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…

  • Compromise and Conceit 17: Into the lair of the lich

    We rejoin our heroes in the snow flurries created by the departure of the Greenland dragon, and in a new bind. Their task now is to journey to the ruined old town of Good Hope, and invade the church there to kill a lich. They have been geased by the dragon, and so have no choice but to do this as quickly as possible.

    So, Brian the Hunter set about making a pool of frozen mermaid blood on the ground, and used it to scry across the Island, seeking the church in which the Lich resided. His vision was drawn initially to a church far away from Good Hope, but then the vision flickered and changed to the main church in Good Hope. The church was damaged in the dragon’s assault all those years ago, but not so badly that it was not covered and protected against prying eyes; however, Brian could see Ghasts moving about the churchyard and the docks of Good Hope, and the characters realised they would need some tactic to enter the church undetected. Their goal was to get as close to the Church as possible before revealing their presence, because Liches are renowned spell-users, and were the lich given sufficient chance to cast protective and summoning magic, they would all be doomed.

    To this end the characters realised they needed to scry inside the Church, to find a way in and to know where the Lich hid, and what its defences were. They returned to their ship, and then sailed back to the main port, where they again enjoyed a night of dubious hospitality in Erik’s Longhall. This time, however, they sought something specific – any relic from inside the church of Good Hope. They found an old bronze ewer inside a cabinet in the long hall, and with Erik’s permission Brian the Hunter pretended to check the value of the ewer. He filled it with water and a drop of his blood and then sought, through the water, to view the inside of the church. Though Erik stopped him quickly, he was able to at least identify two doors, a stairwell, and a confessional box in which sat the Lich.

    Thus apprised of the Lich’s location, the characters set off for Good Hope. Arriving at the docks, they were attacked by 5 Ghasts, but Brian cast a spell of entanglement which called forth great tendrils of goose barnacles from below the quay to envelop the Ghasts, and while they staggered, trapped, on the docks, Merton, Russell and Brian shot them down. From there they docked, and Dave Black and Merton crept up the hillside through the ruined old town of Good Hope to the churchyard to look for a way in. They slipped past the Ghasts in the churchyard and identified a side door, unlocked, which they could move through, though the door would obviously creak. However, none of the other characters – except perhaps Brian – would be able to slip by the Ghasts, and so they would need a distraction.

    Brian provided the distraction in the form of Matilda, his wolf companion. She loped on ahead and, once she had drawn the attention of the Ghasts, led them away from the church while the characters took up position around the doors. Anna Labrousse summoned her Monster, which appeared as a beast made of shattered tombstones and ice; Russell summoned a demon with great webbed limbs to enter the building first, as cover against any powerful spells that would be directed at the door. These beasts smashed through the main doors while Merton and Dave Black slipped through the side door. The Lich, surprised, emerged from its confessional box but was quickly overwhelmed. Anna Labrousse ripped off its left arm with her spell, sending it clattering to the floor in a hail of bones; and then Brian and Merton shot it down before it could muster any powerful magic. Under the protective cover of demon and monster, Russell Ganymede destroyed the Ghasts.

    Having destroyed the lich they investigated its treasure. First they had to defuse the altar, which had protective magic cast on it. This magic hurled Brian back from the altar and almost killed him, but David Cantrus healed him and dispelled the trap on the altar. They then examined the books and items on the altar and its nearby lecterns. The book with the dragon’s name in was written in Dragonspeech, which Anna could read; resisting the lure of the geas, she read the name and flicked back through the previous pages of the book, which gave something of the history of the destruction of the Church. It would appear that, having discovered the presence of the Dragon on the Island (through its demand for sacrifice) the priest of the Church summoned a powerful Knowledge Demon and sold his soul in exchange for the Dragon’s name. The dragon, discovering that someone knew its name, raided the town with the intention of slaying him before he could learn to use it. Unfortunately, in the first attack the Dragon killed the Priest’s whole family. The Priest, incensed, turned his family’s ashes into a phylactery and prepared to become a lich. In the second battle he confronted the Dragon, driving it away with its name, but was mortally wounded and died. Before he could return as a lich the Dragon ravaged the whole island looking for him, so that when he came back he was bound to the church and surrounded only by the dead of his old village. So the Dragon and the lich were stalemated, until the characters came to kill it.

