning.

All I can say is, this system is not ready for prime time yet.

Patrick Crozier laments the fact that, unlike the mainstream press, Modern Railways doesn’t have an Internet version, and he can’t link to Roger Ford’s though-provoking article on the subject of safety.

Sadly the transport press isn’t up to speed on the interwebthingy. As Electric Nose keeps telling us, the model railway press is often quite hostile towards the internet, with the Railway Modeller famously forbidding advertisers from putting URLs in their adverts. Other magazines have condemned certain email discussion lists with the sort of venom Andrew Orlowski directs at weblogs.

They just don’t get it.

Game Dream 6 asks us:

Have you attended a game or media (i.e. comic book / SF) convention? If not, what’s kept you from doing so? If so, how was your experience, and what can you share with others to nudge their decision one way or the other?

As regular readers of this blog should know, yes. Since I moved up to Manchester three years ago, I haven’t joined up with a local gaming group, and have been relying on cons for my gaming fix. This has included big conventions like Gencon UK, one day events like Dragonmeet, and smaller residential cons like Stabcon and Conjuration. There’s also the private ‘mini cons’ at people’s houses, mostly by assorted members of Dreamlyrics, or it’s predecessor, the long-dead RPGAMES forum on CompuServe.

Each type of con has it’s own atmosphere. The larger conventions like Gencon UK are more gaming industry orientated, with game companies launching new products, lots of traders selling stuff, often a great place to get that obscure long out-of-print supplement you’ve been looking for for years. Many of the games are demos run by representatives from game companies; sometimes you get to be GMed by the people that wrote the games. They’re also places where you can meet some of the names from the gaming industry and get the opportunity to shamelessly namedrop; Yes, I did attend the dinner at Belgo’s in London with Ken Hite and Phil Masters during Gen Con UK 2002. I even spoke to E Gary Gygax once!

Smaller cons like Manchester’s Stabcon tend to be more friendly and informal compared to the sometimes impersonal larger events. Games run on a turn up and go basis rather than being organised two months in advance and printed up in a glossy programme. The emphasis is more on the actual gamers and less on the game companies.

The private ‘mini cons’ are something different again. In a way, these are a glorified version of a regular gaming group, only with a few more people meeting once a year rather than every week, although gaming-wise they’re still structured around one-shot convention style games rather than episodes of continuing campaigns.

I’ve played in some great games at conventions; the one-shot format gives the opportunity to play a lot of different systems and styles of play. My convention attendance has significantly reduced the number of games I own but have never played. I think the last eight games I’ve played have been seven different settings and six different systems. Some memorable ones over the years include the demonic In Nomine game run by Jo Hart at GenCon 2000 ending in the firefight with Tony Blair’s angelic bodyguards at a village fete in Devon, the very emotional Angelic In Nomine game run by Mark “L’Ange” Baker at summer Stabcon 2002 set in Naples, and the completely twisted Unknown Armies game run by Maria Whittaker at Sashcon in a hotel in Leicester.

There’s only one problem with cons. Since I guess I’m one of the few people in Britain who’s into both RPGs and model railways, convention organisers and model railway clubs make no attempt to avoid conflicts of dates!
I see Warley MRC Show clashes with Dragonmeet again this year. At least the coming Winter Stabcon doesn’t clash with the Marlow and Maidenhead show, unlike the past two years!

Unlike their contemporaries Marillion, IQ have never moved their sound very far away from the 80s British neo-prog template of Gabriel-era Genesis crossed with mid-70s Pink Floyd. What makes them worth a listen is Peter Nicholls’ distinctive melodies, and the fact that while what they do isn’t terribly original, they do it very well indeed.

Dark Matter, the band’s eighth studio album, doesn’t really break any new ground, merely honing their sound to near perfection. On first listening, it has the feel of their early albums, a sound dominated by layers of swirling keyboards and guitar topped by Nicholl’s vaguely menacing vocals and darkly obscure lyrics. What’s improved from their early work is far better arrangements that leave some of their older material sounding vaguely half-formed by comparison.

