There’s a thread of Dreamlyrics asking for people’s Top Ten SF Characters of All Time.
Mine are:
Marc Remillard
Hiro Protagonist (Snow Crash)
Death (The Discworld Death, as opposed to any other Death)
Granny Weatherwax
Glawen Clattuc
Paul Atredes
Ash (Ash: A Secret History, by Mary Gentle)
Dr Who
The Terminator (Arnie is perfectly cast as a robot!)
Avon (Blake’s Seven, for those old enough to remember)
Dorothea Salo has some interesting thoughts on PBeMs, game fiction and ‘fluff’. I agree that great things can happen on a text-based on-line game made up from good writers.
One of my new year resolutions will be to post more frequently to my on-line games, both on email and message boards.
Our tinfoil-hatted friends at Samizdata.net compare the Tories with the Bond franchise:
I’m off to see the new Bond movie, in a cinema, with a fellow samizdatista. I expect it to be the cinematic equivalent of the Conservative Party: absurdly implausible, formulaic, full of sex and violence but in a ludicrously dated way, and demeaning to women and to ethnic and linguistic minorities. If not, I shall be wanting my money back.
This makes my mind boggle a bit. Ann Widdecombe as a Bond girl? Well, perhaps not; maybe the Rosa Klebb role instead?
I can imagine Tony Blair as a Bond Villain, with John Prescott as his henchman.
But I can’t imagine Iain Duncan-Smith as Bond. Perhaps Michael Heseltine in his Tarzan days?
This picture of class 37 No 37058 at Crewe was posted on the ModMod mailing list, as a comparison with the poorly-received (by the rivet-counters on the list, at least) new Bachmann model.
It’s a fine detail shot for modellers, showing a lot of bogie and front end detail. But it struck me as a good character shot as well; of a old and battered locomotive nearing the end of it’s working life. Here’s another more conventional three-quarter view, departing with a train for the North Wales Coast line, with the front coach (a Mk1 TSO, no less), filled with bashers.
There are a lot more good photos at www.53a-pix.co.uk.
Those of us that spend all of our space cash on model railway equipment, music and games sometimes wonder what the ‘mundunes’ spend their money on.
The truth is scary. Making Light has discovered an on-line catalogue with such delights as “sea-shell toilet seats”, “cat and cow floor protectors”, and “Easter-themed doorknob pillows”. Ugh!
Teresa’s digression is illuminating:
“There’s a reality show on TLC called Trading Spaces. The idea is that two households swap homes for 48 hours. During that time, each redecorates one room of the other’s house, with the help of the show’s crew of designers and carpenters.
Patrick found the whole thing confusing. “I’ve never understood this ‘interior decorating’ stuff,” he told me, the first time he saw an episode.
“Okay. By our standards, mundanes own hardly any books.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Interior decoration is what they do with all that empty space.”
In the January 2003 edition of Modern Railways (dead-tree only, I’m afraid), George Hudson puts the boot into the Strategic Rail Authority:
In short, the SRA has become a bloated, grotesque quango - perhaps the biggest in the country, and certainly the most expensive. It has an appalling split personality; in terms of delivery it is a Soviet-style bureaucracy which periodically produces prolix consultation documents and ten year plans complete with the railway equivalent of tractor production targets. In terms of style and cost, it reflects some of the less attractive characteristics of modern capitalism, with high salaries, a top-heavy structure, and expensive consultancy as a substitute for coherent thinking - no decisions are made without spending vast amounts on advice, in many cases from people with scant knowledge or understanding of the industry; it is consultant heaven!
Of course, the railway was privofragmentised by those with scant knowledge or understanding of the industry. I wish John Major’s liason with Edwina Currie had been uncovered earlier; perhaps then none of this would have happened.
Good article this month about Virgin’s “Operation Princess” as well.
It seems to be ‘conventional wisdom’ that prog-rock is crap ‘because you can’t dance to it’. Clearly nobody has told my seven-year old niece, who spontaniously danced very elegantly to King Crimson’s “Epitaph” and the title track on the classic “In the Court of the Crimson King”. I only put it on the stereo to show my nephew what a Mellotron sounded like.
Marin IJ - Ex-CEO to serve 2 years in fraud
U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer sentenced William Grabske, 59, to 27 months in prison after a jury found the former Indus chief executive officer guilty of scheming to inflate his company’s revenue and profits.
Breyer also imposed a $12,500 fine and three years of supervision following Grabske’s release from prison.
Grabske was CEO when Indus laid off me and many of my UK colleagues when they closed down their UK development operation. Revenge is sweet!
Turn of a Friendly Die: WISH 27: Science Fiction RPGs
The RPG market is dominated by fantasy (with horror coming in second). Why have most attempts at creating a science fiction RPG failed (commercially or artistically), and what would a hypothetical SFRPG need to catch on the way fantasy has?
It depends a bit on your definition of “failed”. While Traveller has never had the runaway success of Dungeons and Dragons, it’s still around (in two different versions).
I think the main reason is that ‘Generic Fantasy’ has a widely-known set of tropes that DnD has managed to capitalise on, while science-fiction is a much more varied genre, and lacks such a standard set of conventions. Every literary or cinematic SF universe works a different way; Trek is different from Star Wars which is different from the SF universes of Robert Heinlein which is different from those of Iain Banks, and so on. A setting-free system that encompasses all of those would end up looking much like a totally generic one - perhaps a lot of SF gamers with original settings use GURPS?
Of course, many published SF games have been licenced games, and they’ve suffered from the whims of the media companies with licences - both of the ‘household name’ SF settings have bounced from company to company, in the case of Star Trek more than once.
To sum up, I think it’s all down to the fact that there’s no such thing as ‘generic SF’ in the same way that there’s a ‘generic fantasy’. Perhaps there could have been. If someone had come up with a game resembling Star Trek but with the serial numbers filed off in the primeval days of gaming, might it have done better than Traveller? On the other hand, was Traveller really that much of a failure? And on the third tentacle, what about RIFTS? This was apparently the third-biggest game on the market (after DnD and Storyteller) for many years.
This blog would like to apologise to all residents of the Essex seaside town of Walton-on-Naze, for my confusing them with their snobbish neighbours, Frinton-on-Sea, which is the previous stop on the line!