    Having learnt this, the characters are now ready to travel on to Ireland, to find the killer of the Dragon whose bone they carried; and whose bone Anna Labrousse turned into a corset when they stopped at Iceland en route to Ireland…

  • Current Viewing: Unintended Sculptures, Henrik Saxgren

    Things one just leaves lying about...
    Things one just leaves lying about…

    I visited Denmark for a week last week, and amongst other places I visited was the National Museum of Photography, which was hosting an exhibition entitled Unintended Sculptures by the Danish photographer Henrik Saxgren. I was drawn to it by this picture on the poster, which is from Iceland. The exhibition is essentially a series of very large pictures of artificial objects left in natural environments, and is meant to provide a contrast of the two. Most of the pictures didn’t do this very well but the ones from Iceland were very stark and impressive. I like the idea of this type of art, found items or whatever it is called – but in this case the exhibition ultimately seemed like a bunch of fancily rebadged holiday snaps. And anyway, everything I have seen of Iceland suggests that anyone who goes there with a half-decent camera could open an exhibition of their holiday snaps and people would pay to see them.

    So overall the exhibition was a bit disappointing – some shots of walls, a few weird cactusses and some big plastic stuff in a forest, and 4 amazing snapshots from Iceland. Go and see it if you’re in Copenhagen, it’s better than the Design Centre, but probably if you have to choose you’re better off going to the botanic gardens (where I saw a red squirrel!)

    Also, Denmark is awesome and Danes are like vikings in suits! And they love Australians!

  • Compromise and Conceit 16: Conversations with a dragon

    We find our heroes sailing into view of the small town of Good Hope, Greenland, where they aim to settle their ship and head inland to find a dragon – or, more likely, to be found by it. However, as they approached, still some distance from the port, they found themselves under attack by a team of 6 horrid, slug-like creatures, with the lower parts of a fish and the upper parts of a malformed seal-shaped human – mermaids! These scourges of the sea attack with their horrible screaming voices, causing their victims first to cower in terror and then to leap overboard into the sea, where they can be torn apart at leisure by the shark-like mouths of these vicious predators. Fortunately, some of our heroes are made of sterner stuff than mere sailors, and were able to resist the initial terror-scream. While some of the group fired infernal weaponry at the swimming beasts, others attempted to cast anti-magic spells on those of their fellows who had fallen prey to the horrid voice of the deep. Anna Labrousse, healed of this magical terror, set about ripping the mermaid’s limbs off, while Brian the Hunter entangled one of them in wreaths of seaweed, and Merton and Russell Ganymede fired their infernal weapons into the sea. However, before they could pick off their foes, Merton was enticed overboard by a mermaid’s screams, and had to be rescued from its magic thrall at the last moment by David Cantrus’s invocation of the Good Lord. Once more rescued from a watery grave, Merton set about firing into the pack of mermaids with a vengeance. Once four of their kin had been dismembered or shot to death, the remaining pair set sail and fled. The characters dragged one on board to investigate in greater detail and then, covering it with tarpaulin, sailed into Good Hope.

    At Good Hope they were greeted by a man called Erik, tall and powerful-seeming, who carried a sword, wore leather armour and was draped in a cloak made of mermaid skin. He was accompanied by two extremely short and grim looking bearded men, whom the characters took to be Dwarves when they discvered that Erik was a Danish mermaid-hunter. He was initially friendly when he met them, though he seemed dubious of their intention to “explore the island”. He took them back to the longhall of Good Hope, where they met more men like him – dour, grim chaps who drank and ate a lot and spared nasty glances for Anna Labrousse. There were also more Dwarves scattered about, also looking dour and grim. Over an evening of drinking and merriment the characters learnt that Erik and his colleagues were an official mission from Denmark, intended to reclaim Greenland for the Danish people after 200 years of extinction. They hunt mermaids and trade in their magical parts and skin – though some of the men at the table hinted that they find a use for the mermaids before, as well as after, their deaths. The men seemed an unpleasant and offensive bunch, and the characters were suspicious enough of them to ensure Anna Labrousse always had an escort during the evening.

    Late at night the characters saw Erik deep in conversation with a sinister looking, very short rakish chap, a man shorter and skinnier than a Dwarf. They had sequestered themselves in the kitchen and were behaving suspiciously. Merton, creeping in to listen, established that perhaps the small man was going to be heading inland immediately for some suspicious purpose. Fearing the worst, the characters took their leave of the longhall and set out inland to capture the gnome. Brian the Hunter sent his dog Matilda ahead, and in the morning they found their target caught against a massive stone in the hills out of town, Matilda sitting on his chest, his leg broken. He revealed himself to be a gnome scout called Gdernak. His mission – to go to a remote spot on the glacier some days’ march north, and warn the dragon of the glaciers that the characters were coming to kill it. No-one in town believed that they were here for any other mission, and Gdernak revealed that they had a long-standing agreement with the dragon – once a year they brought it a live mermaid to kill, and they warned it of any adventurers who had come to kill it. The characters learnt the location of the sacrificial stone on which the mermaids would be laid out, and to which Gdernak had been travelling, and then took him with them to the shore North of Good Hope, where they met their ship. From the ship they took some Bison as a sacrifice to the dragon, as well as the body of the mermaid, and headed North to the sacrifice point. Gdernak was kept out of harms way on the ship for 6 days, the time it would have taken him to visit the dragon and return.

