Where Worlds Collide

No, Mr Nose, I did not want to know that. No more Locomotive Porn for you! Those provocatively painted SD70MACs will make you go blind!

Silkenray wonders aloud:

Apparently, most spousal visas for US citizens moving to the UK take one day to process.

Conversely, most spousal visas for UK citizens moving to the US take more than one year to process.

Add to this that the landing card for non UK citizens entering the UK is half the length of the landing card for US citizens entering the US.

Why is our system so f—ed up?

But our visa waiver form (do we even have one?) wouldn’t sound nearly as funny set to music.

Of course, if the British electorate makes the mistake of electing the Welsh vampire on May 5th, then we might end up with something as Kafkaesque and inhuman as America’s INS.

Meetup.com have just become a pay site, charging 18 US dollars per month to the organiser of each group.

I formed the Manchester Roleplayers group a few of months ago, which had all of three members, too few to actually meet. (Although there was one aborted attempt) I was also a member of the Marillion and Webloggers groups, which didn’t even have group organizers. I didn’t feel like volunteering while I’d failed to get my own group off the ground.

Even with the half-price discount for existing groups, paying $9 a month for a group that doesn’t actually meet sounds like a stupid waste of money. I have therefore resigned as organiser of the group. I expect 99% of other group organisers will do the same.

While I understand that any website needs a revenue stream to survive, the amount they’re trying to charge is completely ridiculous for what you get in return, and I would be surprised if even a tiny fraction of existing groups ever pay up. I think Meetup.com are now heading for the electronic graveyard.

There are two camps in the British progressive rock scene. In one corner are those unashamedly retro bands that seek to recreate the sounds of the halcyon days of the early 70s before the dark ages of punk. In the other corner stand those bands who combine the spirit of that era with a more streamlined, modern sound. Steve Wilson’s Porcupine Tree are definitely in the latter camp.

I read a review of Deadwing in The Times that described Porcupine Tree as ‘now sounding like a regular indie band’, which made me fear the worst, as the last thing Britain needs is yet another generic indie band. But my fears proved unfounded; this album is far more metal than indie. Deadwing’s predecessor, “In Absentia” was notably heavier than earlier PT albums, and this one takes things still further in that direction. Wilson’s work with Scandinavian death-metallers Opeth has rubbed off; indeed, Opeth’s Mikael Akerfeldt contributes some guitar, as does King Crimson’s Adrian Belew. But it’s not all thrashing guitar riffs; there are also some decidedly non-metal ballads and plenty of Floydian textures to offset the heavier parts.

The nine-minute opening title track starts as the band mean to go on, with it’s powerful guitar riff and driving bass line, and the instrumental breaks contrast Wilson’s liquid guitar solo with guest player Adrian Belew’s distinctive angular style. The production is clean and crisp, as you’d expect from Steven Wilson. High spot of the album is the kaleidoscopic twelve-minute epic ‘Arriving Somewhere (but not here)’, which manages to go through all the musical styles of the album in a single track; spacey atmospheric intro, gentle ballad building to the fluid guitar solo, then a thrashing death-metal segment, before it all drops away for an acoustic flamenco solo. Heaviest track is the US single, ‘Shallow’, with it’s Zeppelin-style riff. The most indie-sounding songs are probably the excellent bass-driven ‘Halo’, the UK single, the piano-led ballad ‘Lazarus’, which doesn’t do a lot for me, although Coldplay fans will probably love it, and “Start of Something Beautiful”, with the beautiful piano solo towards the end.

Overall, this album reminds me very much of the last couple of Marillion albums; if you liked “Anoraknophobia” and “Marbles”, or indeed, Porcupine Tree’s own “In Absentia”, I can definitely recommend “Deadwing”.

(This review also appears on Blogcritics)

The Gline is uncomfortable with Mage:The Ascention.

One of the reasons I sort of stopped playing White Wolf’s Mage is because a lot of what was being bandied about in the context of the game sounded uncomfortably close to a lot of the trash I’ve been forced to listen to from people who work very hard to undermine rational thought and a reality-based worldview.

