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

There has been a fair bit of coverage, recently, of Wizards of the Coast's launch of the 4th Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons game. I've already had the chance to play my first couple of sessions of it, and the game itself is an imaginative reinvention of the old warhorse. It takes the existing mechanics of the third edition, but builds a smoother, faster, more varied (and more reusable) range of actions upon that mechanic.

The influence of MMOs from the last few years is particularly obvious, with "cooldown" timers on the re-use of actions (from every round to once a day), vastly more frequent use of spells, and language directly borrowed from the online genre: classes are defined as "tanks", "dps", "healer" and so on.

Clearly (and wisely), WotC have looked at the success of Blizzard's World of Warcraft game, and have asked themselves a few questions. One was probably "what are they doing right that has got people pretending to be swordsmen and sorceresses? Another was "how do we get us some of that there cash mountain?"

I think that the redesign has worked, and is as likely as anything at this stage to claw back some of the pen'n'paper market which - after boosts following the launches of Vampire: The Masquerade in the early 90s and D&D 3rd Edition earlier in this decade - has shrunk somewhat.

However, WotC had a further ace up their sleeve: a real humdinger of a feature which signalled a desire to step right into the online marketplace, and one which had substantial potential for revenue growth. And, so far, they are blowing it.

WotC, you see, announced that fourth edition would come with a ragne of online tools to enhance and facilitate gaeplay. Some of these were online versions of rulebooks, magazines, source material and so on. Fair enough, but it's been done. After all, anyone with access to the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup can (illegally) download versions of the entirety of the D&D canon, right back to the early 1970s, and for free. The 4th Edition rulebooks were there from before launch and, having already pre-ordered them myself, I felt little compunction about nabbing a sbeak preview for myself.

No, the exciting bit was the virtual gaming table: a suite of tools including "three-dimensional" representations of the players and their opponents, depicted as miniatures and in a rendered version of the environment that the DM had prepared in advance. So you and your friends, who used to play in university, could get together again for some games, using built in voice tools, dice-rolling and online games table to play, despite the fact that you're now living hundreds of miles apart. There was a real buzz after this announcement was made: people were talking about "getting the old gang together for one more job."

So how are WotC blowing it? Well, it's a heady mixture of greed and inexperience.

First off was the pricing. While looking at the online games space, Wizards of the Coast had clearly said to themselves "people pay fifteen bucks a month to play these?" and then gone on to multiply fifteen dollars by a substantial proportion of their millions of players and got the answer "money hats". They seem to have been surprised when they announced their price to their anticipatory playerbase and got the answers "lawl", "wtf?" and "nope". Only louder, and massive length and multiplied by thousands.

The fact is that if I pay fifteen dollars to Blizzard (which I do not) to play World of Warcraft then I get a fully rounded, tested world, with literally hundreds of man-years' worth of content built in already. My fifteen bucks a month to WotC gets me a toolkit to create that content: the right to use their toolkit for a month to do the work myself, and which I will then have to continue to pay for in order to access in future.

Worse than that, the money just allows me as the Dungeon Master to create the stuff. If my group wish to play in the worlds I create then each of them will also have to shell out their own fifteen dollars per month. So the six of us will be paying seventy-five dollars a month, on top of the initial few hundred dollars' worth of investment in the rulebooks, just to use these tools.

And that's not the end of it. If you want to use additional features, such as more digital "miniatures" for the game table, it seems you'll be making smaller, additional payments to unlock each of those. WotC have made the mistake that SOE made, of trying to use micropayment and monthly payment models in the same game space, which leaves people asking "why do I pay for this when I already paid for it?"

Forget the fact that the dollar's parity with the potato on the world currency exchanges makes fifteen dollars cost about as much as a glossy magazine or a couple of video rentals. Forget the fact that what is being offered might actually be pretty fair value: these prices will not work. This is a hobby populated mainly by the young, the impecunious and the penurous. It is also a hobby where the payment model has been, largely, one of paying once for the book and being able to play for free after that, with additional sources also representing occasional investments of capital, not income. Just as Microsoft have failed to convert the consumer market to rental models, so will Wizards of the Coast unless they cut the price massively.