    At the sacrifice point the characters found a long slab of stone, crusted with ice and old frozen blood, and a single stone pillar with a silver bell on it. They dumped the mermaid on the stone, and retreated out of sight. Anna Labrousse rang the bell and retreated out of sight, to prepare the ritual of the eagle-hunting herb. Using the best telescope from the ship, they waited until they could see the dragon, far away in the grey arctic sky; Russell thrust the dragon bone into Anna’s hand, and her mind expanded outward, flicking across the vast open air between her and the Dragon to place her mind inside its ancient and alien consciousness.

    The dragon noticed her presence immediately, and engaged in conversation with her. She revealed the reason for her presence, and the nature of the bargain they wanted to strike with it; the dragon agreed, in exchange for the right to occupy her mind briefly as she had done to it. She agreed, and moments later found herself back in her own mind, with the dragon’s great and frightening intellect staring through her eyes. After a moment it retreated, and she was herself again – cast out from the brooding, evil presence which just a moment ago had been all around her. Though they had heard and felt nothing, the other characters knew that something must have happened – Anna Labrousse’s skin had turned so pale it was almost transparent, and her eyes had turned silver, the whites bleached perfect white like marble. Anna Labrousse was dragon-touched.

    The dragon swept in then, and it was mighty. Its body the length of two viking longships, its wings wider still, it was shaped like a dagger or a shard of ice, white in colour on its belly but silver-blue on its back and sides, with scales of such hardness and texture that it appeared to be made of ice and crystal. As it swept in it unleashed a cloud of frozen air from its huge and glistening maw, freezing the mermaid carcass instantly before executing a tight turn, swooping in and landing in a great, cat-like pounce on the body. The body, frozen solid, shattered into massive chunks as soon as the dragon landed, and the dragon commenced gulping them up, crouched over the stone like a cat at its prey. Even from their distance and hidden location, the characters could hear its breathing and the gentle sussurration of its wingtips against the ice of the glacier and the rock wall behind the sacrifice point – and they could see one great, watery blue lizardlike eye focussed on their hiding place.

    They emerged from this spot and approached the dragon to speak with it. Soon the conversation turned to what they must do in exchange for the information they sought. The dragon agreed to tell them from which of its kin the infernal assassin had been made, if they would do a simple thing for it – venture into the ruined church at Hvalsney, the old capital of Greenland, kill the lich that dwelt there, and destroy all the books that it owned as soon as they could. They agreed to do this, and the dragon cast upon them a powerful geas, which would force them all to do its bidding. Satisfied that they were bound to it, the Dragon then told them the information they sought. The dragon bone they had brought with them was the remains of the dragon called commonly Cinderstone, once resident in the mountain of Corrán Tuathail in Western Ireland, near the lake and town of Killarney. Were the characters to visit the town of Killarney they would, perhaps, be able to discover the identity of Cinderstone’s killer.

    The conversation finished, the Dragon leapt into the air and soared away, to what sinister cave the characters did not know. But here before them lay a chance – the Lich’s lair contained a book with the Dragon’s true name written in it. Should they be able to fight their geas for long enough to learn that name, they could perhaps return and slay this dragon themselves. Then its treasure – the treasure of all the adventurers who had come before them to slay it, as well as all the treasure of Greenland of old – would be theirs. Could they breach the geas for long enough to steal the name from that book which they must then destroy – and what other knowledge did the book contain, that they must destroy? The Dragon’s geas was sloppily done – could they copy the contents of the book before they destroyed it?

    What, indeed, are the limits of a Dragon’s magical power, and what are the limits of a promise made to a Dragon?

  • Compromise and Conceit 15: New York, New York

    Having slain an Infernal Remade Chimaeric Assassin, the characters visited a cheap infernalist and his houri in Albany, where they discovered that:

    • they would need to find an infernalist in New York to identify the source of the brass components of the beast
    • The white substance in its arms and ribs was dragon bone
    • every dragon knows every other dragon and can identify every dragon’s bone
    • There is a dragon in Greenland

    Anna Labrousse pointed out that, using Miss Cora Munro’s eagle hunting herb and their dragonbone, the characters could invade the mind of a dragon and perhaps control or calm it.

    With this lunatic plan in mind, they set off for Greenland.

    Deciding on the way to pursue further sources of information on their recently deceased Infernal Remade Chimaeric assassin, the characters travelled by ship to the sea near New York, and from there were dispatched in a longboat to New York. Unfortunately they were spied at the harbour mouth by two remade British wizards and their Grindylow attack beast, and a brief battle ensued. The wizards, fully submerged, initially proved a difficult target, but after some cunning conjuring of monsters, and once Father David Cantrus had shown one of them the promise of hellfire to come, they were subdued. Also, Russell Ganymede was under the boat in his Cancer Labora armour, and tore the Grindylow apart with a single flick of his enchitinised arm. The Grindylow, a 5m long crocodilian monstrosity with semi-humanoid head and massively-muscled arms, sank to the sea floor in several pieces.

