Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

The French Military are Back in Business

The French military, desperately short of good results recently, launched a new offensive today ...and shot seventeen of their own fans.

The fact that so many stationary targets were injured but none killed does point up worrying problems with weapons training.  On the upside, I think we definitely have to count this as a French military victory.  After several centuries, it looks like they're back on a roll.  Unless a German in the audience promptly ran out and beat crap out of them in response.

Hills and Hurricanes

Yesterday saw me complete the Ben Lawers group of mountains, with an ascent of Meall nan Tarmachan - the Hill of the Ptarmigan - at the western edge of the range.

A look at the map in the link above will reveal that the hill has crags and cliffs all along its eastern side.  Those become rather taller and nearer in the mind when the wind is a westerly force 8, gusting as high as force 9 or even 10 at the very top and leaving one very aware of being near such a perilous lee shore.

It was typical Scottish mountain weather: a week after midsummer, and we (I had both dogs with me) set off in drizzle.  This became heavier and heavier rain as I neared the subsidiary summit to the south-east of the Munro itself, and the heavy cloud cover descended as low as 500 metres, leaving visibility at only twenty or so metres at times.  On the lower, 923 metre hilltop I met some English girls, well kitted-out for the weather but a bit nervous in the worsening conditions, who asked if the peak would be dangerous, and what the weather would do.  If they thought that a person alive could predict the weather on the Scottish high tops then they were clearly new to the experience.  I told them that, in the next hour, they would probably get snow, glorious sunshine, driving rain and heavy fog in roughly equal quantities and, if sleet counts as snow, then I was proven quite the prophet.

The final ascent of Tarmachan is, however, well-protected from westerlies: a snug - if rather fierce - chimney leads up below the ridge, and then only the last hundred metres or so are exposed, as one doubles-back to the south to gain the summit.  Thus, I went from tranquil, misty peace to roaring, sub-hurricane gales that threatened to pluck me off the hill and grant me a more rapid descent than I desired.  After hanging around on the peak for as long as was bearable, optimistically waiting for the clouds to break, the weather cleared when I was a mere twenty metres below the hilltop: frustrating since the view from the top is, you just know, always going to be the best one.  I then realised that both the dogs and I had, when on the summit, been a mere six or seven metres upwind of three sheep without so much as suspecting their presence.  To get an idea, here are some other people on the same hill, in only slightly better visibility:

Most of Tarmachan is, in fact, sealed off from sheep and deer and the benefits are beginning to show, with arctic flowers and montane birch beginning to flourish here and there.  The more immediate advantage of this is that the hounds got to run free for hours, sprinting up and down the grassy slopes with their usual zeal.

Oh, and by the time I got off the hill it was beautifully sunny, and I spent the evening outside, relaxing with a well-deserved bottle of Hoegaarden.  Scotland: if you don't like the weather, just come back in fifteen minutes.

As mentioned, I've now been up all eight peaks in the Lawers range in the last six weeks or so, and loved the experience.  I adore the Perthshire hills: generally grassy or mossy mountains, often surrounded by crags.  Where now?  Mheal Glas and Beinn Cheathaich, just twenty miles south-west, offer a decent challenge together from the south-eastern approach, requiring a 30km hike by the time one returns to the road-end.  Or, if I ave less time, perhaps the short, sharp shocks of Stuchd an Lochain or Meall Ghaordaidh to the west will do.  And I still have to return to the two hills that have so far defeated me: Schiehallion (which I will wait and hopefully again climb in snow, to whittle down the numbers on the hill) and craggy Stuc a Chroin, which I will not, this time, attempt from the bealach in dense fog.

But mummy it's not just a silly game you just don't get it

Like Cuppycake, I sometimes read Tobold's blog, and find it interesting from time to time.  But his recent post attacking Richard Bartle was awful, awful stuff that revealed a mixtue of intellectual shallowness and vapid foolishness that I found it hard to comprehend.

Tobold - and here we shouldn't put too fine a point on things - spends thousands of hours every year pressing keys in order to make a graphical representation of an imaginary person make numbers float above the heads of graphical representations of imaginary monsters.  Sometimes, a number increases in the top left of his screen, which in turn makes the numbers above his little person's head increase slightly when the imaginary monster does things, while also scaling up the numbers above the imaginary monster's head when he pretends to swing his imaginary sword.

Now a lot of us have played that sort of game, and enjoyed it greatly.  Some of us like to talk at length about whether the goal of making numbers bigger at the cost of thousands of hours every year is a valuable or worthwhile one.  Some of us are even excited by the technology and advances involved.  Many of us are aware of the history of the genre, can accept criticisms of it thoughtfully.  Some of us even address whether devoting too many hours to a pleasurable but unproductive pastime is truly worthwhile, especially after a certain point of discovery, learning and exploration has passed.

Dr Bartle helped invent the genre of multiplayer online gaming.  He didn't create it, but he advanced it, shaped it, dramatically redefined it and has helped to explain and advance it ever since.  He is a cantankerous, provocative, opinionated but nevertheless authoratitive, insightful and important writer in the field, who, far from resting on his laurels, continues to teach, advise and comment in the field.

