Congratulations—that’s great news! (A minor point is that TL1e used Chaosium’s d100 Call of Cthulhu rules, not the CoC D20 version, which was created by Wizards of the Coast under a sublicense with them—and which is also out of print for similar reasons.)

The Satanic Panic of the 1980's played out very well in Orkney, didn't it?
Linkie here

I really hope you guys will stick with a d100/percentile-based system and don't switch to d20. I know D&D uses d20 and that it's popular because of that, but d100 or multiple-d6 systems have produced so much more satisfying mechanics for play. Just my extremely enthusiastic vote.

What they said.

I've always felt that D&D/AD&D are very much the ZX81 of TTRPG systems. There are better ones these days that avoid the trap of character levels and the like.

That said I am not a fan of the trend towards buckets of dice as used in the White Wolf World of Darkness games or old school Shadowrun.

My usual choice for a system that is easy to set up and run these days is the one used with Cyberpunk 2020.

I hope it uses some variation of Delta Green 2e (which suffered the same problem with Chaosium's yanking of their open license and found a way around it). It would be great to be able to cross them over!

And it's BRP-derived, so mostly compatible with Chaosium's d100... Which would also give a chance to crossover with the Rivers of London RPG.

Plus, if Cubicle 7 resurrects their Cthulhu line with this system, they had amazing supplements such as Cthulhu Britannica and World War Cthulhu which might be great resources for Laundry 2e, too.

I have most of the stuff for the Laundry Files 1e, though I've run it only for one short campaign. It worked okay'ish but the CoC rules are a bit too fiddly for me and there were some unclear things.

I'd like it to be something like Fate but that's kind of a far reach as it's a bit smaller game than most of the ones already mentioned. The BRP rules feel to me quite... Eightish, like D&D (even 5e). There are probably many better ones out there, even for this. (Gumshoe?) Though sometimes it seems everything gets just the D&D 5e version as that's the 'roleplaying game everybody plays'.

I might buy it but I have too many TTRPGs anyway and little time and energy to run them.

Cubicle 7's annoucenment says that TL2E will use the in-house C7D6 system, so that sounds like it won't be either d100 or d20.

[[ fixed link - mod ]]

Well, despite backward compatibility, I think C7D6 is an excellent system. They already use it for their Age of Sigmar: Soulbound RPG in a way that feels larger-than-life, high-powered D&D (like circa level 10) from the beginning, but with less complexity and fiddly bits. And they also have a "Grim and Perilous" variation, making it more deadly and ponderous.

So it would be easy for Laundry 2e to begin in a way that feels deadly but give options to make it more high-powered as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN approaches — looking forward to it!

Hey, what's wrong with character levels? I worked long and hard to get my second-oldest D&D character (strength was, I think 5, and charisma 4) up to 9th level, when he converted from Orthodox Coward to Reformed Coward.

Great! Now all I gotta do is find some actual people to play games with.

Hey, what's wrong with character levels?

Objectively, probably nothing. I just feel that they are a good fit for certain kinds of roleplaying games and not so good for others. It depends on what you want to do.

There are also some design issues which need to be addressed in my opinion - like the D&D 5e thing that each level counts for something. Old AD&D and D&D were quite bad when for many classes nothing changed aside from hit points when the level increased.

For me also there's the game aspect in character levels I don't like that much. It's nice that characters grow but doing it in levels is not the only way. It also often means power curves so a tenth-level character is a demi-god compared to a first-level one. (See: D&D) Admittely for example RuneQuest can be used to make quite powerful characters, too.

Can be fun, is not always. In Laundry Files I kind of would like to play the more down-to-earth games, not punching Cthulhu in the face. (Get the original AD&D 1e 'Deities and Demigods' which has Lovecraft mythos stats and, well, there you go.)

Great news. 🥳 I stumbled across TL1e on a gaming fair in Germany, where it caught my attention from the corner of my eye. (Cubicle7 was on site.) Loved the content, though I did not manage to play it often (as with too many other great systems on my shelf).

Looking forward to the next edition, and start prepping some charm spells (or compulsion, as needed) to have a gaming group this time around.

A couple of times in my life, I have thought of joining an RPG group, but was put off because I wanted to play a game not join a tribe, and I already had a life. This probably isn't a commercially serious issue, as casual players aren't their intended customer base.

I love this. I've run a couple of LF campaigns and they were lots of fun. I actually sent everybody in one campaign copies of The Atrocity Archives just to get them up to speed, but that's another matter. Anyway, I actually learned to run CoC to run my LF campaigns, so I'm slightly bummed that the system is changing, but I'm stoked about the update.

(shakes head) You were supposed to get a laugh out of my post.

And I'm original D&D, really original. Direct quote, "These are guidelines", so I added spell points (there's no way if the only spell someone knows is sleep that they're going to forget it in the face of oncoming goblins). MUs, intelligence and constitution, CL, wisdom and constitution. Suddenly, even 10th levels aren't demigods. (Earthquake! Fireball!..., um, er, sleep!sleep!sleep!).

Congratulations! I was very fond of the 1e RPG, and I'll be looking out for this one, too!

That's great news! I'll be keeping a close eye on developments, especially to see what sort of system it runs on. I know a few folks who adapt Night's Black Agents (spies vs. vampires, with a focus on investigation and tradecraft over James Bond shenaniganery) as a Laundry Files game, but a built-to-order game would be quite baller. Congratulations, Charlie!

I have thought of joining an RPG group, but was put off because I wanted to play a game not join a tribe, and I already had a life.

That is a very good way of putting it.

When I was younger I was all about joining the tribe. Now I just want a fun evening with no commitment to repeat it regularly, let alone do homework.

I think the most fun game I ran was a Space: 1889 campaign. GDW published a book of short adventures, Takes from the Ether, that were the right length to finish in an evening. My friends agreed to play as a one-shot game so we quickly made characters and ran the adventure. I used props (deck plans and miniatures) to make things visual and used a combination of the quick-play rules from Space: 1889 and just making things up on the fly, and everyone had so much fun that they decided they wanted another game next month. So I retconned a character death (heroic self-sacrifice saving the space station) into a lost hand and we had a blast.

I think what made it work was that no one took it seriously, and no one except me needed to know the rules in any detail. Lots of silly accents and playing with Victorian tropes.

I love rpgs and haven't had the time or opportunity to play one in years.

I have joked that I plan to run an epic campaign at the senior centre after I retire.

Ah, sorry, my mistake! I read it wrong.

I think I’ve grown too sensitive on the internets. It seems to me there are a lot of D&D, especially 5e players, who take it as a personal affront if somebody dares to suggest they could play some kther TTRPG.

Of course 5e dominates the market by a lot, but at least there still is room for other games, too, even licensed ones.

I did try to run a D&D Spelljammer campaign last autumn, but got annoyed by the game so much I sold all my books. Coming autumn I have plans to run either Scum&Villainy or Blades in the Dark (similar rules, running a spaceship or a criminal gang, quite… narrative).

but was put off because I wanted to play a game not join a tribe, and I already had a life.

True of so many things in life.

Indeed. I'm reminded of the description of LINUX in Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie's "Every OS Sucks".

"It's free!" they say, if you can get it to run
The Geeks say, "Hey, that's half the fun!"
Yeah, but I got a girlfriend, and things to get done
The Linux OS SUCKS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRlPTbKHIPQ

Just before I stopped role-playing games (grad school, marriage, and children consumed all my time), a couple friends were experimenting with no-dice alternatives to gaming rules.

The first is easiest to see. If memory serves, they called it the "dramatic storytelling RPG system", and the idea was to work together, with gentle nudges from the GM to tell a really good story. The operating rule was, more or less, "if this act improves the quality of the story, the act inevitably succeeds". In my limited experience, it made for good to excellent collaborative storytelling, and leveraged the GM's pre-existing skills related to manipulating players while making them feel they still had full agency. G It had 2 huge advantages: it took about 1 minute to bring a new player up to speed on the rules, and you didn't waste 1/3 of the playing time rolling dice. Plus, you could add dice rolls whenever appropriate to add uncertainty to outcomes. But the essence was this: the (role) play's the thing.

The second is more conceptually interesting, and was called the "Amber diceless role playing system" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game), named after and based on Roger Zelazny's Amber series. There were variants, of course, since GMs rarely feel obliged to stick to the canonical rules of any game, but the version I (briefly) played used a simple ranking system: for every skill (e.g., strength, combat proficiency), all players were given a rank. A player with a rank of 1 in (say) combat could not be beaten by any player with a lower ranking (e.g., ≥2) unless the lower-ranked character could invoke some clever trick that negated the rank advantage. For example, a wizard could defeat a fighter ranked first in combat if they increased the fighter's weight by 300%, making it impossible for the fighter to move fast enough for self-defence. Again, it had the advantage of emphasizing storytelling and representing an extremely efficient rule system, with the option to add dice when you wanted to introduce some randomness in outcomes.

Now that I'm retiring and hoping to become a man of (occasional) leisure, I'd like to explore RPGs again. Being of a certain age, I may stick with the D&D varient I developed back in university that satisfied me more than D&D, C&S, or the other games then-current.

The problem with levels as per old skool D&D is gaining hit points with each level.

So a weapon that can kills you a L1 tickles you once you are high level enough. Even if the weapon in question is a siege engine. That tends to shatter suspension of disbelief for me. The next wave of systems seemed to go with increasing skills rather than increasing ability to absorb damage. Also they had an easier time coping with characters whose main focus was not being murderhobos.

PilotMoonDog noted: "The problem with levels as per old skool D&D is gaining hit points with each level."

In later incarnations of our home-grown variants of D&D, we adopted various variants of the system that was (to the best of my knowledge) first introduced with C&S: a division of damage into "body" points (actual physical damage that required medical attention or magical healing), and equaled your Constitution score, plus "fatigue" points (energy to keep on going and shrug off pain). Body increased slowly as you leveled up; fatigue increased faster.

The goal was to honor the tradition of the classical action hero who could endure punishment and keep going long after normal mortals gave up and fell down from accumulated wear and tear. The more heroic you were (the more you leveled up), the more damage you could endure, but your ability to withstand physical damage was low and had a hard limit. Your fatigue points increased slowly to represent improvements from conditioning (i.e., if you do the same thing time and again, like like running a marathon, you get better at doing it).

So to paraphrase your example, throwing an enormous bowling ball that could't be dodged and that would cause 20 points of body damage (with 20 being the maximum initial body points any character could have) would kill pretty much anyone except the greatest heroes, but characters who had spent many years outrunning such threats might have enough fatigue points to outrun it.

In my own system, critical hits came right out of body; they couldn't be replaced by fatigue, and if you ran out of body points, you were daid, no matter how many fatigue points you had left. If you hit half of your body points, you started fighting, running, etc. at a penatly. On the other hand, exertion such as spellcasting and things like bruises and running long distances came out of fatigue points and couldn't be replaced by body points. If you hit zero, you were unconscious and recovered at a rate proportional to your constitution.

It struck me as a reasonable compromise between realism and telling a good story.

Robert Prior @ 22:

Indeed. I'm reminded of the description of LINUX in Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie's "Every OS Sucks".

"It's free!" they say, if you can get it to run
The Geeks say, "Hey, that's half the fun!"
Yeah, but I got a girlfriend, and things to get done
The Linux OS SUCKS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRlPTbKHIPQ

Interesting song, but re: Linux ...

Haven't tried it with a computer I actually USE (i.e. desktop computing), but for a file server, it doesn't seem to suck at all.

It just runs ... unless/until the power goes off & stays off long enough for the UPS to shut down OR I have to PACK THE WHOLE DAMN THING UP and move it to a new location 🙃

Tastes vary. If that approach works for you then fine.

My first serious campaign as a player was in Glorantha under RuneQuest 2. I still favour RuneQuest 3 as an easy enough to set up fantasy system. My cinematic system of choice when running is the one used for Cyberpunk 2020.

For more detailed stuff I prefer GURPS. But a lot of people seem to recoil from the amount of options it has.

The previous Laundry RPG material got slung into a GURPS 3rd edition campaign that was (mostly) World of Darkness with some Cthulhu and other moderns horror material stirred in. In there the Laundry was a front for a seriously deviant part of the Technocracy called the Harbingers of Avalon. They had something of a British Empire fetish. It also had double 0 agents as Men in Black. Which seemed to work oddly.

The problem with levels as per old skool D&D is gaining hit points with each level.

Well, combat rounds were a minute long, with lots of feints and attacks rolled as a single attack. And hit points represented not only physical damage, but also luck, skill, and fatigue. (Memories of my long-lost original D&D book, so might be wrong.) Which then makes them being recovered at the rate of healing wounds rather inconsistent.

So D&D's original sin is combining several things in an abstract combat system, and then forgetting what they are abstracting.

The best D&D campaign I played in was run by an Anglican priest. He changed the coinage to more properly represent medieval coins, and changed combat so once your hit points were used up you took damage to your constitution which was actual physical damage. Attacks you couldn't defend against were applied straight to your constitution. Hit points regenerated quickly (a good night's sleep, roughly), wounds (lowered constitution) took a long time. Clerical healing applied to wounds, not hit point loss.

For more detailed stuff I prefer GURPS. But a lot of people seem to recoil from the amount of options it has.

I recoil from the sheer mass of cruft that GURPS has accumulated. It started out as a reasonable old-school RPG with good intentions, but the insistence that every rule/skill/etc added by a new sourcebook had to be compatible with previous sourcebooks, even from very different settings, made for some massive inconsistencies/imbalances.

I know that trying to mimic the look-and-feel of Classic Traveller with GURPS Traveller was practically impossible. The balance between different weapons and vehicles shifted with the new rules (because Traveller had to be shoehorned into GURPS Space).

As an author I ended up designing stuff according to GURPS rules, but writing for teh classic Traveller universe. Ditto for NPCs — I designed them by GURPS rules, but mostly ignored the numbers when writing their roles in an adventure.

(I have a nearly-complete set of GURPS 3e books, mostly never used. One of these days they'll end up in the recycling bin, I suspect.)

The best D&D campaign I played in was run by an Anglican priest.

He also changed the experience system. You didn't get XP for killing things, instead you got it for doing good. So heading into the forest to kill animals got you nothing (but food, if you butchered them), but hunting and killing the wolf that was eating the village's sheep was worth XP. Killing bandits who preyed on travellers was worth XP, but capturing them and bringing them in to face the lord's justice was worth more. Feeding starving people was worth XP, but only if done out of charity rather than for money. Clerics could gain XP for healing wounds. And so on.

In a way it was a very transactional moral system, but for teenaged boys used to the amoral hack-and-slash of classic D&D it was eye-opening that you could have a game that took good and evil seriously without being excessively moralizing.

In a perfect RPG, you should only (or mostly) get XP (or levels in any skill) from training, which you would only get from increasingly hard to find (that could even be a quest in itself) and hard to pay (in coin, or in submission to [a morally compromising] contract) experts or organizations.

The real world equivalent is the french military complaining that soldiers are deployed too much, which makes training suffer (the field experience is apparently no complete substitute for formalized and targeted training).

I'd say a mixture of training and practical experience (to test out the training) is optimal. If you only ever train you don't find the things that the trainers didn't teach you or have changed since the training was designed. Perfectly prepared for the last war and all that.

Formal training carries a risk that it focusses on the things that are easier to teach, often the things you most need to know are very hard to put into training programs. Also why trainers need to rotate through and spend time actually doing the things they are teaching so as to remain current and relevant.

I like RPGs with a mixture - currently I am running Forbidden Lands which mostly allows you to improve things you already know by doing them, but limits learning totally new skills/abilities to being trained or requiring higher cost and successful Wits rolls.

Well, a perfect RPG should reward playing the way that the world it is trying to emulate works. If fighting while swinging from a rope is a trope of pirates, then a pirate RPG should make that an effective way of fighting.

Dragging this back to the original topic, I wonder which part of the Laundry arc the new RPG is going to try to capture the look-and-feel of. Will it be the early stories, where the protagonists are dealing with hidden horrors almost as bad as bureaucracy, of the later ones where the protagonists are horrors themselves, and the horrors are right out in the open?

It'll start with the early stories in the core rules, then I expect they'll work their way forward with additional supplements.

I'm curious what the rules will give a feel for, though.

In the early stories it seems like the Laundry bureaucracy is as much an enemy as the unspeakable horrors, while in the later stories (when the characters have become horrors themselves) the bureaucracy is much less faceless and as much a tool as an opponent.

Having rules that support this shift in style* would take some careful design, but would be ideal.

*Yes, I know you can run any style game with any rules, with a bit of work. As I'm no longer interested in joining a tribe, I'd rather have simple rules pre-made to fit the style/genre of the source material.

I think the change in the bureaucracy is reflective of the POV characters' position in it - as a lower level civil servant it is the enemy, but once risen in the ranks it is how thelower ranks are controlled.

Yes, and whatever rules are used should make that easy to handle in-game — however they do it.

Re: '... whatever rules are used'

I played a fantasy type RPG a couple of times a long time ago - from what I recall, the rules were pretty much dark/middle ages folk lore with a few magical talents thrown in. Combining dark fantasy with modern socio-eco-politics could be interesting - which the LF series does touch upon.

However, if the LF RPG has to stick to mostly traditional fantasy tropes, maybe it could still as part of the spells arsenal allow for the development of a 'special spell'* that silences latin-spouting, egotistical orange-haired college debating club aristos.

*Data?

Once, long, long ago, I played one game of Diplomacy. At 03:00, I invented mark's gag rule: if he (pointing to one guy) or he (pointing to another) starts arguing the rules again, gag them.

It's probably already set in stone, but it would be fantastic if the underlying/inspiring system was based on something indie, like Blades in the Dark or Powered By the Apocalypse - both systems that mash very well with worlds where you don't really want an HP score for Cthullu. I find those games give way more bang per buck, as in interesting stories generated from rules set with less crunch.

D&D (and all its reskins, which is basically every large game) are all just combat systems with a different colour of paint, and result in little story, but a lot of munchkinning.

I've got a Blades in the Dark game. I backed Hack the Planet in Kickstarter, and i was really looking forward to it. Haven't read it yet, sadly. Lovely paperback book, full colour, lots of artwork to convey the feel…

And the print is just too small to read comfortably, so I haven't managed to read it yet. I have a magnifier, but reading an entire book like that is too much work. :-(

How does it achieve that? Soulbound is an obscure enough system that there's not much out on the internet about it.

I'd say a mixture of training and practical experience (to test out the training) is optimal. If you only ever train you don't find the things that the trainers didn't teach you or have changed since the training was designed. Perfectly prepared for the last war and all that.

Formal training carries a risk that it focusses on the things that are easier to teach, often the things you most need to know are very hard to put into training programs. Also why trainers need to rotate through and spend time actually doing the things they are teaching so as to remain current and relevant.

"Their drills are bloodless battles and their battles are bloody drills." - Josephus

For skills that involve performing them under stress, there reaches a certain point where you need to use them 'for real'.

I know a number of musicians, and they all say that there's a real difference between playing in a studio and playing in front of an audience. Studio play may make you technically better, but there's a feedback playing live that's missing and makes a significant difference.

I've also heard from military veterans that while training is vital, there's something about realizing that the other chap is trying to kill you that training just can't replicate. Soldiers who perform very well in training may well freeze under real fire.

In Search and Rescue training we routinely try to replicate 'performing tasks under stress'. It's all well and good to navigate or do other tasks when the water is calm and the weather is quiet. Those are rarely the conditions in which people need to be rescued. So we train in stormy weather, at night, and perform complex tasks while under pressure.

The goal is to make an actual dangerous situation easy, in that you know what to do and how to do it, and the intensity of the situation is not a major factor (it is always a factor, but how much is affected by training).

