How to Sing the Blues

Posted on May 9, 2003 by Tim Hall

From Common Sense and Wonder, (Link from Sasha Castel)

1. Most Blues begin, “Woke up this morning.”

2. ” I got a good woman” is a bad way to begin the Blues, ‘less you stick something nasty in the next line, like ” I got a good woman, with the meanest face in town.”

3. The Blues is simple. After you get the first line right, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes … sort of: “Got a good woman – with the meanest face in town. Got teeth like Margaret Thatcher – and she weigh 500 pound.”

You have to have an authentic blues name, of course. A name like “Nigel” just doesn’t cut it.

19. Make your own Blues name (starter kit):
a. name of physical infirmity (Blind, Cripple, Lame, etc.)
b. first name (see above) plus name of fruit (Lemon, Lime, Kiwi,etc.)
c. last name of President (Jefferson, Johnson, Fillmore, etc.)
For example, Blind Lime Jefferson, or Cripple Kiwi Fillmore, etc. (Well, maybe not “Kiwi.”)

Let’s see, “Tone deaf Loganberry Clinton?”

Posted in Music | Comments Off

Hungarian crossing disaster

Posted on May 8, 2003 by Tim Hall

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Many dead in Hungary crash

Once again, a disaster on a level crossing. An express train hit a bus full of elderly German tourists, and 33 people are dead, all of them from the bus. Although the train was derailed, the train driver survived, and there were no serious injuries among the passengers.

It may be that initial eyewitness reports turn out to be inaccurate; but it appears that the bus driver entered the crossing ignoring the flashing red light. Whether through inattention or pure recklessness we’ll never know; the driver died in the crash.

Such accidents are relatively rare in Britain, where the majority of road/rail crossings have barriers, and the only ungated crossings are either on branch lines with few trains, or minor roads with low traffic. I think they assess the risk by multplying the number of trains on the line by the average number of road vehicles using the road, and there will be barriers in the result is greater than n.

It’s an open question as to who’s responsibility it should be to pay for safety equipment on level crossings. At the moment it seems to be the railway authorities that have to come up with the money, when 99% of all crossing accidents are caused by inattentive or reckless road users.

Posted in Railways | Comments Off

Salam is Back!

Posted on May 7, 2003 by Tim Hall

Salam Pax’s Where is Raed ? is back online! For those who have been living under a rock for the past two months (or don’t read blogs other than this one), Salem Pax is a blogger from Baghdad. A lot of the blogosphere have been worried about his fate since his blog stopped being updated once the Iraqi phone network went down. Here you can read his account of the fall of Baghdad (and the subsequent looting) from the point of view of an ordinary Iraqi.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Why does the sound suck for the support band?

Posted on May 7, 2003 by Tim Hall

From Hot Rails to Hull, the full story behind Blue Öyster Cult’s poor show at the Castle Donnington Monsters of Rock festival in 1981: The soundman George Geranios tells the story.

It was now the Cult’s turn. There was much consternation during the set change. No one seemed to know exactly what the problem with the system was, but we all knew there was a problem. We started the set and there was very little volume available. The sound check settings produced an anemic squeak from the huge mass of boxes flanking the stage.

At some point during the set I looked up to see Malcolm Hill himself crawling around the stage right stack at a great height, ears into boxes. I was told not to try to turn the system up, but the band is inaudible. I try anyway and as I push the main faders up, the system volume decreases even more! Things are upside down, and I would be upside down if I tried that again, so said my minders at the front of house.

At one point during this farce I got on the talkback mike between songs and told the band to simply leave the stage. Maybe they could come back out when things were sorted. If they continued without acknowledging the problem then our Donington appearance would be shot. They do not do this and our Donington appearance is shot. The Band finishes with a flourish and……. there is nothing. No response from the audience. Sixty thousand metal fans stand sullen and silent. It is, as they say, an oil painting out there.

He then talks of a later Donnington, in 1987

I remember reading a telling article in Kerrang! the day before the show. The essence of the piece was an extremely perceptive winge about the Donington show sound. The author had attended many a show there and wondered why, given the virtual mountain of speakers, all the opening acts sounded weak and puny whilst the headliner sounded massive. What if you didn’t give a toss about the headliner? Your favorite(s) sounded lame! Shouldn’t every band sound good? You paid your hard earned pounds to see and hear all the bands. The author had heard this at all the Donington Park shows and was quite fed-up.

He then goes on to describe in details I don’t fully understand, how the sound for everyone other than the headliners, Bon Jovi, was deliberately sabotaged.

Attitudes like this limit audience enjoyment and essentially rob the audience of what is rightfully theirs: a full and effective show. It’s also a pussy move. It implies the headliner does not have the confidence to carry the show without kneecapping the competition.

Does this always happen? No, but it happens often enough to be a real problem for touring professionals. It is an unfortunate part of the politics of the music business. These decisions are almost always band decisions implemented by management with the complicity of the sound company.

Posted in Music | 1 Comment

Layout Inspiration

Posted on May 7, 2003 by Tim Hall

When you’re building a small 12′ by 2′ shelf layout because that’s all you’ve got room for, things like this can make you jealous, both of the space, and the likelyhood of remaining in the same place for long enough to get something substantial built!

Even if you don’t model American railroads, such things are wonderful inspiration. It’s just the sort of thing I’d love to build a British-based equivalent of, something like the Cornwall main line between Lostwithiel (or perhaps further east!) and the terminus of Penzance.

Posted in Railways | Comments Off

A Policeman’s lot is not a happy one

Posted on May 5, 2003 by Tim Hall

From BBC News, an Israeli policeman responding to complaints about a noisy party got more than he bargained for.

