damerell

January Noon / The 31st of February / March Violets / April Weeps / The Brian May Band / Sixth June / Last July / August Burns Red / The September When / October Burns Black / The Early November / The Decemberists

That is all.

ceb and I (and bjh21 WINODW) go every year to the Wave-Gotik-Treffen, a giant goth festival in Leipzig.

There's almost always a mostly-punk night at one of the dozen or so venues, and as long as we've been going, it's been on the final night of the festival. This is convenient because I tend to pick up comedy injuries in pits. [1]

Last time the lineup was Erik Cohen ("straight-up rock"), Banane Metalik (some very peculiar but good French horrorpunk), Fliehende Stürme (a not very good goth band inexplicably shoved into the middle of this lineup, but hence providing an opportunity for a bit of a sitdown and a drink), The Creepshow (a Canadian psychobilly band who are utterly brilliant), and The Adicts.

The Adicts are an ancient British punk band in the Clash mould (ie, actually good, unlike the Sex Pistols), but this kind of thing is a bit of a crapshoot; a lot of the time you get a band who were very good in the 80s, and they've slowed right down and become boring and pedestrian. Occasionally you're pleasantly surprised; Fuzzbox springs to mind, or the sadly brief revival of Die Laughing, a 90s goth outfit.

So, first question, will there be a pit for Banane Metalik? It's early, the place isn't that full, and it is extremely hot... but it turns out there will. Yay, shenanigans.

Somewhere around here C turns up. We're out on the balcony between bands; mysteriously, there is a large container full of inflatable balls - big ones, about the size of yoga balance balls, but of much lighter construction - like a ball pit for elephants.

Sitdown and drink had to Fliehende Stürme. I know there will be extensive shenanigans to the Creepshow, and I'm not disappointed; the vocalist, who is a tiny woman, does her usual stunt where she comes into the pit for a bit and is inexplicably not stomped flat.

I have been joking about the weather, to the effect that ideally there will be a torrential downpour just after the Creepshow's set to make me slightly less entirely covered in a wide assortment of sweat. To my surprise and delight, there was one, and I sat outside in the rain and cooled off.

So, The Adicts. Somehow I have managed to become convinced they _have_ become a bit boring and pedestrian, so I squdge back into the gig room without particularly high expectations. I'm also tired, like someone who's just spent most of 2 hours bouncing about and trying not to get squashed, and bruised, so perhaps I'll just...

... ah, it turns out The Adicts have not even remotely become boring and pedestrian, and the audience are also not inclined to be boring and pedestrian. Off we go again.

It also turns out they're going to play for about 90 minutes.

Finally, it turns out that what the inflatable balls are for is to release them, along with a load of balloons, into the pit with about 10 minutes to go. Hilarity ensues as everyone baps balls up into the air while trying not to get squashed, or grabs them and bashes and charges each other with them.

So, that was fun.

[1] I remember the first time we saw the Koffin Kats C saying to me afterwards "did you see that?" "What?", I said. It turned out the guitarist and double bassist had swapped instruments mid-song without a perceptible interruption; I could hear what was going on but was too busy to see it. (They're also a pyschobilly band, and very good; pyschobilly bands tend to go in for double basses, stunts, and being very good.)

"Mishima activates her crowdcutter and it springs from its microcrimped home in the clasps on her dress, a transparent vinyl shell shaped like a shark fin that lets her scythe through the mass of people glomming toward the sign."

Dear author, you have just aimed for cool cyberpunk gadgetry, tripped over your own feet, and landed face-first in the cowpat of utter absurdity; and you have done it in the first chapter, which is not a good start.

What crowd lets you push through it because you're cosplaying as an icebreaker, rather than telling you to fuck off? The thing must have significant structural integrity, and it's not made of gizmodium, so she's been lugging around several kilos of spring-loaded vinyl (which must have to be properly anchored to her, so she's also in some sort of harness) on the off-chance that this specific problem arises, like James Bond if Q was precognitive [1]. Does her dress sometimes go BDOIOIOING unexpectedly? Is she some kind of Swiss Army Knife of unfolding vinyl devices, like a po-faced Inspector Gadget?

More seriously I've just given up on the book because - well, because _Too Like the Lightning_ reminded me that it is not worth finishing a book that makes me go "aaargh, shut up, author" every four pages. Here we are being beaten vigorously with the exposition stick at every opportunity; the author makes a particularly bold move in writing "the rush of exposition in the airport comes as a shock, especially on such little sleep" as a precursor to delivering the lump of exposition, not that it is greatly distinguished from the exposition that surrounds it. Come back, Becky Chambers' "describe the ships to me like I am a child", all is forgiven.

"JaBoDeTaBekBan, the urban conglomeration with Jakarta at its heart, has" a fucking implausible name, like I don't think anyone goes around gobbing up that mouthful on a regular basis, and that's about as far as I got.

As a result, my final objection might be wrong, because there may well be another lump of exposition coming, but it looks to me like the world is sorted into tens of thousands of, well, constituencies each of which elect a single political party on a FPTP basis, and there's a rich tapestry of dozens of political parties; now, one of the many odd things about FPTP is it tends to encourage political parties to agglomerate into vast blobs, so how's that work?

