Minireview: Service, Service! (Paranoia)
Service, Service! provides extra material for GMs who wish to use Service Groups more in their game. Admittedly, this is more useful in a “straight” style game, in the more classic game mode service groups will probably be left mostly as background sources of (mis)info and (dangerous) submissions (like secret societies).
The book is logically split into chapters per service group. Each one contains some general info (including stereotyped opinions of the other service groups), some NPCs, some service services and lastly a short mission related to the service group. The missions range from ok-ish to great – one involving lightbulbs is especially inspired, and has vast potential for mayhem and total confusion. Some of the missions are very specific and only useful in some circumstances, while some are quite general and can be plugged in most anywhere. Should be something for everyone in here.
The book introduces a minor new rule addition in the form of Mandates. A Mandate is a personal service service, and it doled out by a service group. Each mandate has a spiffy title and an extra mandatory duty… which, for once in Paranoia, can actually be useful to the PC. To balance this gasp-inducing fact, the GM has total freedom (of course) to revoke Mandates on whim. If a PC starts to get too much mileage out of a Mandate: whoops, it’s gone, replaced by a much nastier one. It’s a fun little rules tweak; not something absolutely necessary in any sense, but potentially very amusing.
As unfortunately is quite typical for a Mongoose book, the layout here is a bit spotty in places. The font scaling is a bit weird here and there, and some of the illustrations were actually left out of this one by accident (replaced by textual art notes!). This was an actual mishap, as confirmed by the Mongoose guys: the final layout (with pics) had been sent out to (some guy) for final approval, but somehow what got sent to the printers was the previous version (without pics). Oh well, it happens (though Mongoose tends to be more problematic than the norm), and the art design notes are actually quite interesting so it’s not a total loss.
In summary: a full pack of info and mini-missions for, most useful for “Straight” games where the bureaucracy of Alpha Complex gets more screen time. Well written, and some of the mini-adventures rock. In addition, the new Mandate concept can add extra flavor to some games. On the flipside, some layout issues detract from the whole.
New Pornographers coming to Finland, yay!
We have arrived
too late to play
the bleeding heart show
This is shaping up to be an excellent summer for music. I already have tickets to see Rufus Wainwright, Joanna Newsom, Imogen Heap and Roxy Music, and today I heard that Martha Wainwright is also coming to Helsinki in August. Yay! Best of all, today I also heard that The New Pornographers, one of my current favorites, are coming to Finland for the first time in September. Tickets go on sale on Thursday. I’m so there.
It’s funny; just a week or so ago I was listening to advance tracks from their new album and wondering if I’ll ever get a chance to see these guys live. And now I (probably) will. If I’m really lucky Neko Case will be along for this tour, but no info about that yet. In any case… yay!
Snow! Jacuzzi! More snow!
We’re escaping the traditional Vappu celebrations and heading north. Tomorrow evening I hope to be soaking in a spa, then with any luck I’ll be snowboarding at Ruka on Friday & Saturday. Haven’t done any snowboarding at all this year… but hey, this is a good time to start.
All this assuming there’s no new surprise volcanic eruptions, airline strikes or whatever.
Minireview: The Dreaming Void, by Peter Hamilton
I’ll admit I like Peter Hamilton’s books. Though he has his faults as a writer, his book tend to be great entertainment, with some nice ideas thrown into the mix now and then.
The Dreaming Void is the first book of a new trilogy, loosely connected to the “Commonwealth Saga” (Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained). Like most of his books it’s a huge brick (over 800 pages in the edition I have), and admittedly it could have been trimmed down a small bit without hurting things. On the other hand, it’s an engaging read; I stayed up quite a few late nights finishing this. So can’t complain.
This is set about 1,200 years after the previous books, and despite that manages to feature a few of the same characters – people are essentially immortal now, if they want to be. Humanity has split into factions following the Starflyer War, not only on the ideological front but also on the evolutionary. Some have uploaded themselves into a post-human state, some are pursuing post-humanity by enhancing the human body as far as it can go, and some are more traditional. Despite everything, life is generally peaceful.
