Where Worlds Collide

I guess it’s appropriate for a rainy bank holiday weekend. My copy of special edition of Mostly Autumn‘s Storms Over Still Water arrived yesterday. Since MA play the sort of music that requires several spins before it can properly be appreciated, I’ll write a full review once I’ve had a chance to listen to it a few times.

Time for another meme. This one comes via Perverse Access Memory:

List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can�t really understand the fuss over.

Since this blog covers multiple interests that are beyond the ken of “mundanes”, I’ll try and include one from each of them.

1. Depot layouts: A model railway consisting of a traction maintenance depot, with loads of locomotives, but no coaches or freight wagons. Sorry, but I’m interested in trains, not just locomotives on their own. At one point, for diesel and electric era modelling at any rate, depot layouts had become as bad a cliche as those endless GWR branch termini (half of which were of Ashburton)
2. Morrissey and The Smiths: A good candidate for the most overrated singer of all time. If this self-obsessed bore was really as good as his fanboys claim he is, he’d have sold a lot more records than he did. At least Roger Waters had some music to back up his miserablist lyrics.
3. The entire superhero genre: Comics, films, RPGs, the lot. I find the common tropes of the genre so inherently ridiculous I’m unable to suspend disbelief enough to care about the characters or the stories. If people started developing incredible superhuman powers, why do they adopt silly codenames, wear brightly-coloured Spandex costumes with their underpants over their trousers, and Fight Crime! And silliest of all, why do they always have to have secret mundane identities? And why does the presence of vast numbers of superpowered beings have no significant effect on history or culture?
4. Dice Pools: As used in Storyteller, and the horrid Deadlands. I guess the idea behind dice pools in RPG game mechanics was to create a level playing field between those who could do basic arithmetic in their heads, and those who are functionally innumerate. The problem with too many dice pool mechanics is that the designers themselves don’t seem to understand the probability curves of their own systems, which for me can lead to some very unsatisfactory gaming. When I keep rolling critical failures, I’d actually like to know whether I’m just being unlucky, or whether I’m attempting things my character doesn’t have the skill level for. Or whether the probability curve is so opaque that the GM doesn’t know what target numbers to set.
5. Football: If I go to the pub at lunchtime with work colleagues, most of the time they spend the entire lunch hour talking about bloody football. I’m sure the number of sad obsessives amongst football fandom exceed the total number of roleplayers, railway modellers and prog-rock fans. And when was the last time serious drunken violence erupted at a model railway exhibition or an RPG convention?

And now I’m supposed to pass the meme on. I’d like to nominate Amadán, except his blog is in limbo. Or Steve “Electric Nose” Jones, but he doesn’t do memes. But I can nominate Scott, Silkenray, and Carl Cravens.

Tom Coates thinks that Trackback is dead.

I think it’s time we faced the fact that Trackback is dead. We should state up front - the aspirations behind Trackback were admirable. We should reassert that we understand that there is a very real need to find mechanisms to knit together the world of webloggers and to allow conversations across multiple weblogs to operate effectively. We must recognise that Trackback was one of the first and most important attempts to work in that area. But Nevertheless, we have to face the fact - Trackback is dead.

It has been killed by spam and by spammers - by the sheer horror of ping after ping pushing incest and bestiality links. It has been killed by the exploitation of human beings quite prepared to desecrate the work of tens of thousands of people in order that they should scrabble together a few coins. It has been killed by the experience of an inbox overwhelmed by the automated rape of our creative endeavours.

Trackback has been disabled on this site for several months. A spammer actually broke it, by posting so much trackback spam in one go that the site exceeded it’s disk quota and corrupted the database. I have since had little indication to fix it, and trackback will not be coming back in the forseeable future. It’s just not worth the hassle any more. Thanks to spammers, the cost to me in time and aggravation of supporting trackbacks is far more than their utility.

Comments are still hanging in there, just. I have considered getting rid of comments as well, since I got very few legitimate comments and rather too much spam. But recently I’ve had a couple of posts recently that have generated a significant (for me) number of comments, and for the moment, comments are still worth having.

For now.

After far too long an absence, Fudge Factor is back! The format is changing slightly; rather than monthly issues, they’re aiming for one article each week. Starting things off is a modern-day adventure, Ghost Hunters of New England.