    From there the characters alighted at New York and went seeking a suitable infernalist. This nameless chap had moved from his dockside warehouse to a smaller, cosier haunt below a bar on Manhattan Island. The characters found him there and spoke with him at length, learning only that the Fleur-de-lys with the characters SPM was not from France, but from Sheffield Precision Machinery in Sheffield, a company which produces clockwork and brass items for infernal industry.

    Their assassin was English. But why? Perhaps the best way to find out would be to find the organisation which made it – and their second best clue was a suicidal conversation with a dragon in Greenland. So, off to Greenland they went, in their appropriately named ship, Inappropriate Response.

  • Truth seeking in the colonies

    The characters find themselves wondering at the many puzzles which present themselves, in light of both the recent attempt on their lives, and the unfinished matters from the last year of warfare and slaughter. There are some questions they need to have answered, and some things they might want to do…

    1. What is this Remade Infernal Assassin? Who sent it?
    2. Who was the Satanic figure they killed on the deck of the boat in Albany? What was he doing?
    3. What were the Irish doing with the Satanic figure from Newfoundland?
    4. What is really happening with Infernal Magic, and do the Indians have an insight not available in the Old World?
    5. Why were the Northwest Frontier Company, nominally British, helping Washington, and in such a nasty way? Money and power, or something more sinister?

    To investigate these things, the characters can:

    1. Find an expert in Infernal Remaking, either in Montreal or in New York. The former will involve avoiding the attention of the French; the latter will require infiltrating the British forces in New York, where the characters are not popular
    2. For this the characters can visit Newfoundland, and try to find clues to the man’s real identity and purpose
    3. Though the characters may find answers to this in Newfoundland, they may need to go to Ireland or track down the remnants of the Irish forces in Montreal or New York
    4. The characters might be able to learn something from a spirit walk… or from a physical journey into the Black Hills, which hold powerful spirits that could help (or hinder!) the characters
    5. This would involve a trip to NW Frontier company headquarters in New York, and possibly elsewhere.

    Note that some of these things can be done together, especially the tasks in Montreal or New York.

    No doubt other distractions will arise in the course of the characters’ adventures. But if they select one of these paths, perhaps it will lead them somewhere useful…

  • Compromise and Conceit 14: Into the New World

    We rejoin our heroes in the town of Albany, where they found themselves coming to terms with the new landscape of the colonial world. They were now welcome in Albany as heroes, and trusted advisors to its new Council of Elders. Their house remained their possession, and now also they had possession of their own kingdom bordering on the French and Indian territories, which they now needed to find a way to administer. The war had reached a stalemate to their South and for the time being, as Spring passed into the sultry heat of Summer, the three conflicting peoples of the new world paused to consider their next steps, to bury their dead and to honour or shame those who had brought the world to its current pass.

    And so it was that the characters found themselves facing a ferocious delegation, consisting of 2 farmers and a fisherman from the town of Rouse’s Point, the furthest point from Albany in their new kingdom. These men, shuffling nervously before the great men and women before them, had travelled far from their home to present the  characters with a document swearing their fealty in poorly-spelt English, and also to present them with a list of requests. These worthies wished to discuss matters of taxation, defense and native land rights, which weighty matters were soon dealt with by Lord Merton, using his usual even-handedness. Their first subjects departed, satisfied…

    After this the characters took the opportunity to meet Miss Cora Munro, her silent and distant younger Sister Alice, and of course Alice’s husband Magua. Alice spoke little and seemed little interested in anything except her husband. She presented in the manner of an English lady, in skirt and bustles with a parasol, but the faraway look in her eye, the braided hair, and the tattood lines on her arms and chest made it clear that she was no longer in accord with the formalities of British society. Magua attended her dressed in his inimical style, imitating an English gentleman. He wore torn breeches, a red English soldier’s jacket looted from an unfortunate casualty (and still stained with that poor soul’s lifesblood), his tomahawk festooned with the torn remnants of a British flag, and his chest bared to show tattoos, rippling muscle and a wide variety of scars. He had indeed made every effort to oblige the fashion and customs of the colonial gentry…

    What better place to hunt Eagles?
    What better place to hunt Eagles?

