Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Healers in the Crimea: a factual account

    I am presenting a Special Lecture on Global Crime and Public Health this semester, which is really the culmination of my work on international drug cartels, prohibition and harm reduction. In preparation for the lecture on harm reduction, at the end of the lecture on sex work and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) I thought I should give an overview of the “changing” attitudes towards public health and sex work and STIs in the medical literature. I remembered a few years ago reading an archived letter to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in which a doctor advocates not treating syphilis because syphilis serves as a moral warning to society of the dangers of promiscuous sex (this was before Tuskegee, by which time we were so enlightened that only black people got no treatment). The BMJ now has all its issues since 1840 online, so I went trawling through back issues looking for admonitions against sleeping with “loose women” and ways of preventing said women from returning to their “vicious life,” and although I didn’t find that original letter I found a lot of other fun stuff. However, in the process I stumbled upon a doozy of a letter from a certain Surgeon-Lieutenant-General E.M.Wrench, MVO, FRCSEng (and if ever anyone deserved a medal this man did!) describing his experiences as a military surgeon in the Crimean War. It was published in 1908, so by that time he must have been quite old, but it presents a crystal clear image of his experiences in the war. Reading this I was both impressed by how primitive British war-making was in the mid-19th century, and reminded of why I really enjoy working with medical  doctors. Their sense of humour, their writing style, and their earthy view of the world is truly a rewarding combination to work alongside.

    I’ve put in a few bold elements to indicate the bits I find truly disturbing, and a series of footnotes (of course) with cynical/salutary (take your pick) lessons for the modern NHS. But please don’t let them distract you from the horror that is a Doctor’s cynical report on life in the Crimean war. Incidentally, this report was entitled “Lessons from the past.”

    The surgeon begins with discussion of the nature of his arrival, but we’ll skip that…

    I will not, however, talk of these generalities, but describe my experience when in charge of a ward of what might be called the base hospital at Balaclava in November, 1854, shortly after the battle of Inkerman, some of the wounded from which were under my care, together with cases of cholera, scorbutic dysentery, and fever. It was situated in what had been the military school of St.Nicholas, which contained several rooms about 30 feet square. There were no bedsteads or proper bedding; the patients lay in their clothes on the floor, which from the rain blown through the damaged windows and the traffic to and from the open-air latrines was as muddy as a country lane. There were no nurses, no washing conveniences, either personal or for clothing. Two old soldiers, called orderlies, did their ignorant best to attend to the wants of the patients, but were chiefly occupied in rude cooking and burying the dead. There was no bread, of course no milk, and if I remember rightly, no tea, only the famous green coffee. There was certainly no beef tea – Liebig’s extract and similar substitutes had not been invented, and tinned meats were almost unknown. About midday a large iron witch’s-cauldron was carried into the middle of the ward; the patients crowded round to dip in their tin canteens, those bedridden dependent on the generosity of their comrades for a share of the contents of the pot – a mixture of lean mutton and fat salt pork[1], floating in the weakest of oily broth. Notwithstanding the shortcomings of the commissariat each surgeon had to make out a daily diet role, showing what each patient should have – full, half, or spoon diet – to satisfy the red tape system and prevent the purveyor being surcharged for the cost of the scanty food he was able to supply. We were practically without medicines. The supply landed at the capture of Balaclava was exhausted, and the reserve gone to the bottom of the Black Sea with the winter clothing and several surgeons in the Prince-steamer, so that in November, 1854, the base hospital was without opium, quinine, and ammonia. Sanitary science was in its infancy, and sanitary precautions were not capable of being carried out when the living were so hard pressed to live and dead men were for days floating about amongst the ships in the harbour.

    You will not be surprised to hear that many of our patients died, but, probably owing to our unglazed windows, we were free from what was then aptly called ” hospital gangrene,” which carried off, I believe, every one of the thirty wounded Russians in the Town Hall not many yards away[2]. The stench of that building I shall never forget. You may ask why, with so many ships in the harbour, we were not able to obtain bedding and medical comforts. The reply is: The medical department was, in those days, powerless to incur expense[4], and the purveyors’ department was likewise in such a subordinate condition that they were afraid of responsibility. It was to Miss Nightingale’s bravery in setting all red tape at defiance that the success in reforming the great hospital at Scutari was due, and if there is one lesson more than another to be learnt from the breakdown of the medical department in the Crimea, it is that if the department is to be held responsible for the cure of the sick and wounded, it must have the power not only to administer pills and potions, but to secure at all costs the quite as – nay, more – important food, shelter, and equipment of the hospitals. The initial breakdown in the Crimea was the result of the military – monopolizing all the transports, and hence the landing of the army devoid of hospital equipment and the absence of hospital ships, so that the only apology for bedding in a ship full of sick and wounded, of which my brother-in-law, Mr. Swinhoe, had charge from Balaclava to Scutari, were the mats previously provided in the ship when conveying horses to the seat of war[6].

    The condition of the base hospital being such as I have described, that of the field hospital, seven miles away on an exposed plateau under canvas, was, if possible worse; hence it was the object of most regimental surgeons to send away their sick and wounded, as often as the French could lend their mule litters, for embarkation at Balaclava; though their chance of arriving alive at Scutari was not good, for 10 per cent during the winter were cast overboard as corpses during a voyage of 160 miles, none of the ships being fitted for the purpose, and some, as I have already described, intended for the conveyance of horses.

    Much was said in days gone by of the advantages of the system of regimental surgeons, and as one who spent eight years in that capacity I can endorse it as very pleasant for the surgeon, and possibly, in those days of long service, of some advantage to the regiment, from the knowledge acquired of the history of the men, but in time of war no system could be worse. To give an example: During the month of June, 1855, my regiment, the 34th (now the Border[7]), in addition to their share of the fifty daily wounded[8] in the trenches suffered heavily at the assaults of the quarries on the 12th and 18th. On the latter date I marched down to the trenches with twelve officers, and back to camp with two, the other ten being killed or wounded. The men suffered nearly as heavily, and there being no division hospital we had to convert three regimental barrack huts into hospitals, and staff them with men from the ranks entirely ignorant of ambulance duties. Two of the three regimental assistant surgeons soon knocked up, and were temporarily invalided. The surgeon was very shaky; he died of delirium tremens shortly afterwards, and I had to work single handed. As a consequence some of the slightly wounded were not properly attended to for several days, the wounds became infected by maggots, and operations were performed under the greatest difficulties. I remember a case of amputation at the shoulder-joint, when I had to administer the chloroform, compress the subelavian and pick up the axillary artery, whilst the surgeon, with trembling hands, tied it; yet possibly in the same brigade there were several regimental surgeons almost unemployed.

    Here I may allude to the dread of the use of chloroform (then recently invented) by the older surgeons, and to the famous memorandum issued by the Director-General condemning its too frequent use, and adding that the cries of the patient undergoing an operation were satisfactory to the surgeon as indicating the absence of syncope, and that pain was a stimulant that aided recovery. Surgery was then little advanced from classical times; antisepsis was unthought of, and the resection of a wounded joint so novel, that Fergusson invented the term “conservative surgery ” to describe it.

    The duties, as well as the practice, of the regimental surgeon differed from those of the present day; one of his most unpleasant, was his enforced attendance alongside of the prisoner, at what was called “punishment parade,” when his duty was to watch the man being flogged lest he die under the lash of the cat-o’-nine-tails or faint from loss of blood, which usually flowed freely after the first few strokes. The parade over, the man was removed to the hospital for the surgeon to cure him and render him fit for duty as speedily as possible.

    Wars always have been, and always will be, cruel. It is, however, the pride of our profession that, while sharing the fatigues and dangers of the campaign, our sole duty will be the protection of the soldiers from what, after all, is his most deadly enemy – disease[9] – and the alleviation of the sufferings of the wounded. The report of the Royal Commission on the Crimean War reported that the medical breakdown was the result of the system, and not of the surgeons – a lesson that I trust will not be forgotten by the nation. The medical department, unless made efficient and given proper authority[10] during peace, cannot be expected to do its duty satisfactorily during war.