Disclaimer: I know “it’s just a game.” I have no trouble telling the difference between reality and fiction. The reason for my discomfiture has nothing to do with that. It’s akin to — if this makes any sense — a black man playing a member of the KKK in an RPG. And not just playing him, but PLAYING him — having the character engage in lynchings, manhunts, spewing racist epithets, etc. I can’t think of a single person of sober mind who wouldn’t find that dismaying after a while, especially when you yourself embody a big part of the target of such hatred.

I don’t think the Mage situation is anywhere nearly as bad, but that’s what it feels like. If I’m RPing for fun, the last thing I want to do is subject myself to something that makes me squirm for very deep-rooted reasons.

I recognise there are many religious gamers who get squicked out by games that fold, spindle and mutilate the founding myths of major world religions. I’m uncomfortable with the one or two games that protray Christianity in a very negative light, and I know people who won’t play any games that include real-world religions at all. But it surprises me to see an athiest rationalist get the same feelings.

Saying that I can see where the The Gline is coming from. He goes on to mention how he keeps running into the sort of irrationalist claptrap pilloried in Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World, and a lot of that does sound suspiciously like the in-game worldview of Mage:The Ascention. Sometimes I wonder if the libertoids who are in denial about environmental phenomena such as global warming have played too much Mage.

I haven’t actually read or played the original WW version of Mage; I have the less pretentiously-written GURPS version, and have played the Renaissance-era ‘prequel’ Sorceror’s Crusade a couple of times. So I don’t know how much the worldview inside the game reflects the real-life beliefs of the designers.

In the week after Easter I spent a few days wandering around the railways of East Anglia, operated by the new One franchise.

Anglia is one of the first new style franchises; it includes the London-Norwich Inter-City line, the intensive commuter services at the London end, and rural branches radiating out of Norwich. A microcosm of the railways of Britain as a whole.

One Anglia is very much in a state of transition when it comes to rolling stock, much of which still wears the liveries to the two previous franchises, Great Eastern and Anglia. Most significantly for rail fans, ex-Virgin Trains class 90 locomotives and Mk3 coaches displaced by Virgin’s plastic Pendolinos replace the veteran class 86 locomotives and Mk2 coaches inherited from the previous franchisee.

The 86s were supposed to gone at the end of last year, but this was the sight that greeted me on arrival at London’s Liverpool Street station.

It appears that the class 90s availability is not what it should be, and at least two of the 40 year old 86s are still in traffic. Most of the old Mk2 coaches are still running as well; I only saw two Mk3 sets in traffic. I can only assume that Virgin had run them into the ground, and they need some attention before One Anglia can put them into service.

The main line also sees a large volume of freight, mostly container traffic through the port of Felixtowe, operated by Freightliner, the second largest post-privatisation freight operator. Their operational hub is Ipswich, where they lined up three of their ever-growing fleet of General Motors class 66 diesels for this photo.

North Norfolk is a world away from the bustle of the London commuter lines. The Sheringham branch is one of the more interesting DMU-worked branch lines; there’s still some freight as far as North Walsham, and after reversal at Cromer, trains use the last short surviving part of the former Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway to reach the present terminus at Sheringham. The train is operated by One Anglia, but wears the predominantly green livery of Central Trains, another recent rolling stock swap, which has seen the former 150s transferred to Central Train’s Birmingham commuter operations in exchange for 156s.

There are a lot more photos on my Fotopic Gallery.

Easter weekend saw the seventh Gypsycon. More than a dozen people, most of whom are connected in some way to the Dreamlyrics community descended on the remote Cambridgeshire village of Pidley for four days of solid gaming.

On Friday, in a departure from the usual format, we played aone big freeform game with sixteen people, based on an Ars Magica tribunal. Every character has their own agendas and secrets; my agenda simply being to avoid being executed for my alleged crimes. The game culminated in a in-character formal banquet, in which many of the secrets came out. The whole thing worked very well, and I’m sure we’ll see something similar next year.

