Where Worlds Collide

An enjoyable day yesterday at the York Railfest, a special extravaganza running all week at the National Railway Museum in York. The museum itself was open as normal, but in the yard outside were gathered a large number of visiting exhibits, both preserved steam and diesel locomotives from many other museums, and some examples of modern rolling stock from serveral train operating companies. Many of the locomotives were in steam.

Although the star of the show was supposed to be the venerable No 4472 “Flying Scotsman”, in the prime position stood a representative from a later generation of East Coast racehorses, Deltic “Alycidon”. It’s worth remembering that these locomotives have now been preserved for as long as they were in traffic.

Representing modern motive power were this pair of EWS General Motors products. In the background is one of Richard Branson’s horrid Pendolinos.

All aboard the Hogwarts Express! Ex GWR “Olton Hall” painted maroon to star in the Harry Potter film. When she first received this livery, the purists went apoplectic.

One of the oldest visitors, Ffestiniog railways 2′ gauge “Prince” dating from 1863, which gave visitors rides up and down a short section of track, coupled to a pair of vintage coaches. I wonder how much of the original locomotive is left after 141 years and at least four major rebuilds.

Game WISH 98 asks:

What are three games or settings that you’ve bought or seen recently (in stores or previews) that you’d really like to try? What interests you about them and why?

First: GURPS 4th Edition. I’ve been a GURPS player for fifteen years, but was considering dropping GURPS as my system of choice in favour of something simpler, possibly FUDGE. The announcement of a long talked-about 4th edition has very much rekindled my interest in the game.

While at it’s core GURPS 3rd edition is a still a very good game engine, it’s not quite perfect. More significantly it’s suffering from a lot of accumulated cruft; the accretion of rules from a plethora of supplements, many of which were created on an ad-hoc basis with little consideration on how they’d impact the system as a whole. SJG promise to clean up and streamline the system, to produce something for the ’00s rather than the 1980s. I like what I’m seeing in the sample characters and ‘rules leaks’ appearing in Pyramid Online. They make me very optimistic that game will be what it promises to be.

Second: Infinite Worlds, which will be the official ‘house setting’ for GURPS 4th. I loved the two Alternate Earths books (I even reviewed the second of these on RPG.net), although I struggled with trying to come up with a good campaign framework to use them all. Infinite Worlds builds on the concept and promises to add some more exotic new ones, some including the sorts of magic and weirdness omitted from the hard science based originals. While lesser game writers might turn such a multiverse into a horrendous munchkinised mishmash, I’m confident Infinite Worlds will turn out much better than that. That’s largely because it’s being written by Ken Hite.

Finally, for something completely different, FATE, something I’ve downloaded, but I’m intrigued to see how it actually plays. It’s a implementation of FUDGE, but with some intriguing ideas borrowed from a couple other games. It has what looks on paper to be a very elegant way of handling attributes in relation to skills, and a very clever lifepath-based character generation system.

At last, the end of the Cheadle Hulme to Crewe blockade. For five long months I’ve endured the dreadful ‘Rail Replacement Bus’ which more than doubled the length of my daily commute.

Today the train was even on time. I got from my front door to my desk in just over twenty minutes.

Sadly it’s only for a six weeks. In July there’s the Stockport blockade, and it’s bloody buses again for another two months. Bah!

Can somebody explain to me why back in the 1980s they completely rebuilt the whole of Crewe in seven weeks flat, while Stockport, a station of less than half the complexity, will take nine?

Cold Spring Shops shows that while Americans can do big, Russians could do even bigger. But just how does that thing go round corners?

Electric Nose waxes lyrical about the merits of Rail Express, and reminds us to attend the DEMU showcase exhibition in two weeks time. It’s high time I attended this one, even though I’ve always found Burton on Trent an awkward place to get to.

I’m sure the plug for Rail Express has nothing to do with the plug for Electric Nose in the latest issue’s editorial from Gareth Bayer, which rips into the anti-internet attitude of the more established railway modelling magazines.