    Of course, in a Compromise and Conceit-style campaign, this would all be different, since there would be magical healing, the healer’s guild would have “a long, low-roofed white building” set up to receive the injured, and all would be peaceful sage candles and tender moments between red-headed chicks and their injured lovers. When, oh when will the NHS find faith healing?[11]

    —

    fn1: So, the hotel services in the NHS haven’t changed…

    fn2: Hospital Acquired Infections were novel even then… and, the Daily Mail was right, it was all the foreigners’ fault[3]

    fn3: You may laugh at this silly joke, but I have actually read newspapers in the UK trying to blame hospital infections on foreigners… more than once!

    fn4: Whereas, under the current straitened conditions, the NHS is “quarantined” from cuts, and able to purchase such luxuries[5]

    fn5: I have worked in an organisation subject to hiring freezes and budgetary constraints, so I understand exactly this man’s feelings

    fn6: I think it’s worth noting that, while modern armies are well capable of providing hospital services, in certain recent wars their administrative organs certainly seemed to forget other aspects of planning for the post-invasion situation, with similar consequences (for the Iraqis, at least)

    fn7: That’s right, the same regiment as George McDonald Fraser, of Flashman fame. Do they teach writing classes in that regiment, perchance?

    fn8: It’s quite well-remarked (as we’ll see below) that compared to subsequent wars casualties in the Crimea were remarkably low, and in fact military engagements of the time were remarkable for their low casualty rates compared to modern wars between mechanized armies. The main killer in the Crimea was disease, which makes the war all the more tragically pointless.

    fn9: In fact, the Crimean war had a role to play in the development of epidemiology, since the aforementioned “Miss Florence Nightingale” led a campaign to change conditions in military hospitals, and did so using some very cunning graphical devices, which presaged later methods for the comparison of disease. As I discovered in my trawling through the annals of Britain’s response to sexually transmitted infections, the military and their fighting fitness have played an important role in the development of modern public health practice, not just through direct intervention in their health problems, but through the peacetime health policy implemented in support of the health of soldiers.

    fn10: And out of tragedy… a doctor demands more institutional authority!!! Who could have guessed it would end this way?

    fn11: when some quack gets Prince Charles’s ear, obviously.

  • Obligatory Australian Election Post

    We just had a national election in Australia. As I have done for every other election, I held an election party, this time sans-partner (who was in Oz), and sans-Australians (since I was in Japan). It was attended by an Iranian, two Japanese, one Australian, an American and a Thai.

    So, it seems I should also have an obligatory election post here, since I commented on Australian politics recently, and also on the British coalition government.

    For my non-Australian reader(s), a brief overview of Australian politics. Australia has a Federal system with a bicameral national parliament, consisting of the lower house (House of Representatives, HoR) and the upper house (Senate). Voting is compulsory and we have a preferential single transferable vote system, so essentially: you have to vote and if your first choice doesn’t get up, your vote wings its way on to the next most popular person, and so on, until it exhausts or someone you preferenced really low gets past 50% of the (preference-allocated) vote. You can see the shenanigans in action at the AEC virtual tally room[1]. The senate is voted at a state level and is even more horribly complicated. There are two main parties, the left-wing party being a social democratic workers party, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the “right-wing” party being the Liberal Party, which never garnishes enough votes to rule in its own right and so is in a coalition with the classic party of agrarian socialism, the National Party. The Liberal Party is supposed to traditionally be the party of old-fashioned liberalism, but under Howard it took a turn to protectionist/state-interventionist conservatism, and this was reflected even more so in the current leader, Tony Abbot, a failed catholic monk. There is one other significant party, the Greens, who have a broad political platform but are often characterised as single issue because they were, once. They’re also characterized as “watermelons” (green on the outside and red in the middle) but there is actually some debate amongst rational people as to whether or not they are a social democrat party at all – their own policy manifesto suggests an economic, as well as social, “third way” that is neither classically capitalist nor social democrat[2][3]. The significant leftist party, the ALP, were the incumbents for this election, but kind of screwed the pooch a bit when the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was deposed by his deputy, Julia Gillard, just weeks before the election was called, in what is rightly characterized as a midnight doorknock-and-knifing. People were horrified by the brutality of his demise, and I was certainly upset for him (Kevin Rudd seemed like a decent guy), but I also note that this is how the ALP works – they’ll throw their own grandmother under a bus if a) it gets them power and b) it helps the workers[7]. At the time this seemed like it might be an election-winning idea, and I was supportive of it for that reason (I share with the ALP a certain respect for brutality towards the higher echelons of the workplace!) but it turns out that it just meant, in the eyes of the electorate, that the ALP threw away all the benefits of incumbency. Every time anyone said “we were a good govt” people could say “well then why did you take Kevin out the back and shoot him?” Bit of an oops that one.

    A few notes on Julia Gillard and the ALP government: The ALP steered Australia through a recession without any significant harm, through a combination of good luck and fast, early stimulus, well documented here. I have previously discounted statistically claims that the second part of that stimulus package created extra house fires, and recent reports have suggested that the final, biggest stage – the BER – really wasn’t very wasteful, given its context. They also introduced some partial reforms of healthcare funding, a much-needed area of reform in Oz, and they apologized to indigenous Australians for a dismal aspect of our past, the Stolen Generations. They repealed the previous government’s horrific labour rights legislation, the viciously-misnamed “workchoices,” and attempted to pass a carbon-abatement scheme. This carbon-abatement scheme – which, incidentally, was much criticized for doing nothing but give money to polluters – was the cause of all their subsequent trouble, because it led to massive chaos in the opposition, culminating in the replacement of a new breed moderate leader with the worst type of reactionary (Tony Abbot) and was subsequently knocked back in the senate. Then, instead of showing the spine required of an ALP leader, Kevin Rudd squibbed on it and refused to force it through. He had the choice of a) negotiating a real agreement with the greens or b) ramming it down the conservatives’ throat by means of a “Double Dissolution” election. The latter requires spine, and the former requires principles. So instead he announced that he would delay the ETS essentially indefinitely, and then his poll numbers started to dive.

    A few notes on Tony Abbot and the Liberal/National coalition: Tony Abbot replaced a moderate (who was very dodgy himself) in the furore over the carbon abatement scheme, and has run a campaign based exclusively on negativity and having no policies. He promises to “stop the waste, stop the boats and stop the debt” but has no policy on anything to offer. In addition to being very negative, he’s also a staunch catholic who believes women should “save their precious gift” for marriage and who, when health minister, acted to ban the early abortion pill RU486 over departmental advice. I don’t think his religious views would be that relevant in government but if he ever secured control of both houses of parliament things could get a bit… retrograde … in the sex and marriage department[10]. He also got an easy run in the media, who reward stunts over substance every time, and didn’t ever seem to inquire into his policy ideas at all, or pursue them. I have yet to see a single media report on the home insulation program, for example, make any attempt (even vague) to link increasing numbers of fires to increasing numbers of insulations[11]. This is trivial stuff, but as I’ve said before, journalists are so thick that they depend on being fed lies by smarter people than themselves in order to do their job. As an indication of how stupid journalists are – Tony Abbot believes that climate change is “crap” (his words), but journalists still believe things he tells them. It’s actually really hard to pin down a single policy Abbott held in this election except “we’ll give money to rural and marginal seats.” Also, there was a general policy of “our government won’t spend money on infrastructure,” exemplified by his opposition to the government’s $43 billion planned investment in broadband – the opposition preferred a $6 billion policy based on subsidizing the current monopoly to provide wireless to rural seats.