Keyboardist Martin Orford shines on this album right from the very beginning, the synthesised orchestral intro that heralds the 11 minute opener “Sacred Sound”, and the dramatic church organ in the middle section. If that wasn’t enough it follows straight into swirling mellotron backing the guitar solo. Then there’s the wonderful organ work on the ballad “Red Dust Shadow”.

Meanwhile, the more aggressive “You Never Will” is Peter Nicholls at his darkest.

Now as the shadows fall on Allhallows Eve
We spin our tangled web, learn to deceive
I keep on hoping that you’ll do something real
Give in to influence but you never will

“Born Brilliant” instrumentation recalls Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine”, but the lyrics are something else. It’s a matter of opinion who they’re supposed to be about.

My catalogue of failures
Is etched upon my lips
The baggage that I carry
Would sink a thousand ships
My motives are uncertain
Intentions not altogether pure
So don’t you want me beside you
Just like it was before

The album closes with the 24 minute epic “Harvest of Souls”. Even though some of the instrumentation sounds just a little too like “Foxtrot” era Genesis for their own good, it’s still is the standout song of the album, a perfectly structured six-part epic. Each section flows seamlessly into the next, and contains some of Nicholl’s best melodies. There’s one short instrumental passage that’s is such a direct lift from the “Apocalypse 9/8″ section of “Supper’s Ready” I’m sure it’s a deliberate quotation.

This is an album that gets better and better with each listen. On the first couple of listens it was clearly a vast improvement on the slightly disappointing predecessor “Seventh House”. After a few more spins I’m beginning to think this might just be the best album IQ have ever made.

DreamLyrics has an all-new look!

DreamLyrics is a friendly online message gaming community dedicated to role-playing gamers, where new members are made welcome. The site is mainly focused on role-playing via message games, though we do have a live chat room and our own RPG ezine, DreamScribe in addition to other tabletop games.

Check out the two games I run, Arrhan Empire Frontiers and Kalyr. The latter is the other half of the game I run on The Phoenyx.

This independent site is active and well organized, run by gamers for gamers. In fact we have several published authors, including those who have written role-playing books for GURPS and In Nomine. The bulletin board has been running since May 2000. A small charge is made for annual membership to cover running costs and to ensure continuity.

If you’re into message board or PBeM style gaming, you should take a look at this site. Most of the message boards are viewable by all, but read-only for non-members.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Turkish train crash ‘kills 128′

A Turkish government official says at least 128 people have been killed after a high-speed train derailed.

Health Ministry Undersecretary Nejdet Unuvar said that another 57 people were injured in the derailment.

“The scene is one of carnage… There are people lying all over the place,” journalist Oguz Dizer was quoted as telling NTV television.

A number of carriages were overturned, but it was not immediately clear what caused the train to leave the tracks.

Reports say the train had 230 people on board, so 128 dead would be more than half the passengers on the train, which if true is a major tragedy.

From the pictures of the TV news, I have to say I’m somewhat skeptical about the reported death toll. It’s common for initial estimates of the number of deaths on major train accidents to be revised downwards as the wreckage is searched and people are accounted for. Let’s hope and pray that’s true for this crash.

The pictures showed showed several modern carriages lying at various angles, but largely intact. The damage shown didn’t seem serious enough for the sort of death toll being talked about. Of course, I may be completely wrong; presumably a clearer picture will emerge tomorrow morning.

Update:. The Turkish authorities have revised the death toll down to 38. Still bad, though.

In this interview with Fish with a Dutch prog website, he’s clearly in favour of trains of windowless red coaches hauled by class 67s

And there are people depending on the mail, and the mail is not cheap…And with the prices, the service is absolutely [rude word deleted]despicable. So we are now taking legal advice and we’re also going to the BBC on a Watchdog program, because we got fans who complain to us about how long it takes for their [rude word deleted] CD to arrive in the mail.

We’ve sent test packages out to places and seeing just how long it would take to get there.