Both the editorials [of other magazines] direct fire at the Internet in general and specifically at those who contribute to Internet forums such as Yahoo! The feeling is that the ‘net is home to barely educated ‘extremists’ and ‘zealots’ who don’t care about commercial realities, bully those who have unbiased and reasonably opinions, and are generally just a whole bunch of rotters who don’t play fair.

He goes on to compare the critical stance taken by some ‘internet zealots’ with the line taken by other magazines where objective reviews take second place to protecting advertising revenue. One post on the Demodellers list has even compared them with the music press, hardly paragons of unbiased objectivity.

Freedom of speech on the Internet has changed all this, and the old guard don’t like it. But just like sections of the music industry, they’ll just have to adapt or die. It’s not the 1970s any more.

Karen Cravens has some responses to my earlier entry on her Gamehawk development weblog.

(To which I say “Harrumph, I just said that (in different words, granted) on GAMERS, you plagiarist.” Heh.)

That’s pretty much my intention… the Gamehawk forums (and so far, “forum” is the most general-purpose word I can come up with) are already mailing lists, they’ll be displayable in webboards (or blogs; the only real difference is display format), available via NNTP (technically they already are in the Firehawk version, if I turn it back on) and rss/Atom feeds. All that lacks in Gamehawk is, well, me testing it and getting it online. Which I should do instead of blogging.

Yes, on the surface the Group->Topic structure of the mailing list maps nicely onto the Weblog->Category structure of weblogs. But to muddy the waters a bit, for my Archive weblog I’ve used the Category for Chapters. I also notice a lot of bloggers have very large numbers of categories, and then archive all entries for each category on a single page. My use of categories on Where Worlds Collide is probably atypical, in that I’ve got a small list of very broad categories each covering what some people would put in completely different weblogs.

The only thing lacking is figuring out how to work the Wiki in easily. A Wiki’s fine for hierarchical stuff, but a blog is sequential. I’m inclined to make forum entries (posts, blog entries/comments, whatever) a special case for the Wiki… it knows that a given post is groupname/topicname/message-sequence, and it could refer to stuff that way just as easily. I’m inclined to say you could assign a WikiWord to a particular post, in addition. That way you can “name” chapters of the game, or whatever.

Wikis are a different hovercraft of eels. I actually think a Category field would be a good addition to the functionality of the Wiki; it would allow you specify whether a WikiWord was a piece of cultural background, a location, or a PC or NPC character sheet. Could you simply use the subject line (WithAllTheSpacesRemoved) as the WikiWord? What about duplicates? Should they be treated as followups? Or rejected?

On the other hand, you couldn’t edit them… could you? I suppose you could. You could opt to re-send the email (or not, for proofreading edits). The NNTP side would pose a slight problem, since the message-sequence wouldn’t (shouldn’t, mustn’t) change

I’d recommend the way the Dreamlyrics nntp server handles these; when the user updates an existing web post, the nntp interface treats it as a new post referencing the original, then deletes the original.

So users who had read the original post, then pick up the updated one see this:

Thread Start
+-Original Post
  +-Updated Post

While a user who didn’t perform an nntp post between the original posting and the update would see:

Thread Start
+-Updated Post

Note: The version of the album I’m reviewing is the double album that’s only available direct from the band’s website, www.marillion.com. The version available by normal retail outlets is a single album, with four songs missing.

Ever since “Script for a Jesters Tear” many, many years ago, the release of a new Marillion album has been an eagerly awaited event. I’ve followed them through the trauma of having to replace their charismatic original frontman, through the lows of “Holidays in Eden” and “Dotcom” to the highs of “Brave” and “Anoraknophobia”. Since I’ve found their best work takes quite a few listens before you can really appreciate them, I’ve left it a couple of weeks before attempting to review it. After all, if the band too more than two years to write and record it, surely I can spend a couple of weeks listening to it?

Marillion have never been a band to stick with a successful formula. It’s said that each album is a reaction to the one before; after the commercial “Holidays in Eden” came the complex, dark and intense “Brave”, in turn followed by the mellow and reflective “Afraid of Sunlight”. I felt the last release, “Anoraknophobia” was a major return to form following a couple of disappointing releases. Others felt it was too much a departure from their traditional sound, and their were some vicious flamewars on one mailing list between those that loved the new album with its use of drum loop and dub rhythms, and those that hated it.