More on the difficulties for non-American artists attempting to tour the US. The Ministry of Information links to this entry from David Byrne’s Journal (No permalinks, it’s the April 16th entry)

The tightening of the borders in recent years, while it may be understandable regarding genuinely suspicious individuals, is in fact applied with almost no rhyme or reason — although in fact it may only appear to be without reason. A friend told me over a lunch meeting that a chunk of Pina Bausch�s troupe of dancers, based in Wuppertal, Germany, were denied entry, which effectively scuttled the performances that were booked months ahead of time. A tango group in Buenos Aires told me a week or two ago that they have toured Europe 3 times recently but have been consistently denied U.S. visas, so at this point the U.S. doesn’t even figure into their performance plans. Yale says that some of the new regulations make the applicants pay when they apply, without knowing if they will even get the visa. Needless to say some individual members of many bands and troupes are refused visas, usually at the last minute, which effectively cancels the tour. The promoters in the U.S. have become loath to even book or schedule foreign acts these days, as the odds are just not in their favor. The prospect of spending money on promotion, ads and radio only to have the show cancelled by the INS when the act applies for their visas is discouraging, and financially ruinous to some small promoters — so they eventually just don�t end up taking the risk.

I had earlier suggested that this amounts to economic protectionism, but David Byrne suggests a darker agenda. He goes on to suggest this might be a deliberate ploy to keep the American public ignorant and free of foreign influence and inspiration. I personally think there’s still a very large element of plain old bureaucratic stupidity, but the end result just happens to be awfully convenient for the ideological and cultural agenda of America’s current rulers. Are the cancellations of Blackfield’s US tour and Mostly Autumn’s appearance at Rosfest collateral damage from the US right’s so-called “Culture Wars”?

And in other news, from Silkenray

Habeas Corpus is denied on the grounds that while what the government has been doing is unfair, it isn’t actually unconstitutional… and so we ready to move to England.

I had mixed feelings when I heard Fish was going to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Marillion’s 1985 concept album “Misplaced Childhood” by playing album live in it’s entirety. Although many fans consider it to be their masterpiece, it’s never been one of my favourite Marillion albums; I have always preferred the underrated “Clutching at Straws” and “Fugazi”. And in the 17 years since Fish and Marillion went their separate ways, Fish has built up a solid back catalogue of his own solo work. Would Manchester Academy 2 see a triumphal revisit of past glories for old time’s sake? Or would Fish’s diminished voice fail to do the old material justice, and result in a pale shadow of what had once been?

Support was a female-fronted local band, The Haights, who played 70s-style hard rock with a funky edge. If they’d been Scottish, they might have been an early version of the band Frozen Gold from Iain Banks’ novel “Espediair Street”. They played a short but entertaining set, making up in enthusiasm what they lacked in experience.

The hall was packed by the time Fish took to the stage, launching straight into the highly-critical-of-America anthem ‘Big Wedge’. This managed to pack a punch even without the horn section from the original recording. His version on the second line, with “I’d just cleared immigration JFK-K-K” isn’t going to win him any friends in the Red States! This tour the band consisted of a returned Frank Usher on guitar, Steve Vantsis on bass, Tony Turrell on keys, John Tonks on drums, and a second guitarist and backing singer whose names I didn’t catch. Not quite as tight as the last time I saw Fish, back in 1999, but good enough.

The first half of the set was a greatest hits of his solo material, with most of the favourites, including ‘Credo’, ‘Brother 52′, ‘Goldfish and Clowns’ and ‘Family Business’. Fish’s voice held up most of the time, but did go ragged on one or two occasions, which made me wonder whether it would hold out for the whole show.

There was supposed to have been a ten-minute interval, but since things were running a few minutes late, the band remained on stage while Fish engaged in some banter with members of the audience. He told us how much he both loves and hates the film “Still Crazy” (about a 70s band on a comeback tour), because so much seems true to his own career. He keeps seeing “signs”, he told us. Behind the venue is a small park, and he saw a magpie that afternoon. This was A Sign, he told us! Of what?

