The trouble with being a live music fan is you end up going out on Thursday, Sunday and Monday nights, and staying in on Friday and Saturday nights. Tomorrow is Zappa plays Zappa, which I’m really looking forward to. After that it’s Queensrÿche, then Journey. And in between all that, there’s the DEMU Showcase.
Blogging is likely to be light over the next few days.
Yes, I know comments are down. The MT-Blacklist database appears to have become corrupted. Since this site is still running on an old non-longer supported version of Moveable Type, if I can’t easily fix the problem, it may have to wait until I have time to upgrade to either MT3.2 or WordPress before comments are working again 
Update: I’ve managed to coax comments back into life. It looks like my problem was that the blacklist file got too big. I’ve had to cut it back by deleting a lot of entries. Unfortunately this is only really a short-term fix.
Florida delenda est!
Norm links to a long post by Counago & Spaves on the subject of sociopaths, and how to recognise and deal with them.
Here’s Stout’s description early on in the text of the archetypal sociopath (the terms sociopath and psychopath are used interchangeably by researchers in this field):
He or she is more spontaneous, or more intense, or somehow more “complex” or sexier, or more entertaining than everyone else. Sometimes this “sociopathic charisma” is accompanied by a grandiose sense of self-worth . . .
In addition, sociopaths have a greater than normal need for stimulation, which results in their taking frequent social, physical, financial, or legal risks. Characteristically, they can charm others into attempting dangerous ventures with them, and as a group they are known for their pathological lying and conning, and their parasitic relationships with “friends.”
Stout continues
. . . sociopaths are noted especially for their shallowness of emotion, the hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to have, a certain breathtaking callousness. They have no trace of empathy and no genuine interest in bonding emotionally with a mate. Once the surface charm is scraped off, their marriages are loveless, one-sided and almost always short-term. If a marriage partner has any value to the sociopath, it is because the partner is viewed as a possession, one that the sociopath may feel angry to lose, but never sad or accountable.
As soon as I read this, I immediately thought “Jeffrey Archer”. He’s almost a textbook case.
There are further sociological considerations that require exploration, however, touched on by both Stout and Hare but largely outside the scope of their work: the way that contemporary capitalism actively encourages sociopathic behaviour through an ethos that glorifies nonconformism, as well as the danger posed to the majority of people in any hierarchically structured society when sociopaths occupy dominant positions.
I’ve heard this plenty of times before, how the structure of many corporations rewards sociopathic behaviour, and results in Kenneth Lays and Robert Maxwells.
Then of course, there’s the political ideology that’s explicitly sociopathic in nature.
Read the whole thing.
I’ve been reading some mixed reviews of the current Mostly Autumn spring tour, which finished at Bilston last night. I greatly enjoyed the Rhyl show, but I’ve read a couple of very negative accounts of Friday’s show at Harpendon, focussing on the appallingly bad sound. In contrast, all accounts of the final night at Bilston sound like a superb show in front of an appreciative crowd. Makes me wish I’d gone.
There have been two noted criticisms of this tour. First, the band don’t seem quite as tight as they were in 2005, although some nights were worse than others. Secondly, the current setlist is very conservative. On this tour I feel they’ve included too many ‘oldies’ at the expense of much stronger recent material. At Rhyl, they only played three songs from “Storms” and just two from “Passengers”.
While the first two albums have their moments, I think MA’s songwriting and arrangements improved dramatically from “The Last Bright Light” onwards. Passengers and Storms both contain a lot songs that make much of the first two albums look rather half-formed and perhaps a little dated. But MA are still playing more songs from the ten-year old debut than the current album.
Why are songs like “Bitterness Burnt”, “Simple Ways”, “Black Rain” or “Storms” itself not being played live?
I understand long-term fans wanting to hear the oldies, but I get the impression that it’s the more recent material that makes the most impact on would-be new fans. If MA are to survive and prosper, they need to expand their fanbase.
I’m not saying that MA should abandon their roots completely, and play an entire set based on “Passengers” onwards. But I do think they haven’t quite got the balance between old and new quite right on this tour.
I’ve also posted this to the official MA forum, where it’s gathered a few responses
First it was terrorist training camps. Now the ever excellent Dave Neiwert shows us something that looks disturbingly like a Hitler Youth Rally. The scale of these fundamentalist “Battle Cry” events makes it harder to dismiss them as a tiny lunatic fringe. It smells worryingly like Fascism, though as Neiwert points out, they haven’t yet progressed to eliminationist violence. They do, however, preach what looks like a totalitarian political ideology that bears little or no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
We shouldn’t be too smug in England, though. The racist BNP that gained significant votes in a few parts of east London in the local elections a few weeks ago are real McCoy Fascist with no pseudo- or crypto- prefixing it. Despite their attempt to airbrush out their nazi skinhead following, the threat of eliminationist streetfighting violence isn’t far below the surface.
Mike Mearls profiles The Year Ahead in RPG Releases: 2006
The Eighties RPG, 2006 Edition: Remember that game from the 80s? It’s back! Again! We changed the rules for ducking behind a platypus to avoid detection by an incoming torpedo. And you’ll buy it, suckahs! We even went in and screwed up some functional rules to set the stage for the 2007 edition. Eat it, fanboi.
It’s Another Game About Angst!: If mom refuses to buy you that Limp Bizkit album, if dad and his “how was school today” is just a stupid face, then this is the RPG for you. You are an outcast with great powers, but should you use those powers to do anything the suffocating world of mundanity will destroy. Yours is a dance at the edge of oblivion. Guaranteed to reinforce every damaging, self-defeating, and ego boosting falsity that you cling to! That pointless, trained monkey job you have, the one that requires minimal skills that are still beyond your talents, won’t be so soul crushing once you play this game.