This peace is threatened by the Living Dream movement, who commune (or claim to commune) with a vast… something at the center of the galaxy. Something that reaches certain people via dreams, which are shared onwards by “gaiafield” technology. The Living Dream decides to stage a mass pilgrimage to the Void (as that “something” is called), and the other races in the galaxy demand this be stopped, since it is feared this will cause the Void to expand, destroying countless solar systems in the process. To add to the mess, the old “First Dreamer” of the movement has vanished, and lots of people are looking for him. Now a Second Dreamer has appeared, and nobody knows who that is… and just about all the covert factions in existence are mobilizing to find either Dreamer (for various reasons).
It’s a complex plot sequence, and only slowly becomes coherent. The structure here is familiar from many of Hamilton’s other books: a large cast of characters is introduced, and only very slowly do you get any idea of how they interlock. Adding to the initial confusion is the fact that one of the main story tracks is a fantasy one, detailing a boy named Edeard in a strange low-technology world where everyone has some degrees of psionic ability and gene-crafted animals are commonplace. Forced to flee to the big city of Makkatheren, Edeard becomes a low-rank constable and slowly starts up a war against the ruling criminal gangs. It’s a great story (easily the best storyline in the book), but for a while it’s a bit unclear how exactly it relates to the high-tech space opera surrounding it. Thing do clear up, though, at least to some extent – though the truth behind who or what Edeard is will have to wait until the other books.
The book is a fun mix of far-future transhumanist space opera and several varieties of fantasy. It takes a while to get moving, but Edeard’s story alone is worth the price of admission. The other story lines deal with the identity of the Second Dreamer, and with various factions’ secret agents running around on covert missions. While most of the book goes into setup for the action to follow, it’s (mostly) interesting setup. Some storylines and themes seem to get dropped here after the beginning, but they may resurface later – this is going to be a series of three brick-size books, after all.
Targets of Opportunity is here (sort of)
The long-ago ransomed Delta Green book Targets of Opportunity is finally here. Well, as PDF anyway. All of us ransom participants got the PDF (link was in my Inbox this morning) and will get the printed hardcover book later when it materializes. The book is also available for normal pre-order now; the first printing will be a limited hardcover run of 1000 copies (most going to ransom participants), with a paperback retail edition to follow some time later.
A quick skim of the PDF gives a very good impression. It’s a bit over 300 pages, with the traditional Delta Green layout and nice, evocative art. Haven’t read it yet (obviously) and might wait until the printed book arrives to do so, but judging by the writers involved with this thing (Greg Stolze, Ken Hite, Dennis Detwiller, etc) I expect the textual contents to be top-notch.
The book contains:
- “Black Cod Island”, an Alaskan / American Indian scenario with related setting info
- “M-EPIC”, a Canadian counterpart to Delta Green
- “Disciples of the Worm”, a sinister group, with scenario
- “The DeMonte Clan”, a menace rooted in post-disaster New Orleans
- “The Cult of Transcendence”, one more sinister cult
- a bunch of appendixes about game rules tweaks and hints on how to run a DG game
The Doctor will see you now
I have to admit, I was a bit worried about Matt Smith as the new Doctor Who. He’s young, and I was afraid the show would go (even more) in the “zany young action-Doctor” direction. Besides, David Tennant left pretty huge shoes to fill.
Well, I recently watched the first episode of the new series, “The Eleventh Hour”, and can happily report that I needn’t have worried. I’m sold. Matt Smith is good, and he brings an “old soul in a young body” dynamic to the thing that I wasn’t at all expecting. He’s almost professorial, at times. In a “mad as a box of cats” way.
The fact that Karen Gillian, the new companion, is absolutely smoking hot doesn’t hurt, either.
“Hello! I’m the Doctor. Basically… run.”
Added: just watched the second episode. Good stuff.
…and a brilliant throwaway line: “A long time ago, tomorrow morning”
Apple getting more and more Big Brotherish
There’s a big fight brewing out there, between Apple, Google, Adobe and many other companies. Apple is slowly edging into the “big player” role and is fighting very dirty. Not that Adobe’s slate is totally clean either, and bad old Microsoft is infamous for stuff like this… but as I’ve said before, Apple in a monopoly position would be much worse than anything Microsoft did even during their worst periods of dominance.