If Wizards want to succeed, they have to accept that they need to charge a minimal subscription of a few dollars a month at the very most: this in itself will be unpopular, but if it is low enough it will be swallowed as a service charge if the tools are good enough. Then, additional features should be capable of being cherry-picked by those that want them: a range of a dozen digital miniatures for two dollars; an online version of a module for nine dollars (but only three or so bucks if the paper version is bought). Get people using this and, before long, they will begin to use the service for additional features: buy in a proper miniatures wargame then use the virtual board and purchasable miniatures to build long-term revenue: here, gamers will still save money and time over buying lead minis, and will more easily find opponents.

The second problem for Wizards is that they dropped the ball in development. The tools were not ready for the launch of the game. Worse, they are still months away from being ready. It was utterly predictable that they would mess up like this, by underestimating the effort and cost of working in the commercial, online marketplace, but they did it nonetheless. They disappointed their customers, misled them with a fairly weasely announcement that nobody understood (but let them say that they had not lied about the service's availability at launch).

If WotC don't sieze the market then the open source community will. I suspect (and kinda hope) that they will, anyway: after all, primitive versions already exist, as with OpenRPG or Neverwinter Nights. In fact, I'd bet a chunk of cash that, by this time next year, I will be able to use free, open software to design a dungeon, place traps and miniatures, then allow my players to connect online and play through it with me as GM. Then WotC will have a real struggle to even charge for access, let alone to regain the initiative in a market they should dominate.

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.

Scepticism is the new black.

Here is a musician who is great fun to watch, talented (although not above the odd duff note), and who seems to really adore what he does. He posts his jams on youtube, improvising over his sequenced riffs, enthusing sbout ne technology or even just the fun he's having playing his music: "any day you're havin' fun with music is a good day" (the backing track owes something to Daft Punk).

I like the music he plays in and of itself, but there can be no doubt that what has given him exposure is the innocent charm of his enthusiasm, and his unusual, geeky appearance. Looking at the many, many comments on his youtube pages, people feel enthused by his undisguised enjoyment, often protective of an apparent naif, and unthreatened by this gawky white guy playing music normally presented by those of ethnicities that they may feel less comfortable with.

Now of course, one would find it hard to engineer a better character with which to gain exposure in today's viral environment, based on a large degree of genuine creativity and a decent amount of technical skill. There is no shortage today of people posting lo-fi stuff on youtube in order to pretend to be less sophisticated and manipulative than they are. It is easy to find a great many talented musicians on youtube, but most do not have the marketability to capitalise on the medium.

So I did a bit of googling, looking for any traces of this having occurred, but if this is some experienced producer pulling a fast one then he has left no trace that I can find. He seems to be the real deal. Certainly, the apparent spontaneity would be hard to maintain.

But the fact is that, these days, the internet requires and rewards "close-reading" more than most sources, and it is unfortunate that scepticism is more necessary than ever. Snopes is my friend, and wikipedia my semi-trustworthy guide.

Five Munros in a Day

In Scotland, the highest mountains - those over 3000 feet (914 metres) in altitude - are known as Munros.  These 288 (it varies, depending on revisions of the list) tops range in difficulty from gentle (Ben Chonzie) to decidedly unpleasant (ascending the Great Stone Chute in Corrie Lagan).  After doing a few walks in the borders while on holiday last week, I had a hankering to climb a Munro again, after failing to do so at all last year.  Having initially considered a second attempt on Schiehallion, from which I had to turn back in heavy snow last time when only a few hundred feet from the summit, I plumped for Ben Lawers, the tenth highest mountain of the lot.

Feature creep began to set in at this point.  Although it is possible to ascend Ben Lawers by itself, by using the track in Coire Odhar, that is a dreary trudge compared to first climbing Bheinn Ghlas (1103 metres) then following the ridge over to Ben Lawers (1214m) itself .  Then, a third Munro can be added to the list by crossing the subsidiary top Creag an Fhithich (1047m) and grinding one's way up the pyramidical An Stuc (1118m).  At this point, completionism sets in, and the slightly exposed scramble down An Stuc's north-eastern crags to regain exactly the same height on Meall Garbh (1118m) seems bearable when, as the crow flies, the distance between the two peaks is only about 700 metres.  Finally, another few hundred metres of descent and ascent in order to bag Meall Greigh (1001m), only a little over three and a half kilometres to the east, appears more palatable given the gentle, rolling nature of the climb in contrast to the craggy, steep nature of what went before.