We Will Kill Stuff Because That’s What We Like 8th Edition: 979 more ways to kill things! 372 more things to kill! 439 more things to take off the corpses of dead things! Are we having fun yet?
Cruel, cruel. I have a nasty feeling that “Pointless Licensed RPG Number Eight” is taking the piss out of something I actually own…
More positively, Troy Costisick asks: “Does Setting Still Matter?“, and comes to the unsurprising conclusion that it does.
Forgeite-Narrativist games tend to emphasise system at the expense of setting, possibly a reaction against the 90s emphasis on setting at the expense of system. That trend led to games with complex, baroque settings married to often clunky and sometimes vitually unplayable systems. Can you say “Deadlands?”.
I find it difficult to conceive of a game that doesn’t actually have a setting, because I find it impossible to create a meaningful character without some sort of context for him to exist in. I guess this reason why I never understood the appeal of Tavern Gaming on RPGAMES.
Of course, there are a lot of games that don’t have settings, but instead provide the tools to create one. The most extreme example is Primetime Adventures, where you actually create the setting as part of the game.
This makes me wonder about how much setting a game should include. How much is too much? Or two little? The history of RPGs is littered with games for which supplement after supplement added up to hundreds of pages detailing cities, nations, cults and societies, with vast numbers of canon NPCs all tied together with an all-encompassing metaplot. It all makes me wonder how much of that stuff ever got used in a typical campaign. But is it better to describe a cool setting in broad brushstrokes, and let individual groups have fun filling in the details?
These are some of the problems I’ve wrestled with in the Kalyr RPG I’m still trying to write….
Finland’s scary-looking Lordi have won the Eurovision Song Contest, much to the horror of the Greek religious right, who ignorantly labelled them as ‘Satanic’. I notice they got 12 points from Greece, so not all Greeks agree with their po-faced clerics. They also got 12 points from Britain, which indicates there are still rock fans in Britain.
Although described as “death metal”, this lot are more Kiss than Opeth. The song is actually quite commercial. I had earlier thought it sounded like a cross between Rammstein and The Darkness. My brother says there’s an element of Sweden’s Europe (remember them?).
Most of the rest of the acts were pretty awful Eurocheese with very few exceptions. Norway’s “Alvedansen” was the best of the bunch, vaguely reminiscent of Blackmores Night, but ultimately Norway’s Elves couldn’t compete with Finland’s Orcs. Lithuania’s deliberately stupid “We are the winners” had high entertainment value, and gained quite a few votes. The fact that they were obviously taking the piss out of the whole thing upset some southern Europeans who actually take Eurovision seriously. Britain’s lame entry performed by a twit named after a soap powder came absolutely nowhere, exactly where it deserved to come.
I’m not surprised that Finland won. They’ve attracted the attention a lot of rock fans who don’t normally pay much attention to the contest. It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever voted.
Now got tickets for Blue Öyster Cult at Manchester Academy on July 22. They’re currently booked for the smaller Academy 3, but sometimes gigs there have been switched to the larger Academy 2 if they sell enough tickets quickly enough. Should be a good show, whichever hall it’s in.
I’m also considering Anathema in September at the same venue, although I’m still in two minds about it. I saw a superb show by them about five years ago, playing a set drawing heavily from the “Judgement” and “Alternative 4” albums. But their most recent albums have moved too far towards an indie-style sound for my tastes, and their support slot for Porcupine Tree was a disappointment.
Charlie Stross combines his skills as writer of near-future SF with his experiences of working in the software industry to give us a report on the state of the National Identity Register, May 2016. It’s not pretty.
The program is costing the country, and you personally, close to �2Bn a year, rather than the initially projected �5Bn over a decade, and it has totally failed to achieve its objectives. It is, in fact, the biggest fiasco since the Poll Tax.
… All because of the quid pro quo the French government demanded in return for closing the Sangatte refugee camp (i.e. that the UK adopt an ID card), and Tony Blair’s Americanophilia (which caused him to demand that the British ID card follow the example of the US REAL ID Act and use biometric authentication), and the gravy-train instincts of the usual government IT project contractors.
The Guardian’s Paul Harris looks at the history behind America’s obsession with the car, including the deliberate destruction of mass-transit systems across much of the country in favour of massive state-subsidised highway construction. He gets a sense of schadenfreude at the fallout from rising fuel prices.
The focus on the car was a tragedy of human planning. Nor is it ending. Though much has been written about the revitalisation of American downtowns in recent years, by far the more important socio-economic phenomenon is the growth of the exurbs. These are the suburbs of the suburbs and - believe it or not - or even more car dependant. They are so spread out, so distanced from city centres and so utterly car-centric that mass transit is inconceivable for them.
But they are also now in pain. The current American obsession is not Iraq, it is not NSA wiretapping or even the never-ending abortion debate. It is quite simply petrol prices. Americans are being squeezed at the pump, now paying more than $3 a gallon. That is still cheap by most European standards but the shock is palpable in America. It also undercuts the economic model of the exurbs, rendering commuting costs so painful that suddenly, at long last, living by the car alone is starting to become unattractive.
Thank God, I say. There is little political or cultural will in America to tackle the love of the car. But brutal economics might just achieve it. Whenever I see those petrol prices ticking higher I give a lonely little cheer. I keep it quiet of course. I’m already seen as nuts just for liking small cars.
Of course I expect most petrolheads to dismiss this as typical Guardian posturing. I would guess most Americans from outside of half-a-dozen of the oldest cities are about as aware of their own car-dependence as a fish is aware of it’s dependence on water. Where else in the world is “Looser Cruiser” slang for a bus?