Saturday was Vampire:The Requiem, run by Steve “Abaddon” Morley. I’m not a big fan of Goth:The Angst games, but this one was a lot of fun. Set in York (the original one!), it started off with investigating mysterious symbols painted on the floor of a hotel room, but got more complex when we realised the Prince was not what he seemed. The game ran until 3:30am, on the day the clocks went forward an hour! At the same time, the other group were playing the new edition of Ars Magica, and were still in character generation at 7pm!

Sunday was Mage:Sorcerer’s Crusade, run by Mark “L’Ange” Baker. This was the game I’d signed up for at Stabcon in January, but had failed to attract enough players at that event. The game was a sequel to the game that I’d played at last summer’s Stabcon and others had played at an earlier Gypsycon, set in L’Ange’s extremely (if not obsessively)well-detailed Northumbrian village, at which the player characters are setting up a university, a sort of renaissance Hogwarts. We began with an investigation of the gruesome murder of a party of a dozen or so monks on the Great North Road, which soon uncovered supernatural elements, then got sidetracked following many of the villages subplots, including ghosts, and outbreaks of a disease we weren’t allowed to use our 21st century knowledge to cure. Finally we had to deal with a ferocious magical attack on our premises. Let’s just not mention the succubus….

On Monday it was my turn to GM, with a scenario in my own Kalyr world, with the PCs as an team from the Academy of Knowledge, investigating illicit goings-on at a rival guild. I’d originally written it to play last year’s Gypsycon, but unfortunately I didn’t get to run it because some players had to drop out. I had GMed it at last July’s Stabcon using Fudge; this time I ran things using 4th Edition GURPS. Apart from one mistake in combat initiative, the game ran reasonably well; the players seemed to enjoy it. I’m not sure whether I’ll run future games in this setting using GURPS or Fudge; the rules-light nature of Fudge is a closer match to my GMing style, but GURPS seems the more popular system with most players.

As ever, a great time has had by all. Attendance was slightly down on last year, although we were blessed by a special American guest. Roll on Gypsycon VIII!

Reports are coming in of a squadon of maroon and gold pigs seen flying over central England. They were spotted near Telford in Shropshire, and other reports claim sightings of them taking off from Barwell in Leicestershire.

Roger Waters is quoted as saying that they have nothing to do with him.

And they’re off! The British election phony war is finally over, and the metaphorical tanks have begun rolling through the Ardennes. We Brits are in for four weeks of wall-to-wall politics, until we’re all completely sick of it by May 5th.

While I’m not really much of a political pundit, here are a few of my predictions as to what we might see over the coming weeks:

• It’s going to be the dirtiest and most negative election campaign in British history, as both Labour and the Tories try to fight the election the Karl Rove way. The turnout may well be the lowest in history, as a direct result of this.
• There will be disputed results due to alleged abuse of postal ballots, accompanied by much gloating from the Americans who deservedly took so much stick about Florida. Expect at least one resulting by-election where the number of dubious ballots exceeds the winning majority.
• At least in England, it will be a three-party election, which means the assorted would-be fourth parties such as the Robert ‘Ronseal’ Kilroy-Silk’s xenophobic Vanitas and George ‘I Love Saddam’ Galloway’s Stalinist-Islamist unholy alliance Respect will fail to get a significant vote anywhere.
• Since I live in the most marginal constituency in the entire country, I won’t be able to move for bloody election workers for the next four weeks.
• The most exciting moment of the whole campaign probably won’t be the deputy Prime Minister getting into a brawl with a guy with a mullet.
• Transport won’t become an election issue. Both Labour and the Tories have reason to keep quiet about their past record. Who was it who gave us the quite literal trainwreck of railway privatisation, and who else has spent eight years doing nothing whatsoever to repair the damage?
• The influence of the Blogosphere will be over-hyped, and exaggerated. The influence of Rupert Murdoch will not.
• Regardless of all the above, Labour are still going to win.
• At least one of the above predictions will turn out to be wrong.

This post also appears on Blogcritics. I’ve chosen that Amazon link there for a reason….