So it is that the walk grew to almost 25km and five Munros in the end, and that is why I thought I would have to wake up Seileighe, my collie, with a glass of cold water to the face, such was her exhaustion.  She had been delighted by nine hours spent racing up slopes, eyeing up sheep, standing terrifyingly close to cliff edges and gambolling excitedly in snow banks (the current pictures are not mine - I'll replace them with my own ones later -  but the second was closer in terms of snow cover), but it turns out I am a better judge of my own limits than her.  A proud boast: I am better at long term planning than a 22-month-old collie.

Typically for the Scottish hills, I set off on a bright, sunny morning and found myself finishing the second peak in snowfall.  Such were the exertions involved in almost 1.7km of vertical ascent over the full circuit, however, that I spent most of it in only two, ultralight layers, despite the sub-zero conditions.  I cannot pretend not to have been encouraging the dog to drink heavily and often from the water I was carrying for her: the extra couple of kilos of water for the two of us seemed awfully heavy by the time I reached the midway point of the ridge.

The worst part was the return slog: I had no fellow-driver to leave a car in Lawers, and so was necessarily committed to 12 kilometres of return on foot from the summit of Meall Greigh, following the line of old shielings below Lochan nan Cat, Coire Cireineach and Creag Dhubh.  A centuries' old track could be traced along the hill for the last hour and a half, but it was soaked and boggy, features exacerbated by the fact that I had decided to break in a new pair of boots on this hike.  By the time I crossed the Edramucky Burn and the car park by the mountain rescue post had come into view I was leg weary and (as Seileighe could testify to) in a foul mood.

But there are many great delights to climbing.  One is the view from the top, accompanied by the world's best-tasting sandwiches.  Another is the sense of achievement.  Most important, however, is the heavenly sequence of post-walk events: changing from boots into trainers; perhaps dabbling bare feet in a burn; remembering you had soup in a thermos in the boot; getting home and sitting in a comfortable seat; sinking into a hot bath; blessed sleep.

I feel great now: a few blisters and decidedly sore knees (that's three hundred and fifty-odd games of rugby for you), but almost no stiffness at all.  I'm already eyeing up my maps and Cicerone guidebook and planning Sunday's ascent.

Eve Online - Am I Getting My Wish?

Like a good (occasional) PvP gang leader searching for an edge, I ordered the Eve Maps product a couple of weeks ago.  Upon enquiring as to why I had had no delivery, I received an email, part of which said:

"..due to the release of The Empyrean Age expansion in a few months, there will be new content added to the game, and we want to ensure the first edition of EVE Maps will be as up to date as possible. The delay will be no more than two to three weeks. CCP has released the data for this new content to us, and we are frantically updating to ensure you are ahead of the game."

Will this new content be new regions?  A radical new game mechanic that makes a noticeable difference to the maps (possibly involving some version of the touted change to asteroid belts spawning and despawning rather than being in static locations)?  Or just a rebalancing aimed at reducing lag, with further shuffling-about of belts, agents or stations?

With the titular reference to the Empyrean Age - an upcoming expansion whose theme may be factional warfare - my guess is that it will be a combination of the asteroid change with enhanced factional sovereignty attributes.  The expansion is tied in with a book of the same title, by Tony Gonzales.  Given the average quality of MMO tie-in product, I shudder to think.

Edit: On the upside there will, indeed, be new regions.  On the downside they will not be 0.0 space.  This can be gleaned from the CCP responses to Mynas Atoch's thread here.  If this ties in with loooong-promised alterations to lowsec to provide a point in going there then this will be some compensation.  Otherwise, it will do little to solve the over-crowding issues of 0.0, since almost nobody goes to lowsec or the majority of highsec systems anyway, except when travelling elsewhere.

Also noticeable in that thread is the extent to which Bob and their alts use an atack strategy try to divert attention from yet another example of special treatment (sensitive here since Bob moved to their current home region, Delve, a short time before it became public knowledge that the region was to be substantially improved, but after senior Bob members had been informed of the changes).

 

Eve Online - Go West, Young Man!