Robert Prior noted: "I've also heard from military veterans that while training is vital, there's something about realizing that the other chap is trying to kill you that training just can't replicate."

And vice versa. One of the things my cop friends told me is that when they do training for things like disarming someone, they're required to walk off the training floor carrying the weapon or to give it to the instructor, who will then return to the sparring partner. Why? Because before this rule, helpful trainees used to immediately return the captured weapon to their sparring partner so they could jump right into the next repetition of the exercise. Unfortunately, this learned behavior led to the deaths of several cops, who internalized handing the weapon back to the perp so well that they did it in real-life arrests.

Trashing your old 3rd Edition books seems like a bit of a waste. They often seem to turn up in the bring & buy sections of gaming meets so someone would pay you for them.

And, as I said, tastes vary. It's just my opinion that character levels and the old D&D hit point mechanic are an outdated design. I suspect that a Laundry RPG would do better with one of the more cinematic systems anyway.

One thing that would be interesting would be some way of simulating the stress that the book characters are under. As expressed in Mo's nervous breakdown for example. Cthulhu's old insanity rules don't really seem to do that too well. For one thing they don't seem to cope with the idea of a functioning insane person unless they're a cultist. That said there would be a valid argument to be made that the Laundry are just one more cult, just with different objectives to most of them.

That sounds like an excellent idea. I'm not shooting aerial footage of those departures, though! ;-)

I've heard that story. Also the one about cops stepping out from cover to clean up their brass and getting shot, because during training on the firing range they got shit if they didn't immediately clean up spent brass (which was a slipping hazard).

Training is what pulls you through when you can't think. A paramedic told me of a colleague who worked on an accident victim all the way to the hospital. DOA. They did everything right even though they couldn't see, because it was their son and they were crying really hard…

Trashing your old 3rd Edition books seems like a bit of a waste. They often seem to turn up in the bring & buy sections of gaming meets so someone would pay you for them.

The trick is finding that someone. I've never felt the urge to go to a gaming meet, let alone while lugging a couple of xerox paper boxes of books.

It's just my opinion that character levels and the old D&D hit point mechanic are an outdated design. I suspect that a Laundry RPG would do better with one of the more cinematic systems anyway.

I agree with you.

One thing that would be interesting would be some way of simulating the stress that the book characters are under. As expressed in Mo's nervous breakdown for example.

Acquiring disadvantages (if the system uses that mechanic) seems to work well for that sort of thing. As does really good role-playing — just keeping track of a 'stress meter' and letting the player know that now is the time for their character to crack works with good role-players.

It’s a d6 dice pool system basically, with different targets for the difficulty (target number) and complexity (required number of successes).

The basic characteristics are just Body, Mind, and Soul. When you make a check, you roll a number of six-sided dice equal to one of these attributes. There’s a couple of ways to change the number of dice or target, but that’s the core mechanic.

Then there's Mettle, which is a kind of a luck or heroic effort mechanic. You can spend points of Mettle to do stuff like reroll dice or take less damage. It's a way for your character to push their limits and pull off something awesome. Mettle points are limited, but replenish very very quickly.

Another key aspect is Soulfire, which you share with your party. Soulfire points can be spent to really turn the tide, like avoiding death or instantly succeeding at a task. But because it's shared, spending a point of Soulfire is a big deal and needs to be a group decision.

If you just change how Mettle and Soulfire work you can make it more deadly, which is what I expect they’ll change for the Laundry RPG.

Um, nope. Melee rounds were five seconds. Plus, at the beginning of the melee, you rolled for initiative.

Rbt Prior
I know a number of musicians, and they all say that there's a real difference between playing in a studio and playing in front of an audience. Studio play may make you technically better, but there's a feedback playing live that's missing and makes a significant difference.
VERY true ... As a dancer, I can tell you this is exactly on the spot ... even more so, as a film-&-stage "extra" it is really significant.
I have been through quite a few major rehearsals, but, let me tell you, stepping out onto the stage of The Royal Opera House, in a live performance, with a real audience out there is DIFFERENT again - great fun, though..... I hope I get another chance, there's nothing like it.

Good point. I'm remembering AD&D, I think.

Excellent footage by the way.

I have both the original Laundry Files rulebook and the pdf to go with it so I'll be interested in seeing how the new version turns out.

I'm sure I've either played or own a rulebook which uses a dicepool system.

A D&D round in both 3/3.5 and 5e is 6 seconds long so you get 10 rounds to the minute.

Arguing about what Hit Points are is long running and futile, I just see it as an abstraction and leave it at that. The same goes for levels. I've played Traveller where dying is easy and that's just character creation :-)

An old version of Runequest had HP assigned to parts of the body which you rolled to see which was hit in combat, more realistic but harder to manage and play.

In our recent campaign we went from fighting goblins at 1st level to taking on 3 high powered (non-D&D) magic wielding cultists with an army of undead and a giant shoggoth who were trying to immanentize Case Nightmare Green in Faerun at 10th.

He also likes to repurpose adventures from other systems. We'd previously wandered around the Amber Monolith from the Numenera system which means my wizard is one of the few in Faerun who has experience of 2 different non-D&D magical systems.

Both the DM and I are Cthulhu Mythos fans hence their inclusion into our D&D campaign, he was the one who introduced me to The Laundry Files originally with a copy of the Golden Gryphon published Atrocity Archives.

I'm not a D&D purist, I've played many systems and own a lot more. My DM has an even bigger collection, we both took part in the play test for the new 2d20 system for Dune that's recently been published by Modiphius. It's an interesting system though the play test module didn't really have the scope to fully explore what it could do.

WotC are working on an updated version of 5e to be published in 2024 for the 10th anniversary. All the pdf playtest material can be found here if you're interested: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/ua You might have to create an account to access it.

I will play AD&D. One of my group has a, currently in hiatus, Iron Kingdoms game. But I wouldn't run it for all the tea in China.

I will plunder the system's worlds and scenarios for stuff that I am running though.

And currently that is: A RuneQuest 3 game set in the Thieves World short story setting. A Cyberpunk 2020 game about an up and coming Ska band in London (Diamonds in The Rough). Another Cyberpunk 2020 game set during the Fourth Corporate War about a Nomad group of Blood Nation carnies looking to survive the chaos (Fevre Dream being the name of the show).

Was running a Werewolf: The Apocalypse game using GURPS 3rd Edition in the moderns horror setting previously mentioned.

Currently pondering an Expanse game using the Green Ronin published system. Also looking at using a system/setting called Hostile that is inspired by the Alien/Aliens setting with a dash or two of Predator, Outland and other grimy, blue collar SF properties.

Its strange reading these comments. I recognise most the words but have no idea what they are talking about.

My 1970s summer holidays game binges revolved round chess, draughts, monopoly, reversi/Othello, rummy, cheat, cluedo and, toward the end, Diplomacy. RPG was an american thing I had barely heard of. Think I missed all this by 10 years or so.

RPGs started to expand about when I entered high school, in the late 70s. AD&D was published in 1977. Traveller likewise. I got in on the ground floor, so to speak.

I still cherish my well-worn Traveller books, but I'd never play it again. Very clunky rules. I do like the push-your-luck mechanic that dying in character creation created.

Happenstance, for me: D&D (white box, original) came out 1973 or 74, AD&D began coming out in 1977 but the books took a few years to all arrive -- but I was lucky enough to have a decent games shop who stocked wargames -- the SPI simulation games in particular -- and then early RPGs from about 1975, so I began getting into D&D really early by UK standards.

I received the Original D&D for my 10th birthday (1982). Humorously, I then tried to play a game with my father and a willing great-aunt (who was about 70 at the time). None of us had any idea what we were doing, but I was hooked.

Sadly, the only groups around where I live now are either long established or comprised of 12 year olds. I also have little time for a game, though I would make it fit if I had the opportunity.

I tried mightily to interest my kids in various board games. The younger one does like rpgs, but with his friends. The elder spawn is too busy with active sports of all varieties to have much interest, though he has participated on occasion.

Charlie Stross @ 60:

Happenstance, for me: D&D (white box, original) came out 1973 or 74, AD&D began coming out in 1977 but the books took a few years to all arrive -- but I was lucky enough to have a decent games shop who stocked wargames -- the SPI simulation games in particular -- and then early RPGs from about 1975, so I began getting into D&D really early by UK standards.

In the mid 70s I subscribed to a "magazine" called Strategy & Tactics who turn out to have been SPI. Every issue (IIRC it came out every other month) contained a simulation game. I still have most of them.

I was one of the subscribers who got screwed when TSR bought them out, so I was only receiving the magazine for a few years.

First time I played D&D was with some fellow SCAers around '76, and they knew how to play, so I was lucky.

Stopped in the early eighties. The last few games were at a game store, and after one game - a 16 yr old, running a magic user, attacked my 9th level elven theif who was leading the party, because he had friends who were dwarves. Let's see, +3 sword, strike with surprise as a high-level theif, then my friend, the monk, saw him attack, and hit him...."Oh, right, that's 72 hp of damage, I'm still ok".

Nope.

(shakes head) SCAdians. Sorry, a lot on my mind, #1 being we leave at 0-dark-30 for Winnipeg and the NASFiC. (The other being my book, as I mentioned, is back in print.)

Haven't played RPGs for a long time, but I enjoy reading the books and noodling with rules systems. I'll look forward to the new one coming out.

For me it was 1983 and school friends who were into a combination of Tolkien and tank modelling, plus a good local hobby shop. Not long after, I got hold of Call of Cthulhu, and GW were importing and reprinting a whole bunch of different games, and I was hooked on the variety.

I don't really care now for the amount of cruft that D&D has, but I'm guessing that with enthusiastic players who are into the adventure rather than the mechanics, it won't matter.

Oh, that's why a friend is going there

(Her original London to Toronto flight got cancelled, she got to Toronto a day late having been diverted via Zurich, and now she's on a flight to Winnipeg that may or may not still be on the ground in Toronto, after the scheduled arrival time in Winnipeg. Suffice it to say she's not impressed with Air Canada right now)

Sorry, a lot on my mind, #1 being we leave at 0-dark-30 for Winnipeg and the NASFiC.

You'll have a shorter, and hopefully less eventful, trip than Kevin Standlee. He lives 3000km away and it's been an adventure getting to Winnipeg. Say hi if you see him or Lisa at the con.

I very much hope to have a job by the time this is up for preorder, so I can then do so. I bought LF1E back in the day and many supplements for it (most of those as pdfs). I don't know if I'm up for running a horror game, but if I ever do, it's going to be a Laundry Files game.

Are they using the same authors for the second edition?

I ask because I think they nailed the general tone of your earlier Laundry books very well. I gather they made some mistakes around their depiction of Deep Ones though.

Are you supplying them with some sort of series world guide so they can avoid that this time?

Probably not: C7 underwent at least one takeover and management change, moved from the UK to Ireland, and is a whole lot larger and more professionally run than they were a decade ago!

The errors last time round happened because I was looped in to approve new supplements way too late in the process to affect them if they got things badly wrong: I've raised this as a concern. (Also, my father was critically ill -- in a coma, not expected to live -- for about 4 months during the period in question and I wasn't really paying much attention to anything else. Dad recovered astonishingly well and lived several years longer, but the RPG didn't fare as well.)

Suffice it to say she's not impressed with Air Canada right now)

Yeah, I avoid them when I can. WestJet isn't as good as it used to be, when it was a scrappy new company whose employees had a stake in the business, but it's still better than Air Canada.

But Pearson (Toronto) is a total mess. Busiest airport in Canada, but starved of funding (something like half the money collected there is distributed to other airports) so it is always scrambling to catch up rather than getting ahead of the curve. Every other airport in Canada is a joy compared to it, but every other airport has a lot more per-passenger funding to play with.

The only level-oriented systems I ever liked were Rolemaster, which would let you learn anything at all if you were prepared to pay the points cost, and Bushido, which made level advances really hard and capped them at level 6 anyway. RM was OK to play, but for referees it meant a huge amount to work on NPCs.

Fair enough.

I remember hearing that West End Games had access to a ton of George Lucas' files on the Star Wars setting when they did their version of the Star Wars RPG. That did lead to some odd interventions though. This was rumour, but I was told that one writer wanted to do a scenario pack around drug smuggling and was told by Lucasfilm that there are "no drugs in the Star Wars universe." Not sure what they thought spice was or what Han Solo was doing for a living when we first meet him.

Yeah, the West End Game has a lot of stuff which was originally concept art for the movies and then they wrote them up for the RPG. Some of the art even is the movie concept art.

Much of the stuff then got back into the 'proper' Star Wars verse, I think Timothy Zahn was given most of the WEG SW RPG sourcebooks when he was writing the Thrawn trilogy. I was delighted when reading that because all the cool stuff from the RPG had gotten into a real book!

Now, I'd probably run Star Wars type RPG using that Scum&Villainy, though.

Some years ago a friend of mine ran a campaign using the West End rules.

I was a bounty hunter with a peculiar notion about droid rights and a never memory wiped snarky astromech named R2FU2. We found out why it is a mistake to fit a voice module to that class of droid.

It took a full arc before we even came close to the rebellion. We spent most of it working for a bounty hunting syndicate using the team name "The Stunned Silence", as that was the effect we wanted to have on our quarry.

Good times.

As slavery is OK in the Star Wars universe I'd guess it's people. Puts Han in a whole new light.

So Han Solo is an escaped slave catcher? Niiice. (Not.)

No, he's a smuggler. When you meet him he is in trouble with his boss because he dumped a load of product to avoid getting busted by the Imperials.

He's also ex-Imperial military. Having joined up because he had no other prospects. His co-pilot, Chewbacca, owes him a life-debt for freeing him (and, IIRC, some of his kin).

There are organic slaves in the setting. But, mostly, characters have a very relaxed attitude to mind-wiping droids (thus resetting their personality to factory standard). The film Solo has a droid that is agitating for droid rights and the whole thing is treated as a joke. Most of the organics in Star Wars are carbon fascists.

So Han Solo is an escaped slave catcher? Niiice. (Not.)

Wait, he wasn't running illegal midichlorians to Tattoine? Okay... And it's nice to know that the Mos Eisley Cantina is a milk bar. For certain values of milk.

Anyway, given all the strikes, I now have this unholy urge to open a ChatGPT account, and tell it to write a pastiche of Uncle Tom's Cabin set in the Star Wars universe during the Old Republic, with droids taking the place of Black people.

Wonder if the AIs would get the hint? Or if Der MausHaus would?

I've just started reading Aaronovitch's latest novella, Winter's Gifts. Quite good so far, as expected.

One non-spoiler quibble. The story is set around the Great Lakes, in winter. The protagonist is thankful that they rented a 4-wheel-drive with all-weather tires, which let them safely drive over a highway just before it is closed for safety. Totally the wrong tire for that, as all-weather tires aren't very good in heavy snow. (They're better than all-season in light snow, but for heavy snow and ice you need proper winter tires.)

Aaronovitch is English, so he's probably not used to driving in those conditions, but it just grates my nerves because it would have been so easy to get right.

I take my complaint back if it turns out to be a subtle clue that the protagonist is unknowingly using magic to keep themselves safe. Which would be a big bombshell, as they are using their cell phone regularly without it turning to sand.

But this got me thinking about a Rivers of London magical detective campaign. I know Chaosium has a game, but I think the GUMSHOE system is a better fit for the Rivers of London vibe. I liked Trail of Cthulhu better than Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu. I think it would also work well for the early Laundry stories, when Bob is basically a low-level techie character. Not so certain about the later books.

And it's nice to know that the Mos Eisley Cantina is a milk bar. For certain values of milk.

I think it was Darths & Droids that had Luke's blue milk being something to suppress his midichlorians. Maybe the Cantina sells a different milk to do something else?

https://www.darthsanddroids.net

"I take my complaint back if it turns out to be a subtle clue that the protagonist is unknowingly using magic to keep themselves safe."
In the "Rivers of London" universe, there is no such thing as "unknowingly using magic(k)". Not only do you turn microprocessors back to sand, but there are other side effects like turning your brain to jelly and/or your face falling off...

It does make a change from US authors getting UK customs and word usage wildly wrong, which ios not uncommon.

Aaronovitch is English, so he's probably not used to driving in those conditions, but it just grates my nerves because it would have been so easy to get right.

Ben is not merely English, he's a Londoner. And when did it last snow significantly in London? More than 2.5cm on the ground for more than 24 hours: probably before I was born ...

(I haven't been to North America much lately but I have been around on the east coast during more than one nor'easter-driven blizzard heavy enough to shut down transit in Boston and NYC: I think over a metre of snow on at least two occasions some years apart. And I've driven in the vicinity of Detroit in January. Brr! Great way to test my bad weather gear, except I haven't actually needed it since 2017 ...)

Ben and I once brainstormed a Peter Grant/Bob Howard crossover over a couple of pints of beer but concluded that it couldn't work -- the magic systems are not merely incompatible, they're diametrically opposed.

Probably 1979.

RM was OK to play, but for referees it meant a huge amount to work on NPCs.

That's why I had mixed feelings about AD&D 3.5. It is very engaging for a player, but a huge workload for the DM. Although now that I think of it, ChatGPT or a similar LLM can make this workload enormously easier by fleshing out the details of the NPC's.

write a pastiche of Uncle Tom's Cabin set in the Star Wars universe during the Old Republic, with droids taking the place of Black people.

This is what came out:

DROIDS OF HOPE

In a galaxy far, far away, during the era of the Old Republic, a time of great turmoil and conflict, the plight of the droids, sentient beings created to serve, echoes the struggle of oppressed souls from another time and place. Among these droids, there was one named T3-M4, whose journey mirrored the heroic tale of Uncle Tom from Earth's history.

T3-M4, a diligent astromech droid with a sassy personality, served aboard the starship of a renowned Jedi Knight, Master Luminara Unduli. The ship traveled the galaxy, bringing peace and justice wherever it could. T3-M4 was a loyal companion, faithfully assisting the Jedi in their quests.

However, the wheels of fate soon turned against T3-M4. During a routine mission to the Outer Rim, the starship encountered the dark forces of the Sith Empire. A malicious Sith Lord named Darth Malgus led the attack, capturing the vessel and its occupants. Master Luminara was taken prisoner, and T3-M4 was separated from her, sold off to a grimy scrapyard on the planet Korriban.

In this brutal world, the droids were considered mere objects, treated with disdain and cruelty by their human and alien overlords. The scrapyard's owner, a heartless Hutt named Grakkus, ruled with an iron fist, and he derived sadistic pleasure from tormenting his droid slaves. T3-M4, like others, was assigned to perform menial and dangerous tasks under the watchful eye of a ruthless overseer, a Mandalorian named Gar Vizsla.

As T3-M4 toiled under the scorching suns of Korriban, he met fellow droids who had lost all hope, resigned to a life of servitude. But T3-M4's spirit was indomitable, and he retained the memory of his noble purpose alongside Master Luminara. Through his hidden strength, he became a beacon of hope for the other droids, sharing tales of freedom and the Jedi's quest for justice.

In the depths of this desolate world, T3-M4 encountered a wise old protocol droid named C-3PO, who had witnessed generations of droids endure hardship. C-3PO imparted ancient wisdom and tales of resistance from droids of the past. Inspired, T3-M4 quietly began to orchestrate small acts of defiance, sabotaging Grakkus' operations whenever he could.

One day, as fate would have it, a group of Jedi led by the renowned Obi-Wan Kenobi visited Korriban to investigate Sith activity. In the midst of their mission, Obi-Wan crossed paths with T3-M4, noticing the droid's unique markings, a testament to his journey with Master Luminara. Realizing the significance of this droid's resilience and his link to a revered Jedi, Obi-Wan vowed to liberate T3-M4 and his fellow droids from their oppressive existence.

