Where Worlds Collide

Just bought a ticket for Fish at Manchester Academy on September 15th, for what might be my 18th gig of the year.

As well as promoting the new album 13th Star, he’s going to be playing the twenty-year old “Clutching at Straws” in it’s entirity. That’s one of my favourite Fish era Marillion albums, and marked the point where they left the ghost of Gabriel-era Genesis behind for good. Although it was to be the last album Fish recorded with Marillion, it seems to me that it set the template both for Fish’s subsequent solo career, and the music Marillion produced after Fish. While I’d like to hear more of Fish’s lengthy solo back catalogue, it will still be great to hear CaS live again.

The band will include four-sevenths of Mostly Autumn; Gavin on drums, Heather and Angela on backing vocals, and Chris Johnson as the second guitarist.

I’ve been listening to the excellent live album Communion (available from The Fish Shop) recorded at the Fish fan convention last year, also featuring Heather and Angela on backing vocals. It’s giving me some idea as to what ‘Mostly Fish’ are going to sound like. Will Angie be playing any flute this time round, I wonder? It would add a new dimension to “Brother 52″, if they play that song. And what about flute replacing the widdly keyboard solo on “Just for the Record”? I know there are purists out there wanting to hear a note-for-note reproduction of the original album, but sometimes I like to hear bands creatively reinterpret older material. And when you’ve got a great flautist in the band….

Whatever they do, I expect it to be good.

The Blair regime has got this one down to a fine art, and they’ve done it again.

Look what we missed yesterday: The cost of the ID card scheme has gone up another £600m in six months. Yep, to a new total of five and a half billion, just so that Big Brother can stop you in the street saying “Your papers please”. (Link from NRT)

The Psycho Chicken has discovered the album that people like NRT really, really need to own

That is one ugly album cover. They sure don’t do them like that any more.

My Kalyr PBeM game has rather ground to a halt a few months back, which is mostly my fault, due to real life getting a bit hectic. All those gigs eating up my free time have something to do with it, I’m afraid.

We had rather reached the end of the plot cycle anyway. We’d concluding with a riot outside the Calbeyn Citadel and a jailbreak inside, and I was at a bit of a loss as to where to take things next.

So I’m proposing to relaunch the game, but what I’d like to do is make the PBeM an official part of the Kalyr RPG playtest. That means we’ll be using the playtest draft rules, especially the character generation stuff, using a variant of Fudge rather than GURPS. The game itself will continue on The Phoenyx mail server as before, rather than the playtest discussion list on Yahoogroups.

I don’t know how many of the original players are still interested in playing, so I’m putting out a call for both existing players and anyone new that wants to join. I’d like existing players to ‘re-imagine’ their characters using the new system. New players can build interesting new PCs from scratch.

I’d like to treat it as if it’s the start of a brand new game. That doesn’t mean that I’m rebooting the game; what’s happened in the game so far is still part of the continuity, and part of the history of any existing PCs. So we’ll advance the timeline a few months. Existing players, tell me what your PC has been up to in the intervening time.

The Stalinist thug John Reid is to leave the Home Office when Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister. This is the man who may have renounced belief in the Marxist labour theory of value, but still dreams of turning Britain into an police state modelled on East Germany. This nasty piece of work can’t be gone soon enough as far as I’m concerned.

Whether the dour Scotsman will replace him with anyone less authoritarian has to be seen.

Carl Cravens of The Raven’s Mutterings runs across someone that makes him go “Huh?”

From a recent “game opening” post I saw…

If you want to play non-human, you will have to roll a 1 on 1d10. Otherwise you have to play a human.

Wow. People still play like this? No “let’s talk about it,” just “one in ten chance you get to be something I don’t want you to be.” (Or something I don’t want more than one character to be.)

Back in about 1981 something like that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. The market leader was first edition AD&D, and it was full of illogical and arbitary things like that.

Carl’s example just goes to show that there are still people living in sealed bubble who appear ignorant of every development in the hobby in the past quarter century.

If that floats your boat, I suppose…

These, from the Metal Storm forum, seem rather more true than some prog-metal fans are prepared to admit. Some examples:

6. When showcasing a new prog metal band to a non-musician friend, put on the most technically difficult song, and skip directly to the solo part.
7. If your friend says that it is cool, tell him that he has grasped the grandeur of prog and shown that his intelligence is superior to that of the mainstream sheep.
8. If he doesn´t, accuse him of lacking musical intelligence and not being a true prog fan.

And then…

34. Make sure your bandname is either a
a) Oxymoron
-Silent Noise
-Tender Harshness
-Healing Gun
Some geeky sounding name ripped from some obscure book.
-Deitronus
-Tarakoch
-Fentaran
or
c) Random combination of at least 2 three-syllable words.
-Eternal Twilight Tranquility (Can’t get much progger than that)
-Redolent Arithmetic
-Evolution of Vernacular Domesticated
35. Don’t worry about if your band name makes any sense or not. Since 90% of your fanbase is from Brazil and Japan, you can safely ignore conventional English grammar and instead focus on what´s really important:

NRT would probably approve of rule 90

90. No, Marillion is not prog. I kindly refer you to rule 20.

Link from DavidT (or possibly DavidT’s cardboard cutout) on the Unofficial MA forum

Update: 101 Rules of Power Metal from the same site is even funnier:

71. Whenever you short of ideas, pick up your Dungeons and Dragons books. You might as well be the first band to sing about owlbears.

Owlbears? I’m waiting for someone to start singing about Gelatinous Cubes…