Like most people with an interest in MMOs - as well as a great many who would deny having any such hobby - I played World of Warcraft for a time.  Recently, three workmates started playing and I was invited to join them but, despite getting as far as downloading the client, I was unable to make myself resubscribe.  This is not due to having played WoW for years - in fact I only played for a few months - nor to having reached the level cap or otherwise "beaten the game".  The failure of the game really to captivate me stemmed from a lack of innovation from Blizzard combined with over-analysis on my part (as a programmer - especially one who has created his own (cack-handed, awful) multiplayer world - I spoil the fun for myself by constantly looking behind the curtain).

I never got higher than level 45 or so, although I did that several times, and Blizzard's servers are positively clogged up with the dozens of characters of level 17 or 22 or so that I would roll up and abandon.  Some were to try out different classes or races, while others were to indulge my real enjoyment: frontier worlds in MMOs.  I've always been a sucker for the under-populated server, whether that be in WoW, Star Wars Galaxies (Lowca represent!) or Ultima Online shards.  Thus, many times that a new server opened up I would start up yet another character with whom I could watch the nascent power-groups coalesce, develop and bump up aganist each other.  But eventually the world would become static but for the odd bit of internal drama splitting up raiding guilds and, like Dr Stockmann, I would leave the crowd behind and move on.

Given this butterfly's attention spane, it is perhaps a little strange that I have played Eve Online for over two years now.  It certainly suggests that the single-server model CCP has adopted (excepting China), where every player shares the same virtual universe as every other, has succeeded in generating sufficiently involving storylines as to provoke a greater commitment to my character than in any other game so far.

Does my love of the fresh server-state and the new character contain within itself the reasons why I always move on from both the character and, ultimately, the game?  By forcing me not to play my game, have CCP kept me playing theirs?

Perhaps.  But I still long for the fresh Eve server.  With two 30-million skill point characters I am far better off than most current players (remember that in Eve, skills are trained pretty much constantly, regardless of whether one is online or even, up to a point, subscribed).  I am not greatly constrained in my choices as to what I can do with my characters by their skill levels.  And Eve itself is designed well enough that a new character really can be useful.  But the current Eve universe, with the exception of the Drone Regions added a couple of years ago, is basically the same as the one occupied by a few thousand players at launch.

There is no frontier to be found any more.  Roaming PvP requires either large gangs or ridiculous, game-breaking "nano" ships which can travel at stupid speeds to avoid unwelcome combats, because the high population densities of most 0.0 space mean that a small group or soloist in a slower ship will be dealt with within a few jumps of entering hostile space: and I speak as a member of Goonfleet, with the largest amount of empty space available to me of any alliance, courtesy of places like Detorid (and yes, I can fly vagabonds and other nano ships!)  Key systems like Jita or Motsu have become clogged, while fleet battles have become ridiculous 1000+ person lagfests that are beyond CCP's Python architecture to deal with.

Eve has become late-15th Century Spain or Dark Age Norway, with large numbers of aggressive individuals packed into a space they have outgrown.  But, while the younger son could, in those times and places, have simply jumped on a ship and gone to carve out a space for himself to the west, that option is not available to the younger player in Eve.  As well as Goonfleet, I sometimes hang out with the guys from the F13 messageboards in Eve.  There are 60 or 70 of us playing regularly, mainly oriented towards PvP, but there is no way at all that we could carve out our own space in 0.0.  The domination by existing power structures is too entrenched.  Take a look at the latest automated Eve influence map to see how massive power-blocs of thousands of players dominate the game.  Or for a tabular view, consider this table at Eve Maps, which shows that only one in six alliances holds any space of their own, and only two alliances of less than 100 members.  That chart doesn't show the hundreds of systems deep enough in major alliance space to not be held for sovereignty purposes: the real picture is that the top ten dominate the vast majority of the game's space, and that most of the smaller holders exist only as pets or renters of those big powers.  There is nowhere far enough away from the superpowers for smaller alliances to carve out their own space.

Two things need to change.  CCP needs to "free up" more space for settlement: not an increase on the order of the 250% or so needed to return population densities to where they were when I started playing (some population pressures are good for provoking war and drama), but a very substantial amount, much of it low quality (a la Providence).  Low quality space would at least have some chance of avoiding the attention of the big players.  It should be hard to get to from the existing, high-quality space: perhaps reachable through lowsec but not directly linked to current 0.0 space.