    So, Australians went to the polls facing a choice between a lunatic coalition and an ALP that had shown itself willing to back down on its principles at the first sign of trouble. Australians don’t vote in the ALP to back down on principles. So there was a huge swing against the government, most of which flowed to the greens, giving them a new primary vote of 11.5%, a seat in the lower house (Melbourne), and 4 more seats in the Senate. This means that they control the balance of power in the new senate. The two main parties are both going to fail to get enough seats to control the lower house and are currently frantically negotiating with 3 rural independents to form government. A few notes on this:

    • hung parliaments are rarely rare in a compulsory voting, single transferable preferential voting system – the last one was in 1940
    • The Greens vote is not unexpected after the ALP backed down on the carbon scheme, and a first term swing to the opposition is not unexpected as well, but 1.7% nationally is probably a bit much
    • The government lost its majority largely because of shenanigans in two states, New South Wales and Queensland, whose State governments are so on the nose that they may be poisoning the Federal vote – this may have been a problem even if the ALP had behaved impeccably at a national level, and the Liberals certainly played on it
    • If it weren’t for the rural gerrymander favouring the Nationals, the result wouldn’t be in question. The Nationals win 4% of the vote nationally and get 7 seats; the Greens win 11.5% and get 1 seat
    • There was a huge amount of postal / pre voting that polls suggest heavily favoured the ALP, and so it’s possible that close seats will be decided in favour of the ALP (or the Greens) after preference counting is complete. If this happens the “hung” parliament may be reversed to a bare ALP majority (highly unlikely) or the ALP may not have to negotiate with the independents
    • The Independents are ex-National Party rural politicians, but they also really hate the Nationals[12], so it’s unlikely they’ll side easily with them
    • The Independents also seem to be strong supporters of climate change action and broadband investment, so this is a plus for the ALP in negotiations, particularly since the Greens will hold the balance of power in the Senate and dealing with them will require some quid pro quo
    • The ALP has won a slightly higher proportion of the primary vote (50.7%) so they also can argue they are the “more popular” (hah!) party[13]

    So my guess is that we’ll get a coalition of the ALP with Greens and/or Independents; and even if the Greens are excluded from the coalition in the House of Representatives, they’ll ultimately de facto have to be included in the coalition because from July next year they have a stranglehold on the senate. The only alternative (and it’s not impossible) is that Labour and Liberal may work together to exclude the Greens – they may continue to think it’s in their best interests to oppose the growth of a third party.

    The main bonus of this election is that it highlights the coming of age of the Greens, from a protest party through a single issue party to a party of national relevance. They haven’t really been a single issue party for a long time (their manifesto, written by Bob Brown with the philosopher Peter Singer, was published in 1994), but they’ve always been treated that way by the media. It has taken this extreme situation of a collapse in confidence in the major parties and some good luck in a local electorate to get a member in the lower house, and it has been growing awareness of that single issue – the environment – which has propelled them to fame. In the past they have entered coalitions at a State level and it hasn’t worked so well, but at a Federal level they have an excellent thinker in the form of their senate leader, Bob Brown, and there’s every chance they can behave responsibly and with principle. If they do, Australians will be shown an alternative to the two main parties. This will end the ALP’s 100-year-long effective stranglehold on the left-wing vote, and may have significant ramifications for the Nationals if their rural electorate start to think of the Greens as alternative representatives of farmer’s wealth and rural issues[14]. In quite a few electorates the Greens gave the final winner from the main party a run for their money, either coming close to them in the primary vote or forcing them to depend on preferences. This indicates that the old order is starting to fray at the edges, and if either of the main parties forms an effective coalition with Independents and/or Greens, we may see the beginning of the end of two party dominance in Australia.

    The Liberals particularly need to be scared of this, because the combined primary vote of the Greens and the ALP is 50%, much higher than the Liberal/National 44%. If that gets turned into seats for the Greens – either through the ALP coordinating better with them, or the Greens winning in seats where a three-headed race previously favoured Liberal – then the Liberal/Nationals are facing big electoral trouble. The Liberals must be keenly aware of this given that the Nationals’ vote share has been declining over the last 30 years (they are “agrarian socialists” after all). If that vote share drops below a certain level, there’s every risk the Greens will replace the Nationals on the Federal stage, and that is the death-knell of conservative/classical liberal politics in Australia. This in turn would be very good for Australia because it would force the Liberals to reinvent themselves as a socially left-wing, environmentally conscious party of liberalism, rather than the socially-conservative right-wing broad church that they’re trying to be now. Such a move was on the cards after the last election but the conflict over the carbon abatement scheme halted that move. A move towards coalition politics in Australia might – depending on the performance of the coalition partners – hasten it, and <i>that</i> would be a very good outcome for Australia.

    But at present, the more realistic outcome (as far as I can see) is that after a remarkably successful election campaign for Tony Abbot and his conservatives, we’ll end up with the most left wing government in 30 years…

    UPDATE: The independents have presented a list of demands to the Gillard government, and they’re impressive. Part of this is a demand to fully cost both party’s policies, which should be a problem for the liberals – their policies have not yet been costed, and there is some dispute as to whether they will work out. This letter also seems to put the ball firmly in Gillard’s court, since there are a variety of undertakings there that are harder for an opposition to meet than a government. They also in my view address concerns that the independents were just going to be pork-barrelling. I think there is some strong behind-the-scenes distate with the National Party working behind all of this, and I wonder if the past behaviour of the Nationals is hindering Abbot in negotiating with them. I heard that the Nationals’ leader, Warren Truss, is not allowed in the negotiations with these independents and I recall before the 2004 election there was an attempt to smear Windsor with a bribery allegation, possibly by Truss. I imagine there is not much love lost between them!

    —

    fn1: The AEC is an Aussie organisation to be proud of, btw. 14 million Australians voted out of 22 million, and the polling booths all closed without fuss at 6pm, and the decision was (approximately) known by midnight. Compare with the UK, where 27 million people out of 64 million voted, but there was chaos.

    fn2: For this reason I am only partly a greens supporter. I like their environmental and social policies but I’m also strongly social democrat-aligned, and I’m really suspicious of economic policies that aren’t based on social democracy. I can see that for post-industrial (like the UK) or resource-exporting societies (like Oz) a non-social-democratic model could be a good idea, but I can also see that it could just be economic hoodoo, and not worth trying.

    fn3: Incidentally, while I broadly approve of the rough characterization of social democrat as “left,” I think the dichotomization of this kind of debate into social democracy VS. capitalism is puerile, particularly in a country like Australia where essentially all the parties are social democratic, and the debate between them concerns workers rights and what proportion of the economy should be socialized (and that debate itself narrows over time)[4].

    fn4: Lenin agrees with me about this. He was full of scorn for social democratic parties and saw them as a weak attempt to soften capitalism’s hard edges. The way this played out in pre-war Europe is beautifully described in Darkness at Noon by Koestler[5]

    fn5: A book I think is in many ways better than 1984, and should definitely be read by those interested in a genuine, non-ideological critique of the ideology of marxist-leninism[6]

    fn6: as opposed to a non-ideological critique of the outcomes of marxist-leninism, which is trivial, like shooting fish in a barrel

    fn7: though I think it’s safe to say this part of the ALP’s “let’s throw granny under a bus” impulse is getting weaker over successive generations of hacks[8]

    fn8: and it’s also worth noting that in a services- and export-oriented economy like Australia, the concept of “helping the workers” is getting harder to found in a single party political program, which is why I’m increasingly tempted to look into the details of the Greens’ economic policies[9]

    fn9: which is possibly the mistake that Saruman made

    fn10: Typically the federal government doesn’t get control of both houses, and has to negotiate for everything. This is even true of the current ALP, who won in a “landslide” so significant that the former PM lost his own seat; but they still couldn’t control the senate.

    fn11: The media still report deaths in Iraq as “over 100,000” when we know that they’re over a million – they won’t report anything which disputes their preferred narrative, and their preferred narrative for the insulation program was that it was a failure. This narrative is straight from the liberals.

    fn12: One described them as a “cancer” he had given up, two of them referred to the Nationals’ Finance Spokesperson as a “fool” who “embarrasses rural Australia” and the leader of the Nationals, Warren Truss, has been excluded from negotiations with them because their relationship is so bad

    fn13: In the Oz system, “2 party preferred vote” means the percent of votes assigned to the party after preferences have been distributed, and due to the Strong Law of Large Numbers is unlikely to ever be bigger than 52% or less than 48% – very small differences represent large “popularity” (under a very strained definition of popular in which only 39% of people actually voted for the ALP)

    fn14: Australian farmers are typically represented as anti-environmentalist rednecks but there is a lot of evidence that this is just the opinion of their elite representative bodies, the Farmer’s Federations and the Nationals, not actually particularly representative of rural opinions. Country people have a lot of significant environmental concerns quite apart from global warming, and the Nationals have failed to deliver on them for years – which is part of the reason all the independents in the House of Reps are ex-Nationals.

