Where Worlds Collide

Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow. You never know when this information might be useful. (Link from Julia)

If you wondered why all the blogroll entries linked to someone called “Laura” (who’s site was down), it’s because had been hacked

Blogrolling has been the victim off a malicious hack in the past 9 hours. The blogroll links have been restored from an offsite backup from Saturday. I’m tracing the cause off this now and the site may go offline at some point today while I make changes and collect evidence. All new links since Saturday afternoon have unfortunately been lost due to this.

All seems back to normal now. There’s also no evidence that Laura, whoever she was, had anything to do with the hack.

This post on Weblog spam is a little depressing.

Spam works and it is big business, and spammers are increasingly organized and increasingly business-savvy. It’s not some guy in the garage who bought a CD of email addresses from MicroWarehouse (yes, they used to sell them, I have old MacWarehouse catalogs to prove it) who thought it would be ‘cool’ to tell a million people about his Beanie Baby collection. It’s organized crime rings who hire programmers to automate everything they possibly can (domain registration, ISP registration, free email account registration) and hire menial workers for pennies an hour halfway around the world to do all the manual things they can’t automate (like get past image-based login systems). They hire virus writers to write extremely sophisticated viruses that exploit all known holes in everything, install spyware, malware, adware, and remote control programs with which they can both send more spam and launch distributed denial-of-service attacks… against anti-spam advocates.

What he’s saying is the days when we could have open comments on weblogs without people having to register is going to be over pretty soon. He also believes that most current antispam techniques aren’t going to work.

Weblogs may turn out to be The Next Thing for spammers, the next vector to exploit. And if that’s true, then things are going to get really ugly really quickly. If you’re up for that fight, then take them on, Godspeed. But prepare yourself for the worst, and then imagine something worse than that, and then accept that your imagination is too limited, because it will be so much worse than that.

Makes me wonder what they’re going to exploit next; I suspect they’ll start spamming UBB boards, perhaps using packet sniffing to get the passwords of legitimate users.

Nuke Florida from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Game WISH 71: Unwritten NPCs asks:

For GMs : when you plan or play your NPCs, do you intentionally leave out some of the story for each? Do you hold something back and let the Players imagine the rest or do you present NPCs from the core of who they are? Is time a factor; a short game or one-shot not allowing much character depth? Does NPC expertise shine through? Or are there character foibles that cloud the better qualities of the NPC? Are there short-cuts to get this across?

I’ve very develop-in-play when it comes to NPCs. In pre-game planning I’ll often come up with large numbers of NPCs, all of which are defined by little more than name, race, profession and a couple of adjectives. As the game develops those that become more important get fleshed out; nobody starts out with either a detailed back-story or a full-blown character sheet. I tend to add details to individual NPCs as and when they start becoming important to the story. I probably have two many NPCs in the game, which results in many of them becoming little more than cyphers. If you need a database to keep track of them all, them perhaps there are too many!

Saying that, there are a few NPCs in Kalyr with extensive back story who have never actually come up in play; sometimes writing NPC back-stories becomes a form of solitaire play. I don’t think I’ve ever used the story of Lendor Tyr, former heir to the Tharn (City Lord) of Calbeyn, who had vanished into exile, accused of murdering his father. Neither have I made any use of the eight hierarchs of the Academy of the Mind. Maybe their time will come.

Let’s look at the active NPCs in the game at the moment. In one thread a party from the Technology Guild, consisting of two PCs, Karogeth and Luanu, plus an NPC, Vovir, have encountered a group of four street toughs, blocking their exist from the bad part of town. I made up the gang of toughs more or less on the fly, except for their leader, ‘Ug’, who had appeared in the arena as a gladiator much earlier in the game. A combination of a conciliatory approach by the PCs and some good reaction rolls have turned what were going to be opponents in a fight scene to potential sources of information, so instead of defining their combat statistics I’m now giving them some more knowledge and personality. They may well reappear as street contacts in the future.

The PCs are looking for a missing guild member, Batendal. Although he’s yet to appear in person, I’ve had to flesh him out quite considerably to explain why he’s disappeared, and why the PCs are looking for him I cannot reveal any more because the players might be reading this!

One of the PCs, Luanu, started life as an NPC. When the game went down to three active players, I put out a call for recruits, and suggested some NPCs that could become PCs, and Harald volunteered to take on Luanu. I sent him my GM’s notes and he came back with an extensive back-story which also happened to flesh out another NPC, Luanu’s street contact, Kal.

Vovir, the final NPC present, started out as the father of a now defunct PC, Narluis. He’s got something of a backstory as a man who’s alcoholism has destroyed both his once-promising career and his marriage, but who’s now given up drink and is trying to rebuild his life. I developed him during the period Narluis was a PC, and dropped him into the present thread because he was hanging about with nothing better to do at the time. It’s always better to reuse existing NPCs rather than continually creating new ones.

Game WISH is back. WISH 72: Character Interruptus asks:

Talk about a few characters you had to stop playing before their stories felt finished. Where do you think they would have gone?

Most of the longer-running RPG campaigns have folded before reaching any kind of conclusion; sadly it seems par for the course, especially for online (PBEM or PBMB) games. I’m not really an immersive player, so I tend not to play characters with deep, dark secrets or unresolved psychological issues. Instead when a game folds I’m disappointed in not finding out how the story was supposed to end. For instance, the Castle Falkenstein game running on the late lamented RPGAMES forum we never solved the mystery of what the Prussian baron in Zwickau was up to, and missed out on the masqued ball, in which my character, Arthur Trevithick, was to attend dressed as a bear. (Does this mean I’m a closet furry? Oh No!) Similarly, we never reached the final showdown with the lich archmage in the epic Spelljammer Vikings in Space game when the campaign suffered Death by Opera (it’s a long story). But I can’t say either character was unfulfilled; both had a long enough run, especially Mudgard the Norse Paladin, since Vikings ran for several years.