The second change that is required concerns sovereignty mechanisms.  The need for a fleet of 200 remote-repping battleships engendered by current game mechanics (specifically by pimped-out faction cyno-jammer towers) in order to take space has to go.  The marginal utility of blobbing with extra players has to be curbed in order to provoke the creation of greater numbers of moderate-sized powerblocs.  At the moment that utility is limited by lag, and the side to git thar fust with the most men always wins that fight.

My New Moneymaker

I have had harsh things to say about L. Ron Hubbard in the past, but I was perhaps too quick to judge.  So what if he made up a bunch of dreadful space opera sci-fi, slapped the title "religion" on it, and profited from the gullibility and desperation of society's less bright individuals?  He was a canny businessman, and that appeals to the thrifty Scot in me.

However, Scientology has always had a limited appeal in Scotland, perhaps because our smaller population must by necessity have a smaller pool of people with IQs below 70 for them to draw upon.  But my own feeling is that the American-style, new-age language used by the Scientology movement sits ill with the dour Scot on the number thirty-one omnibus.  What is needed, therefore, is localisation.

I am aware that the Church of Scientology is fiercely protective of their name and materials: any money-driven organisation needs to protect their IP, no matter how pernicious or fictitious that is.

It is therefore with great pride and a hungry desire for profits that I announce the foundation of the "Kirk of Physicsology".  Our uniquely Scottish approach promises you that you can become a super-powered Operating McThetan, but that you probably won't because you don't deserve it.

We will teach that originally everyone had the awesome mental abilities that we offer, but that Margaret Thatcher had them shut down in the 80s.  And that they were invented by a Scot, just like steam engines, televisions and dragons, but that the bastarding English went and stole them from us.

Our auditing procedure for assessing the readiness to ascend to new levels will consist of aggressive demands as to "why you think you're so bloody special?  What makes you better than anyone else?" with assessments reading "Honestly, who does she think she is, anyway?  Ah kent hur faither."

Eventually, neophytes will be told that they are cleared, and that they now have powers equivalent even to Tam "Wee Man" Cruise.  However, they will be warned immediately that should they use them then they'll doubtless pay for it later.

Like the scientologists, the Kirk of Physicsology hopes to make some high-profile recruitments in media and films.  I can reveal that we are in talks with the Krankies, and that we have high hopes to snag one of the Jimmy Shand ensemble in the near future.  On the promise of influence in the industry and easy access to funding for bad films, the entire cast of Take the High Road signed up some time ago.

Shame on Brown and on England

Those who know me are aware that my views are hardly those of a right-on, Guardian-reading liberal.

However, to turn on the television today and see Gordon Brown whoring out the city of London to the single most murderous regime in the world today - China - in order to run propaganda for their brutal state and its oppression of Tibet live on rolling BBC news was sickening.

I knew Dr Brown, the father of our current Prime Minister.  He was a quiet, caring and principled minister in the Church of Scotland.  And while I am sure that he would be tremendously proud of his son's achievements, I wonder just what he would have thought of Brown's decision to give his stamp of approval, grinning on the steps of Downing Street, to an oppressive state run by geriatric killers and corrupt military-industrial concerns.  A decision informed not by principle but by import-export agreements, political prestige and by mutual back-scratching over London's 2012 chance to feed at the same trough.

And useful idiot after useful idiot is wheeled out to stand against a background of dancing morons in fancy dress to proclaim that "politics shouldn't interfere with the Olympics."  No politics, please... while Prime Ministers and ambassadors for murderers bare their teeth in ugly smiles for the cameras.  And a team of tracksuited Chinese Ministry for State Security  thugs are allowed to parade throught the heart of our capital, while their colleagues round up monks and peasants in a small, faraway country of which, it seems, Brown knows little.  And cares less.  While the BBC - the BBC - tightens the focus of its cameras each time crowds of protestors would otherwise be in shot on this jolly tour of old London town.

Never forget that the Chinese communist party has killed tens of millions of its own citizens since taking power.  Hitler was a lightweight pretender next to the Communist Party of China.  Even the Holocaust pales compared to what Mao and his successors have done.  Does that seem like hyperbole to you?  Then your historical knowledge is lacking.  Does it seem tangential?  Then you must love sports a very great deal to wish to banish all thought of how they are being used.

And how fitting, therefore, that the "eternal Olympic flame", like the tradition of the relay of the Olympic torch, was invented not by Greeks but by Hitler's National Socialists.