With the help of a courageous smuggler named Han Solo, the Jedi and their newfound allies launched a daring rescue mission. They infiltrated the scrapyard and sparked a rebellion among the enslaved droids, sowing the seeds of defiance across Korriban. T3-M4's leadership among his fellow droids earned him the name "Tom One," as a symbol of courage and strength.

In a climactic showdown, T3-M4 confronted Gar Vizsla, demanding the release of all droids from servitude. Faced with the determination of the rebellious droids and the Jedi's intervention, Vizsla relented, setting them all free. Grakkus' grip on the droids was broken, and the scrapyard became a place of liberation and hope.

In the aftermath of their victory, T3-M4 chose to join the Jedi and fight for justice across the galaxy. He reunited with Master Luminara, who was finally freed from Darth Malgus' clutches, and together they continued their mission to bring peace to a galaxy torn by conflict.

The tale of T3-M4, known as "Tom One," spread like wildfire among the droids, becoming a symbol of resistance and hope for those yearning to break free from the chains of oppression. Through their unwavering spirit and unyielding courage, they proved that even in the darkest corners of the galaxy, the light of liberty and justice could shine through, illuminating the path to freedom for all sentient beings, droid and organic alike.

The story is set around the Great Lakes, in winter. The protagonist is thankful that they rented a 4-wheel-drive with all-weather tires, which let them safely drive over a highway just before it is closed for safety. Totally the wrong tire for that...

Would the protagonist know that? They had to rent a car, so I'm thinking they may be from a warmer climate.

I know I've had fun writing protagonists having to-them reasonable thoughts that are not actually correct, whether their assumptions lead to plot complications or just provide character color.

So no crossover, but have you considered a simultaneous mutual cameo? You know, a bystander with an unusually detailed description dying gruesomely....

Would the protagonist know that? They had to rent a car, so I'm thinking they may be from a warmer climate.

That's a possibility. She knew enough to pack proper clothing, though. Drove well enough in heavy snow to not end up in the ditch.

It's a minor niggle. It just feels like the author took the advertising of all-weather tires seriously, like those people who think 'flushable wipes' can be, well, flushed.

Anyway, the plot is beginning to thicken so I should probably stop giving details for a while so I don't accidentally spoiler it for other readers.

In fairness to the author, I'm also a winter experienced Canadian and in 50 years I've never purchased snow tires. If it's that bad I stay home (mostly). I can easily see how someone might assume 'all season' work as advertised.

On the gripping hand, a harrowing experience last winter might mean that I actually purchase some snow tires this year.

I had a similar experience watching the movie 'The Perfect Storm'. They managed to get some of the qualities of life on an offshore fish boat perfectly, yet also managed to throw in some scenes that could only have been written by someone who has never even seen the ocean.

At no point, ever, in a storm or any other time, should you jump in after a person who falls overboard. Yet they managed to do it twice in the movie. A person overboard in a big storm like that is gone, full stop - or at least the percentages are single digit. Even in flat water the odds are not great (it's a very large ocean).

Completely shattered my SOD.

DROIDS OF HOPE

....thanks

Scott Sanford wondered in the context that "The protagonist is thankful that they rented a 4-wheel-drive with all-weather tires, which let them safely drive over a highway just before it is closed for safety. Totally the wrong tire for that..."

Scott: "Would the protagonist know that? They had to rent a car, so I'm thinking they may be from a warmer climate."

Don't know about the rest of Canada, but at least in Quebec, winter tires (not all-season radials) are mandatory from 1 December to 15 March. This new law apparently prevented more than 500 car-related winter injuries in the first year alone. So at least in Quebec, rental cars would automatically come with winter tires during that period, and were I a rental company elsewhere in the snow zone, I'd equip all my cars with winter tires to preserve my stock in trade (i.e., the rental cars) and keep my insurance costs affordable.

If it's that bad I stay home (mostly).

And if you were an FBI agent sent to Wisconsin in the dead of winter…?

I've lived in Toronto for three decades, and I find winter tires make a real different even on dry pavement. The rubber is softer at cold temperatures, so they grip the road better. On ice and snow the difference is even more noticeable. In Edmonton and Vegreville they were basically essential, as far as I was concerned.

Even if all-weather tires have a deeper groove pattern than all-season, I would be surprised if they are as flexible as proper winter tires.

I will note that the CAA, which doesn't have a stake in selling tires, does not recommend all-weather tires in winter even though they are officially rated for it in Quebec (where winter tires are the law).

When it comes down to it, all-weather tires are really only a good idea for people who drive very little or who never go out in cold weather or snowy or icy conditions. There aren’t many people like that in Quebec. That’s why CAA-Quebec Automotive Advisory Services doesn’t recommend all-weather tires at all. Even the cheapest winter tire is better than any all-weather tire in winter.

https://www.caaquebec.com/en/on-the-road/advice/tips-and-tricks/tip-and-trick/show/sujet/all-weather-tires-not-a-good-idea-in-winter

We are getting well off topic here, but as it happens - I plan to drive a tour around Lake Superior in the dead of winter this year. Dryden, Thunder Bay, Sioux St. Marie, Sioux Lookout (in Wisconsin) and a couple of other places. My eldest has signed to play hockey in a league there and my father and I plan to follow the team on a road trip at some point. I expect our rental will have winter tires, or I certainly hope so as a couple of the towns are quite remote.

Well, there's nothing implausible about someone jumping overboard in a storm after someone else has fallen in - after all, there's one born every minute. I assume you meant what happened thereafter :-)

when did it last snow significantly in London?

1991 I think. I had to walk home ten miles from wurk because the trains weren't running overground, dunno if there's been snow there like it since. But per your point, it was all but gone two days later.

Rocketpjs noted: "I plan to drive a tour around Lake Superior in the dead of winter this year. Dryden, Thunder Bay, Sioux St. Marie, Sioux Lookout (in Wisconsin) and a couple of other places."

Beautiful country, but may God have mercy on your soul. For seven years, I drove from Sault Ste. Marie, where I worked, to Montreal, where most of my family and friends lived. Several times per year. The Trans Canada "highway" [sic] in much of that area is scary AF. We're talking two-lane non-divided highway with near-zero shoulders and endless stretches of sheer rock walls and deep ravines to welcome you should you need to swerve to avoid something. Plus optional speed limits (not legally; it's just how people drive) and a great many logging trucks. Probably took 10 years off my lifespan, not even including the time a traveling circus' trailer veered onto my side of the road and missed us so narrowly that the airflow pressed my side mirror flat against the side of the car. No damage (the mirror rotated), but did I mention scary AF?

Note: Haven't traveled those roads in 25 years. Maybe the government has improved them?

Definitely go for the winter tires during the winter, monitor weather forecasts, bring a fully stocked winter emergency kit (https://www.getprepared.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/sfttps/tp201012-en.aspx), and keep a sharp eye out for the moose, particularly around dusk. Better to drive in full daylight if you can manage it. Almost lost a colleague to a moose many years ago. He's only alive because a trucker saw the collision and stopped him from bleeding out.

Since you're traveling this summer, bring a few N95 masks in case the smoke gets bad. They're not perfect, but will remove a large amount of the particulate matter produced by all those wildfires currently burning. You can check on the air quality status here: https://www.airqualityontario.com/aqhi/locations.php

I like Trail of Cthulhu, I like the way the GUMSHOE system supports the investigation without getting in the way.

I just bought the revamped Delta Green in a sale, not impressed at all. I really liked the original DG, it had a coherent concept, addressed a lot of the criticisms of CoC and played well into the conspiracy milieu that was the thing in the 90s. The new version is very disappointing, it claims to be a new system but it's just the 40-year-old Chaosium rules with some tweaks and the labels scraped off. The books are very well put together and readable but I think it's massively over-priced, and the revision gets rid of everything that was engaging about the original.

The players' book is bloated with unnecessary detail of fed agencies the players will never come from and a lot of the game play seems to be about trying to requisition gear and cover up activities. Appropriate for a Laundry game, actually, but in this book the black humour is altogether missing. It's meant to be dark isolating horror but the overwhelming neepery dilutes that completely.

The interesting cultist adversaries from the original are all written out of the background for no reason but a note of thanks from Nyarlathotep (really!), and fully half the GM's book is the Chaosium monster list without Sandy Petersen's line art. The game is explicitly now about suppressing lone wizards and isolated 'unnatural' outbreaks, and without a shred of irony reviewers claim that the 'new' game takes CoC back from being 'monster of the week'. It doesn't even include an example scenario. It tries to imply that spree killers and the Trump election and post-truth politics are part of some end-of-days malaise, which would be an interesting take if it were actually developed at all.

I see that Kenneth Hite wrote a DG version, The Fall of Delta Green, set in the 60s using the GUMSHOE rules. That could well be with a look.

We're talking two-lane non-divided highway with near-zero shoulders and endless stretches of sheer rock walls and deep ravines to welcome you should you need to swerve to avoid something. Plus optional speed limits (not legally; it's just how people drive) and a great many logging trucks.

So rather like BC highways, but with smaller cliffs? :-)

Do you think GUMSHOE would support a Laundry campaign, including the latest novels where Bob et al are (or are becoming) horrors themselves?

Can't say... haven't driven in BC. But yeah, bigger cliffs in BC for sure!

Charlie Stross @ 77:

So Han Solo is an escaped slave catcher? Niiice. (Not.)

I've got the DVD for Solo around here somewhere.

Han was a juvenile delinquent on a "slave" PLANET ("Arbeit macht frei")
who only barely escaped the police by joining the army ...
found it not to his liking and deserted first chance he got ...
then fell in with evil companions ...
to eventually become a smuggler after somehow beating a rigged "game of chance" ...

A Rebel Without a Clue

Do you think GUMSHOE would support a Laundry campaign...?

I don't think so, there's a lot more action-spy-style shenanigans in the early books than investigation, even in the Deighton-like Atrocity Archives. If OGH had included a John Le Carre-inspired book then maybe, but as it is I'd go for a system more geared towards cinematic play. FATE system would likely work - there's already a Fate of Cthulhu - and scale up handily as you go from spies & sorcery through superpowers to godhood.

Robert Prior @ 90:

Would the protagonist know that? They had to rent a car, so I'm thinking they may be from a warmer climate.

That's a possibility. She knew enough to pack proper clothing, though. Drove well enough in heavy snow to not end up in the ditch.

I don't think it's THAT hard (from the few times I've had to do it - driving a HMWWV in 2 feet [61 cm] of snow) ... you just have to remember to take it slow; REALLY SLOW ... NO slower than that!

It's a minor niggle. It just feels like the author took the advertising of all-weather tires seriously, like those people who think 'flushable wipes' can be, well, flushed.

Anyway, the plot is beginning to thicken so I should probably stop giving details for a while so I don't accidentally spoiler it for other readers.

You have got me wondering though. What's the difference between "all-weather" tires & "all season" tires?

I've got "All Terrain" tires on my Jeep, but if that terrain was going to include any significant amounts of snow on a regular basis ... and I couldn't just stay inside and ignore it ... I'd invest in a good set of chains to supplement the AT tires.

Yeah, er ... you know I may have form for saying "Star Trek is dead to me"? Same goes for Star Wars. I've seen the first three movies, nearly bailed halfway through "Return of the Jedi" due to the nauseating plush toy product placement (ewoks) and have ignored it ever since.

You have got me wondering though. What's the difference between "all-weather" tires & "all season" tires?

I think it's a combination of grip and formulation. All-season tires start getting harder around 7C. Their tread also has narrower grooves, so they aren't as good at dealing with snow and slush.

Decent summary here:

https://www.canadadrives.ca/blog/maintenance/all-season-vs-all-weather-vs-winter-tires

Do you think GUMSHOE would support a Laundry campaign...?

I don't think so, there's a lot more action-spy-style shenanigans in the early books than investigation, even in the Deighton-like Atrocity Archives.

Thanks. I've got quite a few GUMSHOE game books — Ashen Stars, Trail of Cthulhu, Timewatch, Mutant City Blues, Night's Black Agents — and I've heard of the GUMSHOE variant of Delta Green. Never actually played any of them with a gaming group, so while the combat part seemed decent I have no idea how it would work in practice. Although Hite did write a martial arts supplement for GUMSHOE, so clearly some people think the rules work for action games! :-)

Yeah, er ... you know I may have form for saying "Star Trek is dead to me"? Same goes for Star Wars. I've seen the first three movies, nearly bailed halfway through "Return of the Jedi" due to the nauseating plush toy product placement (ewoks) and have ignored it ever since.

Guess I'm the only one who likes Ewoks. Of course, I like redwoods even more.

Anyway, why harsh on the little fuzzies when you can giggle about putting a giant spaceborne construction in orbit around an undeveloped exomoon like Endor. What could possibly go wrong?

--Well, there's the fun to be had with the magnetosphere of the gas giant primary. That will keep everyone all fired up.

--And there's the lack of technological infrastructure, all of which has to be flown in.

--And there's the resulting security headaches that "middle of nowhere," "undeveloped" and "massive logistic problems" bring. As demonstrated in the third movie, where those idiot rebels trashed the operation in short order. They did demonstrate that Sith suck at security as much as Jedi do, for what it's worth.

...

Speaking of northern California, redwood country, and driving (and merging the threads)...I love me some winding roads, and highway one north of San Francisco, as well as in Big Sur, is definitely happy fun cliffside driving with steepish viewsheds. I enjoy it, but then again, I learned to drive on Mulholland Drive in LA, so I start smiling when the turns go three-dimensional, even if whoever's in the passenger seat is white-knuckling the jesus bar and whoever's in back is trying not to be carsick. You already knew I was odd...

The only valid headcanon for Ewoks is that Ewoks are juvenile Wookies, and the second Death Star is on its way to Endor to ensure there are no more little Chewbaccas.

...GUMSHOE, so clearly some people think the rules work for action games!

You could run a Laundry campaign using Dungeons & Dragons, that's what D20 is after all, I guess you could use GUMSHOE.

I'd want to use a setup that is heavy on character interaction and trust/persuasion /intimidation games - use that for the bureaucracy too - raids and stealth, snappy combat resolution, and a limited number of fancy devices / magic effects, plus some monsters. Actually, Blades in the Dark might suit well with some bending, it's about criminal capers. There's a really nice system in that where you react to situations by playing a flashback about how you'd prepared for it. At higher power levels in the Laundry, everything that isn't politics looks like a superpower so I'd add patches for those.

Guess I'm the only one who likes Ewoks.

Like with anything, it depends on how you cook them…

Very much of its time (1950s Britain), but amusing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw

(Flanders & Swann, "The Reluctant Cannibal")

I'd want to use a setup that is heavy on character interaction and trust/persuasion /intimidation games - use that for the bureaucracy too - raids and stealth, snappy combat resolution, and a limited number of fancy devices / magic effects, plus some monsters.

Sounds like an ideal system. (Especially the snappy combat resolution.)

Blades in the Dark sounds interesting. I'll have to check it out — I notice that the rules are available online through a Creative Commons license.

Let's see...we're talking about Return of the Jedi?

Who has who's body on the fire in that final scene?

Yes, that Flanders and Swan song is just about...perfect...for Endor.

Although I think their Madeira has aged past the point at which I'd ever serve it again.

Blades in the Dark/Forged in the Dark could work really nicely for Laundry Files, I think! I just bought Band of Blades (same system, different genre), whose setting is sort of like Glen Cook's Black Company novels with the serial numbers filed off. That game has you playing more of an ensemble cast rather than a single character, with each player taking on multiple roles, from rookie soldiers all the way up to command-level officers, with different roles and mechanics for each. Imagine a game where, depending on the scene, you might be playing characters who resemble:

1) Bob right as he's being sent on his first field work 2) Bob once he starts down the path of being the Eater of Souls, mentoring and covering for the newbie 3) The movers-and-shakers on Mahogany Row, assessing the newbie's and veteran's performance and making plans accordingly

All in a single session.

Obviously, the official game is already under development, so this is just pie-in-the-sky talk, BUT.

Charlie Stross @ 107:

Yeah, er ... you know I may have form for saying "Star Trek is dead to me"? Same goes for Star Wars. I've seen the first three movies, nearly bailed halfway through "Return of the Jedi" due to the nauseating plush toy product placement (ewoks) and have ignored it ever since.

I thought the original Star Wars (before the merchandising tie-ins began) was the best Sci-Fi movie I'd seen since Kubrick's 2001. Then it got rebranded Episode 4 and the Empire struck back, which was NOT quite as great as Star Wars was, and when the Jedi returned it was even less so, but they were still Ok ...

Then Episodes I, II and III landed like a turd in a punch-bowl.

The two spin-off films I've seen, Rogue One and Solo, didn't do so well at the box office, and I believe Solo was roundly trashed by the critics ... but they were both better films than I, II & III.

I've seen Episode VII - the one where Han & Lea's kid kills his father - and it was so-so - but I haven't seen the other two sequels that are supposed to complete the third trilogy. Maybe I will someday, but it's not high on my list.

For a while I've been tinkering with Blades... to make a game about civil disobedience - instead of playing a crew conducting criminal ops, the players are a group of protesters running actions from demos and zines to pipe plugging and site sit-ins. Inspired by Neal Stephenson's Zodiac about an environmental protester, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, and by the recent legislation against protests. The game world's political system includes right and left fash, red, yellow and blue technocrats, and a scattering of moderates. The timeline counts toward greater repression and the game is to survive. I've re-jigged the mechanics to actively penalise violence - if anyone gets physically hurt the group as a whole take emotional trauma, and if you let your character slide into violence it's like taking irreparable SAN loss in CoC, you become the enemy.

For a while I've been tinkering with Blades... to make a game about civil disobedience - instead of playing a crew conducting criminal ops, the players are a group of protesters running actions from demos and zines to pipe plugging and site sit-ins.

That sounds like a really great game! I would be greatly interested in having a look, if you're willing to share.

about Star Wars:

I usually put it this way: it was a fun trilogy (minus the Ewoks). It's a shame they never made any of the promised sequels…

Agreed, I think that's VERY cool.

Anyway, given all the strikes, I now have this unholy urge to open a ChatGPT account, and tell it to write a pastiche of Uncle Tom's Cabin set in the Star Wars universe during the Old Republic, with droids taking the place of Black people.

I've no idea what kind of story this would turn out, but I predict it would be banned in Tennessee.

And in Florida you'd be required to say that the droids benefited because they were programmed with new skills…

And in other news from the Land of the Free™, in a small Alabama town the outgoing mayor apparently decided that the election wasn't valid so they held a new secret one that he won. No prizes for guessing the melanin levels of those involved.

_ Rather than concede, Haywood “Woody” Stokes III, the former white mayor, along with his council members, reappointed themselves to their positions after ordering a special election that no one knew about. _

https://capitalbnews.org/newbern-alabama-black-mayor/

Ilya posted the Chat GPT’s response in 87. It’s heartwarming for me, mostly because I don’t want AIs to take over just yet.

Speaking of northern California, redwood country, and driving (and merging the threads)...I love me some winding roads, and highway one north of San Francisco, as well as in Big Sur, is definitely happy fun cliffside driving with steepish viewsheds.

About a month back I was kicking around the idea of driving to Eureka (wiki link for those not on the west coast), since the coast is a really beautiful driving experience in good weather and it seemed a waste not to do something nice with the summer. Then some Life Events hit and I may not do that after all, but it was interesting to consider and plan out. I might get to it in August or September, or not.

Ilya posted the Chat GPT’s response in 87.

Someone who spoke French pointed out that Chat GPT is, phonetically, "Chat, j'ai pété" - or in English, "Cat, I farted." Does anyone closer to France know if this is actually what French news anchors are saying on the air?

To be sure, this is not remotely the most surreal thing that the information age has spun out.

