BT Engineers managed to screw up the wiring for my ADSL exchange so I wasn’t connected to the right exchange anymore - thankfully the problem was sorted out after I sicced One.tel on them.
For a breath of common sense, check out Jack Straw’s article in the Times today: “Have a little faith in the ‘c’ word”.
I’ve been disconnected for a while so I’m still playing ‘catch-up’ on everything from blogs, gaming news and webcomics (that’s a whole lot of funneh to catch up on). This post is liable to be FAT.
So what’s been going on in the world? There’s been the WTO protests - a large horde of Korean dirt-farmers trashing Wan Chai, the failure of Sir Donald’s reform package (which afforded us the unique privilege of a blog comment from Conrad of the now-defunct-but-always-fondly-remembered Gweilo Diaries) and of course the current protests in Iraq over election fraud.
Turning to the protests, I’m heartened to read that it’s your standard peaceful protest with dialogue between all the parties. I have to wonder though, how much of it is simply frustration at being stomped on in a democratic environment when the Sunni minority spent decades on top. Iraq fell into the old trap of trying to prevent over-arching parliamentary majority by employing an electoral list system and the result is of course that 15% of the people only have 15% of the seats.
I’d have suggested a First-Past-The-Post system for the constituencies as it would let the Sunnis wield a disproportionate amount of power simply because of geographical concentration. However the strong government which normally results from such a system is rarely a panacea for a troubled country without the sobering force of stuffy traditionalism (which countries like England have in spades) to keep the exercise of power in check.
It would be like letting a starving man loose on a banquet, too much too fast. The benefit of an electoral list is that it obliges parties to form coalitions and reach consensus - whilst this is a laudable aim it falls rather short in Iraq when the disaffected minority are a real minority. Nonetheless it’s nice to see that the larger political forces are willing to embrace their tempestuous cousins, when in a more stable, peacetime country they’d be told where to get off .
On a domestic note, the house is now playing host to my uncle Robert. Ever-gripped by the spirit of Christmas and a whirlwind of efficiency and diligence, Zio Roberto is a big asset at Christmastime. The fact that he’s also tackling the garden is simply a bonus.
He’s going to love the Christmas present I bought him.
The Christmas prank has stalled somewhat, I’m not so sure my little sister deserves it this year as she hasn’t really played any pranks on me for a while and she certainly doesn’t deserve Scenario Alpha; the meanness quotient of which is so potent that the scheme practically radiates its own malign halo.
I beat Snowcraft (thank god, I was beginning to think I’d be sitting here all day trying to finish) so that Christmas tradition is dispensed with.
I’ve still not managed to wrap my youngest siblings’ gifts, nor my mothers. I ought to get onto it at some point today.
As I may have mentioned a few times in this blog, I’m a gamer geek at heart. CCGs, RPGs, Tabletop games, Board Games (not of the mindless-do-what-the-card-says ilk which covers everything up to and including Monopoly) are all ‘on the menu’, so to speak.
Anyhow, Board Games are unique in the gaming world in that they require ‘limited buy-in’. See when one person picks up a CCG (collectible card game) then everyone who wants to play them fairly needs to spend the same amount of money on that game. Very often that figure starts to creep up to the cost of a box of cards (£50 odd). This was of course, fine ‘back in the day’ when I first started playing Magic: the Gathering and met Z at the Colchester Games Club. Everyone we introduced to the game all played the same thing so fundamentally the buy-in wasn’t much of an issue.
(Oh I now have the odd honour of being the man who introduced the current UK Magic: the Gathering Champion to the game, Richard is about a million times better than me anyway.)
However, new CCGs couldn’t really be picked up easily because everyone would have to buy the same amount (or at least a minimum number of booster packs).
Board Games have the advantage of only requiring one guy to buy the game, after which everyone else can play. Roll2d6, the superlative gaming podcast, gives this as the reason why its producers play Board Games almost exclusively.
In our group, it seemed that Conrad had a disproportionately large number of Board Games (like, 4 to Nil, Nil, Nil, Nil and Nil) so I decided a few months ago to even the score.
I’ve been picking up games at a rate of one a month (with the odd in-between purchase for really cheap games, such as those made by the marvelous Cheapass Games) and this month added Battlestations to my arsenal.
The game is a sort of RPG/Board Game hybrid which mixes the finest traditions of Hex-map based space combat games with ‘between the bulkheads’ games like Space Hulk and Awful Green Things From Outer Space. However both Space Hulk and AGTFOS concentrate exclusively on combat - Battlestations is about actually running around doing the things necessary to run your ship. You want to turn the ship? Someone has to run down to the helm and actually steer the thing. Fire a cannon? Not if someone’s not in the cannon module, at the battlestation in question.
Boarding isn’t a case of simply rolling of dice, you actually load your characters into a boarding missile and burst into the enemy ship. The system does an excellent job of giving you a real sense of both scale and consequence as your horribly understaffed crew bustle about the ship in a state of permanent alarm, fixing battledamage, carrying out vital ship functions (“DIVERT ALL POWER TO THE SHIELDS!!”) and kicking rebel aliens in their bizarrely placed erogenous zones.
Your characters improve as missions go by, in the style of a tabletop RPG (although the characters are rather pared-down to streamline the gaming experience) and even though the crew of my group’s human scout vessel, the Vindicator, have only carried out 2 missions, the players are really enthusiastic about the system. We’ve only scratched the surface of the features and mission types so we’re really looking forward to the next session.
Right, that’s a pretty fat post.
I’m going to go see if I can be of any help around the house - Midnight Mass tonight!
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at December 24, 2005 11:40 AM