I'm a Scot, and one of my countrymen once spoke about far away trouble, using China as an example.  Read what economist Adam Smith said, and each time he speaks about an earthquake in China, think instead of state-run murder in Tibet.  And each time he talks of losing a finger, think of Brown worrying about his precious 2012 Olympics:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

Playing with music - Bach, Tool and more

I listen to a lot of music, by a lot of bands.  Every now and then, every few years, a song truly strikes me, to the extent that I (with my butterfly's attention span) can listen to it dozens of times in a week, finding new twists, harmonies, intricacies of rhythm and nuances of lyric.  It's quite a 17-year-old thing to do, I suppose, but one I am glad not to have grown out of in the decades that have followed.  I think that the songs that have attracted me like this down throug the years tend towards several features: playfulness, complexity and length (never mind the quality, feel the width!)  They tend to be in minor keys, often with either a drone (it's the influence of the bagpipes, I tell you), repeated figures, or a middle-eastern feeling.

I suppose the first one I can remember was when I was 10 or 11, and was Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.  Not a bad place to start, I'd say.  And yet this apparently complex piece is (while technically gruelling to play and often astonishingly modern in its use of chords and shapes bordering on atonalism) strikingly simple to understand, even if you know nothing much about music and can't read a jot of notation.

One fun way to see the trickery and complexity of this piece, without needing to read music, is to look at this version of it.  Here, you can see a visualisation of each note, of the figures and patterns Bach uses, and spot where they reappear, transposed or reversed.  You can see the shapes of the music, especially in the fugue section.  It starts at around 2:50, and then you immediately see the same figure (series or pattern of notes) repeated with the right hand (the top rows, in brown) seconds later.  Then again at 3:13 in purple, and again and again throughout.  Look at 3:46, where the bottom pattern (played with the feet, here) lies under a variation on the same shapes being played simultaneously with the right hand (at the top).

See how striking the patterns are when displayed in visual form: the human eye can see the curves, twists and sinusoidal patterns of the sounds, and understand them better: look at the flowing falls in the notes at 4:06, or the transpositions of the regular rise and fall at 4:22.  And if you ever wanted to understand suspended notes (where a chord sounds like a dischord - jarring and incomplete, then resolves itself into something complete and pleasing) then go to 8:07 and watch the slowly resolving series of chords.

The same formalism and mathematical playfulness of the music that attracted modernists like Berg to Bach also make it easier to see just what he is up to in this format.

Anyway, more to come.  I don't want to make this too terrifying a wall of :words:  Next up, Tool's 10,000 Days (Wings for Marie Pt2) and A Perfect Circle's Judith.  Can you possibly wait?

It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that...

So the NUT have decided that army recruiting material should be blocked by their members in schools.  They have not, as the Daily Mail has it, banned the army from schools.  Thankfully, the teachers' unions have no such power, nor was that the intent of their motion.

Still, speakers at their conference played their game of petty politics in comedic and predictable style.  People like Paul McGarr - a man who could benefit from a stint in Helman province almost as much as the country would benefit from his prolonged absence - who tell us that the army is there to provide "imperialist occupation" (never mind that the Afghans want us to stay.. that doesn't fit in with the viewpoints of an good, old-fashioned Marxist like McGarr).  Young people who choose to serve their country, McGarr alleges with a good Marxist's condemnation of an entire class of people, will go abroad and "torture" the natives.  McGarr is, for all his progressive language and claims of sympathy for soldiers as individuals, simply another lower-middle-classed scoundrel, playing on some of the oldest stereotypes and tricks in British politics, perhaps from a sense of inferiority and resentment.  As Johnson would have suggested, maybe McGarr "thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier".

Wrapping himself in a pretence of concern for the young people whose routes out of unemployment and poverty he is seeking to block, McGarr expresses concern that soldiers may be injured and die.  He also claims that he has done such a poor job of educating those in his care that they don't realise that the army fights wars with the risk of death or injury, and that they will, instead, be signing up for the free parachuting courses and tobogganing.  I look forward to next year's conference, when this paragon of concern insists that students be denied access to literature - sorry, propaganda - from other such murderous organisations as the lifeboat service, the fire service or charities running gap years in the third world.

Kipling summed up the behaviour of McGarr's type in a way that such a vile little man will never appreciate:

"Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep

Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;

An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit

Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.

Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy 'ow's yer soul?"

But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll- "