    The Munros, Magua and the characters took a picnic at dusk on the hill overlooking Albany. They had hoped to see fireflies, since it was the season; but the smoke and poison of war had driven the fragile insects away, and the only such lights they could see were the distant fires and explosions of the siege of New York. At this picnic Miss Munro presented the characters with a detailed contract outlining her claim to prospect the hills of their new kingdom for rare herbs, and they agreed to consider her request if she would consider acting as their regent. She, of course, agreed to this and as a token of her good faith invited the  characters into the hills North of Ticonderoga, there to indulge in a spot of Eagle Hunting. Somewhat dubious as to the nature of this activity, the characters agreed. So it was that they found themselves, several days later, sitting on a remote bluff deep in the hills of their new kingdom. Before them to the Northwest lay a splendid view of hills and plains, falling away to the distant glint of the St. Lawrence River. They sat, with four of Magua’s braves, around a fire over which Cora had boiled some water. As the braves began drumming, Magua threw a herb on the fire and  a strange smoke began to envelope the clifftop, where as if by magic the wind had  stopped blowing. Cora poured herbs into the water and stirred, and an acrid and disgusting smell covered them. Then Cora asked which of them would proceed with the hunt first, and Merton, ever willing to sample a new drug, of course raised his hand first. Cora offered him a small shot of the boiled water and then, as Merton drank it down, Magua leapt forward in one of his customary unexpected changes of mood. Towering ominously over Merton, he drew from his beltan Eagle’s feather and cast it into Merton’s hand. Merton, suddenly struck numb by the liquid, fell backwards clutching the arrow; and as he did so he heard and saw an Eagle, circling far overhead. In moments his senses had exploded outward and, in a rush of wind, sun and sky he found himself in possession of the Eagle, looking through its eyes, feeling the wind in its feathers, even sensing its feelings. He circled high in the sky for a long, silent, wind-stroked time before his host’s questing eyes found the rabbit they sought; and then, still fully aware of all around him, he was siezed by the Eagle’s lust for blood as it plummeted earthwards to its quarry…

    … only to be hauled from his reverie by Magua, who snatched the feather from his hand and thus dragged him, groggy and confused, back to the leaden grip of Earth. It would be unwise, Magua warned him, to be in the Eagle when it catches its prey. There is always the ominous threat of not returning, or of being changed.

    In turn each of the characters was offered their flight, in an Eagle, a Falcon, or finally a swift. So they experienced their kingdom from the air, and looking down saw its beauty, or felt its ferocity. As Magua and his braves cleaned their camp, Cora told them that the herb used for this effect was grown in their kingdom and could no doubt be used on other beasts provided a part of the beast was available to them. She had merely to find it – and who knew what other uses it might have?

    So convinced of her claim’s usefulness, the characters returned to Albany. However, when they reached their house they discovered their Butler missing, and the house silent and dark. Immediately suspicious, they went looking for him, prepared for battle. Outside the butler’s chambers they were attacked by a mysterious assassin-creature, a wiry beast of some 8′ in height, demon-possessed, with remade arms composed of demon-flesh, brass and bone. From one arm snaked a chain of brass links and wicked bone-and-brass spiked balls, and from the other protruded a sinister set of blades. The beast could turn invisible and struck with stealth, attempting to dismember Brian the woodsman. Eventually they subdued it, and searched it for signs of its provenance. It was clearly a sophisticated mixture of infernal and Remade technology, its chain powered by clockwork and its body enhanced with a strange white, bone-like substance mixed with bronze. There was no other clue to its origins but for a symbol on one of the brass strakes of its weapon arm, consisting of a Fleur-de-lys with the letters SPM engraved underneath.

    Once again, do the characters find themselves embroiled with the French?

  • Current reading: Blood of Elves

    Blood of Elves is the “sequel” to The Last Wish, which is the first book in the series which spawned that most excellent computer game, The Witcher. It’s by a Polish writer called Andrzej Sapkowksi.

    Unfortunately – and I knew this before I bought it because a Polish girl warned me but I forgot the warning – Gollancz sci-fi have done the dirty and released the English translation of the third book in the series without releasing the second. The inner sheet on the book even acts like Sapkowski has only written the two books, but he hasn’t, he’s written at least 3. I got several chapters in before I started thinking “there’s an awful lot of assumed knowledge here” but because the first book had a lot of unstated or implied information (see below!), for some time I assumed the “second” book was doing the same. Sadly, it wasn’t, and now I know everything that happened in the second book even though I don’t read Polish. This is a Bugger. However, the book is excellent so I shan’t stop.

    The Last Wish is essentially a set of fractured fairy tales, fairy tales with a twist or revision to the original story. The central character is a Witcher who runs around the world protecting people from Monsters, which in many cases are the Monsters from the Fairy tale; but sometimes the humans involved are the real monsters. Often the Witcher drops into the fairy tale after the original story is over. But the book really doesn’t bash you over the head with its fairy tale element, so for most of it you just feel you’re reading a set of vaguely related short stories about a washed up Polish rock god with mutant genes[1]. I liked the character, I liked the world and I liked the stories, and I liked the subtle element of fairy tale revisionism built into them[2].

