BBC NEWS | England | End of line fears for mail train
It looks like the famous Post Office Railway will join the Travelling Post Offices into oblivion. For those that have never heard of it, it’s an automated narrow-gauge railway running beneath the streets of London that originally connected seven Post Office sorting offices.
Hopefully it won’t end up going for scrap. If it can’t be used as a freight line, perhaps it has a future as a passenger-carrying tourist attraction?
This Daily Torygraph story about the Belgian pensioner killed by his own booby-trap sounds too much like an RPG scenario to be true. Was he a fan of Gary Gygax’s “Tomb of Horrors”?
At first Belgian police assumed that the 79-year-old had committed suicide and bled to death from a gunshot wound to the neck after finding him at his home near the town of Charlerois.
It was an assumption which nearly cost one detective his life as he searched the house and opened a booby-trapped wooden chest. A shotgun hidden inside went off, missing the policeman by inches.
The detectives beat a hasty retreat and called in military mine-clearance experts who, after unravelling a series of enigmatic clues left in the engineer’s scribbled notes, uncovered a total of 19 death traps, among them an apparently harmless but lethal pile of dinner plates, the television and even an exploding crate of beer.
“We have never come across anything like it before. It was all fiendishly clever. The house was booby-trapped from top to bottom. We’ve had to take everything apart,” said one of the explosives experts.
It was all a plot, it seems, to get back at his ex-wife.
he set about installing the traps, most of them using concealed 12-bore shotguns triggered by barely-visible nylon threads or fishing line.
His thinking appeared to be that if he were evicted, he would ensure that the new owner would not live long enough to enjoy the benefits of the house.
The military engineers found that Dethy had numbered and catalogued each device and left coded notes for the whereabouts of each.
I’m sure some GM, somewhere, is going to make use of this…
I’ve been running my Kalyr PBeM on The Phoenyx for something like five years now. This site, run by Carl and Karen Cravens has been providing mailing lists and gamesmaster tools for PBeMs for a long time before that.
Now they’ve decided to make a major change in the focus of the site, as detailed in this announcement.
Massively Multiplayer Play By E-Mail
Okay, that header is kind of a joke. But we realized that what we often have in our application file is a gamemaster who has had a good, unique idea that he wants to try out. And that’s neat, except: when he has the next good, unique idea, is he going to want to continue with this one? If something unexpected happens to him, will we ever get another gamemaster who’s interested in picking up that game?
In the Phoenyx brainstorming discussions, we’ve adopted a policy of voicing any idea, no matter how weird, because we really felt we needed something different. So my idea was MMPBEM. A shared, standardized world, where gamemasters can run individual games, but benefit from a shared environment. Now gamemasters can exchange ideas (plots, NPCs, monsters), have crossover plots, even run opposing groups of players. New gamemasters can come from the ranks of players, because the world is all laid out in a shared format (probably the Wiki). The problem of non-standard offsite game homepages is solved, because nobody’s going to come to us with a pre-built game and already-existing pages.
To do all that, we need to build worlds. Worlds will have to be Phoenyx property (or the Phoenyx will have to have an unlimited license), to avoid the “I’m taking my marbles and going home” syndrome, so they have to be built from scratch. That’s usually a huge project, but in this case they really just need to be “generic” worlds with all the usual tropes for their genre… we’re specifically not striving for uniqueness, we’re just looking for a shared framework gamemasters can hang their own stories on.
I have very mixed feelings on this. It’s a bit like my attitude towards modular layouts. I like the idea of shared worlds, in that it enables something much bigger than anything a single GM can come up with. On the other hand, I’m less keen on the sort of compromises I’d have to make. Bit like the unrealistic 3-track format of Ntrak.
I also have to admit that Dwarves ‘n Elves generic fantasy isn’t to my taste either. As Karen said in the ensuing discussion:
We’re going for a sense-of-comfortable-like-old-shoes rather than sense-of-wonder, with the basic tenets of the world.
That’s really not to my taste at all. I loathe the hack fantasy of the likes of David Eddings and Robert Jordan. But I have to admit they’re enormously popular, an awful lot of people love the familiar tropes.
However, Kalyr will continue more or less unchanged, because:
Existing games get grandfathered in, and nothing about them will really change. So long as someone’s willing to gamemaster them, they’ll continue. Those that can fit into the Phoenyx standard worlds are welcome to do so, of course.
If a current (or even prospective) gamemaster wants to turn his game into a shared one, and is comfortable with all the requirements, that’s doable.
Kalyr as a multi-GM game in it’s own right? I don’t want to make any pronouncements at this stage. Let’s see how things go..
I found out from Scott that Neil Morse, singer and main songwriter of the excellent progressive rock band Spock’s Beard is leaving the band “to pursue a spiritual path”.
Spocks Beard have been one of the best bands on the neo-progressive scene in recent years, a band with a distinctive sound with recognisable elements from the likes of Yes and Gentle Giant, and avoiding sounding too much like early Genesis.
The band have pledged to get a new singer and carry on; whether they can retain the magic without their main songwriter remains to be seen.
Let’s also hope Neil continues making music, albeit of a more explicitly religious nature. Shades of Twelfth Night‘s Geoff Mann, who was eventually ordained as an Anglican priest.
