Where Worlds Collide

Last call for the 20 First Lines meme. Half of them have already been guessed (six of them by the Electric Nose!). You have about 24 hours to try and guess the other half.

I’ll post the remaining answers tomorrow.

Not even Reginald Perrin was that late.

A minute before my train to work was due, it’s headlight appeared on the horizon. The train came to a stand, as often happens, to let a Manchester-bound train come off the Macclesfield line across it’s bows. But the signal didn’t clear, and the points didn’t change.

Minutes passed. The train still sat within sight of the station. Nothing moved.

Then one of the down signals started showing flashing red aspects. As far as I know, this isn’t a legitimate signal aspect, but seemed more like a distress signal from the signalling system itself.

More minutes passed. Eventually the station staff informed us that due to signal failure all trains were at a stand, and he had no idea when anything would be on the move again. The dodgy Italian computerised signalling centre that doesn’t work properly had suffered a Blue Screen of Death, and nobody knew how to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart it.

Another hour passed. By this time all of the Manchester-bound passengers departed for the local bus services which would at least get them to Stockport, from which there might be some trains. The number of people waiting for the Crewe train had diminished, but there was always the feeling that the moment you decided to walk half a mile to the nearest bus stop for the very slow bus to Wilmslow, that train you could see just outside the station would finally start moving.

By the time the signals turned finally green again, that train was 85 minutes late.

For what should have been an eleven minute journey.

Don’t buy signalling systems from Ansaldo. They don’t work.

Summer Stabcon lived up to its usual expectations; I’ve been going to this small local convention for four years now, and it’s reached the point where I recognise 90% of the faces. Over the weekend I played four RPG sessions and a lengthy session of the boardgame Arkham Horror on Friday night, which we didn’t get to finish because everyone was wilting by midnight.

I haven’t really got time to do a full writeup of this years Stabcon, but here are a few random thoughts:

• The fact that far more people took time out on Saturday to watch the football than watch Doctor Who loses us some geek credibility points. (I was one of those who watched Doctor Who!)
• In military SF games I am now officially typecast as Rocket Launcher Guy Who Can’t Hit A Barn Door. Even though I managed to make enough enemy assets go boom in ways their owners didn’t intend, there were still jokes at my expense at the end when the GM described the heavily cratered lawn in front of the captured enemy HQ
• Apologies to everyone who suffered my gratuitous prog rock reference in Amanda’s Stargate SG:13 game on Saturday. This was after our team returned from the previous mission (which happened off-camera) where we had to babysit an anthropologist studying a primitive culture who were really into interminable and tuneless folk songs about ploughing. When we had a few hours of R&R between missions my character went to the jukebox in the bar and put on some Jethro Tull, to the groans of the other characters.
• Mike Cule’s game of Primetime Adventures on Saturday ran a lot better than the game six months before, when all of us including the GM^h^hExecutive Producer were still feeling our way round the rules. This time we recognised that it’s really a game where everyone is a co-GM, and anybody could introduce NPCs or throw in plot twists. For instance, I introduced the main villain in one of my turns. As before, the brainstorming session at the beginning was a fun part of the game, with the final setting (the PCs as members of a circus who really do have supernatural powers) being an amalgam of several people’s suggestions.

I’ve already signed up for the Winter 2007 Stabcon in January