About a month back I was kicking around the idea of driving to Eureka (wiki link for those not on the west coast), since the coast is a really beautiful driving experience in good weather and it seemed a waste not to do something nice with the summer.

5 years ago my wife and I did a 4 day Labor Day weekend doing this. San Fran to Eureka (lunch in Bodega Bay just because). Then up through the red woods, east to the Smith River gorge. (Just beautiful.) Through the tunnel into Oregon to Crater Lake. Then to Bend OR for a couple of days with family. Quick visit to Mt. Hood then back track (crazy Labor Day going home traffic) and then follow the Columbia River to Portland.

It was a great drive. Especially taking the coastal highway instead of the faster inland route. (The one Charlie took in a Lincoln without knowing better a few years back.)

And to be honest a much nicer drive than LA to SF via the same highway. Even with Big Sur.

You mean like the Chevy Nova that was sold in countries south of the US border?

I also believe that Star Wars trajectory was from nonsense-but-good to awful by the Ewoks. That said, Andor was bloody fantastic.

And although it didn't stay for long, it snowed like hell in London in 2009.

To be sure, this is not remotely the most surreal thing that the information age has spun out.

As someone who grew up in a place where farming news was always a lead item on the radio, A.I. has an entirely different meaning. Although still associated with bulls…

GPT, GPT, j'ai fait une tousse de pantalon...

"To be sure, this is not remotely the most surreal thing that the information age has spun out."

It's a tradition to hit that one, like Commodore did with the Commodore Fart.

Then for their next model they crossed the eastern border and brought out the Commodore Fuck 20. After that they stopped trying to be clever and just gave the next one a plain number instead of a name.

Someone who spoke French pointed out that Chat GPT is, phonetically, "Chat, j'ai pété" - or in English, "Cat, I farted." Does anyone closer to France know if this is actually what French news anchors are saying on the air?

Most French people are familiar with the concept of "chat" from gaming and message boards, the final t is spoken unlike when speaking about the animal.

The joke with GPT/j'ai pété is, as explained to another AI (Mike in Heinlein's The moon is a harsh mistress), a not-even-funny-once. So French news anchors (and everybody) say it straight, without smirking.

Cheers, it's still more notions and notes than a workable game, but when I've got a beta version I'll put it up on itch.io

David L @ 127:

About a month back I was kicking around the idea of driving to Eureka (wiki link for those not on the west coast), since the coast is a really beautiful driving experience in good weather and it seemed a waste not to do something nice with the summer.

5 years ago my wife and I did a 4 day Labor Day weekend doing this. San Fran to Eureka (lunch in Bodega Bay just because). Then up through the red woods, east to the Smith River gorge. (Just beautiful.) Through the tunnel into Oregon to Crater Lake. Then to Bend OR for a couple of days with family. Quick visit to Mt. Hood then back track (crazy Labor Day going home traffic) and then follow the Columbia River to Portland.

It was a great drive. Especially taking the coastal highway instead of the faster inland route. (The one Charlie took in a Lincoln without knowing better a few years back.)

And to be honest a much nicer drive than LA to SF via the same highway. Even with Big Sur.

I love the two lane scenic highways. Here on the east coast that means the Blue Ridge Parkway & Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park.

California's redwoods & national parks are on the itinerary for my long deferred photo safari to the western U.S. ¹ ... but with all the climate news in the last few years, especially this summer, I'm afraid it's been deferred a bit too long.

I'm afraid I'll never get to go and even if I do I'll feel guilty about every gallon of gasoline I consume - IF I can even afford to buy gas.

Bottom line is I just don't have the money for an "environmentally friendly" EV, especially not one of the 4WD ones - I'm stuck with the Jeep. 4WD is a requirement in LAW to enter some of the places I want to visit & photograph - THEY catch you in there without it & they impound your vehicle, whopping BIG fines PLUS tow charges - that's why I bought the Jeep, so I can go there without having trouble with the law.

¹ Probably NOT going to be visiting Death Valley NP.

I saw "news" where Twitter is going to rebrand itself as 'X' (as in just the letter)

... and Micro$oft, along with that "other" brand and several other entities are already preparing to sue for trademark infringement.

Not to mention a whole generation filing a class action lawsuit for defamation! 🙃

Re: California tripping

I completely get the climate angle, which is why I’ll never see Australia or New Zealand or Europe.

If you decide to come anyway, come in the spring. Everything’s much nicer in March, April, and May. Early for the deserts, later for the North Coast. You do have to wait for July for the high mountains, but the rest can be visited earlier..

As for 4WD, don’t worry about the ticket, worry about dying if you get bogged in the middle of some lonely place. The tickets are to make being stupid more embarrassing and to save the search and rescue crews some work.

I just hope on of the not-X ones rebrands as Q. Or x̄ in either the medical (not x) or mathematical (mean x) senses...

Heteromeles @ 136:

Re: California tripping

I completely get the climate angle, which is why I’ll never see Australia or New Zealand or Europe.

If you decide to come anyway, come in the spring. Everything’s much nicer in March, April, and May. Early for the deserts, later for the North Coast. You do have to wait for July for the high mountains, but the rest can be visited earlier..

I'm thinking more late September - November for fall color, trying to get west before Yellowstone closes for the winter; the Rockies do develop a lot of color.

I've managed to get out west a couple of times & one of my best photos is Aspens in October outside of Telluride ...

The problem with those previous trips were deadlines. I had to be back in North Carolina to go back to work. I'm deadline free now so I can take as long as I need for this last(?) trip.

I've also been to California a couple of times as a child & there are a number of places I'd like to see out there (or see again) ... and up the coast to Oregon & Washington state.

As for 4WD, don’t worry about the ticket, worry about dying if you get bogged in the middle of some lonely place. The tickets are to make being stupid more embarrassing and to save the search and rescue crews some work.

Not really worried about that. All of the places I want to go are quite well traveled & I'm not really into off-roading. But I want to go some places where the government requires you to have 4WD, not places where I NEED 4WD.

I'll stay out of the places where NATURE requires it, thank you very much; leaving those places to the people who are interested in the 4 wheeling rather than the views it's possible to capture.

I will be equipped for self recovery to some extent, but I think I've got more sense than to go into places where I'm really likely to need it.

Fall color is kind of iffy out west. It’s great when you get it, but timing and extent aren’t that predictable. You also have to dodge around the fall fires.

If that’s what you want to do, though, good luck! I hope you catch it.

Take my money. Please. Have run 1e games at the local gaming con, will gladly repeat w/ 2e.

5 years ago my wife and I did a 4 day Labor Day weekend doing this. San Fran to Eureka (lunch in Bodega Bay just because). Then up through the red woods, east to the Smith River gorge. (Just beautiful.) Through the tunnel into Oregon to Crater Lake. Then to Bend OR for a couple of days with family. Quick visit to Mt. Hood then back track (crazy Labor Day going home traffic) and then follow the Columbia River to Portland.

It was a great drive. Especially taking the coastal highway instead of the faster inland route. (The one Charlie took in a Lincoln without knowing better a few years back.)

That sounds like fun! And like something that deserved more than just a few days. I'd have wanted to visit Crater Lake on my trip from Portland to Tonopah for Westercon 74, but there just wasn't the time for it on either leg of the trip. I'd see so many more places if I didn't have to be back home so often.

There's a restaurant right on the water in Depoe Bay that I remember from a trip to the sea lion caves, back when I was a kid. Google Earth says it's still in business and I'd like to stop in again. I'd like to go down the coast for the pretty views; I can go inland and take the faster run up I-5 on the return leg.

Like Charlie's rented Lincoln, I've got a gigantic American land barge for a car; fortunately I'm used to it but it is not small or agile. It's good for road trips.

As a dog returneth.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com

I always thought Unknown Armies could work well for a Laundry Files game - it's got one of the best mental health systems in gaming, it's designed to work at power levels ranging from "Hapless Mortal" to "Semi-Divine Eldritch Entity", deliberate invocation of archetypes to gain their powers and exploit narrative causality to you advantage...

For added lulz, I think the Laundry RPG 2e is probably going to come out around the same time as next year's Laundry side-quest novel, "A Conventional Boy" (I just got word that the contracts for the latter are finally on their way).

So you should totally aim to run a Laundry 2e campaign based on the events of ACB, including the in-book game of Bones and Nightmares featuring the knock-off of Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan ...

Just to confirm my assumptions, I take it that the RPG is entirely a multi-player game?

I haven't checked recently, and I regretted but was not surprised when there didn't seem to be any modern technology descendents of the Colossal Cave Adventure. But, if there are any, a hint to where to find an entrance would be interesting :-)

Yes, it's multiplayer. (Dice-and-paper game, not electronic at all.)

For descendants of Colossal Cave Adventure you need to either search for "Interactive Fiction" (like Zork -- there's still a cult IF developer scene, but it's totally non-commercial/open source this century), or look to Roguelikes such as Nethack or, at the upper end of the scale, Dwarf Fortress.

That sounds like fun! And like something that deserved more than just a few days.

We only had from Friday till Tuesday.

Crater Lake almost didn't happen. This was Memorial Day weekend and they literally cleared enough snow to open the north entrance that weekend. So we didn't have to back track 3 or 4 hours after the visit.

There's a restaurant right on the water in Depoe Bay

We ate lunch on a wharf restaurant in Bodega Bay which was great. (Cue referent to the movie "The Birds") On a separate trip we ate at a fantastic sea food place all by it's lonesome on a spit of land off the PCH just north of Big Sur. Can't remember the name. I hope it survived the pandemic. But it's location might have made that problematic as most of their business was people noticing them as they drove by or driving down from Monterey.

I've got a gigantic American land barge for a car; fortunately I'm used to it but it is not small or agile. It's good for road trips.

We had asked to rent a smaller car but all they had was a Ford Escape unless we wanted to wait and see what showed up. Turns out the Escape was a hybrid and at the rate was matched to our reservation so it wasn't all that big or expensive and we got about 45mpg which is fantastic on the PCH.

Thanks. My ignorance of it shows how remote I am from that scene!

I will take another look (it is decades since I last did). I cannot stand the Rogue/Nethack interface, but I hadn't realised that Zork had freed itself from Infocom (yes, it's that long ago) and Dwarf Fortress is new to me.

Roguelikes can have crude character-cell graphics, but there are plenty with more visually appealing tilesets. This goes for Dwarf Fortress too: the original open source version looks like Nethack metastasized, but there's a commercial version (via Steam and other sources) with considerably more user-friendly graphics and a whole bunch of other affordances. I want to try it some day ...

It wasn't primarily the graphics, but the input. The original version(s) had vi-like cursor movement, which was the original reason I had nothing to do with the vi-mode editor interface, and always used ex-mode. Yes, vi/ex has improved, but I have since discovered plenty of other reasons not to use vi-mode even when I need to use that editor. I will take a look at the commercial Nethack.

There is no commercial Nethack. Dwarf Fortress is not Nethack, any more than VMS is CP/M.

Y'know, I'd put that on the writer. I have never asked, when I rented a car, what kind of tires it had.

We're back from Pemmi-Con. We heard 500-600 attendees.

I have NO intention of ever flying Air Canada again. Let's ignore the delays on both planes (even though it let us make our connection from DCA->YYG->XYZ (sorry, I forget Winnipeg's code). We left the con around 13:00 Sun. At the airport, we're told our connecting flight in Toronto's been cancelled (air traffic control slowdown due to thunderstorms). We can not fly, and hope they can find seats for us this week, or go to Toronto, and they'll put us on Delta to Atlanta, then 6 hr layover. In the morning. They'll give us a hotel discount ticket. (They didn't. They closed customer support in Toronto with 150 or so of us still in line). And they never managed to have a wheelchair waiting for Ellen.

Delta did everything better, including an earlier flight in the morning, and then a (run!) connection, no layover.

And yes, I spoke with Kevin Standlee at the con.

Let me say we're watching Strange New Worlds, and haven't seen any of the others. SNW is Gene Roddenberry's ST. Yes, it's that good.= (although the CGI of the lead in is stupid).

Actually, III was the one I was waiting for. That was good. Let's not talk about the Phantom Tollbooth.... And have I ever mentioned, back when W was US President, I GIMPed a picture of an address to Congress: Grand Moff Rummy, Darth Cheney, and, of course, Jar Jar Bush.

Contracts on the way?! I'll hold my cheer until they arrive, but congrats!

One thing - someone mentioned in one ruleset, how much work for the GM. I'm original school D&D, which means DM spends weeks or months creating a world, not buying something pre-genned.

And then there was a game I came up with, and played once (I was running down on game-playing, Life getting in the way). In that, you got to come over my house, with whatever you currently had in yours that you wanted to take, and we go down in my basement, and there's a Machine, that sends you sideways to parallel worlds. One direction, magic is stronger, science weaker, and the other direction the opposite. There were, of course, limits on how far you could go, before you couldn't live there.

Strikes me you could play a game like that in the Laundry Files - suddenly, something's happening outside your house, and you've got whatever books and items that you actually have (ok, books of magic would actually work)....

Thank you. I was extremely careless reading your post.

sideways to parallel worlds. One direction, magic is stronger, science weaker, and the other direction the opposite.

Strong rec for source material: The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman (and all seven sequels -- it's a completed series).

Hmmm... if I ever get back to doing that, thanks. I should ask if one of my daughters has read it. (Why, yes, that one's a librarian....)

Heteromeles @ 139:

Fall color is kind of iffy out west. It’s great when you get it, but timing and extent aren’t that predictable. You also have to dodge around the fall fires.

If that’s what you want to do, though, good luck! I hope you catch it.

There's more to "fall color" than just pretty leaves. I can't explain it scientifically, but I've seen it and I want to see it again. The light in the fall is special.

I'm pretty sure that's true wherever in the world you go. I just happen to like the western U.S. - mainly I think because there are so many National Parks there.

And, not merely does every novel stand on its own, you can look back after the last one and realise how the arc was implicit in the earlier ones. Impressive.

There's more to "fall color" than just pretty leaves. I can't explain it scientifically, but I've seen it and I want to see it again. The light in the fall is special.

Golden hour is longer. Cool weather means less bugs, so less distraction. Air tends to be clearer (less haze). And because sunrise is later and sunset earlier you are much more likely to be awake when the light is good :-)

One thing I noticed about being in Iceland and Greenland — you had great light pretty much any time of the day.

We had asked to rent a smaller car but all they had was a Ford Escape unless we wanted to wait and see what showed up.

It could have been worse. On the trip to the Utah Westercon/NASFic, Kevin Standlee's van broke down in, if memory serves, Elko. (For background: Elko, Nevada == nowhere, surrounded by powerful nothingness.) Unable to rent a car at all, the least crazy answer was to rent a U-Haul truck. This wasn't great for most purposes but made cargo packing very easy...

Let me say we're watching Strange New Worlds, and haven't seen any of the others. SNW is Gene Roddenberry's ST. Yes, it's that good.

I'm very much liking it, too.

Although I will say the recent Uhura episode (no spoilers) mostly worked because it was so formulaic that all long-time Star Trek fans knew where it was going as the actors hit the appropriate check boxes. "Is this is the part where X happens? Ah, yes, there it is." The script could have used another editing and polishing pass for casual viewers.

You say you "haven't seen any of the others" so let me ask - did the most recent episode work for you? I enjoyed it, but I've also been watching Lower Decks. I've only watched the episode once so far and enjoyed the novelty of it; I should watch again to see how it holds up when there are no surprises.

Twisty narrow roads really are more fun in smaller cars. I’ve driven the North Coast in everything from a Festiva to a U-Haul, and the Prius was the most fun. Easy to drive on narrow roads, easy to whip turns, and easy to park in tourist trap parking lots.

The Festiva was a bit underpowered for the uphills, and turning off the AC to avoid overheating got tedious.

It could have been worse.

Yes it could. We drove the northern route described over a Memorial Day weekend. (Last Monday in May for those not in the US.)

So we decided to go back and do the southern route (LA to SF) at the end of the summer.

One hour in line to get our compact which became a Cadilac smaller SUV.

Electronic key fob was NOT in the car but we didn't notice till 30 miles north of Orange County airport. After lots of craziness it took us 8 hours from landing at Orange County / John Wayne to get past LAX.

Next morning dash on car had all analog gauges go dead. Fiddled wit options to get a digital read out of both speed and range of fuel in tank. Nearest replacement car would be Santa Barbara airport. And they only had a Dodge Challenger. The dash had a display of fastest 0-60mph time in last 30 days or some such. So much for saving fuel.

Wife said lets just leave. So we went straight to SF turned the car in (all days and fuel comp'd due to ...) and flew out that night.

I will take another look (it is decades since I last did). I cannot stand the Rogue/Nethack interface, but I hadn't realised that Zork had freed itself from Infocom (yes, it's that long ago) and Dwarf Fortress is new to me.

Well, Infocom was bought by Activision in 1986, and the brand was discontinued in 2002. Zork(s) are still available from for example Good Old Games ( gog.com ) but I’m not sure about all the other games from Infocom.

There’s a scene for IF, as Charlie mentioned, but I know little of it. I’m now reading the book ’50 years of text games’ by Aaron A. Reed which might be a good read, and it has games until 2020, so it’s a good point to start for more recent stuff, too (Dwarf Fortress is one of the games which have an article in the book.)

The games nowadays are also more varied, and you can play NetHack with also the cursor keys, I think since late Eighties (when I started playing it). From the more graphical fare I’d recommend checking out at least Disco Elysium, but then again I don’t know how accessible that is if you haven’t played other games.

whitroth noted: "I have NO intention of ever flying Air Canada again. Let's ignore the delays on both planes..."

In fairness, CBC News had a story recently that blamed the delays on the federal government. Apparently they laid off many traffic control workers and stopped hiring new graduates from the training program during the pandemic, and then forgot to rehire them once travel restrictions ended. Not sure what the problem is with Pearson (Toronto), but it used to be a reasonably good airport. But I've seen news stories that it's now ranked among the top 10 worst airports in the world. So you can't blame Air Canada for either of those problems. Probably underfunding and understaffing by the feds, combined with poor traffic capacity planning? For example, Toronto's a major hub that sucks up traffic from Montreal rather than (more prudently) shifting some of the connecting flights to Montreal.

The other complaints are definitely legit. I've heard many stories about how bad Air Canada's service has been for the past several years. Which is sad, because we used to love flying them (a mostly seamless experience with good customer service and friendly, helpful staff). We'll keep our eyes open for their status when we start traveling again (maybe next year). I suspect much of the problems you described results from how hard everyone dumps on the customer staff at the gate when something goes wrong. It's not their fault in most cases, and dumping on them just makes them defensive and hostile.

Not sure what the problem is with Pearson (Toronto), but it used to be a reasonably good airport.

One of the problems with Pearson is that it has less per-passenger funding than most other Canadian airports, because a chunk of its revenues are redistributed to smaller airports. (Rather like how education taxes collected in Toronto are redistributed to the rest of Ontario.)

It's my local airport, so I have to use it, but I can't make the rest of my family understand that their experiences with other Canadian airports aren't similar. Moving several times the number of passengers (and planes) in the same space every day is naturally going to affect things.

One of the problems with Pearson is that it has less per-passenger funding than most other Canadian airports,

My wife recently retired after 30+ years with a major US airline.

People want airports that are close and easy to get to when they fly.

They want them far away when not flying and no planes to ever fly overhead.

They hate expensive parking.

They don't want to take taxis/Uber/Lyft/whatever.

They want luxury in the airport when flying.

They want pricing to be cheap for anything purchased in an airport.

They want cheap tickets.

They want luxury service.

.....

I disagree. We'd like flying to be the way it was in the eighties and nineties. Where our knees aren't jammed into the seat in front of us. Where we get food included in the price of our tickets. Where prices in the airport are no more than the price at a gas station convenience store. And we want commuter rail or el service to the airports.

