Author Archives: Tim Hall

Worst RPGs ever

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Tim Hall

A comment left on another post sent me down the rabbit-hole of the worst RPGs ever.

The less said about “The Unholy Trinity”, the better; all are self-published efforts that as far as I know never saw print editions, and arguably shouldn’t really be considered as proper published games. The first two are notorious purely for the offensive nature of the game content, and only deserve to be flushed down the memory hole. The third, “Hybrid”, is quite literally complete gibberish from beginning to end, and it’s difficult to tell if it’s the ramblings of someone with zero SAN, or the whole thing is an elaborate practical joke by a troll.

Some of those intended as serious games bring back memories. I remember occasional commenter Amadán’s review of Senzar (A rilly kewl game if you’re 14). As for Wraeththu, well, I’ve actually played a convention game using that setting, something I signed up for largely on the reputation of the GM, knowing little or nothing about the game’s background.

At the top of the “bizarre setting” list is this game, based on a series of novels by Storm Constantine. The Wraeththu are hermaphrodite bishonen ubermenschen who are apparently slowly taking over the Earth—and, along the way, converting the occasional human into one of them by transfusing blood into them. Oh yeah, there are only male Wraeththu—and their genitalia look like flowers or anemones.

Although that RPG.net piece more or less admits that the problem with the Wraeththu game was more down to the clunky system that didn’t fit the setting. The game I played didn’t use that system, fortunately. Don’t remember much about the actual game now, suspect it may even pre-date the publication of the official RPG, except I think the player characters were all human, and the hermaphrodite bishonen ubermenschen of the setting were the opposition. Perhaps that premise would have made for a better RPG?

Posted in Games | 1 Comment

Crimson Sky, Sea Mills

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Tim Hall

Jane Setter of Crimson Sky at Sea Mills, Bristol

Some photos from a few months back, Crimson Sky playing their home town of Bristol back in May 2012. The gig was a double headliner with Winter in Eden, held in the Sea Mills community centre after the original pub venue went out of business. It was a stroke of luck that an alternative if unconventional venue was available at short notice.

I was an assistant roadie for the band for that gig, and one of the reasons I never reviewed it at the time was because I was focussing on helping load out afterwards I found I couldn’t remember enough to be able to write a coherent review. One thing I do remember, though, was how cold the venue was. At one point I had trouble operating the camera because my hands were frozen.

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Rob Cottingham – Captain Blue

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Tim Hall

Captain Blue is the second solo album by keyboard player and vocalist Rob Cottingham, best known as a member of Touchstone. Rob has described that album as “a cross-genre-ational album covering the themes of time, self-realisation, death – and not taking yourself too seriously“. It’s a concept album, telling the tale of the mysterious Captain Blue.

The album also features the delightfully named Dr Goatius Foot on bass, Touchstone’s Adam Hodgson on guitars, Gary O’Toole on drums, Heather Findlay on vocals, and on one track, the guitar legend Steve Hackett. While all of these make great contributions, the emphasis is on Rob’s own vocals and keys.

It begins with the dramatic voice of Shane Rimmer, the voice of Thunderbirds’ Scott Tracey, on the epic spoken word “Condemnation“, which reinforces the Gerry Anderson feel of the whole album.

Parts of the album sound far lighter version of Touchstone, whether it’s rockier up-tempo numbers or lush ballads, with the dual male-female harmony lead vocals recalling that band’s early years when Rob handled a greater proportion of the vocals. In a couple of places it veers into dance-pop territory, and I can easily imagine a club remix of “The Drowning Man“. At times it strips right down delicate to piano and vocals. It’s all very song-orientated and highly melodic throughout, made up of of shorter numbers rather than sprawling epics, with the occasional instrumental bridge piece, and the instrumentation is more about atmospherics and colour rather than pyrotechnics. Although Rob does indulge in a keytar solo at one point. The production is immaculate, with a clear and crisp yet rich sound.

Rob Cottingham has taken a supporting role as a vocalist in Touchstone of late, but here he sings the majority of the lead vocals, with a voice that’s been compared with the clean vocals of Opeth’s Mikael Ã…kerfeldt. Heather Findlay takes more of a supporting role here, adding harmonies as well as duets with Rob, only taking sole lead on one or two songs. Her contributions are sublime, with some ethereal yet sensual performances that are as good as anything she’s ever done.