  • Alternative NHS Reforms

    So previously I mentioned that I don’t think the Tory’s reforms of the NHS will work, and there was a bit of discussion (well, me waffling, really) about alternative models. Today via the Guardian I discovered this gem of a website, in which the Treasury has put up a list of suggestions that British people submitted for ways to save money. They then get rated and the Treasury will (apparently) seriously consider some of them. So of course, since it’s about spending and costs, the NHS has a whole section of its own. This includes terribly exciting suggestions for cost-cutting like “rationalise journal purchasing across NHS Trusts[1]” (someone must have thought this process was serious!)

    Of course, one of the most endearing traits about the British is that they can take the piss out of anything, with a depth of cynicism and wit that I think is unmatched in the world[2], and indeed they’ve managed to do so with this. Here are some alternative suggestions:

    • The NHS should prescribe monocles: and patients can pay the extra for two lenses out of their own pocket. Sadly this won’t work because “top-ups” are banned in the NHS.
    • Stop selling alcohol for one week: I think this has been tried before and wasn’t quite a cost-cutting success, but the person submitting it (“bigoted_oaf”) has an amusing dig at “moderate drinkers” and an excellent implementation strategy: “Go into Tesco with a golf club and set about their cut-price displays. Let everyone else know politely that it’s not allowed.”
    • Tax cigarettes: and restrict where they can be sold. Anyone think this might have been tried somewhere before? Maybe we could raise money by taxing people’s incomes, too?
    • More alternative therapies: because they’re cheaper. Whatever would Prince Charles say?
    • Get stoned: apparently natural hemp oil kills cancer. You heard it here first!

    In amongst these reform suggestions were the serious ones, which seem to mainly consist of:

    • charging a nominal fee for doctor’s appointments, A&E appointments, or prescription drugs
    • charging people for non-attendance at appointments
    • some arcane stuff about end-of year budget rollovers
    • blaming foreigners

    There were also a few sad comments by people using the site to lodge complains about the poor treatment they received in the NHS.

    Oh, and someone wanted to bring back Matron!!!

    —

    fn1: For some reason in the UK a Hospital or small collection of Hospitals is referred to as a “Trust,” even though when you visit, all they do is give you a paracetamol and send you home

    fn2: Though I get the impression that the Polish and maybe Iranians give them a run for their money

  • Current reading: Kraken, China Mieville

    Kraken, by China Mieville, is another “city-within-a-city” novel, like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and Mieville’s previous (rather lacklustre) effort, UnLunDun. In this case the city-wthin-the-city is a supernatural world of grafters, shonksters and magicians, all oriented around a plethora of cults who worship “cast-off” deities and apocalyptic visions, all residing within London. There are some parts of London that are hidden or secret but the majority of it happens in plain view, in the same London that you or I know.

    Unlike Mieville’s previous effort, the elsewhere London in this novel is really apt to the real London. It’s a world of cockney arseholes, criminals, rip-off merchants and sleazebags, where people construct their magical lives from cast-off objects and ideas, working their magic in the interstices of objects and cultures. Even the magic itself is beautifully London, a type of make-do enchanting called “knacking” that depends on the resemblances between real objects and the spells constructed from them. The magic is often low-key, cobbled together, not-quite-right, and a bit dirty. Just like London. The elsewhere world perfectly reflects the realities of London’s fragmented, higgledy-piggledy reality, its dirt, the way everyone in the city has to make the best they can of what they’ve got. It also cleverly reflects that sense in London of ideas and cultures all packed together, confused, borrowing from each other and overcrowded in the same supposedly English space. London is a broken, nowhere town, full of transient people, transient plans and transient cultures. Mieville seems to have finally put all this together into a science-fantasy of quite stunning brilliance.

    He’s also managed to merge the modern and the arcane in quite clever ways, just like Jim Butcher has in the Dresden Files. A few small examples:

    • a character uses the internet to search out her lover, and discovers a whole hidden world of “knackers” and cultists working online
    • a character is paid for his work in Star Trek memorabilia that has been “knacked” so that it works
    • cultists and believers steal ideas for their “knacks,” their style and manner from science fiction and fantasy, so that their work is self-referential, and sometimes their magic is intended to mimic the magic or tech of their favourite shows
    • a chameleon character uses his magic to infiltrate organizations by appearing to be one of their members; but the way he does it is perfectly and completely dependent upon mimicking and exploiting modern corporate culture

    My absolute favourite so far has been the chapter devoted to describing the background of the guy who runs the Familiar’s Union. He used to be  a statue that served Egyptian souls in their afterlife, but he ran a strike there, then left the afterlife and swam back up through the netherworld to the world of the living, to become an organizer. This story is uniquely brilliant to me because it merges cultures rather than technologies from two different times. Instead of him being simply an Egyptian magician who wears an ankh necklace and hangs out in a club, he’s an Egyptian magical slave from a slave-owning time, who has transcended the netherworld to become that quintessential element of the modern Industrial age – a union organizer. But the things he’s organizing don’t always have souls, and work in an industrial landscape that is pre-modern (the cottage industries of wizards). This is Mieville at his best, blending politics, culture, and history through sci fi fantasy for the pure purpose of having fun.

    The plot is also beautifully self-referential without being wanky. Essentially, it involves the theft of an embalmed giant squid from the London Natural History Museum. The squid is probably a dead god, and is worshiped by a cult of messianic krakenists, who believe that at the end of the world they will be drawn to a heaven in the Ocean’s deeps. The whole thing is full of cthulhu references (sometimes directly) even though there’s no admission that either the squid or the cult are directly cthulhu-worshipers. The theft coincides with some kind of magical change in London, and the chase is on to find the squid before something really bad happens. Of course the people doing the chasing are in conflict with a sinister, evil organization or organizations, who are really really evil and constructed from a really interesting pastiche of modern images, sub-cultures and cults. The book includes two bad guys, Goss and Subby, who are almost up to the standard of the bad guys in Neverwhere.

    I thought that Mieville went off the rails a bit with Iron Council (pardon the pun) and UnLunDun, but he’s back on track with this gem. I haven’t finished yet but so far it’s brilliant, and I recommend it to anyone who needs a bit of science-fantasy entertainment. This book also cements my view of China Mieville as a great writer of, and possibly the main exponent/inventor of, some kind of new sub-genre of science-fantasy, Urban Chaos Science Fantasy, maybe, or CityPunk, or something. His three best novels that I’ve read – Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and now Kraken – are all based in a kind of city, and the vibrancy of the city itself is essential to the plot of the books. The city is almost a character on its own in his work, and his strength is in his representation of the extraordinary and ordinary lives of its denizens.

    I also think that Mieville’s leftist politics is a complete furphy in analysis of his work, because although it clearly informs the creation of some of the characters, and his depiction of the different strata of the societies he creates, I think ultimately his works are surprisingly devoid of political messages (though rich in political conflict). For a man who is generally caricatured as a cardboard cutout lefty from the Politburo, his work is actually both suprisingly anarchist (not leninist at all!) and generally devoid of strong left-wing political messages. I don’t think I’ve met a single character outside of Iron Council who ever could be said to represent Mieville’s politics, nor have I read a plot that shows them clearly. Even The Scar, which is a bit of a Utopian quest, if it has any political interpretation at all, would be a guarded critique of the folly of trusting vanguardists – which would be a bit wierd coming from someone of Mieville’s supposedly Marxist-Leninist views. The key to understanding Mieville’s work is his representation of cities.

    So, again: read this if you have the time and money, ’cause so far it’s great!

  • Fucking Linux

    I’m going out for a drink now. I spent much of this afternoon and evening trying to install Linux on a PowerPC iBook G4. The only reason I’m doing this is that I thought it might be nimbler than mac os 10.4. We use this iBook purely for watching movies (it’s plugged into the tv) and playing music, but recently its been struggling with streamed stuff, and I thought a non-mac OS might work. Linux is supposed to be speedier. So I tried installing it.