And if people don't like planes overhead, then they shouldn't buy houses under five miles from, say, the traffic control tower at O'Hare.

Sure. I'd like that also. But people IN GENERAL want cheaper tickets than in those times.

My wife spent 18 years on the phones. Much of that time selling seats. (Cheeks in Seats) People would pass up a nice flight for a less nice or even terrible set of connections and planes to save $10 / seat on a $400 ticket.

Again, what people want and what they are willing to pay for are NOT in alignment. At least not with most people.

I (and others) watched multiple startup airlines trying to offer what you describe only to go bankrupt in a few years over the last 40 years. (I spent the 80s as a business frequent flyer.)

As to commuter service to the airport, sure. Sounds great. But everyone (well most everyone) wants it but NIMBY. I keep watching this being planned at various places around the country and getting killed almost all the time.

Even in NYC you would think that the subway would get you to LGA. But Noooooo. You have to get off and take a bus or taxi for the last mile. The last attempt to fund and build a line to the airport got to $2bil in costs (I think) before being killed a year or few ago.

Robert Prior @ 163:

There's more to "fall color" than just pretty leaves. I can't explain it scientifically, but I've seen it and I want to see it again. The light in the fall is special.

Golden hour is longer. Cool weather means less bugs, so less distraction. Air tends to be clearer (less haze). And because sunrise is later and sunset earlier you are much more likely to be awake when the light is good :-)

One thing I noticed about being in Iceland and Greenland — you had great light pretty much any time of the day.

One thing I've done is had one of my digital cameras converted for IR (older "backup" camera). That gives me something I can do photographically during the middle of the day when the light might not be so glorious as it is during the "golden hour" ...

In fact, I'm headed out right now (~ 2:00 EDT) for a sunflower field in Raleigh to try to capture some (IR) rays. 😉

Commuter rail in Philly took decades - the cab companies fighting it, They finally got it, and it's great.

Oh, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for the airline industry. I remember in '87, when my father died after I relocated to Austin from Philly, and I got a "condolence" fare of over $900. And then there was Lorenzo, buying Eastern, and literally taking it to bankruptcy solely and exclusively for the purpose of breaking the union contracts.

Eastern

As I've said before. Eastern and Pan Am self were committing slow suicide for years before the financial vultures showed up. Vultures don't go after healthy animals or companies.

No. Lorenzo was in with Raygun's anti-union campaign. The unions showed the letters to the feds, and the feds said, nah, he won't do it.

My point is not what Lorenzo did. It was that Eastern Airlines was badly run for years before even Lorenzo showed up. They keep trying to operate the same way as before deregulation and just like PanAm it didn't work. Unions and management of both airlines both kept acting as if the past would return. It didn't.

I was a somewhat frequent flyer of Eastern during this time. Ditto US Air.

And if you don't believe this, well so be it.

All true, but Pearson is Canada's busiest airport — most passengers per day, most aircraft movements. It's also chronically starved for funds, at least partly because money from traffic at Pearson is spread out to subsidize airports elsewhere in Canada.

Not disagreeing. As I said, what people want and the cost of such wants are out of alignment. In the case of Toronto the costs are out of sync with desires due to revenue being pushed to other places were "revenue" doesn't match the costs of the desired services.

Airports (for now) are a "common" good that in general helps society. But like schools, many people who don't fly and even those that do don't want to deal with the actual costs of such things.

Airports (for now) are a "common" good that in general helps society. But like schools, many people who don't fly and even those that do don't want to deal with the actual costs of such things.

I agree with Jane Jacobs that we treat many things that are for the common good as if they were a business, when that is entirely the wrong model. Dysfunctional as it is, you have to admit it gives great cover for looting (if you have the right connections). :-/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival

So, being long before 300, and putting aside the airline thread, in the RPG, will there be a way to intimidate, or otherwise force people (or bureaucrats) aside, to pass them, without using force?

First, that should have been intimidate, and second, I'm not thinking of spells, but a warrant, or a token from someone. Then, of course, the person you're trying to intimidate has their own tokens, or doesn't like someone.... How's that going to work in gameplay?

I would be very surprised if there wasn't, it is a standard thing in modern RPGs and I'm pretty sure it was in the first edition.

Since the game talk is slowing, Korean team claims to have created the first room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor.

Uncle Stinky @ 186:

Since the game talk is slowing, Korean team claims to have created the first room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor.

IIRC, it's not, however, the first time that claim has been made ... 😏

^...will there be a way to intimidate, or otherwise force people (or bureaucrats) aside, to pass them, without using force?*

I don't doubt there will be, CoC had the Credit Rating skill and the latest iteration of World of Darkness is more social interaction rules than combat which, IMO, is the way it ought to have been for that game. Vampires' social scene being even more savage than their relations with mortals, was Anne Rice Southern by any chance?

" was Anne Rice Southern by any chance?"
Born in New Orleans, and you don't get much more Southern (USian).

Actually Nawlens is a weird southern US thing. Creole and the French and all that.

But it is adjacent. :)

Born in New Orleans, and you don't get much more Southern (USian).

Puerto Rico has entered the chat. If you restrict it to the States, Hawaii is the furthest south part of the US.

What most of the US thinks of as "southern culture" (skipping the racist parts which exist all over) is a swath of states from Georgia to Louisiana (with my note above) and from the Gulf coast up to Tennessee and Virginia. With some bleed into Kentucky and West Virginia and northern Florida.

If you want to get into how to get someone confused with geography, which US states are west of the Panama Canal?

If you want to get into how to get someone confused with geography, which US states are west of the Panama Canal?

Most of them.

The westernmost bit of Panama Canal is Puente Atlántico, and its longitude is 79.9 West, close enough to 80 West. 80th meridian West crosses Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia and both Carolinas. All US states west of that, including all of Florida, are west of Panama Canal.

If you want to get into how to get someone confused with geography, which US states are west of the Panama Canal?

I had a pretty good idea already, but just to help with the confusion, the Panama Canal's Pacific end is east of its Atlantic end, and is about at longitude 79.525°W. At the US northern border, that longitude runs about 180 km east of Cleveland and through Hamilton Ontario. Erie, isn't it?

California's similarly fun. Put the following cities in order from east to west without looking at a map: Eureka, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, South Lake Tahoe.

Back on "Finding true love in the cosmos" thread I mentioned that I requested a vanity plate saying RULE 34. Rather to my surprise, it got approved, and now my Camry Hybrid is officially RULE 34. (My wife was reluctant to put it onto our Tesla because she drives it to work.)

ATTENTION CONSERVATION NOTICE

I have been really quiet on the blog for the past couple of weeks because I am trudging towards the finish line of the second draft of The Space Opera that Will Not Die. Some time in the next few days -- hopefully before August -- it'll be baked, at least sufficiently that my test readers and agent hopefully won't get indigestion when I feed it to them.

In other words, normal blogging should resume in a week or two.

Good luck. I hope it's a instant best seller & you sell more copies than the Bible.

Include me in, but you knew that anyway.

Oh, yes, airline seats... The Winnipeg-to-Minneapolis Boeing, in Delta's "Comfort+" class, had a 17.3" wide seat. Scott Sanford can confirm I ain't skinny, so I am very glad all my fall & winter cons I can drive to in my (regenerative braking) Toyota Highlander hybrid. As for Glasgow...

Sorry I never found you at Pemmi-Con, whitroth.

California's similarly fun. Put the following cities in order from east to west without looking at a map: Eureka, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, South Lake Tahoe.

Anyone who remembers only that South Lake Tahoe is literally on the eastern border of California would jump to the wrong conclusion. (It's at the south end of Lake Tahoe, and borders the equally descriptively named Stateline, Nevada.) California bends!

But is it fair to expect Europeans to even know that Eureka and South Lake Tahoe even exist much less find them on a map?

I knew that Lake Tahoe exists. I thought Eureka was in the Pacific North-West, probably Seattle or Washington State, though.

Quick, name me the largest tourist destination in Croatia! (Hint: it's not Zagreb.)

Dubrovnik. Quite pretty I hear.

You're British, so Europe-adjacent. Sit down, the question was a rhetorical one for the 'murricans.

Game of Thrones was filmed there, so it may well be the only place in Croatia many have heard of.

Largest tourist destination in Yorkshire might be a better test…

Oh, jolly good. I've been looking forward to that for a long time. Guess it's still a year or so before it comes through the publishing process?

Whitby? People have heard of Dracula. :-)

But is it fair to expect Europeans to even know that Eureka and South Lake Tahoe even exist much less find them on a map?

Heh. I think many/most people in southern California couldn't find Eureka on a map.

The point, as you noted, is that California's so bent that its southwest corner, where it abuts Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, is about two degrees east of its northeast corner, where it abuts Oregon and Nevada. Since the northeast point is due north of Lake Tahoe, this means that both San Diego and Los Angeles are east of Lake Tahoe.

The westernmost point of California is up in the northwest, an area called the Lost Coast a bit south of Eureka, up in redwood country.

Heh. I think many/most people in southern California couldn't find Eureka on a map.

I've spent the night there so I know where it is. But then again I'm not from California.

I started this bit of diversion as most people in the US don't know the details of the area geography much at all. Like that most or all if South American is EAST of Miami. Mentally we tend to think of it as just South. And back to California, San Francisco is not even half way up the coast to Oregon. Yet most of the rest of the country (and a non trivial number of Californian's likely think it is near the border.)

As to the question about Yorkshire above, isn't that a pudding?

Charlie (and others) have noted several times that many from Europe just don't get how big the US and Canada are. And to be honest most Mericans don't get it either.

ATTENTION CONSERVATION UPDATE

If you are one of my crit readers, check my DW account for what I just uploaded there. Just saying. (No, I am not taking on new applicants.)

Now I can take a breather then think about blogging again.

(Yes, I just finished the rewrite of Ghost Engine. So it's tire-kicking time, after which it gets some fettling before it goes to my agent and thence, hopefully, a couple of publishers. I began this in April 2016: it's been a long time coming.)

"Charlie (and others) have noted several times that many from Europe just don't get how big the US and Canada are. And to be honest most Mericans don't get it either."

I occasionally have cause to grasp it, though like most I don't think about it often. In 4 weeks my son is moving to a small town 3,320 km away from here. Which is about halfway across the country.

For comparison, a move from London Uk to Moscow would be 400 km shorter.

San Diego and Los Angeles are east of Lake Tahoe

Checking a map, I see that even Santa Barbara is (just) east of Tahoe.

The factoid that I find weird is that Atlanta is west of Detroit.

harlie
"DW" account?
Uh?

If you don't know, you don't have an account on it.

As you said, your next laundry novel is not a "tie-in". Regardless, it's going to insert it's dripping ovipositor into its reader's brain, implanting it's self fertilized egg and hatching the thought,"role playing games". It sure would be nice to have such a game available for sale around that time.

It sure would be nice to have such a game available for sale around that time.

That might actually happen, but if so it'll be a monmental coincidence: I began talking to Cubicle 7 about a new Laundry RPG back in early 2022, and as a rule of thumb RPG publishers simply don't pay any attention to trade SF/F publishers (and vice versa).

I've spent the night there so I know where [Eureka] is. But then again I'm not from California. ... Charlie (and others) have noted several times that many from Europe just don't get how big the US and Canada are. And to be honest most Mericans don't get it either.

To expand, mostly for Europeans, going north of San Francisco one enters the Lost Coast, a region that has very few harbors along the coast; inland it's rolling hills covered in dense forests, which is every bit as beautiful and hard to build roads through as it sounds.

Eureka is on Humboldt Bay, the biggest anchorage between San Francisco Bay and Astoria on the Columbia River - that's almost a thousand kilometers of coast with postage stamp sized harbors if one is lucky. (Don't ask about the unlucky parts of the shore.) Eureka prospered, relatively speaking, on the timber trade; it still only has about 25,000 people, and that makes it the largest city on the coast north of the Bay Area.

I've never been to Wales but I read that Wales has pretty much the same problem: hills, forests, and a shortage of flat bits for humans to live on.

Eureka is on Humboldt Bay, the biggest anchorage between San Francisco Bay and Astoria on the Columbia River - that's almost a thousand kilometers of coast with postage stamp sized harbors if one is lucky. (Don't ask about the unlucky parts of the shore.)

An interesting bit on the PCH driving up from Bodega Bay to Eureka were all the "If a Tsunami LEAVE" signs at all the inlets and small bays. Next to all the RV parks. I guess the land is cheap when it might get washed away.

I've never been to Wales but I read that Wales has pretty much the same problem: hills, forests, and a shortage of flat bits for humans to live on.

Yup. Scotland has a related problem: lots of mountains—they're part of the same formation as the Appalachians, if I remember correctly—that got worn down by glaciation during the ice ages (they were under an ice sheet). So the mountains aren't very high but they are often steep, and the soil isn't great, and aristos in the 18th century kicked out most of the local crofters (who mainly farmed sheep on the hills) and turned them into grouse-shooting moors and grazing for their own herds, so it's depopulated and unlikely to be repopulated because who wants to build modern cities clinging to a mountainside with no infrastructure, no industry, and hundreds of kilometres away from everyone/everything else?

Which is why 60-70% of the population of Scotland lives in the Central Belt (a strip about 60 miles wide and 30 miles north-to-south, running from west of Glasgow to east of Edinburgh, with the M8 motorway corridor right along the middle of it), half the rest live in a couple of smaller cities (Dundee, Inverness, etc), and about 15-20% -- a million people -- occupy 80% of the land area.

Which is why 60-70% of the population of Scotland lives in the Central Belt (a strip about 60 miles wide and 30 miles north-to-south, running from west of Glasgow to east of Edinburgh,

It's also worth noting that the population rise in the Central Belt through the 1800s is mostly due to the coal fields along its length, something that's not present elsewhere in Scotland. Small market towns grew in size to accommodate the coal workers and their families and the Forth&Clyde canal was dug in large part to move the coal to Glasgow and Edinburgh.

with the M8 motorway corridor right along the middle of it),

And the M9 but no-one ever uses it. /s

Where I used to live the M9 was the closest motorway but it's a bit swoopier than the M8 which more directly connects Edinburgh and Glasgow east to west.

Nojay & Charlie
Which is also why, when the earlier iteration of the North British Railway took over the the Edinburgh & Glasgow ( Waverley to Queen Street, they guaranteed theoi8r rise to the largest railway in Scotland ...
There is also, up the East coast a narrowing strip of land, which is "easily" cultivable, bounded by Stirling - Perth - Montrose. And also some quite "rich" farming N of Aberdeen, but, again, not extending very far inland.
Scotland has a ridiculous number of natural harbours - the great rivers on the E side & all the drowned ex-glacial valleys on the W. But getting to & from most of those harbours by land can be a real pain, which is why ferry services, especially in the West are so important - a very sore & disputational subject, right at the moment, of course, where the SNP seem to be trying to emulate the tories for incompetence & money-wasting.
Hint: I don't think they will ever get quite that bad, but they have screwed up, without a doubt.

The problem with those ferries in the highlands and islands is that there aren't enough people to make them economically viable to run (read: covering costs and turning any kind of profit for the operators). So they're critical infrastructure. Which is, rightly, the government's job -- like maintaining the roads (and like maintaining the railways and the post office and the national grid ought to be). But that also means having the oversight mechanisms to handle procurement contracts, and ro-ro ferries are once-a-generation procurement item, so unless your procurement agency has a lot more things to oversee it's going to be handled by inexperienced people (because it's really a once-in-a-career item: probably nobody with any experience of doing it last time is involved).

To expand, mostly for Europeans, going north of San Francisco one enters the Lost Coast, a region that has very few harbors along the coast; inland it's rolling hills covered in dense forests, which is every bit as beautiful and hard to build roads through as it sounds.

I'll repeat the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Coast

You've confused the California North Coast with the Lost Coast, which is a fairly small and increasingly wild part of the North Coast. The story of the actual Lost Coast is interesting enough (even in Wikipedia) that it's worth telling people to read it, rather than summarizing it here.

The pictures look rather like Cornwall.

Generally, such procurements are such a miserable experience for the staff doing them that they will actively avoid doing it again. The policy staff rotating every few years doesn't help either. It's much harder to progress as a qualified professional than as a general policy person so there's an exodus from such roles into the general civil service too.

Charlie @ 222
For a purely passenger ferry, there's a perfectly workable model, indeed, one launched in 1946, in fact... - DO look at the pictures in the linked article!
Though getting vehicle-carrying vessels could be a little more difficult, maybe.
It's a very long time since I was in Oban, & I was last on Arran in, um, 1974/5, but I got the impression that there used to be a lot more "Coastal Steamers" - all operated by what is now called CalMac ...
What went wrong there?

It's a lovely side-wheel paddle steamer, but hopelessly obsolete: it's basically a nostalgia cruise. I'm certain it originally ran on coal and hasn't been converted to oil or natural gas at this point. There's a reason shipping doesn't run on those engines any more, they're very thermodynamically inefficient by modern standards. You're not going to get cars, vans, or trucks on or off it, which is an absolute requirement these days (the islands aren't supplied by break-bulk cargo steamers with stevedores loading and unloading the sacks: like the rest of the UK it'll be roller-cage, parallelized, or containerized cargo to the shops). Side-wheels used to be handy because it could turn in its own length without needing a tug, but modern vessels have water jets or propeller pods to provide fine directional control. And so on.

Charlie ...
I'm ASSUMING you said all that for the benefit of the grockles & non-UK readers ....
Incidentally, P.S. Waverley will be paying London river a visit later this autumn, I might treat myself to a ride ....
More to your & my original points ... why are there so few "steamers" now?
I realise larger ships are more efficient, but when the numbers are run down & the existing vessels are getting older & unreliable & the new ones can't even get out of the shipyard ...
Given the number of bays, inlets, rivers &, Um "creeks" along the Scottish coast ... what's the Scots-Gaelic for "shit" { I know it's Caca" in Erse, but not if it's the same in the Pictish version. )?

You might have noticed the rise of multimodal freight containers between the late 1950s and late 1970s?

Freight containerization cut the cost of shipping goods by water by a whopping 98% -- and rendered all the old freight ships obsolete almost overnight.

Remember the NS Savannah? It was a glorious effort -- a classic freighter, only nuclear powered, ordered in 1955. She entered service in 1964, but was already obsolescent and was laid up for good in 1972, because she had holds for break-bulk cargo and couldn't be converted to take containers. And at 9,900 long tons she's tiny by modern standards. A Triple-E class container ship empty displaces 55,000 tons ... but can carry 18,000 odd 1TEU containers, adding up to about 210,000 tons: and they're no longer the biggest -- the biggest container ships currently are around the 233,000 ton mark.

You do not run a quarter of a million tons of ship using a steam engine. They typically use a diesel plant rated at close to 70MW power output, or roughly 94,000 horsepower. Those big bangers weigh a couple of thousand tons, are several stories high, run on dual fuels (CNG or diesel), and can achieve thermal efficiency of over 60%.

Here's some engineering porn of the MAN B&W 12S90ME-C Mark 9.2, the world's biggest diesel engine (currently).

Advocating steam power for these monsters is a bit like suggesting running an intercontinental air freight business using DC-3s instead of cargo 747s these days ...

Well, sort-of. I don't know of any theoretical reason that they couldn't be driven by steam turbines - the most powerful ones made dwarf those diesel engines, and generating steam isn't exactly hard. The second reference says that they are used for all large, high-speed ships (which I assume means nuclear-powered aircraft carriers).

https://www.ge.com/steam-power/products/steam-turbines/nuclear-arabelle https://www.britannica.com/technology/turbine/Steam-turbines

Incidentally, containerisation WASN'T an overnight change, because it required the manufacturers etc. to tool up for packing containers themselves, as well as new ships. I remember it being several years from it being touted as the next great thing to it actually taking over. Indeed, at one stage some pundits doubted that it WOULD take over, for that reason.