In a recent interview, Dr Bartle made a number of points, some clearly deliberately hyperbolic.  None were as excruciatingly, horribly ignorant as Tobold's opening line: "Richard Bartle is the co-author of MUD, one of the ancestors of modern MMORPGs. But as he failed to patent any of the inventions he did while creating it, all he got was a Wikipedia entry."  Perhaps Tobold actually believes this to be true, but I thought I recognised a different pattern of behaviour.

Dr Bartle, as even Tobold is surely aware, is an authority figure in the genre.  Tobold was back in the position of being a little kid, being told by someone in authority that he was wasting his time with something silly. Tobold must certainly know that he is throwing away so much of his life through the unbalanced pursuit of a single pastime that he describes.  It seems he is rather sensitive to being told so.  In the time that he spends in MMOs every year he could study for another degree.  He could read every book in the classical canon, and take time to study each.  He could learn to play a musical instrument, or give time to voluntary causes.  I have no doubt that he has an argument as to why his frankly obsessive pursuits are normal and justifiable, and indeed I imagine that he is deeply in denial as to their extent.  But his blog is lengthy and voluble evidence to the contrary.  And when it is pointed out, he reacts as he did in his own comments and posts: furiously.

In a comedic note, Tobold even commented that he thought Bartle was anonymously trolling Tobold's comments pages, sock-puppetting to defend himself.  I wonder if Bartle was even aware that Tobold had mentioned him.  I seriously doubt that he was losing any sleep over it, and am absolutely certain that any responses would be signed: this is an old usenet and listserv warrior, after all.

Anyway, i am getting too worked up about this.  Tobold, as I said in his comments, is a diarist: he spends his leisure time in computer games and then writes about what he did.  His forays into thinking about the nature and characteristics of those games (as opposed to complaining about the surface impact of features) are occasional and unoriginal: they are on the level of a regular bus traveller suggesting better placement of the ashtrays or a sliding step from which to alight.  For him to dismiss and mock someone who helped give him the games in which he spends all the time he can is as ungracious as it is ungrateful, and his criticisms of an interview - one which was undoubtedly given while aware of the responses of the dedicated fanbois - are at best facile.

The funny thing is, by writing his piece, Tobold yet again proved the relevance and importance of his target.

D&D Insider - Part Deux

This is going to be a bit shorter than my last wall of words on the subject of D&D Insider.

I just read a piece by Timothy Burke where he describes the perplexity experienced when hunting through the Wizards of the Coast website a few days after the new system was launched, looking for the Insider tools that were so massively hyped as a key element of the game during the year or so before release.  I experienced the same bewilderment myself at the time, although with less success in my hunt for answers on the official site.  Tim found the FAQ with an explanation: I had been stymied by Wizards' decision to try everything short of removing the lightbulb and sticking up the famous "Beware of the Leopard" sign on the door.  Instead, I'd turned to the rest of the web for information on Wizards' own product.

I remember a description from my postgrad course about the stages of crisis at which companies lie to themselves and mislead or deceive their customers.  This one really fits the pattern described.

Tim (I have referred to his blog before, and am never am never sure whether to use the full or informal forms of the name of someone I don't know.  But Tim seems more .. wizardy) believes that the prognosis is poor for the online tools suite.  In a classic example of wood and trees, I'd not thought about that, despite being in the position of working in the world of software development (sort of).  I imagine it depends where Hasbro see the D&D brand going in future.  If they believe that it has serious upside, especially in the online marketplace, then they may bite the bullet and throw the necessary money at the project.  If they see it as a niche product - a cash cow with gradually fading prospects to whom they gave a few million for a chance to pep up the product range - then a delay of many months would sem potentially fatal.  Given Wizards' history with what they unfortunately tended to call "eTools" in the past, my guess is that they'd be more likely to scavenge some of the easier-to-support elements like the online rulebooks and go with those in some very limited fashion.

From my experience in content delivery, I'd not be surprised if that area was one of the real stumbling blocks: there is an awful lot of content to be converted for the rulebooks, and massively more (much of the older stuff unavailable in useful electronic formats) for the bundled magazines.  It's prosaic, and so tends toget overlooked until it is realised that there are six weeks to launch and several hundred content issues outstanding.

If asked to bet, I'd say that the bulk of the functionality will be released, much of it during this financial year.  But it'll be stupendously buggy in places, will provoke a lot of bad-feeling about reliability during the beta period, and price afterwards, and (I still believe) will provide stimulus to the open-source softwaer movement to provide something better and free.

Dungeons and Dragons Insider: Greed and Missed Chances

Meall Buidhe - A Walk in the Park

Since I had the pleasure of my wife's company for this weekend's climbing, I decided to tackle one (and only one) of Scotland's easier Munros: Meall Buidhe.