    Blood of Elves is a much less literary effort, using a standard fantasy trilogy-style narrative structure, less special fairy tale references, and occasional shrek-style references to modern ideas. Geralt (the Witcher) is on a quest, it’s simple, it goes from beginning to end (so far). It’s also got more of that desperate sense of struggling against the darkness. However, it still has the key elements of the original – some very dry cynical wit[3], Geralt is the same, the sense of a world on the cusp of modernity but surrounded by magic and evil powers. It’s very fun to read, alternating between dry humour, satire, dark emotional depth and good old-fashioned fightin’ and lovin’. It also has a much better depiction of inter-racial conflict (between elves, dwarves, humans, etc) than many other fantasy stories, and the central conflict in the book seems to involve issues of racial harmony very strongly[4]. I do wonder if this part of the book reflects Polish cultural debate about Europe, though I don’t know enough about what’s going on in Poland and their attitudes towards Europe, history or modern race relations to be able to make a judgement.

    This is part of what I enjoy about the Witcher, actually – there are hints of cultural references I don’t quite get that make the whole thing a tad more mysterious than it might otherwise be. But mostly I like it because it’s funny, dark and well written. I should probably advise waiting for the books to come out in the proper order but, hey! We all enjoyed the Firefly series despite this sort of philistinism on the part of its producers, so hey – go and read it! Screw the linear time thing! If you had to sit through distorted narrative structure in the whole of the first book, why stop now!?

    —

    [fn1] That’s just what he looks like – you’ve all played the game, you know what I mean!

    [fn2]: My partner, who is really into fractured fairy tales and studied them at University, was not so impressed; she is a much better judge of literature than me and a much harsher critic. So maybe my opinion is best taken with a grain of salt. But you knew that.

    [fn3]: of course when I lived in Australia I knew nothing about Poles; but since I came to London I’ve met and worked with many, and they do seem to have a wickedly dry and cynical humour in general, more fatalistic and biting than the British without some of the worst of the ascerbic rudeness that comes with British sarcasm.

    [fn4]: I’m not entirely sure what the outcome of this discussion of racial harmony will be. I think it might be something like “we’re all fucked anyway, so can’t you just get over it?” but I’m reserving judgement.

  • In place of Japanese Reading, Randomised Block Experiments

    I use a Japanese social networking site called Mixi, that is a kind of blogging/photo uploading/community/facebook style site all rolled into one, minus (mostly) the spam weirdness of facebook, with a lot more privacy settings and slightly more obtrusive advertising. Recently I have been roped into playing a farming game with my friends, called Sunshine Ranch:

    See the turtle god smile on my harvest...
    See the turtle god smile on my harvest…

    The principle is that of all civ-type games. I grow plants, I sell them, I make money and buy seeds and upgrades. You can see in my dock down the bottom[1] that I have various tools. Sometimes I have drought, sometimes insects infect my crops. I start with 6 plots and as I get rich I can buy more, and when I get to level 10 I can go to the animal yard and start growing chickens (which are very cute; I’m looking forward to the cute way they die horribly when I “harvest” them). This game has competitive and cooperative options though – on the right hand side of the screen you can see a list of those friends of mine who have replied to my request to waste their time harvesting stuff. I can go to their farm and put insects in their crops, and scrump their apples. I can also water their crops or kill insects. I get experience for this (and I can sell the apple-y loot).

    The thing is, it’s all in Japanese (this is why I use Mixi!). I can read most  of what’s on the screen and the tooltips, but there are some things I can’t read properly – particularly the explanations of what the various  purchasable items do. So I have this suspicion that putting fertiliser on your plants increases the amount they yield as well as the speed at which they yield; but the tooltip doesn’t say this and I can’t read the more detailed information (well, i could, copy and paste and the joyous rikaichan being very useful; but I can’t be bothered). So instead of reading about it, I am doing a kind of randomised block experiment where I choose one of the blocks of similar plants (in the picture above, it’s apples) and apply fertiliser, while the other one remains natural. I then compare yields at the end of the period. Normal fertiliser costs 30 coin and gives a 1 hour increase in speed, and I can apply it once at each stage of growth  (there are usually 4 stages). But an apple tree (for example) takes about 15 hours total to grow and yields about 100 coin; so unless I gain a significant amount of yield benefit from the fertiliser beyond the time frame, it’s not worth spending the money. Hence the experiment. The problem is, yield may depend on my level and also on how many insects my friends blight me with; so I should really be keeping detailed data on covariates.

    If I were going to do that though I would just as well translate the help, eh?

    Anyway it’s fun, and I’m currently a better rancher than my friends. I even have a 7th plot! Just wait till I have a horde of chickens to slaughter!! I’m sure they’ll be very cute…

    —

    [1]  I didn’t notice at first but it really is exactly like a dock – the tool symbols increase in size when you roll over them.