This was my first novel-length No Award this year.

[1] indeed, in IIRC Goldeneye Bond's car has a popup attachment for cutting cables strung across the road at a highly specific height, and sportingly the bad guys string a cable across the road at just that height.

I was given three things to write about.

Spider plants I am drawing a bit of a blank on. I own one plant, the daughter^n of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryophyllum_daigremontianum which I got when I was 13; I have kept it this long since they are almost impossible to kill.

I am perhaps being slightly unfair in not counting the mass of brambles etc in the front garden, which I was happy enough to count as mine while eating the crop of blackberries last year.

Mead is easy. When I was an undergraduate I'd buy cases of Moniack mead from Highland Wineries, which at the time was still in Moniack castle in Scotland and came in impressive octagonal bottles, then sell it on at enough of a markup to count 2 bottles as clear profit from each case. Dark mead is good for hangovers.

A friend of mine still has an octagonal bottle of the stuff which he doles out dribbles of, insisting the recipe has changed in the last 20 years and is not as good now. I dunno; I think his bottle tastes different because it _is_ 20 years old.

Tolkien you know about, but to introduce something personal, I've found the Peter Jackson films have shrunk on me; I was quite impressed with them at first but rewatching has made their flaws more and more apparent; both the extended editions and the utter travesty of the Hobbit have a lot more of the self-indulgent nonsense that mars the films, and once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it.

I did get through the Silmarillion once but nothing after that; as far as I can make out the later "Tolkien" is like a series of fishcakes with increasingly small amounts of JRRT fish and larger amounts of Christopher Tolkien potato. I know CT can't actually lack money but it sure feels as if he digs up more of his father's notes every time the gas bill is due.

Spameron, of course, started this whole referendum nonsense to keep Boris out of Number 10 (no bad idea, in and of itself). If Hunt wins it'll merely be a Pyrrhic victory; but if Boris gets in anyway, will any British Prime Minister ever have suffered so ghastly a Pyrrhic defeat?

I enjoyed this (a series of ten song parodies about 1830, a boardgame about railways and sharp stock-trading practice), but I only can speak from the point of view of someone who has played 18xx games, but never seen Les Miserables.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Moz4jIMkzHc

1) What was the first type of cheese you ever ate?

I dunno who these people are with perfect recall of cheese, but they're not me.

2) What was the type of cheese you ate most recently?

Some fairly generic Double Gloucester in a sandwich.

3) What is the most unusual cheese you ever ate?

Goat's cheese has always struck me as unusual inasmuch as it's cheese, and I love cheese, except that goat's cheese tastes utterly horrible.

4) What is your favourite cheese?

The next one. Er. To be honest you can't go wrong with a nice lump of good Red Leicester, boring as I'm told this is.

5) What is your favourite dish made with cheese?

"Piece of cheese", which goes like this: 1) find some cheese 2) cut off a piece 3) eat it.

This is basically all spoilers for The Delirium Brief, one of Stross's Laundry books.

( Consistency - one trivial gripe and two serious ones )

I've been reading back through some old roleplaying books, and came to this glorious take on encumbrance in _Dungeoneer_ - an RPG based on the old Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and one which also had some serious systematic problems detailed in a boring footnote. [1]

Rather than listing specific item weights in kilos (no, really, quite advanced for 1989), they suggest that a Hero can carry 10 medium-sized items. Light items count as 1/2 an item, Heavy items as three, and Very Heavy items are more. So far, so good. Then we come to the examples of these categories.

Light items include a pouch of coins, a plate, an ale flagon, a dagger... and a domestic cat.

Indeed, yes. Picking up 20 domestic cats seems a totally plausible scenario. You may say, perhaps they are in a sack that someone else will open, or dead, but cats weigh about 4kg. I daresay Thumpface the Mighty can pick up an 80kg backpack, but can they really run around the dungeon smiting orcs with it?

Medium objects end with a smaller creature like a Dwarf or a Goblin. We don't know how big Goblins are, but we do know dwarves are the standard four foot axe maniacs. Ten of those seems ambitious; indeed, a dwarf PC has the same carrying capacity, so can presumably carry ten of their fellow dwarves. Axes and all.

What of Heavy objects? They include a full chest of treasure, a bed, and a creature which is human-sized "or greater". You will want a bed after picking all of those up, especially since you still have room for two domestic cats.

[1] The major problem is that in character creation you roll SKILL on d6+6 and that determines how good you are at everything, aside from taking hits (but since SKILL lets you fight expertly, dodge, avoid falling into pits, climb slopes, and everything, you'd rather have more SKILL than more STAMINA) and being lucky (but SKILL will avoid many times you have to Test your Luck).

Everything. There are a large number of specialist skills, like Sword or Climb. They all default to your SKILL. If you buy levels in them, they add to your SKILL. And to add insult to injury? You get as many levels to buy as your SKILL, and you can't spend more than 4 in any given skill, so if you roll a 7, you can at most get to 11 - using half your points to not even match your lucky friend who still has 12 points to spend.