The hill is a bit too easy by itself, so we took a circular route up to it, over a couple of subsidiary peaks.  The sheep were all in the glen for the shearing, so the dogs were able to run free for the full ascent and descent (collies are a bit more interested in sheep than the sheep really enjoy).  In fact, they found a fawn at one point, hiding in the heather in the Coire Beidhe while its mother watched nervously from a couple of hundred metres away: it was absolutely beautiful, and the dogs were no more than curious, pointing from a few metres away (collies can be trained to do just about anything if you find the right encouragement), but I called them away in seconds and made an uncomfortably rapid ascent of the corrie to our left, so as to let the mother return quickly.  The fact that it was remaining hidden in the heather and grass while its mother was away means that the fawn was less than a week old: until then the mothers leave the young in order to feed, although the fawns, none too keen on being left behind like this, sometimes have to be pushed to the ground by the mothers to stop them attempting to follow.

Anyway, from there it was up Meall a Phuille, itself forty or so metre short of being a Munro, but which gave a wonderful view of the Meall Buidhe ridge, lined with crags and cliffs to the east and stretching for over two kilometres to the isolated summit of Garbh Mheall to the north. A short descent across rolling, mossy moorland and then it was a brisk little climb up a subsidiary, unnamed peak and onto the ridge proper.

The wind was gusting heavily from the north, and we could see weather sweeping along on either side of the ridge: sheeting rain in vertical pulses a hundred or so metres apart within a kilometre to east and west, but we had a dry walk along the ridge, a gentle slope falling away to the west into the Rannoch Moor and more dramatic views to the east into the corries.  As we reached the summit itself, the clouds broke and we had wonderful views of Schiehallion to the east, the forbidding profile of Ben Alder's cliffs to the north, and Buchaille Etive Mor to the west, guarding the entrance to Glen Coe.  From here, we were able to plan a possible hike into Rannoch Forest for later in the summer, pointing out possible camping spots on the banks of the Duibhe Bheag as it winds through the woods.

One strange feature of the ridge is that its northern end - a full fifteen metres lower - seems to loom above the actual summit.  I would have sworn that the two heights were reversed, if I didn't have a map and compass.

At this point, the clouds closed in on us, and we had to turn back before tackling the most northerly subsidiary top, the isolated dome of Garbh Mheail to the north.  This is a shame, as it is a lovely hill, surrounded by crags for about nine-tenths of its flanks, but a hill with only a fifteen-metre-wide escape route and with cliffs in every other direction is not the place to get caught in low visibility, and especially not with two dogs intent on exploring every steep plummet in search of their beloved patches of snow.

Sure enough, we were assailed by rain and hail on the way back off the hill, although it lasted only for ten minutes or so, and barely had time to make me regret wearing shorts before it stopped again.  By the time we got back to the car for the hundred-mile drive back to Edinburgh I was dry, and not particularly tired.  After the multi-peak odysseys of previous weeks, my legs weren't even a little stiff the next day.  But my accumulated ascent for the last three outings has been almost exactly 3,300 metres, so I am a third of the way to my target for the year.  Next, I think, it will be back the Ben Lawers area for the final peak in that range: Meall nan Tarmachan.

Another Day, Another (2) Munro(s)

It turns out that I am exploring the Ben Lawers massif.  Having climbed all five munros on the main ridge a couple of weeks ago, I was back again yesterday to climb the next two peaks: Meall Corranaich and Meall a Choire Leith.

One advantage of the Lawers range is that you can leave Edinburgh at 8 and be pulling your pack on and setting off by 9.30 or so.  Despite such proximity, the weather can be very different: last time it was warm in Edinburgh and snowing on An Stuc.  This time it was pouring in Edinburgh and glorious sunshine on Meall Corranaich, albeit with a few snowfields left on the north-eastern slopes.

One advantage of climbing hills in the same range for a while is that you get to look at what you did previously and feel rather impressed at yourself: looking over the Coire Odhar at the vast pyramid of Bheinn Glas, and seeing the rise and fall of the ridge that I had followed made me feel rather smug.  Another is that, when stupidity makes you stick your sandwiches into the "afterwards" rucksack in the car boot and not the climbing one, you are not entirely lost despite the fact that you have left behind map, compass and sun block and are instead lugging such essentials as a pair of trainers and a bulky guide to dog-friendly pubs in the UK up a kilometre-high hill.

Judgemental (and sane) Munroists will at this stage be tutting, and citing the changeable and deadly moods of the Scottish hills while stating that the only sensible thing to do at this juncture would be to abandon the route and return while sunny conditions held.  And they would be right.  But while I would issue the same, stern injunctions in their place, Meall a Choire Leith is a gentle, rounded hill with escape routes on three sides, and I could see that the nearest weather was several hours away to the south-east, while I could see as far as Stob Diamh and Beinn Eunaich to the west, 40 miles away.  So I carried on, and beat the rain by ten minutes.  In the end, Seleighe and I didn't even get to visit a dog-friendly pub, but were back in Edinburgh by 5pm.

The final peak in the area is Meall nan Tarmachan - the Hill of the Ptarmigan.  Hopefully I'll get back to that before the end of the month.  I'm hoping to climb the height of Everest this year (I'm currently at about a fifth of that from two trips) so I'll need to get back to it soon, despite a couple of busy weekends coming up.

Pictures to follow.