  • All foxes are grey

    Yatta! We did it!!! Even though the pop-up porn virus Echo put in the world’s computer system didn’t work because the architects of the flesh knew we were coming to their space  station to throw their god into space to join the christian god who is all beardy and looks down on you from very far away and didn’t like his own son very much but maybe they were too busy looking at all the colourful lingerie that the porn girls were wearing and they didn’t have time to arrange a proper party for us because all they had to throw at  us were 50 space zombies and a spinning dragon called Desdemona who’s really a woman. They really really must hate clothes in the future because the space zombies weren’t even wearing space suits they just fired them out of the space station straight at us in just their underwear but I suppose if you’re dead you don’t care what you’re wearing or maybe once you die in the future you get some sense and you refuse to wear their  stupid grey clothes I wish I did! Actually after Grandma Noodles’s Apprentice fired me out of the airlock with all the other rubbish I thought about that a bit and I used my magic to change my body so I didn’t have to breathe anymore and then I didn’t have to wear that stupid grey suit. I suppose I got the idea from Grandma Noodles because I had to help her change her suit so it could fit all those bottles of special potion that smells like bad sake. She fights really well after she drinks that potion but it smells pretty bad especially since she’s such a good noodle cook (her noodles are sooooooooo oishii yo!!) but I’ve never actually seen her make the potion so  maybe she buys it somewhere anyway when we take over allllllll the Feng Shui sites in the world maybe she can make a better potion.

    [gasp!]

    anyway so they fired 50 space zombies and a dragon at us, so Grandma Noodles’s Apprentice fired me out of the airlock with all the rubbish, and then he found out that the spaceship has this big claw on it which must be what he was going to use to bring me back inside when he realised he’d fired me out of the airlock but instead he started hitting the zombies with it which is a really good idea because in space even a little bump makes you fly off forever into the sun unless you’re like me and you can fly wherever you want and wear any miniskirt you want even a grey one but I’m never gonna wear grey again never ever! So I thought making the  zombies fly into the sun is a good idea so I threw rubbish at them with my magic and it hit lots of them and Grandma Noodles and Kitsune and Echo and Uncle Ed who turns up sometimes when I think really hard went out onto the spaceship and started killing space zombies who move like really slowly but then the big dragon stopped spinning round and round and landed on the nose of the spaceship so everyone had to fight her but she kept blowing up and even though I was a long way away and hiding behind rubbish I nearly died which is weird because my science teacher told me that there’s no fire in space so it must have been magical fire who knew that a dragon has magic fire? I thought they just flew around and had a pearl in their brain and said clever things but then I didn’t know they moved by spinning around either so I suppose you learn something new about people every day before you kill them.

    [gasp]

    so after Kitsune turned the whole spaceship into an electric exploding death rocket and Grandma Noodles’s Apprentice crashed the spaceship into the space station through the dragon and Kitsune had somersaulted off its exploding spleen we all went to the door to the space station which the Architects of the Flesh had to keep locked because there’s no air in  space so I disintegrated the door and then Echo opened the inner door because she’s really clever but I came in late because I had been burnt really bad like the yakitori Grandma Noodles makes only yakiyuki so I had to spend  a bit of time healing myself. We all got inside the door and looked around and there was a room with these scientists in and there was a hole in the roof but no air was escaping because  it actually went to the netherworld which has air in it even though demons don’t need to breathe which must mean they like yelling a lot which is what the dragon did when Grandma Noodles’s Apprentice flew the  rocket ship through her stomach only we couldn’t hear what she was saying because there was no air and if there was we probably would only have heard lightning and explosions anyway

    [gasp]

    but the Little God that’s tougher than our God was there in Fox form with one tail sticking into the netherworld and the other 8 tails swishing about like my Cat did when it was watching a mouse and the God was looking at us but it was kind of see-through like a jellyfish so I don’t think it had manifested properly which is kind of an oops but then when we looked down under the floor we saw that the shrine box that Gods come in was bound in a kind of magic circle that must be stopping the Little God from getting out  which is weird because that’s what the Architects wanted to do with the God but we didn’t think about that too much yet because we don’t think we just Do because that’s what Bruce Lee said works and it’s worked so far hasn’t it? But Echo thinks and she said she thought Omega was somewhere in the room and she would know because she’s just like him only younger so I cast a spell through my phone and I could see omega was right in front of us and I sent everyone the picture and then Echo did a thing with her big sword and one of his scary guns broke and all his scary agony grenades that hurt us last time fell on the floor like that time I was trying to leave the convenience store with the chu hais and my high school skirt unrolled by accident and they all fell on the floor and I’d forgotten to pay and the guy behind the counter got really angry and it took me like 10 minutes to calm him down which is really long for me and then the other customers were really angry because they were locked out and there was a special offer on UFO Noodles. Only Omega didn’t get to pick up his agony grenades and go home and lie down like I did because then everyone started kicking and punching him and his other gun exploded and melted his face and then Grandma Noodles touched him on the elbow like Bruce Lee does and then while he was standing still looking at the ceiling Kitsune said something to him that none of us could hear and then he died horribly and I said “otsukaresamadeshita” and everyone else clapped and Grandma Noodles had a drink