    I have previously managed to install windows 7 on two iMacs, one of which is depicted here. I got this done with the help of Apple’s bootcamp, which sorts out the boot sector of the mac so you don’t have any really painful problems. I found a couple of sites online – here and here – which claim to have installed ubuntu on an ibook, so I thought I’d try it.

    Of course it was impossible. Just like the last two times I’ve tried to install linux on anything. What a useless piece of shit linux is. Here is why:

    1. For a start, the installation disc randomly crashes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Brilliant.
    2. Secondly, the installation disc runs into some kind of problem with the file system and, instead of throwing up an error saying “encountered a file system problem, you really should try using a decent computer” or some such, it produces an incomprehensible and meaningless “ubi-partman crashed with exit code 141.” Now, correct me if I’m wrong but “exit code” sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for “error code.” Could it be the linux community are so up themselves now that they don’t want to refer to errors as errors?[1]. Anyway, I looked up “exit code 141” on the internet and it has multiple possible causes. This is singularly unhelpful. This is a microsoft or SPSS level of debugging power[3a]. I want to know what causes my error, so I can work around it[4], not just get pointed to a series of websites full of people with diverse OSs and hardware talking about a meaningless error code. So I had to go back online looking for oblique solutions to the problem. This is nothing compared to the last time I had to solve a Linux problem, but we’ll get to that
    3. Thirdly, the available information about how to proceed to a successful implementation has no relation to the way that the Ubuntu installer works. For example, one of those sites says “Choose all default options but when it comes to partitioning, dlete the Ubuntu partition you created earlier. go back and choose to use maximum free space”. None of these processes or options existed in my installer. So there’s no way for legacy information to be used to inform current installations. I’ve never seen a “use maximum free space” option in any partition software. But I get three completely different options I can choose from. I think it’s probably a mark of an amateur software project to have completely different installation processes at every release. The basic processes of installation are the same in every iteration, surely?
    4. WTF is it with the verbose way that Linux starts up and shuts down? I know that there are a couple of hundred people in the world who think it’s cool how the computer tells you that “random process A” is “doing incomprehensible shit B”, and there might be another 10 people in the world who actually know what it’s doing, but it really looks juvenile. It’s like the BSOD – nobody understands that crap, so why bother? The shutdown process in Ubuntu is particularly pratty. Why on God’s green earth should I have to hit return halfway through the process after the CD spits out? There’s no going back from here, why bother?

    Anyway, so the basic problem seems to be this: Apple mangles the boot sector, and you need to somehow come up with a set of partitions that the linux installer can read in order to use it. The installer is supposed to be able to preserve the Apple bootsector, so it just becomes a straight dual boot, but in fact no matter how I contort the installation process I end up fucking the apple boot sector 8 ways to Sunday (take that, Steve!) and then it can’t reboot. Following the information in the few websites by people who’ve done it is just impossible, largely because I don’t understand the process of setting up Linux drives[5] but possibly also because Apple mangled the boot sector, and maybe also because I’m profoundly stupid when it comes to linux[8].

    So I tried setting up an ext4 partition on top of the Mac OS one. My Hard Drive is 30g, so I had:

    • 32 kb boot sector[9]
    • 132 Mb of nothing
    • 6 Gb of MacOS
    • 132Mb of nothing
    • 21Gb of ext4, the standard linux file format (apparently)

    Then I start the Ubuntu installer (after several tries, of course) and it offers me three partitioning choices: install side by side, use the whole disc, or custom format. The first choice doesn’t “install side by side at all” but instead splits my 21gb partition into two chunks of ext4. The second choice does what is expected, but that will probably shaft the bootsector so it was out; the third choice demanded to know “where is the root mount” and since this is my partner’s computer I’m not going to root mount it; I left this well alone. Choosing option a), I proceeded with an installation that just stopped 75% of the way through, and somehow managed to shaft the bootsector, because when I gave up on the process and restarted I had lost the mac os boot as well.

    What kind of installation software is that? I just downloaded a “disc” that is designed to fuck my machine. And on top of that, when I repeated the process – same partition in mac os, same install disc – the following happened:

    • The first time I insert the install disc, it just fails, out of hand
    • second time, the install disc works but I get the stupid “ubipartman” error, i.e. the partition software can’t handle the ext4 file system (???!!!???)

    So, I don’t really even know if this ubipartman error has anything to do with apple’s shenanigans with the boot sector, or if it’s just a bodgy piece of software. Someone else I spoke to said all knowingly “ah, yes, getting the partition software to work is always the trick.”

    You know your software is shit when people are saying things like that about it. Let’s try similar phrases with some other software shall we?

    • Stats software: “ah yes, getting the mathematics engine to work is always the trick”
    • Graphics software: “ah yes, getting the colour palette to work can be a tad fiendish”
    • Nuclear powerplant software: “oh yes, we always take the radioactivity meters with a grain of salt, it’s the software don’t you know old chap?”

    So, this is my third time attempting to install linux and my first time on a laptop. Let’s review our results:

    • First time: nothing, the installer just died in the arse
    • Second time: I installed it fine but X Window didn’t work. Who wants linux without x window? It’s a glorified telex machine. So I hunted around on the internet and it turned out that there’s no standard drivers for the i810 chipset, but someone had written one. I downloaded it and installed it but it didn’t work, and another day of hunting on the internet enabled me to discover that a couple of lines of code in the driver had typos in them. Fucking typos. So I hunted out other drivers with similar code and worked out how to correct the typos, and X Window worked. Oh my god! This is the computing equivalent of making fire. A fucking GUI, man! What next – object oriented programming?!! Anyway, so then when I invoke my beautiful X Window[10], there is no networking. I try invoking the control panel thingy to work out what the next driver problem is and… nothing. No functioning control panel. Two days of struggle to get X Window to work, and I still have to work out the control panel?!! Fuck that. I wiped it
    • Third time: Who knows what mysteries can be produced with the arcane combination of Steve Jobs ratfucking your boot sector and linux trying to clean it up?

    So I think I just need to give up. But I just want to point out that EVERY TIME I have spoken to someone about installing Linux they have said to me “oh, it used to be really hard, but now it’s trivial, point and click, out of the box baby.”

    Well, I beg to differ.

    None of this would be an issue of course, except that there’s an army of linux nerds out there carefully watching the progress of linux, calculating every 10th of a percentage point increase in its market share, claiming it’s the best thing ever and wondering why it isn’t more popular. If any of you are reading this, perhaps there is a hint of why contained in my struggles[11].

    And don’t even get me started on my attempts to get hold of a decent, working 64 bit windows package!!!!

    —

    fn1: Many years ago I had cause to call a Microsoft helpdesk[2] and the guy on the other end of the phone referred to a clear bug as an “oversight.” I challenged him about this and he told me that it was official policy that bugs were “oversights.” Windows NT was great at the time[3], but jesus christ…

    fn2: Hey, don’t criticise me! I was at work, it was Windows NT, I was desperate!

    fn3: This is where Apple screwed the pooch. Windows were floating around with the shittest software on the planet (windows 3.1), but it was tied to the best productivity software (MS Office). Apple had a chance here to come up with a killer OS that would take market share, provided that a) it worked and b) they used MS Office. Unfortunately, they gave us Mac OS 8, and they were too arrogant to respond to complaints of “my computer freezes” with “we’ll fix that” before Windows NT came out. I don’t know what happened to b), but jesus Mac OS 8 was shit.

    fn3a: not as bad as SPSS. Until their most recent incarnation, when SPSS syntax ran into an error it told you the column number rather than the line number[3b]

    fn3b: Possibly not as bad as R, either, another piece of open source joy. When I was working with R in Japan, I actually had a piece of code that worked on one computer but not another, until we removed the comments[3c].

    fn3c: which is almost as bad as my friend’s experience of an electronics lab in our undergrad physics days, when his experiment worked using wires with blue insulation plastic but not red.

    fn4: Witness here the soft bigotry of low expectations. I’m so used to Microsoft and Apple (and SPSS) that instead of saying “I want to know what the problem is so I can get someone to fix it” I say “If I know what it is I can find a way around it!”