Of games that ended too soon, I’ve already mentioned Karl Tolhurst of Ümläüt several times before, as well as the fact that I resurrected him for another, quite different game. Two other characters I’d really liked to have played for longer were my two characters in different In Nomine games, Jack the Cherub of Jean, and Ed Cragentinny the Ofanite of Jean. Sadly both games folded before I could really develop either of them. Jack was about to cause trouble in New York by summoning his superior. There were plenty of other games that never really got started, such as Traveller Sword-Worlder Þorkell. One real disappointment was Lucanus, one of my early online PCs. I joined an established Runequest game in which I’d been lurking for some time, only for the game to fold almost immediately when two other players dropped out.

I could also mention a few player characters in games I GMed where their players faded away. From my Kalyr games, I had a lot of plans for Lan, the escaped human gladiator sold into slavery after having an affair with daughter of a powerful kandar noble. This including a reunion scene with the now pregnant young noble, herself exiled due to her disgrace. Similarly I had quite a bit planned for Karela the noble assassin, and Kolath the somewhat mentally unstable legionnaire. I find dealing with dangling plot threads when players drop out to be a major headache for an online GM, one reason some ex-PCs such as Iodeth and Kylar continue in the game as NPCs.

According to one of the guys from M G Sharp I spoke to yesterday, the long awaited Kato/Lemke N-gauge model of the Swiss Re6/6 Bo-Bo-Bo is finally due within the next four weeks, and could well be on sale at the Warley show in December.

One of the modern European locomotives in Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon, the powerful prototype locomotives were introduced in 1972 for use on heavy passenger and freight traffic over the steeply graded alpine main lines, especially the Gotthard line. Nowadays the newer Re460s have replaced them on passenger work, but they’re still hard at work on heavy freight throughout Switzerland.

With the original models produced a few years back by Hobbytrain now fetching silly prices, the new production is eagerly awaited by anyone modelling the Swiss scene in N.

Al-Muhajabah is sick of people who murder to advance their cause

The Quran says “Whoever kills a single human being unjustly is as though he had killed all of humankind” (Surah al-Ma’ida ayah 32). Deliberate murder of another person will put you in Hell forever. Imagine the punishment for those who have killed dozens. Whoever has committed this atrocity will have God’s wrath upon them. They should remember that any victory they might gain in the world that was not by means that God has allowed will be made void by God on Judgment Day, and that is no victory at all but the ultimate loss. The only way to gain true victory is to obey the limits that God has set.

Not really much more I can add.

In Wanting More Than Anger, Bruce Baugh, line editor of Gamma World tells us some of the things he dislikes about fanboy behaviour.

I’ve been thinking lately about the extent to which fandom - any fandom - seems to be about providing reasons to be angry. If you’re a fan of something mainstream (in terms of the hobby in question), you can get angry whenever it changes and whenever something new comes along and gets any popularity. If you’re a fan of something less popular within the field, you can be angry at the mainstream for not getting the obvious merits of your clearly superior thing. If you’re into the history of the field, you can be angry at how everyone else is neglecting treasures of the past, and if you’re trying to create something new, you can be angry at all the traditionalism and stuck-in-the-mudness. And of course wherever you are on questions like that, you can be angry at the public at large for marginalizing this wonderful thing (or worse, depending on how much you feel like indulging a persecution complex).

Many reviewers have been harsh on Gamma World, and there’s been a lot of vitriol on the boards of Pyramid Online and elsewhere. Most of the nastiest comments have come from people that liked one of the earlier incarnations of GW, and hate what Bruce has done with this one. At the end of the day, it’s only a game. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy it at gunpoint.

I find there’s something pathological about more extreme fanboy behaviour. I feel that anyone for whom the continuity of a movie franchise or comic book series is a crucial part of their identity has a serious need to get a life. It extends to music as well; one reason I no longer read many bands’ mailing lists is the constant hate between different sects of fanboys. The Marillion one was particularly bad. I was on that list at the time Anoraknophobia came out, and there were terrible flamewars between the sect that believed it was the best album they’d ever done, and those that believed it was a betrayal of everything the band stood for.

It even extends to model railways. Every time any major manufacturer releases a flagship new model, there’s a chorus of people on lists like Demodellers condemning it’s inaccuracies. “It’s 2mm too wide!”, they cry, “The cantrail is all wrong”. For the people that don’t like Gamma World, look at this; scroll down to the Monday evening - 03/11/03 entry. (Bah! no permalinks!) Has anyone torn up a copy of GW, photographed the result, and posted it to the net?

Does this represent the Dead End of British locomotive building? Or is it the latest Carnival of the Vanities?

Not to be confused, of course, with www.class60.co.uk.

I’ve put a few more of this spring’s photos online at Fotopic.Net. These were taken at Olten in northern Switzerland, junction of five routes, north to Basel, south to Luzern and the Gotthard route, southwest to Bern and the Lotchberg pass, West to Neuchatel and Geneva, and east to Zurich. It’s a busy place with a wide variety of traffic on it’s six running lines.

I saw everything from the veteran Ae6/6 locos dating from 1952 to the modern ICN intercity multiple units. Even a Swiss Express push-pull set. As well as SBB passenger and freight, there’s also freight traffic from private railways RM and BLS. It’s a real hotspot; a pity I visited the place on a rather dull and overcast day.