    [gasp]

    which makes me think that if the Buro’s super soldier is that easy to kill then maybe the God is too but the scientists didn’t want to let the God out for us to kill but then I disintegrated the glass barrier between us and them and all the bits of Omega that Kitsune left on the glass went spattering into the room and I think that scared them so they let the God go but that was a really stupid thing to do because we were just going  to talk to them and maybe also throw them out of the airlock to die unless Kitsune got to them first but the God stole their souls and turned them into wraiths and then the God changed from its Foxy Form to its Wraith Form and I didn’t know shrine Gods had a wraith form maybe that was something Mummy was going to tell me if the Copycat Ninjas hadn’t killed her

    [gasp]

    so anyway I was thinking that maybe I should go out of the airlock too but my scooter blew up with the rocketship and its a long way to fly to earth without a scooter and anyway I’d be trapped in the future with the grey clothes and a mad Fox Wraith chasing me after it ate my friends’ souls so I figured I’d better stay and die well so I stayed. We had this magician with us and he turned out to be from 9AD and because in 9AD they don’t have the internet or philosophy or anything their magic is really really evil so he offered us snakes we could use to become evil too and only the good die young so everyone said YEAH we’ll have snakes and be powerful and evil and live forever and me and Kitsune said no we’ll be good and weak and die young because we don’t think we just Do like Bruce Lee who must be good because he  died really young. And the WraithFoxGod made its dead scientist wraiths attack us and plugged itself into the  computer because all the chi beaming up from earth was going to go into it and it was going to keep getting bigger and tougher until it was bigger and tougher than anyone so Echo plugged the Big God that’s weaker than the WraithFoxGod into the computer too and then Echo started trying to channel the chi from Earth into our God instead of the bad God but they were fighting in like the spirit world or something which is a really boring place but at least they weren’t doing it where we were. So we fought the 9 Scientist Wraiths which steal chi but then I remembered that I’m like a priest so I started banishing them and Grandma Noodles hit a few and Kitsune killed a few and then they were all gone.

    [gasp]

    and because Echo was doing really cool computer things our God was beating the WraithFoxGod and so then we all attacked the WraithFoxGod and it died really fast and disappeared and we were all really happy until we realised we were stuck on a space station without a rocketship and the only way out was through the netherworld portal but that goes to the army of the Architects of the Flesh and the way the world works we could probably kill all of them but if they had more spinny-explodey dragon-women then we could all die and that’s what you get for being like Bruce Lee and not thinking before you Do I suppose but he died from taking aspirin not from being eaten alive by a giant spinning exploding dragon (but I haven’t seen the movie so I don’t know for sure) anyway then the bad wizard with the evil magic from 9AD made a hole in the floor and said “frying pan or fire”? which I think must be some kind of 9AD invocation of great power, because when we jumped down the hole and he said “oh fiiiiiiiire!” we ended up in Hell. Well, we all guessed it was hell from the fires and the moaning sounds and the colour of the sky and the smell but sometimes Kitsune takes a long time to understand what’s happening like how she didn’t realise it was a copycat Ninja that killed her mother but kept thinking it was Omega but there was this man who was looking over his shoulder at us and he was crying like he’d cut an onion and he told Kitsune we were in Hell

    [gasp]

    so now we’re in hell but at least we killed a God. Yatta!

  • So many bullets, so little time…

    The Guardian has a Friday article about which computer game its readers would most like to see deleted from History.

    Amusing points from this article:

    1. a surprising number of people hate Halo
    2. Guardian readers say really nasty things about people they don’t like
    3. WoW is seen by some commenters as a nasty influence on computer games generally.

    I particularly like this quote:

    If WOW was removed from history I’d have about 2400 hours of life back, which I could use to learn to paint, play piano to a high standard, travel the world, write a novel etc. But I’d probably spend it playing Eve Online or something.

    It shows how much time people burn on these games… still I’m sure it’s better than spending that time in front of a TV.

    Also I like the commenter who thinks the Final Fantasy series should be deleted, just in order to prevent Sephiroth Cos-players. I don’t have a theory on deleting games, but I would certainly say not to delete Freedom Force, Baldur’s Gate 2, or Halo. I definitely disagree about Halo, sure it was just a FPS but it made up in atmosphere and beauty for what it lacked in depth.