“Marbles” attempts to satisfy both camps, and I think it succeeds. The opener, “The Invisible Man” sounds like the best of the most experimental bits of “Anoraknophobia” condensed into about thirteen minutes; the first sections of dub rhythms and atmospheric soundscapes slowly build in intensity before everything drops away to a gentle Floydian section of piano and bluesy guitar, which then leads into to a big wall-of-sound climax.

In complete contrast, the Grendel-length “Ocean Cloud”, dedicated to ocean rower Don Allum, is closer in feel to the sound of much earlier albums. This is perhaps the standout song of the album, and easily the best lengthy epic the band have done.

All though the album I keep hearing echoes of earlier albums; it might be a keyboard fill, or a brief vocal melody, or just a fragment of overall sound. But it’s far from a retread of the band’s past. They’ve put bits of quite different albums into a blender and come up with new combinations. The hit single (yes, it was a Top Ten single in Britain!) “You’ve Gone” is a good example of this; it combines elements of “Anoraknophobia” such as the drum loops with the reflective sound of “Afraid of Sunlight”.

On several songs we see a welcome return of Steve Rothery’s trademark soaring guitar sound, drenched in sustain. And compared with some recent albums, this one is full of solos. The guitar work on the album closer, the epic ballad “Neverland” is classic Rothery stuff. But he demonstrates he can play more than one style; there’s a beautiful acoustic solo in “Angelina”, and some very Floydian blues-style playing elsewhere on the album. There’s even some slide guitar on “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, a song that starts out sounding like Pink Floyd’s dreamy “Pillow of Dreams” before launching into an uptempo rocker.

Seldom is a double album completely devoid of filler; I don’t particularly care for the Radiohead-lite of songs like “The Damage”. But that’s a minor quibble; there is enough great music here to compensate for one or two weak songs.

Carl Cravens has been wondering on the Gamers mailing list about whether blogs take traffic away from mailing lists and reduce community.

It’s true that the vast majority of blogs don’t seem to have enough of a critical mass of regular readers and commenters to get much comment discussion. I occasionally wonder whether blogging is a bit of a solipsistic activity compared with participating in other online communities such as mailing lists or web forums. On the other hand, there are some weblogs that have a very active community of commenters, such as Making Light or BlogCritics. There’s also Moveable Type’s Trackback feature, which lets discussions wander from blog to blog, something used in the Game WISH meme. I’m sure there’s scope for an aggregator to format them like a threaded discussion

I’ve heard the blogosphere described as Usenet turned inside out; it’s sorted by people rather than by group. In my Usenet days you could read my thoughts on different subjects in uk.railway, alt.music.blueoystercult or rec.games.frp.gurps; nowadays a lot of them are gathered together here. It’s an interesting question as to whether or not this increases or reduces the overall signal-to-noise ratio. I tend to read the blogs of people who write about subjects I’m interested in; for worthwhile posts on gaming or model railways I also get the progress of people’s diets and strongly expressed political opinions I don’t necessarily agree with. But I don’t have to put up with a lot of the dross of Usenet; the spam, idiots, trolls and flamewars, which are restricted to the comments sections of one or two blogs.

I suspect the functionality of blogs, web forums and mailing lists will converge over time, and the same content and discussion might be available in multiple formats; email, html, rss, nntp, and so on.

Blogs vs. Wikis is another subject. There are pros and cons of using both to support online gaming. For instance, I use a Wiki (hosted by The Phoenyx) to maintain a lot of gameworld background information (and there’s a lot of it), because the Wiki lets me construct a hierarchical structure of sorts; and the WikiWord format makes for rich internal linking. But I have also set up an MT Blog for the actual game archives, because I find that easier to manage for something that’s essentially sequential.

On the Kalyr wiki, some thoughts on Crime and Punishment in Kalyr.

Another gaming blog hits the Blogosphere. Gamethink is a group blog of gaming professionals, lead by Bruce Baugh.