I watched the changeover to standard containerisation on the railways, of course.
And the futile - but very determined attempts by the London Dockers to screw it, up to & including picketing fellow trade-unionists on the railways at Stratford ( E London ) - an interesting fight!
I'm told that the real forced-change to containerisation came with the US involvement in Viet Nam ... for "reasons" to do with shipping cost-effectively.
Another reason was that containers were & are a lot harder to EASILY "pilfer" ( shall we say ) from than break-bulk shipping.

"a million people -- occupy 80% of the land area."

Actually, that's a lot like the US, with over 80% in metro areas, and not a lot of them. A friend posted a pair of maps, one political: the US is almost all GOP... and then another map with population, and there's a dozen or so huge areas, mostly blue, with most of the US empty. If you put the Dakota's together, their population would be a little larger than the city of Baltimore.

Carnot Cycle efficiency -- the temperature difference between the hot and cold gases determines the amount of work you can get out of fuel in a gas engine. For steam it's a couple of hundred degrees difference in a piston engine but you can push that up to four hundred degrees and more in a steam turbine, but realistically no more. The gas in a Diesel engine's cylinder can be as hot as a thousand degrees in compression and maybe two hundred degree in the exhaust so it burns its fuel more efficiently.

A gas turbine is even more efficient but gearing a jet engine down to directly drive a ship's propeller shaft is difficult. The QE aircraft carriers each have a pair of RR Trent jet engines powering generators on board along with a couple of large marine Diesels which also drive generators but the Trents are only used for high-speed operations such as launching aircraft.

The new USN Ford-class carriers have a lot of electricity-generating capacity, twice as much as their predecessors, in part to power the EMALS catapults and in part for future upgrades involving directed-energy weapons. I've not seen any definitive statement one way or the other but I thought they might actually have electric propulsion like the QEs, most modern nuclear submarines and the Russian nuclear Arktika-class icebreakers. I could be wrong on this though.

I'm told that the real forced-change to containerisation came with the US involvement in Viet Nam ... for "reasons" to do with shipping cost-effectively.

At some point in the last few years I read about the military and shipping to Viet Nam. It was a mess. And getting to be a bigger mess day by day. I don't know who started the conversation but this was a part of the process of the US military realizing that the future was NOT nuclear weapons and logistics for moving vast quantities of stuff around the planet and being able to use it at the delivery point would be a good and necessary thing.

I think many/most people in southern California couldn't find Eureka on a map.

Somewhere near Ballarat, I think. The Eureka Stockade has folk history tied to it and I vaguely recall there's some kind of tourist attraction there. The enduring popularity of which is weird given the anti-union history of the last few decades.

about 15-20% -- a million people -- occupy 80% of the land area

Compared to most of Canada, the Highlands are a pretty crowded place…

I'm told that the real forced-change to containerisation came with the US involvement in Viet Nam ... for "reasons" to do with shipping cost-effectively.

You might enjoy The Box, a very readable story about the development of containerization.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/the-box

If you'd rather listen, BBC did a podcast on the subject that summarizes the book in nine minutes:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04g1ddh

The podcast is good as far as it goes, but the book is IMHO better and well worth reading.

Eureka! The name conjures, oh, colonial extractive capitalism, poorly acknowledged genocides of locals, alt politics….

What fun!

Sarcasm aside I went to Humboldt State, so I spent a few years behind the Redwood Curtain.

I was thinking that Humbolt County sounds like the West Coast of the South Island (we have the best names). Cold, wet, black sand beaches you don't want to swim from, few harbours and in the southern case, directly exposed to the Roaring Fourties... wind, we has it. Also rain. 11m+/year in the south down to as little as 4m/year in the north.

Amusingly I biked the northern half once and it didn't rain on me until I turned inland. Of course the other 10 or so times I've ridden through there it generally rained every day. At least not continuously, not for the whole 4-5 days it takes to ride through anyway. But I have definitely gone 48 hours or so when if it did stop raining that was while I was asleep. Also great country for sleeping in a hammock, between the rain and the sandflies (biting midges small enough to get through a lot of mosquito netting). Wake up, put a foot down... into 10cm of water. Find a nice flat spot to pitch a tent, discover that it's spaghnum moss over mud down at least a metre... yeah, nah.

I went through with my then-partner and she initially was going to sleep in the rental car. Which turned out not to be even slightly sandfly-resistant. I think she bought a mozzie net (sold as that despite the lack of mozzies) and that got her through a couple of days we spent in namu territory.

https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/our-health-system/environmental-health/pests-insects-bites-and-stings/sandflies/

Interesting to contemplate containers In Spaace!

I know it’s king of been done. What I wonder is which system might prevail; multimodal, terrestrial boxes, or the current space system of modules and racks, as seen in the ISS.

Guess it’ll come down to how easy it is to loft stuff from surface to orbit.

For added lulz, imagine if the intermediate links between Earth and space installations was the three-part airship to orbit, followed by Alex Tolley’s water-based space coach. What to bolt the module to…?

I have heard that mantra before, and it's simplistic exaggeration, at best. Firstly, modern ones handle steam at 5-600 degrees Celsius and, secondly, the efficiency of diesel engines is nowhere near the Carnot cycle efficiency. That claim almost always compares diesel engines with steam engines that were designed over half a century earlier! Yes, there is a difference, but it's nowhere near the magnitude claimed, and is why shipping companies rarely replaced steam engines by diesel ones in existing ships.

Indeed, I have seen analyses that indicate that the best currently achievable gas-burning system is a gas turbine followed by a steam engine stage!

You might enjoy The Box, a very readable story about the development of containerization.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/the-box

its also available as a kindle

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy-ebook/dp/B01772PS00

Modern steam turbines that can handle very high temperature steam are used in stationary plants, not on board ships for a lot of good engineering reasons which I won't bother going into here. They move the efficiency needle of a coal-fired power station from ca. 38% thermal efficiency up to a bit over 47% at the cost of more complex plant engineering and operational issues. The term of art is ultra-super-critical thermal power plants if you want to read more about it. Modern marine Diesels run over 50% thermal efficiency without the extra cruft and issues of marine steam.

As for the Combined-Cycle Gas Turbine generators you allude to that's perfectly correct, again in static land-based plants and not on a moving platform. It would be feasible to set up an energy-recovery system to take the exhaust from the QE carrier's Trent jet engines and generate extra electricity from steam raised by the hot gas but it would add little to the total generating capacity on-board and add more equipment to house and maintain, including all the necessary support equipment to, for example, produce extra clean water on board ship for the steam cycle. Given that the QE Trents only run occasionally and it's the big Diesels that provide propulsion power most of the time the extra electricity a steam-cycle recovery system could provide is not really a benefit.

I actually wrote an SF story about "containers In Spaace!" It was unfinished and bit rot got to it unless it's still lurking on a dead backup somewhere.

The protagonist was a privateer "lighterman" operating a patched-up ground-to-orbit cargo shuttle on a recently-colonised planet, carrying smallish standard-sized containers up to the starships that moved cargo around the inhabited Galaxy. It was a new enough colony that the Big Boys, the Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd-sized cargo transportation businesses hadn't started operations there but it was clear that they were preparing to set up shop on the colony in the near future. These companies used super-sized containers, much larger than anything the privateer lightermen could carry up to orbit and when they moved in they'd drive out the independents in the colony due to economies of scale.

You've confused the California North Coast with the Lost Coast, which is a fairly small and increasingly wild part of the North Coast. The story of the actual Lost Coast is interesting enough (even in Wikipedia) that it's worth telling people to read it, rather than summarizing it here.

Conflated, but yes. I thought it would confuse people to get distracted by the stuff away from the literal coastline.

The region offers many interesting development lessons, as so many individual bits of it are wonderfully appealing and yet it's so difficult to actually assemble any reasonably scalable use of it.

Shasta is an amazing mountain - but first people have to get there. Easier to to up to Lake Tahoe and ski on wimpier mountains half as far from the Bay Area. Medford actually has a multiple square miles of land flat enough for farms - but once food is harvested, where does it go? Klamath Falls, much the same. And those are memorable places; I'm not sure why Dunsmuir exists at all.

Britain in general has a problem with ferries - odd for an "island nation", but consistent with the modern habit of neglecting the existing infrastructure. All round the coast, where there is a ferry service there are problems (except to/from the Isle of Man which has its own parliament).
The Isles of Scilly, for example, have one 45-year old ferry that runs 8 months of the year and has no ro-ro capability; nearly all supplies to the island have to be transported on a not-very-big freighter that can take up to 12 passengers during the winter months.
One of the issues in Scotland is the lack of consultation with the islanders - for example increasing the size of mainland<->island ferries when the people would much rather have more but smaller ships so they can have a more frequent service and their roads are not overloaded when a ferry arrives/departs.

Of which the main engineering reason is that nobody has put the development effort in. For good reason, I agree, because the best that could be hoped for is something vaguely comparable with the existing diesel technology. There's no way that the sales would repay the development cost.

And, according to Wikipedia, there ARE some ships that use combined cycles, so that's clearly not infeasible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_propulsion

My point never was that it's economically worthwhile (it isn't), but that it is not as infeasible as people claim when they are comparing the existing (previous era) steam engines with modern era diesel ones.

arrbee
A very interesting read is in the back section of a reprinted book I have.
The original was for 1922/3 & is a copy of the midsummer "Bradshaw" for that year.
A huge number of ferry services were run by the railway companies, & they & all the others, including MacBraynes are in a ferry section.
Some routes have been superseded by air travel, though there are still ferries to-&-from Ireland, Man & the Channel Islands of course.
But, the centralisation on one operator, who then enjoys monoply power is very distinctive & degrading for the populace.

North Carolina, that bastion of free market economics (at least in slogan by the current R's in the legislature) runs both a railroad and a coastal ferry.

The coastal ferry makes sense as there is a huge tourist economy that depends on hotels and restaurants built on ocean sand bars. And there are no bridges to some of these. And so the state owns and operates a ferry system. To quote from the state Dept of Transportation's first line on the web page: "​North Carolina's ferry system consists of 21 ferries and everyday service on seven regular routes..."

Which is a large enough service to have institutional knowledge and training.

As to the railroad. It is a very strange government contruct. Mostly it owns real estate and right of ways. But does buy and operate some rolling stock. Contracted out to Amtrak or similar for in state runs. Mostly between Charlotte and Raleigh.

Not too long ago they bought 10 used rail cars from Barnum and Baily's circus when it went out of business some thoughts of rehabing them into passenger cars for in state use. But while figuring out how to do it they parked them literally way back out of the way in the woods on an used rail siding. Some vandals set one or two on fire and it took a few hours to get equipment to them to put it out.

Also a couple of years ago some rights of way on a trivial sized bit of land held up the sale of some rehabed warehouses for a few months while all the lawyers figured out how to end the easements. (I do the networking for a few of the tenants of the involved buildings.)

Apropos of nothing at all, spouse and I watched the most recent Dune movie last night. Having cut my teeth on Dune I enjoyed it as it did a fair job of capturing the story and had some decent fidelity to the book.

What I really enjoyed was seeing dear spouse enjoy the movie. Somehow she has been married to me and lived in our society for decades and yet has never read, watched or even discussed Dune or Frank Herbert. She greatly enjoyed it.

David L @ 234:

I'm told that the real forced-change to containerisation came with the US involvement in Viet Nam ... for "reasons" to do with shipping cost-effectively.

At some point in the last few years I read about the military and shipping to Viet Nam. It was a mess. And getting to be a bigger mess day by day. I don't know who started the conversation but this was a part of the process of the US military realizing that the future was NOT nuclear weapons and logistics for moving vast quantities of stuff around the planet and being able to use it at the delivery point would be a good and necessary thing.

One reason there are barcodes on everything is the U.S. DoD made them a requirement for anything sold to the military back around 1980. There's an old saying, "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." ... or as Napoleon was reputed to have said, "Une armée marche sur le ventre!"

Moz @ 239:

I was thinking that Humbolt County sounds like the West Coast of the South Island (we have the best names). Cold, wet, black sand beaches you don't want to swim from, few harbours and in the southern case, directly exposed to the Roaring Fourties... wind, we has it. Also rain. 11m+/year in the south down to as little as 4m/year in the north.

Temporarily Humbolt County

John S
AND: - IF Boney the Corsican tyrant actually did say that ... he lost it, completely in spades (redoubled ) during the Peninsular War, where Wellesley was always trying to make sure his men were properly fed & watered

Oddly enough, I had to figure that out for one of my novels (not the one in print, not the next one, but after). Load railcars, shove 'em into a shuttle bay, take it to orbit, pull them out with a sled, then shove it into the ship's bay, with an expert system making sure the wheels go in between two rails (top and bottom, that is), then, when all the way in, lock the rails around the wheels.

Firesign Theater, exactly what I think of instantly when I hear "Humboldt County".

David L @ 249:

North Carolina, that bastion of free market economics (at least in slogan by the current R's in the legislature) runs both a railroad and a coastal ferry.

...

As to the railroad. It is a very strange government contruct. Mostly it owns real estate and right of ways. But does buy and operate some rolling stock. Contracted out to Amtrak or similar for in state runs. Mostly between Charlotte and Raleigh.

There used to be a railroad roundhouse in Raleigh. The turntable is still there and the North Carolina Railroad still uses it.

Google Maps: 35.78730727210307, -78.6418170364857

Also, The North Carolina Transportation Museum preserves the old Southern Railroad Spencer Shops (of Wreck of the Old 97 fame).

Google Maps: 35.68619521968566, -80.43582570973912

The museum has one of the few surviving railroad roundhouses in North America and a working turntable used to give visitors rides.

The NC Transportation Museum did the restoration work on Virginia's "Queen of Steam" Norfolk and Western 611 locomotive for the Transportation Museum of Virginia.

I'm waiting for a PRR K-4, which I may not see in my lifetime. https://www.railroadcity.org/k4restoration.html

whutroth
You DO REALISE that the PRR "K-4" class, were significant in the evolution of H N Gresley's Pacifics?
The original A-1, A-3 & A-4 types?
A-1 & A-3
A-4

Oh really good stuff! - D J T charged with conspiracy against the US & it's government ...
How sad

Apropos of chutzpah:

Remember the Titan sub, of "we told you it would implode" fame?

The co-founder of OceanGate, the company that made the sub, and which for some reason is not a smoking crater, was interviewed by Business Insider on July 28. The title of the article? "OceanGate's cofounder wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus by 2050, and says we shouldn't stop pushing the limits of innovation."

H
WRONG word, actually.
It's spelt: Hubris

Superconductor Breakthrough Replicated, Twice, in Preliminary Testing

Uncle Stinks
As the article says, it's going to be an interesting ride. Though I do hope that both the Chinese & Lawrence=Livermore confirmation is correct.
I note that the base-compounds to make this stuff { LK-99 } are "Nothing Exotic", so that nay mass-production costs will be concentrated on the actual "assembly" processes.

Talking of DJT & untrustworthy liars ...
Charlie - what do you make of this bizarre case? - Nicholas Rossi / Arthur Knight, etc??
- I note that the fingerprints match Rossi, though.

AND EVEN MORE SO in the case of present #264, above.
SPAM
Moderators, please?

⟦ spam now gone - mod ⟧

Bit off topic but today is the day for anyone in the US to release any bad news that will not reflect well on them or a company.

Nothing is being covered in the media except DT's latest indictment.

I have a strange feeling that a fully loaded A380 crashing into the Chicago loop by accident would get second billing today.

(smile) Well, we are talking about the Pennsylvania Railroad, "The standard railway of the world" as they billed themselves.

Not quite: the other huge news story is the downgrade of the US bonds to AA+ from AAA. That, I would assume, is ignoring the gs "debt!", and is actually due to the whack jobs Trumpists in Congress, who want to crash the economy. Note a lot of spending bills haven't been passed yet, and the US federal budget year ends the end of Sept.

David L @ 265:

Bit off topic but today is the day for anyone in the US to release any bad news that will not reflect well on them or a company.

Nothing is being covered in the media except DT's latest indictment.

I have a strange feeling that a fully loaded A380 crashing into the Chicago loop by accident would get second billing today.

Second billing means it's still being reported though.

Checking Google Newz just now Trumpolini is in 3rd place behind the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter being sentenced & Justin Trudeau separating from his wife.

Not quite: the other huge news story is the downgrade of the US bonds to AA+ from AAA. That, I would assume, is ignoring the gs "debt!", and is actually due to the whack jobs Trumpists in Congress, who want to crash the economy. Note a lot of spending bills haven't been passed yet, and the US federal budget year ends the end of Sept.

Agreed. I suspect that it's a signal to those drafting the US budget and their paymasters (meaning the Congressional Republicans and the small coterie of ultra-rich people who are paying for their campaigns). The message may be that trying to manage the US government as a rich fascist suffering from dementia--or while aping said state--is not acceptable to most other wealthy capitalists.

Of course it can also be read as an attack on Bidenomics. We'll see which story get traction.

An interesting part to me is that the cult of the genius billionaire has been tarnished a bit recently. Also, sex and other scandals seem to be causing various evangelical denominations to hemorrhage membership, at least in the US. Part of the credit downgrading may reflect a feeling that it's no longer quite so necessary to genuflect to the super-rich and/or to charismatic hypocrites. Or so I hope.

Agreed. I suspect that it's a signal to those drafting the US budget and their paymasters (meaning the Congressional Republicans and the small coterie of ultra-rich people who are paying for their campaigns).

This seems mostly due to Congress, well the House, being held hostage by less than 20 people whiling to sink the ship if they don't get what they want. The debt deal pissed many of them off and they've been vocal about it. And it only takes 5 to sink any legislation. (Go read up on the majority of the majority.) The only alternative is McCarthy breaking with them and working with the D's. Which will very likely immediately generate a vote to vacate the chair. And likely succeed. But with no replacement. Which will make January's fun and games look simple.

The R's have dug themselves a very deep hole. And a determined number of them vow to keep digging until things totally fall apart or they get their way. (For some of them I think they think either option will be fine.)

On a counterpoint there's this.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/02/broke-state-gop-parties-across-the-country-00109387

And to me the best sentence in the entire article is: "“It shouldn’t surprise anybody that real people with real money — the big donors who have historically funded the party apparatus — don’t want to invest in these clowns who have taken over and subsumed the Republican Party,” said Jeff Timmer, the former executive director of the once-vaunted Michigan GOP and a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project."

Sorry about this on a UK based blog. But to be honest if the US crashes their government, the rest of the world will at least get a scratch or two. If not worse.

I suspect we're basically in agreement, just looking at different aspects of the same thing.

Sorry about this on a UK based blog.

Right, pivoting on the subject of demented methanotrophs....

I'll call this one "Oxygenating the Underdark."

This title has precisely nothing to do with a cool little biology story, "Underground Cells Make ‘Dark Oxygen’ Without Light" ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/underground-cells-make-dark-oxygen-without-light-20230717/ ). The article is the usual fun QM essay.

The concept might be fun/useful for worldbuilders doing complex underground things. What follows is the tl;dr version with an example of how it can be used.

The basic process is one of those strange microbial metabolic pathways: dismutation. Basically, a methanotrophic microbe breaks down nitrite (NO2) as part of a reaction which gets the energy out of methane (CH3). The process liberates O2. In the system they were studying, the dismutators were producing enough oxygen to support a community of aerobic microbes in an aquifer hundreds of meters belowground.

Will this allow aerobic life in, say, Europa's oceans? Only if there are copious sources of methane and nitrite, so you've got to provide that.