The latest spate of control freakish dickery is a modification to the app developer agreement, in which Apple forbids iPhone/iPad app development with languages (and tools) which aren’t natively Objective-C, C, C++ or Javascript. This targets a lot of stuff, including (critically) all cross-platform tools. In other words, Apple is dictating the programming languages that apps need to be originally written in. Techically, in this day and age, this is fucking insane. Sure, Jobs has some excuses on the subject, but ArsTechnica nicely picks those apart.
Daring Fireball provides an analysis that sounds right on the money. Apple doesn’t want developers developing for any other platforms, and they are doing all they can to hinder any sort of cross-platform apps. The moment the iPhone becomes “just one more phone”, they’ll have problems. Apple wants apps only on their phones, not on competitors’ models. And hey, I can understand that, from a pure business perspective. It’s a ruthless move, but it makes sense.
That doesn’t make it something that anyone sane wants to support. The whole of Apple’s Disneyfied walled garden app ecosystem is something that makes me deeply uneasy. Also, I have zero doubt that Jobs would push the same model on the OS X computer front, if he could just figure out how. Walled gardens and a captive audience? Sure. It’s a license to print money, without all that nasty “competition” stuff.
It’s actually quite analogous to DRM in music. When that came out, the “geeks” and technical people were vehemently opposed. The ordinary “man on the street”? He didn’t care. He thought the geeks were overreacting. He just wanted something easy, “who cares about all that technical and ‘freedom’ stuff”. Then, slowly, he discovered what the geeks had figured out long before: the system was broken, the music was nonportable and often stopped working at some point.
I feel a bit the same way about Apple’s iPhone/iPad ecosystem. It’s not something I want to support, sending money in its direction would feel “dirty” in the same way as paying for DRM’ed music would. Voting with your wallet is, after all, still a valid form of expressing an opinion.
The other side of the coin is the fact that Apple does tend to do beautiful and very polished products. At some point I do want a portable PDF reader, and at that point I hope there is an alternative to the iPad available. Me, I’m hoping to see an Android-based tablet. Rumor has it that Google is working on such, but… well, rumors are just that.
I’m rooting for Google to kick Apple’s ass, somewhat. Jobs is both the best thing that Apple has going for them and the worst. His perfectionist attitude has resulted in Apple climbing out of the 1990s proprietary, ultra-expensive pit that they had sunk into. However, that same perfectionism manifests in a total control freak, “Jobs way or the highway” attitude. With the more and more proprietary and closed direction Apple is heading in, there is a real danger that they will repeat the mistakes of the 1990s all over again.
I’m sure that hordes of Apple apologists will totally disagree, and quote some tired old “well, don’t buy one then!” refrain. That’s fine. Instead of typing additional words, I’ll just link to iPad: The Disneyland of Computers and Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either), both of which are views I mostly agree with.
I’ll have to reiterate: I do like many of Apple’s products, and love the attention to detail in them. I just hate the more and more obnoxious walled garden restrictions that surround the iPhone and iPad. That’s also the reason I’m more and more interested in Android.
(Vaguely like) Scorchio!
The tipping point for “summer”, for me, is the point where I can sit outside on our patio and read in the sunshine, without needing winter wear. That point came last weekend, where it was almost hot there for a while. Granted I was wearing a fleece jacket, and the moment the sun vanished behind clouds the temperature dropped fast. But who cares, it felt like summer, or at least like a proper spring.
The cats approve, too. Despite the still lingering huge piles of snow all over.
Managed to switch to summer tirer on the car, too, though otherwise the car is still in an immobile state. The radiator leaks and (I think) the thermostat is also a goner. That, or the water pump. Hope it’s just the thermostat since that’s a fairly cheap replacement. Anyway, the thing started overheating recently and I just barely got it home. Now have a new radiator as a spare part and garage time scheduled for next week, we’ll see what the mechanic says. Hope it’s nothing too serious, the weather is starting to look like I can finally drive with the top down. Whee!