It’s a consistently strong record with little in the way of filler despite a 70 minute running time. High points include “Only Time Will Tell” with so many multi-tracked harmony vocals it sounds like the Mellotron of early King Crimson. It almost makes me wonder if Heather took a trip back in time in Captain Blue’s timeship to lay down the original “choir” settings for the first Mellotron. The album closes with the big wall of sound epic “Soaring to the Sun” with Steve Hackett on guitar, before The Magic Roundabout’s Zeberdee tells us it’s “time for bed”.

This is an impressive piece of work that grows on repeated listens. Any fan of either Touchstone’s music or of Heather Findlay’s vocals ought to love this. But so should anyone that likes atmospheric and melodic rock, written and performed by real musicians and real singers.

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FATE Core vs. The Kalyr RPG

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Tim Hall

Now that FATE Core is out there, I’m wondering what to do with the FATE-based game I’ve had in the works for ages. It’s been on the back-burner of late, but maybe now is the time to pick up the project again.

For those of you unfamiliar with the project, the game is optimised for play-by-post rather than tabletop gaming, and as such some of the mechanics are streamlined and simplified. The setting comes from my long-running science-fantasy game I’ve been running online for years, heavily influenced by the novels of Jack Vance, amongst others.

The most significant changes are:

  • No Stunts. I’ve got a few tweaks to the skill system to allow for things like specialisations, and slightly expanded the role of Aspects.
  • Combat used the old Fudge-style simultaneous rounds rather than the alternate rounds of more recent builds of Fate, resulting in combat that’s round-based rather than turn-based. I find this works better for asynchronous play across multiple time zones.
  • No stress tracks. Losing a round in combat goes straight through to consequences. This speeds up combat, which would otherwise be too slow.

FATE Core has redefined a lot of game terms, for example, “Manoeuvres” have become “Create an Advantage”, and the game text needs to be revised to be consistent with this.

At the moment I’m keeping the simultaneous combat rounds and lack of stress tracks. Stunts on the other hand, I’m still not completely sure about. Early drafts included Stunts, later drafts removed them (Awesome Adventures was an influence here). FATE Core, along with every other FATE game I’ve read with the exception of Awesome Adventures, makes Stunts an important part of the game, which makes me think I ought to revisit this decision. Again.

And the game still needs a catchy and evocative name…

Posted in Kalyr RPG | 1 Comment

It is difficut to read this piece about Azidoazide Azides without thinking of my old school Chemistry teacher Mr Mullins. Or, for that matter, The Alchemists’ Guild of Ankh-Morpork.

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Farewell, Jessops

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Tim Hall

Torquay harbour, June 2009

This was the first photo I ever took with my current camera, taken minutes after buying it from Jessops in Torquay in 2009 after my existing camera died on me while on holiday.

Today came the news that Jessops is to close all stores, putting 1,370 people out of a job. Jessops had been ailing for some time, and there was always a gut feeling that it was only a matter of time before the chain went under. The suddeness of the end still came as something of a shock. Debate rages over whether their downfall was due to the rise of smartphones replacing “real” cameras, competition from Amazon, or simply poor customer service.

The Torquay branch where I bought the camera had already closed before today’s announcment. So had the Slough branch, over a year ago, where I made my last significant purchase from Jessops, a fast zoom lens.

I’m lucky that in Reading there are a couple of other camera shops including a branch of The London Camera Exchange. But there are many other towns and cities where Jessops was the only photographic specialist on the high street. What does this mean for photography?

Posted in Photos | Tagged | 6 Comments

Where The Sun Don’t Shine

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Tim Hall

A man called Geoffrey Nunberg has been working on a Unified Theory of Assholes. We’re talking the vulgar epithet used to describe a certain type of individual, of course.

After all, assholes have been around for ages—even if the word’s figurative use is modern. (It was soldier slang during World War II.) But something has changed. Consider Donald Trump, an unquestioned asshole in the eyes of James and Nunberg. The attention our culture pays to self-absorbed buffoons is for James evidence that assholery is on the rise. “Our narcissistic age thus might help explain why assholes seem to be everywhere of late.” Nunberg takes it a step further, noting that every era has its emblematic scoundrel: Once it was the cad, later it was the phony, today it is the asshole.

Nunberg identifies their defining characteristic, on top of the obvious self-centered amorality, to be an inflated sense of entitlement. He comes to the conclusion that not only are they increasing, but they’re taking over the world, using their influence in business and politics to corrode the institutions society needs in order to function.