And the thing is, the Royal Mail, they are now going to take the night train off. We used to have the famous night train. And it was this train from London, and it was this train that goes down with all the packages and the post and stuff. And they take it off because we don’t need it anymore.
THEY [Another Rude Word deleted] NEED IT NOW MORE THAN [the same word deleted again] ANY OTHER TIME - [Insulting sexual reference]!!

The whole interview is well worth reading. The piscine one is not happy with the current state of the music business.

I think Scott would appreciate this one!

Neocon Riots Rock DC

Large areas of the nation’s capital were in ruins as violent protests continued for the third day against a bill that would revive the military draft, but only for neoconservatives.

The bill, officially called the Bellicose Resources Deployment Act but informally known as the Roast Chickenhawk Initiative, would supplement the nation’s dwindling supplies of mindless belligerence by drawing on inexhaustible deposits found in seething think tanks, frothing newspaper columns, fulminating talk-radio programs, frenzied Sunday morning television and publications owned by Australians. It would then be shipped to the Middle East, where it is urgently needed.

If only… Read the whole thing, as the saying goes. (Link from The Light of Reason)

Doc’s Game Dream is the successor to Game WISH. I’ve got some catching up to do on this one, it’s already got up to Game Dream 5, which asks:

To what level (if any) do the groups you usually play with encourage communal creation of the game world? Are the players spectators, or do they actually have a say in the plot (moreso that just guiding it by the actions of their characters)?

The two online games I run (with many of same players) are very different in this regard. Kalyr is very much a labour of love, something I’ve spent fifteen years developing, with reams of backstory, politics, culture and religion. It’s also a world with a lot of deep mysteries, and one of the themes of the game is about the players finding out the truth behind the various cults and guilds. Because so much of the world is predefined, there’s not much space for the players themselves to add much more than local colour; I compensate for this by giving the players a lot of plot freedom.

The second game, Ahrran Empire Frontiers is a very different beast. It’s a space opera game I inherited from another GM, with a big universe for which very little is predefined. Since I’m more or less making up the whole thing as I go along, there’s no good reason why I can’t let the players do some of the work. Some of the planets, such as “Esturia” and “The Scouse Cluster” came from one of the players in an online chat. The whole concept of “exchange” comes from an in-character post from another very creative player. I see my job as GM as trying to keep the whole thing coherent and providing some overall direction.

Ah, the eternal popular culture vs. High Art argument. To this ridiculous piece of fogeyish drivel, Uncertain Principles has this response:

The only distinction I really see between most “high culture” music and the pop that people sneer at is what you might call the “Agyar Criterion,” after the narrator in Steven Brust’s Agyar, who responds to questions about the quality of art by saying “ask me again in fifty years.” The main thing distinguishing pop music from classical music is age, and the filtering that comes with age.

I’m not going to attempt to claim that all pop music is the equal of Mozart- the occasional channel-surf past MTV would make clear that that’s a foolish idea. Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of Everything is Crud”) applies to music as well as literature. 90% of what people listen to these days is total garbage, but 90% of what people listened to in Mozart’s day was also total garbage. It’s just that nobody remembers the garbage from back

The thing about taste in music is that it’s very personal and quite subjective; I think your appreciation of a particular piece of music is strongly influence by whatever other music you’ve heard. If you only ever listen to opera, or heavy metal, or jazz, or top 40 pop or whatever, it’s going to be more difficult to appreciate something from a quite different musical genre. But that doesn’t mean that any one musical genre is inherently superior. I take exception to those people, either classical snobs or pseudo-intellectual rock journalists, who insist that their tastes in music are not subjective opinions, but objective truth, and anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot.

As an aside, and at the possible risk of contradicting myself, I wonder if some of the classical-is-good, popular-is-bad attitude comes from the apparent fact that the first half of the 20th century seemed to be lean times for popular music. Judging by the relatively few popular songs from that era that have passed the test of time compared with those from the 50s and 60s (which is still long enough ago for the test of time factor to come into play).

I wonder. In the year 2100, which of the following is most likely to be revered as a great composer of the late 20th century?

• Harrison Birtwhisle
• Andrew Lloyd-Weber
• Roger Waters
• Pete Waterman

At the moment, I think we have no way of knowing.