The second half of the show was what many of the punters had really come for, the complete “Misplaced Childhood”. This was the point when the crowd really erupted. Large sections of the audience were singing along to Fish’s impenetrable and deeply personal lyrics. (My brother likened them to obsessive Morrisey fans; Ouch!) If Fish’s voice had been slightly shaky earlier on, he recovered his strength now, from the eerie ‘Pseudo Silk Kimono’, through the hit singles ‘Kayleigh’ and ‘Lavender’, the dark and twisted ‘Bitter Suite’ and the anthemic ‘Heart of Lothian’. The band made a good job of reproducing Marillion’s complex music, with Frank Usher making a credible stab at Steve Rothery’s guitar parts.

Call be a heretic, but I’ve always felt the first side of the original LP contained all the best moments, and the second side dragged a little. So it was tonight; although it still has it’s moments I think I’d rather have heard Fish’s later epic, ‘Plague of Ghosts’.

Having already overrun the official curfew, there was time for just one encore. I was expecting Fish’s traditional encore, ‘The Company’, but the big man decided to go right back to the dawn of time and treat the audience to a rousing version of Marillion’s very first single, ‘Market Square Heroes’. Are you following me?

Overall, a good show, if not quite a great one. Fish’s voice will never be what it was twenty years ago, but it was far from the disaster I feared it might be. The band continue on tour in England (but surprisingly not London, or Scotland), then to south America before returning for some more European dates in the summer.

Official Fish Website www.the-company.com

Today was the first time for a long while I’ve been to a major train show (Derby) without buying any new stock at all.

Considered (but decided against) a square headlight Hobbytrain/Kato Re6/6 (a fourth one would be overkill), a Fleischmann DB BR185 (Not confident I can renumber it, so I’ll wait for Fleischmann to bring one out with a different running number from the one I already have), a Kato Re460 (Like I really need anotherRe460? I’ve already got ten of the things in assorted liveries!) a Dapol 73 (Since my British outline interests centre on Cornwall, which isn’t somewhere 73s tended to visit), and a Kato Japanese Class 9600 2-8-0 (Really don’t want to start buying Japanese stuff; who knows where it might end!)

Should I be worried, or am I doing the right thing by saving my money for the things I really *do* want? Such as the Wessex 158 and the forthcoming ATM Silver Bullets.

On the other hand, I have recently ordered a Freightliner 66 from CJM, maybe that’s my modelling budget accounted for for a while…

Some good layouts on display, though. I liked the minimum-space (5′x2’6″) Swiss layout who’s name I can’t remember. The 4mm urban “Farkham”, and the N gauge East German “Colditz Ost Brucke” were excellent; the latter is simple but effective, centering on a bridge carrying a double track main line over a broad river; no stations or yards, and the only structures apart from the centrepiece bridge were a couple of small cottages.

If you live in Britain, especially in a marginal seat, you’ll have seen the posters warning us how hordes of illegal immigrants let out of prison will infect your daughter with the hospital superbug unless you vote Tory. With lots of white space, they’re very tempting for ‘unofficial additions’. Such as this one (Click on the picture for a larger version that’s easier to read)

Now this site lets you create you own parody versions of these awful posters. Such as:

Or this:

Or what about:

And finally, for any Cthulhu fans reading this:

Link from Harry’s Place

I loved the first two of Miéville’s baroque steampunk fantasies, “Perdito Street Station” and “The Scar“. Set in a phantasmagorical mix of steam-age technology, D&D magic and cyberpunk attitude, they managed to breath new life into some old cliches, and produce something that was far more than the sum of the parts.

The third novel in this setting, “Iron Council” tells the story of the construction of a transcontinental railway, who’s striking construction crew rebelled and struck out on their own across the wilderness, laying down rails in front of the construction train and taking them up again behind. But despite some nice touches, such as the golem magic, I found this book something of a disappointment compared to it’s predecessors.

With the action switching between the city of New Crozubon and the rebels in the wilderness, and between present-day and flashback, the whole thing seemed to lack the focus of his two earlier works. This time, Miéville’s politics is far more heavy-handed and comes over very preachy. Being shown what’s wrong with unrestrained robber-baron capitalism is one thing, but sometimes it felt like being beaten over the head with a hammer-and-sickle. The biggest flaw of all was the weak characterisation, so bad that I found I didn’t care what happened to several of the leading characters by the end of the book.

While the book isn’t a total failure, Miéville is capable of far better than this.

I have decided (following advice) to remove this post and the associated comments - people had been posting potentially libellous things concerning a situation I know little or nothing about.

Move along, there’s nothing to see…