    fn5: why does it have to be so fucking difficult? Why can’t they just have one drive with a sensible name (i.e. not “root”, which is a well-known Australian euphemism for fucking and just sounds stupid, I don’t ever want to be a “root user” in any situation which involves a hairy nerdy guy who keeps his dog in his office[6]) and why do they have to have a separate swap space etc? This software has been around for 20 fucking years, can’t they find a solution to the omfg-so-hard problem of swap space?

    fn6: I once worked in a place whose network support guy, the classic bearded neckbreather, actually kept his dog in the office – in a tiny cage – and fancied himself an ubernerd. Like most neck-breathers, he was incompetent. When you went into his office, if he wasn’t there the dog would bark and snarl at you from in its cage. Need I add that it was a chihuahua? Need I also add that he stuck to Novel Netware 5.1[7] long after Windows 2000 Server was out?

    fn7: If anyone thinks that Windows 95 is a product of Cthulhu, they should try trouble-shooting a Novell Netware Server, as I once had to do. Truly there are heirarchies of evil.

    fn8: and, you may have noticed, just a tiny bit antsy.

    fn9: Actually I reckon this is just a 32kb file with “Steve Jobs is GOD” written in it over and over.

    fn10: Did I mention that Linux/Unix is beautiful when it works? This is the real shit about all of this.

    fn11: I know, I know, you’re going to say “It’s Apple’s fault.” But in my experience, the person who glibly states “it’s because it’s an apple” is always wrong. How come I can install windows on my unix-based apples, but I can’t install linux, even though linux is supposedly infinitely more amenable to hacking, and flexible, than windows or apple? Because it’s too fucking hard is why.

  • Should Han Solo have died?

    According to the Guardian today, at a recent convention Gary Kurtz, the writer of Return of the Jedi, revealed the original plot to the movie, which was that Han Solo would die halfway through in a raid, Princess Leia would have difficulty adapting to her new role as leader, and Luke Skywalker would walk off into the distance an embittered loner. That last part certainly fits with his presentation in the movie. I don’t know about Han Solo though – people like him are meant to survive anything, it’s part of their mystique. Someone who can say “I know” just before being frozen, possibly forever, is the kind of guy who doesn’t die in mid-level base raids.

    So, would the movie have been better done this way? Note the alternative storyline doesn’t preclude ewoks.

    I think Skywalker’s end, particularly, would suit him better, but I also think that Vader’s redemption was a really important part of the 3rd movie and there’s nothing in the alternative described in the Guardian to suggest what happened to him. I actually liked the existing end of the movie, with the rebel alliance successful, Vader redeemed, and Skywalker a bit of a grump. The only thing that spoils the movie in my view is the ewoks, and they don’t spoil it much.

    But in the decision about how to end the film, there is a hint of the real tragedy to come: Lucas decided to give it a happy ending because toy sales were very high. It’s really hard to work out what happened to the mind of a man who allegedly wrote the first 3 movies as a film representation of the journey of the hero, as described by that academic (Campbell?) and how he slid so far in the making of the new movies. Proof of the existence of the Elder Gods, I suppose.

  • ウォーハンマー3のやりかた

    ウォーハンマー３ていうのは、英語はんだけですけど、プレイヤーさんたちは、英語が分からない（って言いましたーたぶん英語が分かるけど。。。）だからどうやって英語ばかりのゲームができるようになるかと考えておいて、いちばん簡単な方法は、ルールの基礎をやりながら説明して、プレイヤーが使うカードを翻訳すると決めました。

    私にとっては、カードの翻訳はいい準備です。いろな言葉を習ったり、いろな表現を覚えたり、説明について考えたりできましたから。

    でも、カードたくさんあるから、全部を翻訳したらとっても大変です！だから、ゲームを始めた前に、キャラクターを決めて、作成した。その感じで、あの４人のキャラクターに使われたカードだけの翻訳が必要です。

    この翻訳の複雑生を分かるように、ゲームの時に使ったキャラクターシートをみてください：

    シューゼットのキャラクターシート

    見えるカードより、もう５枚くらいが存在します。カードの翻訳はこの形です：

    シューゼットはこの翻訳のおかげで生存するか？

    プレイヤーさんは、このレジュメーを持ちながら、ゲームをやる。インクの節約するように、カラーで本当のカードとして印刷しませんでした。才能というカードも翻訳した：

    １４歳のに、強い！

    この才能カードで、翻訳の難しさが分かりやすいとおもいます。私の日本語はそんなに上手じゃないから、「clear-minded」の正しい翻訳が分かりません。それにも、「新入り」は「Initiate」の翻訳ではない。正しいのは、「入信者」です。でも、自分で言葉を探したら、正しく見つけたかどうかわかりません。

    でも、基本的にわかると思います。ゲームが進めるから十分です。だんだん上手になって欲しいですが、まだまだです。

    この上は、ゲームの準備のやりかたです。

  • ウォーハンマー3のプレイーレポート２：始めの冒険の終わり

    この投稿はプレイヤーの一二三んさんに書いてくれました。

    このキャンペーンは、私に作られたシナリオ、そしてルールブックの「目には目を」というシナリオで続ける予定です。この投稿は私が作ったシナリオの終わりです。

    ーーー

    前回の続き

    シュゼットは村長さんの家へ呼ばれ、何も疑うことなくトコトコとついていく。
    あまり豪華とは言えない玄関を通ると、応接室に通された。
    応接間には、3人の先客が居た。

    ******************
    ＰＬ：スローラーナーさん
    名前：シュルツ
    種族：人間
    性別：男
    年齢：25歳
    職業：見習い魔術師
    ******************

    彼は首都アルトドロフで魔術を学ぶ学生だ。
    魔術師の位は見習い魔術師。
    年齢が25にして見習い魔術師なら、少々遅咲きだろうか？

    ただ魔術の才能を見るのに、年齢はあまり関係ない。
    魔術の才能があっても、周りの環境によってはその才能が埋もれてしまう事など良くある。
    10代前半から魔術学院に通える子もいれば、シュルツの様に20を過ぎて魔術の基礎を学ぶ人も居る。

    彼は中肉中背の目立たない男で、粗末なローブを着ている。
    今は学園の冬休みを利用して、国内を探索してるらしい。

    ******************
    ＰＬ：楓君
    名前：ハインツ
    種族：人間
    性別：男
    年齢：21歳
    職業：兵士
    ******************

    手に槍をもった、厳つい兵士である。
    身に着けてる盾や鎧は、歴戦の証である傷跡が無数に刻まれてる。
    年齢はまだ若く、熟練と呼ぶほど年をとってないが、若輩と呼ぶほどではないようだ。
    当然、それなりに腕が立つだろう。

    彼がどこの地域の兵士かはしらないが、どことなくドワーフの臭いがした。

    ******************
    ＰＬ：てんちょーさん
    名前：アルソン
    種族：エルフ
    性別：男
    年齢：80歳
    職業：盗賊
    ******************

    茶色いフードが、その男の全身を隠すように覆ってる。
    背中を壁に預けてあまり目立たない。
    口数も少ないので、最初シュゼットがこの部屋に入ったとき、彼の事に気づかなかった程だ。

    シュゼットは遠慮なく、彼のフードを覗き込む。
    彼女の行動に悪気はない、ただこういった世間知らずで無神経な行動は、あとあと痛い目をみるだろう。

    フードの中を覗き込んで、シュゼットはびっくりした。
    エルフだ！この人、エルフだ！

    このアルトドロフでは、エルフはあまり見かけない。
    大概のエルフはローレローンの森から、一歩も外に出ようとしないのだ。
    どこにでも居るドワーフやハーフリングとは、偉い違いである。

    ＊＊＊　＊＊＊　＊＊＊

    という訳で一同は村長さんの家にあつまった。
    そこでこんな依頼をされた。

    「この村の周りに居たビーストマンとグリーンスキンが、急に居なくなった。居なくなってうれしいが、原因を調べてほしい」

    村長は報酬として、一人頭銀貨20枚を提示した。
    この金額は1ヶ月分の衣食を満たすのに、十分な金額だ。
    4人は少し悩んだりもしたが、結局は依頼を受けることにした。