“Society becomes awash with people who are defensively unwilling to accept the burdens of cooperative life, out of a righteous sense that they deserve ever more.”

The result: Living standards rise for only a few; political power is concentrated in the hands of a minority, whose members change the rules to protect their own interests; and “liberty,” “opportunity,” and “prosperity” devolve into platitudes.

Indeed.

As an aside, it’s remarkable how many “self-made entrepreneurs” who insist on pulling the rug from beneath everyone else and delare that people must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps turn out to have been beneficiaries of large inheritances. One wonders just how far many of them would have got had it not been for Daddy’s money. I can imagine some of them not lasting long in jobs that involves saying “Do you want fries with that” before their sense of entitlement gets them fired…

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In God We Trust

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Tim Hall

Video of the opening track from the album “Guided By Degrees”, filmed at the album launch in Cardiff back in December, featuring the new five-piece lineup of the band with Arnie on bass and Paul on 2nd guitar.

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The Ghost in the Machine

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Tim Hall

A thread in the Software Testing Club asked about the funniest bugs people had seen. This one of mine is much about the way it was reported as it’s about the bug itself.

Many years ago, we had a support call from a customer, saying “Help, our system is possessed by the spirit of a negligent Edwardian maintenance engineer“.

The function dealt with planned maintenance schedules, which had a frequency in weeks. To allow for two-year maintenance intervals, the frequency field was a 3-digit integer.

The customer had a business requirement that was not explicitly supported; they wanted planned maintenance jobs that would be performed on-demand based on criteria that were outside the scope of the system, rather than performed at fixed intervals. When the engineers decided the job needed doing, they’d update the record and set the due date.

So they entered the maximum permissible number into the “Frequency” field, 999, which worked out as just short of 20 years. Once the maintenance task was performed and completed, the system would obediently calculate the next due date some time in the next century (I told you this was some time ago, didn’t I?)

Then the system started showing long-overdue maintenance tasks that were supposed to have been done in 1907.

We had hit an instance of what was later called the Y2K bug way back in 1987.

The irony was that the Oracle database at the time supported four-digit years, but the UI (built using a precursor to Oracle’s SQL*Forms) did not. The short-term workaround was to limit the value of the field to 520, buying enough time for Oracle’s UI tool to support 4-digit years properly. Later upgrades supported the “missing” functionality properly by making Frequency and Next Due Date optional fields.

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That Facebook Privacy Meme

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Tim Hall

I see this cut-and-paste meme is doing the rounds on Facebook yet again.

Dear friends: I want to stay PRIVATELY connected with you. I post pictures of my family & friends that I don’t want strangers to have access to.

However, with the recent changes in fb, anyone can now see activities on ANY wall. This happens when our friends hits “like” or “comment” automatically, their friends would see our posts too. Unfortunately, I can not change this settings by myself because Facebook has configured it this way.

So as a big favor could you place your cursor over my name above (DO NOT CLICK), a window will appear, now move the cursor on “FRIENDS” (also without clicking), then down to “Settings”, click here and a list will appear. REMOVE the CHECK on “COMMENTS & LIKE” and also “PHOTOS”. By doing this, my activity among you my friends and family will no longer become public.

Yes, of course it’s a hoax, but such is Facebook’s cavalier attitude towards privacy that it’s hard to blame people for spreading it. But do try to remember that, like most of these cut-and-paste chain letter-a-likes, it’s a load of cobblers. The fact is, if you comment on any public post in Facebook, the whole world will be able to see it. That’s always been the case. And unsubscribing from photos means you no longer see that person’s photos in your feed. You do that to mute people who post too many annoying platitude-jpgs, not for the sake of privacy!

Of course, the problem with Facebook’s deliberate blurring of public and private is that it encourages people to overshare, all the better for them to sell your data to advertisers. That’s their entire business model. It’s not a “safe space” where you can share things you don’t want employers, partners or complete strangers to be able to see, as much as Facebook misleadingly makes people to think it is.

If you want to share things privately, and want control of who can and can’t see what you post, then Facebook isn’t really the venue for that sort of thing. There are plenty of photo-sharing sites that have far more robust privacy policies, so those family photos can’t been seen by anyone but family. There are also plenty of places on the net that don’t require you to use your real name, so your public postings won’t show up when some censorious busybody from Human Resources Googles on your name. And if you don’t want anybody eavesdropping in private conversations with friends, there’s always good old-fashioned email.

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