Where Worlds Collide

Nasty prang this morning at Norton Bridge in Stafforshire, where one Freighliner intermodal train ran into the back of another. Looks like at least one and possibly both locomotives are writeoffs. Reports suggest the crew retreated into the machine room of the locmotive and survived unhurt. Locos are 86631 and 86611, both hauling the 4M53 Ipswich-Trafford Park, a train that would have passed within 50 feet of my desk at work had it not crashed.

A more worrying rumour is that the train had a false green signal.

Update: Mick Tindall has a a lot more pictures showing the crash site. Meanwhile BBC news reports the driver escaped unhurt by taking refuge in the centre part of the locomotive.

Update 2: Dave Skipsey has some more photos, taken from the window of a passenger train running on a parallel track.

Ken McLoed isn’t impressed with electronic voting in the US, a subject Jeanne D’Arc also tackles in Inside the black box. Ken has this to say:

I find the whole thing almost literally unbelievable. How the hell can a great nation hand over control of its voting, for crying out loud, to corporations? Corporations who are deeply partisan? And deeply interested in the outcome of the elections? Hello? Some of them run by people who believe in theocracy? WTF?

Touchscreen voting with no verifiable paper trail is to real voting what McJobs are to real jobs. You don’t have votes, you have McVotes.

This is something that you wouldn’t put in a science fiction novel, unless it was a blatant knock-about satire - you know, some squib about a world where Mickey Mouse runs for Governor of Florida, or Arnold Schwartznegger for Governor of California. It’s too unbelievable. A good editor would call it a plot hole.

There’s nothing quite as foolproof as the good old British paper ballots that you mark with a pencil. OK, so it’s a lot of work counting them all up, and they have to hire vast armies of experienced bank clerks to do it come election time, but surely that’s a price worth paying to have clean elections.

Of course, it may be that the rumours of rigged elections are groundless. But with these electronic machines with no paper trail, the software in then being proprietry code which won’t be revealed, and the company that makes them having close links with one party, it requires a degree of trust I simply don’t have in order to believe that elections aren’t being rigged.

I’m sure the truth will eventually come out. If there have been fraudulent elections, let’s pray that the truth comes out while those fraudulently elected are still in office.

Not that I’m saying British elections are totally free from fraud, or British politicans are uncorruptable and totally trustworthy, of course. But these dodgy touch screen systems in America are two dangerous to trust any politicians with.

They originated from Romania under the communist dictator Nikolai Ceausescu. The first thirty were horribly unreliable. They’re on the way out and will be gone by spring 2004. And the Graham Farish model of them is cr*p. On, and Carnival of the Vanities no 56 is at Priorities & Frivolities.

From the International RailwaY Circle website, a picture of Midland Main Line’s new Meridian sets on test in Belgium. Based on the now infamous Voyager, but with a more sensible interior layout. Judging by the increased number of windows, these trains appear to have a more sensible number of disabled toilets (one rather than three), which waste so much space in the Voyagers.

Also, from the same site, and especially for Steve Karlson, an SNCB GM Nohab.

According to Making Light, there is now a smoking crater where the infamous Lolita spammer’s pr0n website used to be.

Update: The Ukranian redirection site is indeed gone, but the pr0n site itself is sadly still there. While there’s a possibility this is a Joe job, I think it’s likely that the spam incident was by people connected with the site. I won’t consider it a victory until that one’s down as well.

I’m thinking the past weekend was for the Blogosphere what the infamous Canter and Siegal Green Card spam was to usenet. It certainly wasted a large amount of an awful lot of people’s time, and ruined a great many weekends. Teresa Nielsen Hayden still wishes a plague of boils on the spammer, to which I’ll add a bad case of haemorrhoids. Meanwhile Samizdata proposed using old-fashioned violence. while Scott just has a personal message for the spammer.

Even the new Governor of California should be able to understand this sign.

From the Telegraph: Virgin Trains have cooked up a scheme to transport passenger’s luggage by road because of the lack of luggage space in their silly, far too small Voyagers.

The Virgin spokesman denied that the luggage problem was caused by a design fault in the Voyager. “People are just taking more luggage with them these days and we are looking at ways of making their journeys as comfortable as possible.”

When Virgin first introduced those tinny things, the first thing everybody said was “where’s the luggage space”. These trains are used on busy holiday routes to Bournemouth, Devon and Cornwall. On the old trains they replaced, Virgin had taken out a bay of seats in every coach to make room for an additional luggage stack. And those luggage racks were always full of bags. And these trains also had more seats and more coaches. Nobody at Virgin Trains should have been under any illusion that their long distance passengers, whose travels tend to involve overnight stays, carry luggage. Instead they dream up a new train with an interior layout best suited for short distance commuter journeys. What were they thinking?

(Link from Dodgeblogium)

A collapsing teddy bear pyramid in Flash. Some people have too much time on their hands….

I feared the worst when I got a random comment attached to a very old post with the words “Nice Site!”. As suspected, the poster’s URL leads to a commercial porn site. Now I see that lots of Movable Type blogs, such as Making Light and Blogcritics have been hit by the same piece of bottom feeding slime, in their cases dozens of posts rather than just one. I got off lightly.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden wishes a case of boils on the perpetrator. I’ll add a severe case of piles to that.

This post on the Movable Type support forum suggests a drastic solution; renaming the legitimate MT Comments script, and replacing the original with a spider trap that adds the perp to the banned IP list in the HTACCESS file.

Someone’s done some detective work and identified the porn spammer as based in, you’ve guessed it, Florida. There’s always the Traveller Imperial Navy solution; “Nuke the state from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure!”

In the meantime, if you run a Movable Type blog, be sure to add the IP Address: 209.210.176.20 to your IP ban list.

I haven’t done any Game WISHes for a while. This week’s one is about Multiple-GM Games.

Have you ever played in or GMed a game with more than one GM? What was your experience with it? What were the strengths and weaknesses of having multiple GMs? Was it positive or negative? Would you do it again? If you’ve never tried it as a GM or player, would you like to? Why or why not?

I’ve played in two, one good, one bad.

The bad one was the time I was one of the co-GMs, and it went badly pear-shaped, largely because of lack of communication and a basic incompatibility of GM styles. It was a space opera style game focussing on crew of space pirates. The other GM controlled the overall game setting, but wanted to play a PC as well, so he had me GMing a lot of the individual scenes. Unfortunately things didn’t go well; for example, if I was too slow in responding, he’d jump in and take a thread in a completely different direction to the one I’d planned. Eventually I came to the conclusion this just wasn’t working, and bailed out leaving the other GM to run the game on his own. The story doesn’t end there, though. The other GM eventually quit, and I volunteered to take over the game. It’s still running.

The good example was the GURPS cyberpunk game Hawaiian Vacation, which had three GMs. In this case, there was one ‘master GM’, Maughn, and two assistants who played various NPCs, both adversaries and potential allies. This worked very well, and the whole thing was one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played in.

Why was this game a success, where the game I’d co-GMed was a failure? I think it was because there was a high level of communication between the GMs, and most importantly, each of the GMs had a clearly defined role.

Would I co-GM again? Probably, because now I know where I went wrong the first time round. It would have to be with someone I know well and had a good rapport with, and we’d need to clearly define each other’s roles within the game.