    村長に詳しい話を聞くと、以下の事が分かった。

    ・グリーンスキンのキャンプは、簡単に見つかるらしい。
    ・数も少ない。
    ・キャンプはこの村から徒歩で1日程の距離。

    ＰＣは他にも情報を集めるべく、村を散策する。
    調べるとグリーンスキンに一番詳しい村人が【汚い象】という酒場で飲んだくれてるらしい。
    さっそくその酒場へ向かう。

    ＊＊＊　＊＊＊　＊＊＊

    この酒場は【汚い】象と言う名前を表してるとおり、えらく汚い酒場だ。
    店の床にはあまり見たくない汚物が飛び散っており、嫌な臭いが鼻を突く。

    酒場には3人の客がいた。
    飲んだくれてるオッサンと、飲んだくれてるドワーフと、そのドワーフにまとわり付いてる商売女だ。

    グリーンスキンに詳しい人というのは、飲んだくれてるオッサンだ。
    一行は話を聞くために、店の中へ足を踏み入れた。

    すると一向に目をつけたドワーフが、エルフを睨んでこう言った。

    「エルフくさいです！フ○ッキン！」

    ドワーフは鼻を摘みながら、店を出て行く。
    出て行く際に、中指を立てるのを忘れない。

    ドワーフとエルフの仲が悪いのは、この世界の常識だ。
    両者の因縁は長く、こう言ったやり取りも、さして珍しくは無い。

    だが問題はこれで終わらなかった。
    ドワーフにまとわり付いてた商売女が、エルフに突っかかってきたのだ。

    「よくもあたしの商売を邪魔しやがって！このままじゃすまないよ！」

    商売女は仕事の邪魔をした賠償として、エルフに銀貨2枚を要求してきたのだ。
    エルフの森と違って、人間の住む場所ではこういう事が多々ある。

    続く

    ウォーハンマー３版のシステムの感想

    ※リングテイルのプログで今回のレポを上げてます。
    http://www.ring-tail.com/blog.php
    あわせて以下の文章を読むと、より分かります。・・・たぶん。

    僕が上げた一枚目の画像を見ても分かるとおり、もう２版とはまったく違うシステムです。
    最初キャラクターシートやカードを渡された時は「ボードゲームみたいだな」と思いました。

    キャラクターシートを見ると、２版では47あった技能が３版では18に減ってます。
    これが良くなったのか悪くなったのかは、まだプレイが浅いので分かりません。
    ただＰＣがかなり万能になったんじゃないかな？と思います。

    攻撃や異能は、全てカードになったみたいです。
    見た目はとても分かりやすいですね。
    英語が分からない僕でも、イラストを見てすんなり分かりました。

    またこのカードを使った戦闘は、とてもユニークです。
    ただ場所を多くとってしまうのが、難点ですね。

    スチュさんの翻訳

    スチュさんがカードを翻訳したので、その画像を乗せます。（２枚目と３枚目ですね）
    彼は全員のカードを、こうして丁寧に翻訳してくれたのです。（それも無料で！）

    翻訳も意味が分からないという事はないです。
    むしろいい味が出てます。
    洋ゲー好きなくせに英語が弱い僕は、あばばばばばーです。

  • ウォーハンマー3のプレイレポート１：始め

    ブログのノート：これはー二三んさんというプレイヤーに書いてくれた投稿です。かれのMixiページからコピーされています。

    プレイーの日日は７月２１日でした。最近忙しかったから少し遅く投稿しました。。。

    A note from the Blog: this is a guest post by Mr. 123, one of my players in the Japanese Warhammer 3 I am running. I didn’t write any of this, but copied it (with permission) from his social networking site, Mixi.

    —

    昨日夜7時、俺は別府のリングテイルに到着した。
    何をする為かと言うと、ここ

    ウォーハンマー３（以下ＷＨ３）をプレイするためだ。

    まだ日本語に翻訳されてないこのゲーム、とても遊べるものではない。わたし、えいごわっかりませーん。
    ただし今回は力強い味方が居る。それは日本語が達者なオーストラリア人のスチュさんだ。彼がこのＷＨ３を日本語に翻訳してくれた。

    昨日リングテイルのお店に集まったのは、以下の５人。

    ①　オイラ、一二三んです。
    ②　ＷＨ３を翻訳し、ＧＭを勤めるスチュさん。
    ③　店長さん。
    ④　楓君。
    ⑤　スローラーナーさん。

    全員ともリングテイルを通して知り合い、全員がＷＨ好きな人ばかりだ。だから普通の人なら引いてしまう洋ゲーでも、バッチこい。

    さっそくゲームを開始。
    ＧＭが必要なシートの類を準備してる。
    んでね、その時、ＧＭが僕にこう言ったんですよ。

    「一二三んさん、僕が準備してる間、他の人達にＷＨの世界観を説明してください」

    僕は言いました。

    「なーに、ここに居る人達にＷＨの世界観の説明など不要です」

    楓さんとスローラーナーさんはＷＨ２をプレイ済み。
    プレイしてない店長さんにも、世界観の説明は不要でしょう。
    みなこの混沌でダークな世界観が好きで、この店に来たのだから。

    さてＧＭのセッティングが終わった。
    ＰＬ4人は恭しくキャラクターシートを受け取る。
    さて、ＷＨ３とはどのようなゲームなのか・・・！

    用意されたキャラクターは以下の4名。
    ①　兵士
    ②　エルフの盗賊
    ③　入信者
    ④　見習い魔術師
    ※各キャラクターの詳しい情報は、ＷＨのＨＰをご覧ください。　　　　http://www.hobbyjapan.co.jp/wh/career/

    皆さんならどの職業を選びます？
    僕は速効で　③入信者　を選びました。
    今回は猛ったシグマー教徒でプレイしようという気分だったのです。混沌ぬっころすお。
    ただ入信者の宗派はモールでした。ちょっと残念。

    キャラクターシートには既に能力値等が書き込まれてました。
    サンプルキャラなんでしょうか？英語の分からない僕にとってはとてもありがたかったです。

    さてまだ名前も決めてないが、さっそくプレイ。
    今ＰＣが要る場所は首都アルトドロフの南にある小さな村。
    季節はまだ寒い2月で、各ＰＣは別々の宿屋で寝転がっている。

    まだＰＣ同士が知り合いで無い、という設定でした。

    そしてＧＭから
    「じゃあ君が泊まってる宿の名前を言ってね」
    と振られる。
    僕はとっさにこう言った。

    「ええと・・・【ウルリックの牙】という酒場です」

    おいおい・・・モール信者にありましき名前。
    【モールの墓場】
    【モールの棺桶】
    【モールの葬式まんじゅう】
    なんて名前の方がよかった。

    僕が酒場の名前を言うと、各ＰＣも泊まってる酒場の名前を言います。

    ・見習い魔術師のスローラーナーさん　【白い蜥蜴】
    ・兵士の楓さん　【青い小鳥】
    ・盗賊の店長さん　【リングテイル】

    酒場の名前を伝えたところで、冒険が始まりました。

    ＊＊＊　＊＊＊　＊＊＊　＊＊＊

    店の外がガヤガヤと騒がしい。
    飲んだくれてた一同は、何事かと店の外に出る。

    外には仕事が終わったばかりの街道巡視員が居て、この村における道路状況を説明してる。

    この村の周りには悪い奴等（ビーストマンやグリーンスキン）が多くて、物不足が起こっていた。
    悪いやつらを退治しようにも、お上はなかなか動かない。
    涙目な村民、こんな感じです。

    しかし今来た街道巡視員の話に聞くと、急に悪い奴等が消えてしまったとの事。
    何か分からないが、これで商人の往来も増えて村が豊かになる。旨いビールが飲めるぜ、って感じで、村民は嬉しさで踊ってます。