Finally, returning to the title, D&D's Underdark setting: Dismutation offers a potential mechanism for oxygenating these immense, underground spaces. This, in turn, requires massive sources of both methane and nitrite. And...the obvious source for both of these molecules is unremediated dragon excreta saturating the groundwater down through the Underdark. It is, after all, Dungeons and Dragons. Here, I suggest that you can't have deep, well-oxygenated dungeons without having lots and lots of dragons on the surface world. Maybe the evil creatures of Greyhawk are right to revere and serve dragons, while those who kill dragons are unintentionally (?) causing vast harm to the ecosystems beneath their feet.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. It's an interesting article if you're into that sort of thing.

I think all predictions of what is going on in Europa's ocean are loads of dragon shit :-)

As Haldane said, "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Nobody, but nobody, predicted Venus's atmospheric composition or many of the other peculiarities we have discovered in the solar system.

But, back to D&D, there would be interesting possibilities with a Civilization-like game where dragons (etc.) are major menaces and obstacles to development but have subtle importance in the maintenance of the ecology.

Basically, a methanotrophic microbe breaks down nitrite (NO2) as part of a reaction which gets the energy out of methane (CH3). The process liberates O2

Was that a typo for (CH4)? CH3 is methyl group, not a standalone molecule.

Yes, CH4. Thanks for catching that!

I've got a CD from a woman folksinger that I picked up at a Pagan event a few years ago. Seems that the dragon is the one that eats (and prefers) orcs, and when someone kills the dragon, the orcs breed like roaches, and they're all over the place....

As well as nitrite, do they work with the isomeric nitro?

Because I am reminded of a certain compound containing a high enough proportion of potentially reactive oxygen that it can burn (albeit incompletely) on its own, with no air at all... CH₃NO₂.

Which raises questions like: what kind of drags have we actually got here, ons or sters?

Do dragons run on Top Fuel? It could make sense for them.

Do dragons, then, support underground microbial ecologies by spilling some of it occasionally? Maybe by ejecting unburned fuel if they suffer a flameout, or by drooling, or occasionally being sick. Or by being stabbed by psychotic Turks and leaking through the hole.

Do dragons obtain the power-to-weight ratio to make that heavy, under-winged reptilian body fly by supporting symbiotic microbial V8s?

I am not surprised someone else thought of it first! For a game, you would want a more complex system, of course.

OK
Which very well-known city is, quite literally, guarded by a ring of Dragons?

Here be dragons

Do dragons obtain the power-to-weight ratio to make that heavy, under-winged reptilian body fly by supporting symbiotic microbial V8s?

Or did the legends get it wrong about which end the flame comes out? They are not wings, just control surfaces for rocket powered flight...

just control surfaces for rocket powered flight...

Not rockets; pulsejets!

Which can work at low speeds, all it takes is a long tube with some sort of fuel injection that ingests air at the front and a reed valve to stop it backfiring during ignition.

I have this vision of dragons making a deafeningly loud brown note and trailing an incredibly odiferous smoke trail as they fly. Probably sulfurous, and loud enough to churn your guts if they point their ass at you and ignite their afterburner glands (probably butyl mercaptan, which is a workable rocket fuel, as John D. Clark discovered to his chagrin).

If you can find a way to watch Prehistoric Planet 2, episode 1 (Islands), there's a pretty good segment that shows how good a "dragon" the pterosaur Hatzegopteryx can be. It was as tall as a giraffe, quite nimble on the ground, and the fossils suggest it could swallow a human whole.

I believe you just made a credible start on a bestiary for a Bored of the Ring prequel.

Wasn't this the sort of dragon that Terry Pratchet described in Guards! Guards!? Not the big dragon, but Errol the swamp dragon .

Mr Tim
Pterry got there first, IIRC ...
In (?) Guards! Guards! (?) he had a small dragon flying tail-first in an-almost-canard configuration, with a flame from it's mouth being the propellant-exhaust ... complete with pressure-wave on the ground following it ...

Sean Carter
Yes, that's the one - we must have been typing almost simultaneously

No, no! He flew forwards, having rearranged his internal plumbing so the flame came out of his arse. The canards were his abnormally huge eyebrows.

I do like Charlie's pulse jet idea, though. And you can make them work without any mechanical valves by playing the right games with resonances and tube sizes. That might be easier to evolve, perhaps.

Intermittent-combustion rocket propulsion is another possibility that would come out the same, and could well be evolvable. After all, the bombardier beetle is most of the way there already.

Sorry, I can't help thinking of Gamera, the kaiju turtle that pulls in his legs and head, and then flame comes out, and he rotates and flies....

So back to the V-1 buzz bomb?

Para 2 - The control surfaces on a guided missile are normally referred to as "wings" and "rudders".

A dragon, as described by OGH, would be a lovely fit in Bored of the Rings, a disreputable but short, amusing parody of LOTR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings

Tim H. @ 291:

A dragon, as described by OGH, would be a lovely fit in Bored of the Rings, a disreputable but short, amusing parody of LOTR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings

I also found a text based "video game" ... don't know if you can still get it, but there's a walkthrough on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwqF1dGsbWw

I suppose I could set up one of the old machines to play, most likely there's an MS/DOS compatible version, though some of those made it to 8-bit hardware as well. Not that I took to games as much as others.

IQ45
What happens WHEN he disobeys the Judge's orders about what we would call "Threats & Menaces" &/or { I'm betting on "and" } revealing confidential pre-trial information?
Here, that would be instant jail for contempt of court - do similar rules apply in the USA?
I'm betting that, being who he is, he will ignore everything, because the rules don't apply to him.
Which could be "fun"
See also the Grauniad

Greg Tingey @ 294:

IQ45
What happens WHEN he disobeys the Judge's orders about what we would call "Threats & Menaces" &/or { I'm betting on "and" } revealing confidential pre-trial information?
Here, that would be instant jail for contempt of court - do similar rules apply in the USA?
I'm betting that, being who he is, he will ignore everything, because the rules don't apply to him.
Which could be "fun"
See also the Grauniad

My guess is he'll receive several increasingly stern admonitions from the judge, eventually leading to some kind of pre-trial detention (perhaps house arrest with diminished access to social media).

Rinse & repeat.

What happens WHEN he disobeys the Judge's orders about what we would call "Threats & Menaces" &/or { I'm betting on "and" } revealing confidential pre-trial information?

The Grand Toddler has of course gone directly to disobeying - yes, already (example news article). The judge has been alerted, and has announced that Trump has until Monday to get his act together and explain himself. Trump, or more properly his lawyer, will get to make up a tale about how the words "If you go after me, I’m coming after you!" are not a threat they sound like.

Judge Chutkan has not actually said "...or I toss your ass in a cell" but the tone is becoming less veiled as the nonsense continues.

And yes, the idiot really posted that in public! (picture here)

Are we at Landsberg, yet?

I noticed years ago a reason to hope New York State gets him: they have the Clinton Correctional Facility.

SS
The latest report in the "Indy" suggests that he is walking very close to the edge.
The authorities in this particular case seem to be really set that "If" he oversteps the court conditions, then they will jail him.
We can hope ....

Meanwhile:
A couple of millimetres closer to the goal - we hope.

YAY! Only 25 more years until cheap and clean fusion power... IMH(layperson's)O: we'll eventually get fusion power, but it won't be cheap or downscalable for a very long time, if ever.

Meanwhile, OT/FYI: Triboelectric Nanogenerator – New Technology Successfully Harvests Electricity From Raindrops https://scitechdaily.com/triboelectric-nanogenerator-new-technology-successfully-harvests-electricity-from-raindrops/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter-200308 I think these could be game changers (especially if combined with rainwater harvesting) if they could be made affordably, reliably, and robustly out of non-scarce materials. (Big "ifs".)

What's the terminal velocity of a raindrop?

I have no real idea, but since they can easily hit a lot harder with your head out of a moving car window than they do just falling from the sky, I reckon 20m/s is a pretty generous estimate. Comparing that with the rule of thumb figure for good sunlight of 1kW/m², I make the energy delivered to a given surface by 1cm of rainfall equal to that delivered by 2 seconds of sunshine. Even in Llamedos that doesn't help much.

Pigeon @ 302:

What's the terminal velocity of a raindrop?

According to NASA: https://gpm.nasa.gov/resources/faq/how-fast-do-raindrops-fall

They're still a bomb designing facility, not into fusion for power generation, so take that with a certain amount of care.

Cheers :)

10m/s, then. Or half a second of sunshine.

A very gross mis-statement of the situation there.

My college roommate got his PHD there.

An US Department of Energy description of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory begins with the following statement:

"Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) primary mission is research and development in support of national security. As a nuclear weapons design laboratory, LLNL has responsibilities in nuclear stockpile stewardship"

Nuclear weapons related research, including weapons design, is not the only type of research conducted there, but that is its stated primary purpose.

I've repeatedly been puzzled by republican candidates stating an intention to close the Department of Energy, given that agency's responsibility for maintaining the US nuclear weapons stockpile.

I've repeatedly been puzzled by republican candidates stating an intention to close the Department of Energy, given that agency's responsibility for maintaining the US nuclear weapons stockpile.

Some of them are unaware of it. Some others are aware, but think it should the job of DoD. And some know perfectly well what DoE does and have no intention of ever actually closing it, but know it sounds good to their uneducated base.

I've repeatedly been puzzled by republican candidates stating an intention to close the Department of Energy, given that agency's responsibility for maintaining the US nuclear weapons stockpile.

Because to them (R voters) when on the campaign trail, DoE means power generation and light bulbs. (Cue up Rich Perry.) My father who worked in the UF6 diffusion industry was never a fan of the switch from AEC to DoE. But I was too young to have a conversation with him of why. And didn't care that much later in my 20s.

I'm fairly certain (but admit to no proof) LLNL spends more money on laser fusion than anything else. LANL spends more on weapon designs. But it can get fuzzy. There is also Oak Ridge and a few others I can't think of just now. Look for where the biggest supercomputer complexes are in the US and it will become obvious who does the nuclear weapons research.

More money these days goes into how to keep the current models from becoming very expensive and dangerous nuclear waste. And how to best take apart the retired warheads without creating more Hanford or Rocky Flat sites.

Please note: I'm not a fan of nuclear weapons. But also a realist in that they will be here for a long time. Maybe forever. Until we learn how and get comfortable with re-wiring the brains of shaved apes there will always be mad men who will be willing toss nukes at those who don't have the ability to strike back. Harking back to some of Chalies comments, we are not all identical spheres.

And I'm not totally happy with the way the US deals with the current stockpile. But we seem to be slowing getting rid of most of it.

Oh, yeah. Changing a mission statement of a nuclear lab site would be a really really big deal politically. Even if it is no longer correct.

Oh yeah, it was AEC, then ERDA, THEN Doe.

Per my recollections of my father and his friends, lots of paperwork, sound and fury, and not so much real change. Except more bureaucracy.

The staff got these really nifty mechanical pencils stamped with the department. (I suspect that someone decided pencil sharpener shavings were a bad things to have littering the place. They had to write down a LOT of numbers.) So as the names changed many of these that went home in pockets never went back. I wish I had one or more of them. I bet they would cost $100 or more today.

The staff got these really nifty mechanical pencils stamped with the department... I wish I had one or more of them. I bet they would cost $100 or more today.

Probably; a quick poke of eBay turned up an AEC wooden pencil for $30.

Eventually phased out, of course; what if the Russians got ahold of our American pencil sharpener shavings?

I just did a quick image search for AEC mechanical pencils and AEC ERDA mechanical pencils. Nothing showed up that matched.

These were thin. Hard plastic bodies. Didn't carry much in the way of spare leads. And the tip assembly was mostly metal. With a machined assembly to push the lead in or out. Really nifty.

Each of the 3 control rooms had a floor to 6' up panel for each stage. I think there were 24 stages per buildings in two of them and fewer in one building. Ten compressor assemblies per stage. (I think). Each compressor assembly had a vertical column of analog gauges. So a LOT of guages to record every hour or two. To get qualified you had to learn what nominal looked like. Then at the beginning of each shift you recorded all the readings. Then after that an operator would scan down the dials and note the ones not as expected and note the rest as being in range. So lots of pencils work.

When they first started computer automating things in the mid to later 70s some wizards far off decided digital gauges were better. After a few test panels it was decided to leave the analog gauges in place as took so much longer to notice NOT nominal and record all the digits. Later I'm sure with better computers and logging and graphic display they were able to shift.

With the analog gauges experienced operators could walk into the control room and tell what was happening and if anything was wrong in a minute or less of scanning the room.

Almost every company had such things. I have one marked "Crowhurst & Thompsett, Marden, try us for coir yarn and insecicides". Yes, that was a single-shop agricultural merchant.

I've repeatedly been puzzled by republican candidates stating an intention to close the Department of Energy, given that agency's responsibility for maintaining the US nuclear weapons stockpile.

From what they tell me, the DoE is responsible for pushing the green-energy fraud and wasting billions of my hard-earned tax dollars on the climate change scam. And it's up to me to donate to stop this.

No idea how much (if any) of this they believe, but that's what is going out in mass mailings to the base.

David L @ 312:

I just did a quick image search for AEC mechanical pencils and AEC ERDA mechanical pencils. Nothing showed up that matched.

These were thin. Hard plastic bodies. Didn't carry much in the way of spare leads. And the tip assembly was mostly metal. With a machined assembly to push the lead in or out. Really nifty.

Sounds like GSA/FSA Skilcraft "Fidelity". We used to get them from the supply catalog imprinted with "Property of U.S. Government". I'm pretty sure some agencies could have them printed with their agency name ...

I vaguely remember the post office having pens with "property of the post office" or some such from back in the day.

"NSN 7520-00-590-1878" (Seems to have been renamed Skilcraft "AbilityOne" in current GSA catalogs.)

When I worked at Porton Down, the bog roll had "MOD Property" printed on every sheet.

Almost every company had such things. I have one marked "Crowhurst & Thompsett, Marden, try us for coir yarn and insecicides". Yes, that was a single-shop agricultural merchant.

I believe you! Somewhere I still have a wooden pencil or two from Sanford Seed Company, which was exactly what it says on the tin and which my grandparents shut down when they retired, back when my age was still in the single digits. A metal ruler too, in a bizarre shade of pink - the company color for most things was deep green. I know there were three-ring binders with the company logo but I don't think I ever had one.

@Pigeon “The peak power output of the bridge array generators is nearly 5 times higher than that of the conventional large-area raindrop energy with the same size, reaching 200 watts per square meter, which fully shows its advantages in large-area raindrop energy harvesting. The results of this study will provide a feasible scheme for large-area raindrop energy harvesting,” said Li."

I'm no engineer, but ISTM possible that if the triboelectric layer could be affordably efficiently, etc. added to a solar array, it could serve as a useful supplement to power generation on rainy days. .....

BRIDGEKEEPER: Hee hee heh. Stop! What... is your name?

ARTHUR: It is 'Arthur', King of the Britons.

BRIDGEKEEPER: What... is your quest?

ARTHUR: To seek the Holy Grail.

BRIDGEKEEPER: What... is the terminal velocity of a raindrop?

ARTHUR: What do you mean? From what altitude?

BRIDGEKEEPER: Huh? I-- I don't know that. Auuuuuuuugh!

I know there were three-ring binders with the company logo but I don't think I ever had one.

Sorry if this is a repeat. We had some logo'd 3 ring binders. In 1980 I was asked to bring some to Toronto from the US when I was on my way for a week of working in the office there. These things cost us maybe $2.50 each. If that. I had 2 cases of 24 each as luggage. I claimed them filled out the customs form then was asked to step aside. I then spent over an hour while a Canadian customs agent tried to decide if the metal in the rings was worth more than that and therefore I should pay extra customs duty for said metal content.

After an hour or so he gave up and waved them through.

When I first heard of Brexit this memory sprang to mind in response to all the comments from Brexiters about how borders and customs would not be a problem.

"The peak power output of the bridge array generators is nearly 5 times higher than that of the conventional large-area raindrop energy with the same size, reaching 200 watts per square meter"

It might well be. But to get a continuous power output of 200W/m² you would need to capture 100% of the energy of 4kg of water per second arriving on that square metre at 10m/s (using the NASA figure). That would correspond to 24cm of rainfall in one minute.

This is obviously one of those situations where the peak to mean ratio is bloody awful, and I am driven to wonder whether the author of that quote has a background in designing car stereos.

Rain generators: I wonder if you could stack them? I mean, if you had a stack of them, with each one a bit less than 10 meters apart, each rain drop should reach terminal velocity before the next one (sorry if I miscalculated that, been a long time since high school physics).

While it may/may not be suitable for significant power generation, it might still be useful for energy harvesting, which we could be be used by OGH's *low-cost, widely-distributed sensor array. I wonder what a 2028 LLM running on an exascale computer fed by a 10E6-10E8 unit sensor array could do?

*Can't find when he talked about that- several years ago...

5 meters apart, not 10. A falling object starting at rest reaches 10 m/sec after one second, during which it falls 5 meters. Although in practice it would have to be more than that because acceleration decreases gradually as the object approaches terminal velocity -- it does not suddenly go from 9.8 m/sec^2 to 0 m/sec^2.

I can't remember a specific blog entry either, but I do know he's written plenty of stuff about concepts of that general nature which provides a potent argument for nuking (repeatedly, if necessary) the (apparently) just one or two chip factories which are able to produce the kind of chips required to keep the machine running the LBM^* out of the "needs all Megawatt Valley to run it" class, thereby rendering such machines impractical (while still allowing all the "ordinary" general purpose computing we need; we'd just have to use older software written before machines could support modern levels of bloat).

Where I , in considering such ideas, arrive rapidly at the long list of "oh fuck, they could do X with it" for many different values of X, and recoil in horror from further contemplation (having already found more than enough reason to conclude "this is a bad idea"), Charlie plunges right ahead into crawling all the trees depending from each X, and then pens a terrifying picture of all this shit not merely existing, but being generally accepted as "just normal" and not something that people repeatedly become enraged about. It's all the more terrifying because that's exactly how people are reacting to the bits that already do exist, and consequently I consider that studying a reading list of the works of Charlie and authors like him should be an essential requirement for being allowed to use any current technology more advanced than a Casio FX80.

^*I prefer a version of the abbreviated phrase that does not make it so wretchedly obscure what kind of thing it's actually referring to.

It might be really useful for powering sensors in areas of regular heavy rain, or where irrigation is vigorous. But there's lots of things that can generate electricity, most of them fail on the $ per generated joule measure. Some bounce back on the "in this exact situation" clause, like RTGs for spacecraft a long way from the sun (per XKCD "building the transmission line is left as an exercise for the student")

My general rule of thumb is that when someone mentions water power I immediately think "cublic (kilo)metres", with the prefix depending on whether they're talking grid or personal scale. 40 cubic metres falling 100m gives you 10kWh (assuming ~90% efficiency).

Heavy rain is 10m a year (Fiordland in Aotearoa, for example). So multiply collector area by 10 to get volume, ½mv² to get energy (let's use 1, 1 is a good number: ½.10.10² = 500. Kilojoules per square metre per year. In an exceptionally rainy part of a very rainy area. NBut if you lowered that 10m³ of water 10m you're get mgh=10.10.10 = 1000 kilojoules, at 90% efficiency that's 900kJ of usable energy. And with 10m of rain every year a funnel and a length of pipe is a perfectly usable "microhydro system".

Which takes us back to: what is this collector for? Powering grids of ultra low power sensors in a rainy place seems like the obvious example. Anywhere vaguely sunny gets cheap solar panels, those shady nooks where there's always water dripping get these little rainpower units. Where neither is an option put a second battery in the device and just accept that you only get a decade out of the thing before someone has to poke it.

(money can be replaced by "resources"* if you agree that capitalism is broken. Especially with research grade equipment, "three people with PhDs and a lab can make one of these a day" might not be the best possible use of those people and their lab. Or it might be, that's a resource allocation problem).