Patrick Crozier of UK Transport mourns the loss of Euston Station in the great act of philistine vandalism in the 1960s. But Steve Karlson of Cold Spring Shops reminds us of the present day threat to the fourth arch of London Paddington, with the plan to replace it with another faceless office block with a dingy underground vault for the passengers.
What’s the economic value of beautiful buildings? How much does Birmingham’s economy suffer from the fact that people’s first impression will be the fume-filled claustrophobic underground vault of New Street station?
The problem with bean counters is they always assign a value of zero to anything that can’t be measured.
If anyone’s waiting for a reply to an email they sent me the last couple of days, it looks like a spammer is to blame!
It appears that a very near neighbour of kalyr.co.uk’s IP address either hosts a spammer or an insecure relay and has ended up on Spamcop‘s RBL list. Since I’ve configured my email client to filter on the header line X-RBL-Blocked, all the email forwarded from my domain name email ended up in the junk mail bin.
Can we class spamming as terrorism?
BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Twelve dead in France train fire.
Today’s hardly been a slow news day, so this story is getting buried a bit. From what I can gather from the BBC report, it sounds remarkably similar to the fire at Taunton 20 years ago, when a small fire in a heater killed ten people by carbon monoxide poisoning.
I remember the initial furore over the fact that some of the train doors were locked, until it was revealed that all the dead were still in their cabins, poisoned in their sleep. Everyone that actually woke up made it out.
Initial reports suggest today’s French tragedy was also caused by a faulty heater; but since five Americans are among the dead I expect at least some warbloggers to blame this on ‘Islamofascist’ terrorism.
Update
Steve Karlson asks what what there was to burn in what looked like a very modern steel-bodied sleeping car. From the Guardian report on the disaster:
The sleeping car was built in 1964 but had been extensively renovated in 1999 and overhauled again last year, Deutsche Bundesbahn said, adding that its age would not in itself have been a factor in the blaze.
I recall reading somewhere that the coach still had wooden interior panelling, which probably fed the fire. (Can’t remember where, otherwise I would have provided a link)
In the Taunton fire I mentioned earlier, a pile of bed-linen had been placed on a heater in the end vestibule (which had inadequate guards). When the heater came on after the train was connected up to the locomotive’s power supply, the linen caught fire. It was the smoke from this, in a confined space, that caused the carbon monoxide that killed the ten fatalities. I don’t think the fire itself spread much beyond the vestibule. Like Nancy, the smoke was the killer
It’s Wednesday, so Carnival of the Vanities #7 is now up at Silflay Hraka.
Not much blogging today; I’m too busy packing up ready to move. Normal service will be resumed at the end of the week.
War Liberal muses about an article in Slate on Monorails. (Most of the musings are in the comments section)
Old-fashioned science fiction cities always seem to be full of monorails; a generation or two ago they were seen as the mass transit of the future. As a child watching Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds, I was enthralled by the vision of aerial monorails replacing the London Tube, and cities linked by high-speed intercity monorails. ‘Serious’ transport publications presented a similar vision. Two rails was the past, one rail was the future!
Of course this brave new world never came to pass. For inter-city travel we now see such wonders as the French TGV, sleeker and more futuristic than anything imagined by Gerry Anderson, but running on the same flanged wheels on steel rail as used a century and a half earlier by George Stephenson. For urban travel we’ve seen the remarkable revival of a form of transport though obsolete three decades before, the tram. Just about the only monorails in Britain to carry passengers are amusement park rides at places like the Beaulieu Motor Museum and Blackpool Pleasure Beach
Monorails have a long history. Right back in 1878 the world saw the not terribly successful and much-ridiculed steam-powered Listowel and Ballybunion Railway in Ireland. 1902 saw the rather more successful Schwebebahn in Wuppertal, Germany, still running today.
The Slate article thinks monorails are a better idea than light rail.
Light-rail options are the current vogue, hailed as low-cost and easy to build. But laying trolley tracks on busy urban streets is more labor-intensive than it sounds. A separate lane must be created, electric wires must be hung to provide power, and streets often need to be widened to accommodate both trains and autos. There’s also the issue of providing crossing points for pedestrians and vehicles. No matter how many safety precautions are put in place, sooner or later an unlucky driver or walker gets smooshed.
I’m not surprised monorails have never really caught on. They’re far more expensive to build than light rail, the overhead supports are going to be obtrusive, and they don’t really have any big advantages over the two-railed alternative. The arguments the Slate argument makes over collisions with other vehicles and pedestrians is exaggerated; a tram is no more dangerous in that regard to a bus!
The Slate article suggests monorail’s advantage is the ‘fun’ factor.
Besides, if you want a lovely view in a monorail town, simply fork over your fare and watch the scenery zip by at 50 miles per hour. It’s a heck of a lot more entertaining than slogging through a city center via light rail.
As crazy as it may sound, that fun factor counts for something—a lot, in fact. The goal of mass transit is to convince people to abandon their cars, which feature such enticing accessories as CD players and elbow room. Light rails are too buslike to impress most commuters, too squished and close to the ground.
Well maybe. But I can’t say I’m really convinced by his arguments. The light rail system in Manchester has enticed people out of their cars, even when much of the route is a conversion of existing heavy rail lines; ridership on the new trams is significantly higher than the trains they replaced. And it’s twice as fast as the bus.
The monorails is doomed as one of those exciting-looking technologies that never really worked in practice, like airships, they represent a future of the past; something out of old-fashioned science-fiction.