The rowdy women had ordered a male stripper dressed as a policeman and, thinking the stripper had arrived, began trying to undress and caress him, ignoring his protestations.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Game Wish 44: Picking Games

Posted on May 5, 2003 by Tim Hall

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 44: Picking Games

How do you choose games to join or to run? What factors influence you: timing, people, system, genre, etc.? Do you weigh different factors for different kinds of games, e.g., online vs. tabletop vs. LARP? Is it a group decision or a decision you make on your own?

It’s a long time since I’ve played in a long-running face-to-face campaign; all my gaming nowadays is either PBeM, PBMB, or one-shot convention games.

At Gypsycon two weeks ago I didn’t get to personally choose the games I played in, but got allocated to games based on a best guess of my preferences derived from the PBMBs I play in. However, when I do get to choose the games, either on line games, or at larger public conventions, there are three factors that influence things:

First, if the game premise sounds sufficiently interesting, or is a game system or genre I’ve always wanted to play but never got round to it, or is game I’ve enjoyed a lot in the past. When I first started online gaming I joined a lot of games in systems or gameworlds I’d have sitting on my shelf but never actually played, such as Call of Cthulhu, Traveller and Castle Falkenstein. At conventions it’s been similar, with games like Hero Wars, In Nomine, Nobilis or GURPS Transhuman Space.

Second is the reputation of the GM. A convention game run by someone like Phil Masters or Mark “L’Ange” Baker, or a PBMB run by the likes of David Edelstein or Maughn Matsuoka is always going to get me interested, especially if it’s a genre or system that interests me anyway.

The third is when the GM headhunts me into his or her game, which is a common method of recuitment on online games, especially on forums like Dreamlyrics where there’s a limited pool of potential players. It’s also happened at conventions where I’ve been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a GM with an empty slot in his game has seen me wandering around not doing anything.

Posted in Games | Comments Off

Game Wish 42: Reusing Characters

Posted on May 5, 2003 by Tim Hall

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 42: Reusing Characters

Do you ever reuse characters from game to game? When you reuse characters, what do you bring from game to game: a name and a personality, stats, or more? What kinds of characters do you reuse and why? If you GM, do you like to have players bring in existing characters? Why?

While I prefer to create a new character from scratch each time, I have reused one character, (the now infamous Karl Tolhurst). As I said in the previous Game WISH, I prefer characters that closely mesh with the world’s settings rather than generic archetype in generic worlds, so for most games that entails creating a specific character for the game world in question.

The one character I have reused had a lot of changes to his back story, taking him back two years earlier in his career, to a point before the tragedies that were a defining point of the original character concept. Arguably it’s not really the same character at all. I’m not going to rule out reusing a character in the future, but again I’ll rewrite the backstory and change aspects of the character to fit in with the new game.

As a GM, I’m not really bothered whether the players recycle old characters or not, as long as they either fit my world and can be modified until they will fit.

Posted in Games | Comments Off

Game Wish 41

Posted on May 5, 2003 by Tim Hall

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 41: Coherence

I’ve got seriously behind on these.

How coherent do you expect a game world to be? Is a game world merely a stage for the characters, or does it have a life of its own? How deep does it need to be to satisfy you? How do you contribute as a player or GM to making the game world more coherent, if you do?

I place a lot of importance on coherence. To me, internal consistancy matters far more than adherence to genre tropes, one reason why I don’t particularly like either DnD-style generic fantasy or spandex’n capes superhero games.

My model for a game universe is definitely the book trilogy with 50 pages of appendices at the back rather than the generic Hollywood action movie with lots of kewl fight scenes but a backstory that doesn’t make sense (The Matrix, anyone?). I like game worlds with a lot of detail, that give the characters some sort of context in which they exist.

Saying that, the world has to be accessible. Even if there are several hundred pages of notes describing nations, locations, personalities, religions and so on, it should still be possible to summarise in a paragraph or two. There are some very rich fantasy worlds, such as Glorantha where the density of internal references is so great that newcomers to the world can easily feel intimidated by the amount of information they’re expected to assimilate. The publishers of Glorantha have countered this to some extent by focussing on just one culture within the wider world, at least for beginning scenarios.

My own world Kalyr suffers from this problem to some extent. I’ve tried running convention style scenarios focussing on just one organisation (The Karazthan, the secretive but powerful guild of technology), avoiding the need to dump a whole load of information on other guilds or organisations on the players heads. This approach seemed to me to be a success, if the game I ran at Gypsycon is anything to go by.

Posted in Games | Comments Off

Down with suburban sprawl!

Posted on May 4, 2003 by Tim Hall

Transport Blog links to this article, The New, Neighborly Architecture by Philip Langdon and Andres Duany, about alternatives to the typical low density suburbia of many American cities.

I’ve read many articles on the blogosphere about the failure of suburban light and heavy rail in America, and the apparent addiction of Americans to their cars. The trouble seems to be that the layout of American cities doesn’t give any real alternatives. The population density of most places is too low for any form of mass transit to be economically viable, and the result is cities where it’s simply not possible to live without a car.

Sometimes I wonder if American commentators that advocate light rail have visited Europe and seen the vibrant city centres and efficient mass transit there, and then wanted to recreate this in American cities. But simply building light rail systems won’t change things. The suburbs, designed and built around the car, are too just spread out.

As I’ve mentioned before, three years ago, my then employer closed it’s UK development centre and relocated it to Atlanta, Georgia. Although I was offered the chance to relocate, as a non driver there was no way I could live in the suburban spawl where the company had it’s offices.

I’m glad to see that at least some Americans are looking at alternatives, and recognising that the car suburb isn’t the only way.

Posted in Railways | Comments Off