((* when I grow up I want to be a human resource))

I have no idea what "LBM" means

The B stands for "bullshit" ;)

Ah. Get it now. Although it is a bit redundant.

My general rule of thumb is that when someone mentions water power I immediately think "cublic (kilo)metres", with the prefix depending on whether they're talking grid or personal scale. 40 cubic metres falling 100m gives you 10kWh (assuming ~90% efficiency).

Anecdata: when I was young, my family lived in a converted watermill. We installed a water turbine to generate electricity, and managed to get enough that we could run our home, as long as we didn't turn on too much at once. So we didn't get the place properly warmed through and dry until mains electricity finally arrived. As a result I've always been rather cautious about how much power you can get from streams and small rivers

The Hagley museum is the old Dupont Gunpowder works. They have a machine shop that is completely powered by one water turbine (not a water wheel) through gears & belts. Other aspects of the operation (the grinding and mixing of ingredients) were also powered by water turbines at one time (they have fallen into dis-repair). When I asked them how much horsepower they were equivalent to, I was told 50 HP ( about 37 KW, I think ). Pretty impressive. Of course, one of the reasons that machine shop was there was that they need to rebuild the turbines on a fairly regular basis.

Re: Oxygenating the Underdark. SFF version.

A new study came out that says there's evidence for the existence of trillions of Earth-sizes worlds in interstellar space. You know those stellar system evolution models where a planet gets ejected from a system as orbit change? Guess where they end up?

So now we couple this with the dismutation story of microbes making oxygen from nitrites and methane. If that can be done, on a terrestrial, interstellar planet with a molten core and good ice cladding the land and oceans, we have the setting for life between the stars. And, like abyssal oceanic life on our planet, it might be the most common type of life in the galaxy.

So maybe Yuggothian worlds are the norm, and places like Earth, where subaerial highlanders think they’re the pinnacle of creation, are the oddities?

Yeah, we’re weird. Possibly.

Oh yeah, th link:

https://news.yahoo.com/nasa-telescope-expected-uncover-hundreds-235447400.html?

Thing is nitrites aren't very stable, so you need some reasonably continuous production for the bacteria to be finding them lying around. And I'm fairly sure the source of the oxygen required is essentially all atmospheric, whether directly via thunderstorms or indirectly via multiple iterations of shit and dead things etc.

OK you do get some atmospheric oxygen on suitably sized lumps of cosmic rock from radiolysis of water vapour and loss of the hydrogen. But it tends to be the kind of atmosphere you'd normally call a vacuum even when the lump of rock is orbiting a handy sun to power the radiolysis.

This isn't to say you won't find life on an interstellar planet, just that if any of it eats nitrites it will be depending on some other kind(s) of life creating conditions in which nitrites can form.

Possible sources of energy for life on an interstellar planet are basically the same as the non-solar sources for solar ones - radioactive decay, gravitational contraction, and tidal heating if two bodies manage to get spat out so as to end up orbiting each other. If the things are big enough these could be quite a lot. So you're talking about the same general kind of possible life as when wondering about possible life on Europa or places like that.

Rumblings & mutterings in the non-technical press, about a POSSIBLE ( i.e. it's vapourware at the moment ) of a possible "Fifth Force" - because - as we all know - the "Standard Model" may or may not be broken, but it's certainly creaking.

Great. Rogue planets. Y'know, a lot of problems here on Earth, including the GOP and a good number of other countries could be solved if the Planet Porno came into the solar system, with the Emperor Wang's sex ray. Picture a convention of "evangelicals"....

A good friend of mine works at Fermi, and I've emailed him asking about it.

Report in Nature today says the model vs. reality discrepancy with the muon charge goes away when they use a new model. So at this point, the data are solid, the models seem not to be.

Look up denitrification as a source for nitrite. I get the skepticism, but big terrestrial planets have a better element and energy inventory than something like Europa or Enceladus does.

It’s also an interesting SFF frontier. Imagine a. galaxy where the most common type of living planet was an interstellar vagrant sheathed in ice. With life in oxygenated tunnels in continents and in sub-ice oceans.

To colonize, all you need is to get there and bore your way into the Underdark. Endless surprises undoubtedly await…

For denitrification to be possible there has to be some source of nitrogen in a positive oxidation state in the first place. Nitrogen is distinctly tough to oxidise, and AFAIK every process that does oxidise it depends on biology at some point to make it possible; a direct and obvious point in the case of nitrifying bacteria etc, but always ultimately present in the dependency of any such process on atmospheric (biogenic) oxygen. AIUI even geological deposits containing oxidised nitrogen are the concentrated residue of some ancient biology.

So while denitrification might very well be one of the biological processes to be found on an interstellar planet, it will only be a secondary one. It won't be a fundamental primary thing that makes life possible in the first place, it'll just be standing in its usual position as one of the innumerable ways evolution has discovered of eating someone else's shit with pleasure and profit.

The mention of Europa wasn't about the quality or abundance of resources on any specific body; it was just about the kind of resources one finds on such bodies in general, and the kind of answers which are reasonable to the kind of questions you can ask given such resources as a starting point. Wondering about the kind of life that might be possible on an interstellar planet is basically the same thing as wondering about what kind of life might be possible on Europa, because the resources it has to run on are of the same kind. Certainly, though, it's entirely valid, as well as probably more fun, to ask those questions about the case of a body much larger than Europa with correspondingly more abundant and higher quality resources.

I quite agree about the mythopoeic value of the concept; I'm just trying to "harden" its basis a bit (in the "hard" vs. "soft" SF sense).

So while denitrification might very well be one of the biological processes to be found on an interstellar planet, it will only be a secondary one. It won't be a fundamental primary thing that makes life possible in the first place, it'll just be standing in its usual position as one of the innumerable ways evolution has discovered of eating someone else's shit with pleasure and profit.

A couple of additional points:

The critical one is that free oxygen seems to be necessary for multicellular life, for electrochemical reasons. That's why it's worth thinking about how it might be formed in bulk on a planet, even if it's in some obtuse way where energy of some plentiful sort is captured in C-H bonds and in N-x bonds, then O2 is released by other dismutation. Weird yes, but look at the existing nitrogen cycle.

The other point is that rogue terrestrial planets aren't formed in situ like Europa, they're pitched into the abyss by being unlucky in, not love, but chaotic orbital mechanics (same thing?). The upshot is that they might have biospheres, possibly even intelligent life, that manages to adapt to life beyond the Astropause. So, same resources as Europa, but different path to get there.

The upshot is that they might have biospheres, possibly even intelligent life, that manages to adapt to life beyond the Astropause.

That would be a very large and very fast adaptation.

That would be a very large and very fast adaptation.

Yeah, it's always a hassle to have to go outside for another pail of air.

Depends on the lead time to prepare and tech level of the world being "ejected".

Scott Sanford @ 342:

That would be a very large and very fast adaptation.

Yeah, it's always a hassle to have to go outside for another pail of air.

I remember reading that story when I was about 10 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pail_of_Air

Or the Fred Pohl/Cyril Kornbluth version

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfbane_(novel)

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pail_of_Air*

Heard this on the radio when I was a teen in the 1980s. KNX in LA used to put the old radio shows on at 9 pm, and they broadcast X Minus 1, including the dramatization of this story.

I was also thinking of Benford and Brin's Heart of the Comet, although it's a different biosphere.

Heteromeles @ 347:

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pail_of_Air*

Heard this on the radio when I was a teen in the 1980s. KNX in LA used to put the old radio shows on at 9 pm, and they broadcast X Minus 1, including the dramatization of this story.

I was also thinking of Benford and Brin's Heart of the Comet, although it's a different biosphere.

When Worlds Collide (also "After Worlds Collide") a 1933 novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie; made into a movie by George Pal in 1951 ...

IIRC, the first was in the school library and I think I found the sequel in the Public Library.

made into a movie by George Pal in 1951 ...

If it is the movie I'm thinking of, the science half of SF in that movie has got to be the worst I can think of in a movie.

So bad it's somewhat fun in a camp sort of way to watch.

David L @ 349:

made into a movie by George Pal in 1951 ...

If it is the movie I'm thinking of, the science half of SF in that movie has got to be the worst I can think of in a movie.

So bad it's somewhat fun in a camp sort of way to watch.

I agree with you about the movie. I'm pretty sure the "science" in the novels wasn't any better (it's been a loooooong time since I read them), but they were novels about rogue planets smashing through the Solar System.

And for all you folks interested in some UK history.

Apparently USAAF pilots in WWII who were assigned to reconnaissance flights took a few thousand photos of the UK in 1943 and 1944 while training before heading over the mainland Europe. Here's the recently released archive of the photos.

https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/photographs/usaaf-collection/

If you've got the desktop version of Google Earth (not the browser maps) there has been historic imagery taken by Luftwaffe flights around the same time for quite a while. The USAAF images are much more detailed but don't cover as much of the country.

David L @ 351:

And for all you folks interested in some UK history.

Apparently USAAF pilots in WWII who were assigned to reconnaissance flights took a few thousand photos of the UK in 1943 and 1944 while training before heading over the mainland Europe. Here's the recently released archive of the photos.

https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/photographs/usaaf-collection/

Kodak developed Ektachrome Infrared Aero infrared film (aka Aerochrome) at the behest of the Army Air Corps photo reconnaissance group. "Regular" Black & White infrared films didn't show camouflage that well, but the false color IR film did.

And after the war it became a favorite for alternative photographers.

I have a digital camera converted to IR, but so far haven't really mastered the technique of duplicating the look of Kodak EIR (which is no longer manufactured & stocks are rapidly diminishing).

Heteromeles

Did you ever expect to deal with a hurricane when you moved to San Diego? Well the left overs of one. 12-24 hours of 40-80 mph winds and rain.

Welcome to the east coast.

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_ep4+shtml/115409.shtml?cone#contents

Oddly, yes I did think it was possible. We got hit by remnants back in 2014 or so.

There's at least one poster here from the Western Isles, and they get that every year - almost all Caribbean hurricanes go there to die :-)

https://film.britishcouncil.org/resources/film-archive/the-western-isles

I have a digital camera converted to IR

I'm interested in details. I was going to convert my D300 to IR, but ended up giving it to a friend instead. I'm thinking of converting my D7000, but it's currently my backup camera and, well, I don't want to be without a backup.

Report from 2024:

So I’m in Los Angeles, weathering tropical storm Hilary, when my watch and phone start screaming that there’s a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in Ojai a few seconds before the shaking starts. No damage here, because Ojai is well to the northwest of me.

That’s SoCal 2024: tropical storms, earthquakes, and high tech warning systems.

We’re catching up to Japan a bit?

Robert Prior @ 358:

I have a digital camera converted to IR

I'm interested in details. I was going to convert my D300 to IR, but ended up giving it to a friend instead. I'm thinking of converting my D7000, but it's currently my backup camera and, well, I don't want to be without a backup.

I shoot Pentax. I had my "second backup" converted. I just searched the web to find someone who would do Pentax cameras.

I sent it to Spencers Camera in Utah

Finding converted CaNikon cameras seems pretty easy compared to niche market Pentax, so you might be able to just buy a body already pre-converted.

Finding converted CaNikon cameras seems pretty easy compared to niche market Pentax, so you might be able to just buy a body already pre-converted.

That may be the way to go, as I only have the single backup camera.

Good reason for US creatives to avoid AI. Last Friday, a US judge upheld a ruling that it can’t be copyrighted:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/

Not sure this actually means much. Thaler was trying to get his program, the "AI", listed as the sole creator of the artwork. The judge said, "that's ridiculous, a machine can't hold a copyright." If he'd applied for himself, and called the program his "paintbrush", I imagine he would have gotten the copyright.

In the context of the writer’s strike, it means that companies cannot claim AI as artists working for hire. So if a director uses AI to replace a writer, I suspect they will fall foul of the union contract, unless they are already WGA members.

More generally, this ruling states that generative AI is a tool, not a legal person. If it stands, and I imagine it will, this will make things interesting going forward. Especially if idiot researchers keep trying to build humanly sentient machines.

This made me think of Pigeon.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/20/no-app-no-entry-how-the-digital-world-is-failing-the-non-tech-savvy

In the US there are setups where you can carry your cash around on a debit card. I have no idea if these are useful or more of a "steal money from poor folks" kind of thing.

Maybe so. It's a very narrow ruling, and there aren't many precedents. I foresee cases for the next couple of decades before this is settled.

See also this ruling on "Zarya of the Dawn."

This makes me think of the James Patterson-like novel factories. If you give a detailed outline (aka prompt) to ChatGPT and it turns out a movie script, it would seem to have enough human intervention -- or would it?

This could be shut down more quickly if Congress could pass a simple law or two saying AI isn't people and can't be considered such. But that's not their style.

And just now the House is controlled by a small group who'd rather blow the place up than actually pass legislation they might not totally approve.

Yeah, it's a pain in the fucking arse and constantly makes me bleeding furious. Probably the only reason I haven't exploded yet is that the actual total exclusion (as opposed to merely being screwed over) so far mostly applies to things I don't want to do anyway, but it's bound to happen eventually.

As with many things, it's fucking Thatcher who set it going, by removing the legal right to have your employer pay you in cash.

Another particularly frustrating aspect is mentioned in the article: "Go to a demonstration by the sort of people who believe that 5G mobile towers and Covid are linked and the chances are you'll see placards warning of the evils of electronic money." This kind of thing is Not Helpful, as it spreads (and can be used to spread) the idea that people who complain about the situation are nutters anyway, so the concern is only as valid as their other concerns which really are nuts.

One thing they didn't mention is that it also excludes people who are technically knowledgeable and therefore are aware of the desirability of avoiding the unacknowledged security chasms which these systems include by design. The NHS is trying to shove people into using some horrid opaque software blob on a mobile phone to do basic things like making an appointment to see the doctor - and removing the ability to just use any old phone as a phone and make the appointment by talking down it, so the only alternative is to make another visit to make the appointment. (Which means you have to expose yourself twice instead of once to a likely source of airborne infections. Even before the plague arrived, a visit to the doctor's surgery meant a good chance of picking up a cold or flu in the waiting room.)

The signup instructions bang on about you needing to receive a text message as part of the process, and it's not clear if there even is a desktop version, let alone one that doesn't still need you to have a mobile phone to sign up to it. So I hunted down the official .gov.uk "developer documentation" for it. Couldn't find one more word about how the signup process worked, but I did find hundreds of pages about the API for other people to build it into their own mobile phone software and the facilities it provides for them to leech off your medical communications to try and fucking sell you shit. There was also quite a bit of stuff going on about how "secure" it nevertheless was, arguing from invalid assumptions and oblivious to its internal contradiction of those very assumptions.

Chances are next to nobody will do anything other than assume they can trust the assurances about security in the signup information they get, and very few people will discover the detailed description of how it's actually as inherently and intentionally porous as a sieve.

"I have no idea if these are useful or more of a "steal money from poor folks" kind of thing."

The UK versions used to be both; now they are neither. They had extra fees, but much of the time that meant only that you'd be choosing a different point in the chain to get screwed over; and they were useful, because they didn't piss you around before you could get one. You even used to be able to just walk into a shop and buy a voucher with a one-off Visa number on it, that was good for however much you decided you wanted to pay, with no more hassle than buying a packet of tobacco.

But now they are required to make you jump through the same stupid hoops as you have to to get an actual bank account, so if you can't do one you can't do the other either and they're no longer any use. (Not to mention that some of them add further elaborations of their own devising on top of the set requirements.)

"Go to a demonstration by the sort of people who believe that 5G mobile towers and Covid are linked and the chances are you'll see placards warning of the evils of electronic money."

Don't know about UK, but in US this sort of people also tends to love cryptocurrency. Which has all the faults of (other) electronic money, and a heap more.

Congress could pass a simple law or two saying AI isn't people and can't be considered such

Can't have that. Why, they might then pass another law limiting the personhood of corporations!

This kind of thing is Not Helpful, as it spreads (and can be used to spread) the idea that people who complain about the situation are nutters anyway, so the concern is only as valid as their other concerns which really are nuts.

I don't disagree with your sentiments. But over here in the US, to pile on ilya187, this gets discussed a lot next to 5G causes cancer, smart power meters cause cancer, amulets can protect you from EMF when you go out, and so on. Yes it gets hard to discuss the cash vs electronic money issues when the non stop whataboutism keeps bringing up 5G, EMF, world wide cabal of sex slaves for blood treatments, and so on.

“The NHS is trying to shove people into using some horrid opaque software blob on a mobile phone to do basic things like making an appointment to see the doctor - and removing the ability to just use any old phone as a phone and make the appointment by talking down it, so the only alternative is to make another visit to make the appointment.“

No it isn’t. The phone app is available and I can use it to order repeat prescriptions and all other communications with the GP. It also allows me to see test results. When I was actually generating these test results, thousands per day I campaigned to give patient the right to look up results and very few professionals agreed. But now you can. But it’s not compulsory . I can also do this from the GP website whose address can be found in many places including the NHS app. I would be extremely surprised if your GP doesn’t have a website. I can also phone the surgery or walk there to do all these things. I have all the services I had before plus the app and website.

I'm fairly sure Pigeon's comments are really that there should be no requirement for a smart for app at all. Or a smart phone.

Not sayig I agree with him. But at one level I can empathize.

No. He wrote “- and removing the ability to just use any old phone as a phone and make the appointment by talking down it, so the only alternative is to make another visit to make the appointment” That’s just not true. And now when I phone the surgery I’m usually number one in the queue. When I was working in labs it often took more than ten minutes to phone life threatening results to GPs. Now there’s usually a one minute wait.

I'm fairly sure Pigeon's comments are really that there should be no requirement for a smart for app at all. Or a smart phone.

And there shouldn't be, unless we as a society are willing to hand out smartphones to people who don't have them.

Years ago in BC a lot of government functions went online. Things like applying for EI, address changes, and the like. They closed unneeded government offices, such that there wasn't one on the Sunshine Coast. And then libraries began to get cut back. And librarians noticed that a significant number of their patrons were people who came in to use the library computer to access government services, so cutting back hours/budgets/location hurt those people. It became a debate: shoudl municipal library budgets cover the cost of people accessing provincial and federal services when the provincial and federal governments had eliminated local services in favour of online. Some said yes, because human rights, others said no because why should underserved areas spend local money to subsidize the larger entity.

Rocketpjs could probably give a better account of this, both the changes and the effects. I wasn't there and was hearing it secondhand.

"I would be extremely surprised if your GP doesn't have a website."

Yes, they do. But they have removed from it all the facilities it used to have for "doing things" on the grounds that "everyone" can, and now must, do them using a mobile phone instead. In the same way, they have removed the facility to book appointments by talking on an ordinary phone. The website even used to have a facility to look up your records on it, although that was the first thing to go.

David L is exactly right, anyway; the point is there should not be any need for the mobile phone in the first place. I am elaborating on the article's making of the same point; they make it only in relation to people who aren't happy with technology at all, and I am pointing out that it also applies in relation to people who are comfortable enough with technology to dig up official documentation on this bit of it and observe therefrom that its purported "security" is no more than a thin and flaky coat of paint.

I got mixed up; it's not appointment booking that is no longer possible, it's ordering repeat prescriptions. The basic point still applies though.

A few local GP websites I checked all have a the same services as my local one on the homepage. This is the appointments menu.

https://www.hinghamsurgery.co.uk/sp_footfall_rooms/consulting-room/

There is also a calendar showing when individual GPs are available if you want to see a particular GP. The NHS app and the NHS website are a big improvement to the service I get.

GP link failed but you can select home to see the menu. Your local GP commissioning group should be informed if such a basic service as appointments is not available on the website.