    いい気分なのはＰＣも同じ。またビールを一杯頂こうとすると、フードを被った怪しい人がＰＣに近づきます。

    「この村の総理大臣があなたに会いたがってる。来れば報酬で銀1枚です」

    この村の総理大臣・・・？
    たぶん村長さんの事でしょう。
    なに、ゲームに国境など関係ない、ＧＭの言いたい事はよく分かる。
    村の総理大臣って言ったら、村で一番偉い人の事でしょ。
    おーけーおーけー、一二三ん日本語わっかるよー。

    ＰＣは快くこの村の総理大臣（以下村長さん）に会う事にした。

    この話を持ってきたのは一人だけでなかった。
    他のＰＣも同じ事を言われてたのだ。

    そうして一行は村長さん宅で、顔を合わせることになった。

    ＧＭ「それじゃ、各ＰＣの名前とかお願いします」

    ここで初めてキャラクター紹介だ。
    能力値や装備はあらかじめシートに書き込まれてたが

    キャラの名前
    年齢
    性別
    生い立ち

    等はＰＬが自由に決めていい。
    さてどうするか、と悩む僕。

    うん、決めた。僕はこのキャラで行こう。

    ******************
    名前：シュゼット・クレイプ
    種族：人間
    性別：女
    年齢：14歳
    職業：入信者
    ******************

    説明：
    裕福な商人の一人娘で、何不自由なく暮らしていた。
    とても愛らしい容姿をしており、性格の方も容姿同様に綺麗で可愛らしく、純白そのものである。

    好きな飲み物はミルクティー。
    好きなお菓子はスコーン。
    好きな言葉は博愛。

    シュゼットは、とってつけたようなお嬢様なのだ。

    だからだろうか。その容姿や振る舞い故に、皆からは【ミルクティー・プリンセス】と呼ばれていた。
    彼女は商人の娘でも、プリンセスと呼んでも差し支えない気品を備えてた。誰もが彼女をプリンセスと呼ぶ事に、疑問は持たなかった。
    愛しきミルクティー・プリンセスは、みんなの誇りであった。

    12歳の時、シュゼットは勉学のため生まれた街を離れ、モールの教会へ行く事になる。
    そこで悲劇は起こった。

    彼女は生まれて始めて飲んだでビールを気に入り、暇さえあれば一杯かますようになった。
    以後彼女辛党になり、ミルクティーを捨てる。好きなお菓子だったスコーンも捨てて、変わりに燻製のウィンナー・ソーセージを食らう。

    今は全国のビールと乾き物巡りのため、メイスを片手に旅に出てる。
    まさに親泣かせ。父親のガレットの悲しみを思うと、涙を禁じえない。
    ちなみにご両親は共に健在だ。故郷に帰れば大きな屋敷と大勢の使用人が待ってる。どこぞの世界のシュゼットはゆすり屋に痛めつけられる等の不幸な目にあってるみたいだが、この世界のシュゼットは幸せそのものだ。

    【ミルクティー・プリンセス】　改め　【ビールぷはー！プリンセス】

    彼女の冒険は始まったばかりだ。

    続く

    追記
    今日は付き添いでジムに行く予定なので、もう日記書いてる時間が無い。また後日に続きを書きます。

    追記　その２
    スローラーナーさんと前回ソロで遊んだＷＨ２の話をしたんです。
    そしたら衝撃な一言を貰いました。
    「一二三んさん、僕のＰＣの名前はエルストンでなくて、エルンストなんですよ」

    まじで！？あばばばばー。失礼しました。

  • GMing warhammer 3 in Japanese: An Eye for an Eye

    Last night my players gathered at my house for the second session of our Warhammer 3 campaign (for that is what it appears to have become). We’re running through the module in the WFRP Adventure Book, An Eye for an Eye. We started a little late due to address confusion and eating, and there aren’t really any additional details I need to add about the Japanese element of the experience, except:

    • It really helps to prepare language – I consistently go into situations like this thinking I’ll just “work it out” but there is no way to work out words in a language completely different to English. You need to find them and memorize them ahead
    • Japanese players really do get down to business quicker than English-language players, in my experience
    • One of my players forgot his translated cards, but between us we muddled through without too much difficulty. He could either read them himself, or I helped him, or people shared theirs with him. The main problem he had was in skimming them to make a decision – the titles are meaningless, and it’s from the titles and names (of powers, spells, cards, whatever) that you primarily decide what to do
    • I put an explicit ban on purchasing new action cards with advances, because I want my players to become more familiar with the cards they have and I need time for translation. This worked out- we soon identified that the thief character needs a “firing into combat” card, and by next session I aim to translate some suggested cards for the soldier
    • I had an amusing language stuff-up that I’m going to have to retroactively reversed. In negotiating their fee for their adventure, I told the characters they would be paid “1 gin” (1 silver) for uncovering the mystery, when I was meant to say “1 kin” (1 gold). They were all like “we’re out of here” (1 silver is not much money!) and I couldn’t fathom why. One of them said “let’s negotiate” and pushed it up to “4 gin” (4 silver), and they were all still saying “fuck this for a game of soldiers.” Finally someone realised I might be confusing two common words and checked with me, and now they’re all earning way more than they should be. I’m going to correct that by email. Oops.

    Translating cards makes things slower, but the combination of “false beginners” (everyone actually knows a lot of English words) and the Warhammer 2 translation means that people are getting along okay. Despite starting late (9pm) and language difficulties, and the distraction of a visitor coming to meet the cat, we managed to get through the following stages of the adventure in 3.5 hours:

    • purchasing some stuff in town
    • spending experience points
    • learning about the mission and making a deal
    • travelling to Grunewald Lodge, and the fight with the beastmen
    • Meeting the head of the Lodge and discussing their job

    I think that is  a pretty good run of events for 3.5 hours in the second session of a new system.

    I only have 2 points to make about warhammer 3 as a whole, which I’m still really enjoying. First of all, I really like the progress tracker, it’s a really useful tool in any situation where you need to handle time-dependent conflict, and secondly, it’s really really deadly.

    On the deadliness of Warhammer 3.

    Mr. Kaede is playing a soldier who has a mail shirt, a kite shield, and has spent his first experience points on combat-related bonusses. In a pinch, he can and does add 7 misfortune dice to an opponent’s attack on him. He has 13 wounds, the most of the party, and his reckless cleave action is nasty as potted doom. The thief character has an awesome ranged attack, rapid fire, which mows down opponents. I pitted the party of 4 against a group of beastmen, consisting of 2 Gors and 10 ungor henchmen. They attacked in 2 waves, the first consisting of 1 Gor and 5 ungors, the second arriving 2 rounds later and suffering fatigues in order to reach the battle quickly (fatigues count as wounds for bad guys, so they arrived weakened). The first leader, fighting the soldier, suffered damage fast. The thief and wizard mowed down 4 of the Ungors in one round, so at the end of the round all that remained was a wounded leader and a wounded ungor. But this Ungor reduced the thief to two wounds. The way initiative works in Warhammer 3, when the second round commenced the round was set to start with one PC and one monster acting. The players’ initial decision was to have the soldier finish off the Gor, but I pointed out to them that regardless of their decision, I was going to have the Ungor kill the thief, so they needed to adjust their initiative order to save the thief.

    I really like this flexibility! In the first round the first people to act were the soldier and the Gor, on an initiative of 3, then everyone else on 2. In the second round, both enemy and party can change who acts when. So the characters had to decide who would save the Thief. The thief himself is a crap fighter and the wizard had no power, so the cleric – 14 year old Suzette – had to charge in to kill the ungor (the soldier was engaged in a separate area). She failed, despite using all her luck points on the task, so then the thief’s fate hung in the balance. He threw his luck points, parried, did all he could – and the ungor just missed. The soldier then followed up with a support action which emabled the thief to disengage from combat so he could use his missile attack, which he did, to kill off some ungors.

    In the following round, the other Gor charged in to attack the soldier, using its special charge power. Even though he added 7 misfortune dice, it seriously wounded and critically wounded him, getting him down to 5 wounds, before he could kill it. There is no healing in the place they have arrived at, so when the final boss battle arrives their soldier is going to be critically wounded and 1 good hit away from death – and their only archer is on 2 wounds.

    Also, they chewed through 12 beastmen in 2 rounds. This game is deadly, even if your character has combat skills.