Where Worlds Collide

Within the ancient stone walls of Ardryr House, the kandar overlord Zartheyn Tyr has summoned his chief of security.

“So, Valneth”, said Zartheyn, “It is six days since we last spoke. Please update me on the security situation”.

“The rebels attacked us again last night”, the knight replied.

“And?”, Zartheyn asked, “What damage this time?”.

“My militia gave a good account of themselves”, said Valneth.

“You have not answered my question”. Zartheyn tried to suppress his rising anger.

“They.. attacked the village at Gavius Hill”, the knight replied, “Set fire to the barns using flamelances. And some farm workers are missing. My men extinguished the fires, and saw the rebels off”.

“Flamelances again?”, said Zartheyn, “We’re not up against regular feral humans, are we? They sound like legion deserters to me. Or worse”.

Zartheyn let out an audible sigh. Valneth was his half-brother, after all, and ties of blood within the clan are supposed to run strong. He’d be in trouble with the elders if he dismissed him without good cause. But Valneth was so clearly not up to the job.

And the rebels did have to attack Gavuis Hill, of all places. It was almost as if they *knew*.

“It is probably fortunate that I have persuaded the legion to step up their border patrols”, Zartheyn continued, “I am expecting reinforcements to arrive tomorrow, and expect your full co-operation”.

“Will there be humans in the patrols they send”, asked the knight.

“They’re from Calbeyn, so that is to be expected”, Zartheyn responded, “And don’t look so disgusted. They tell me they’re sending veterans from the Zughru wars, so they’re men, kandar and human, who know how to fight. And I’m summoning their commanding officer her as soon as he arrives so that you and I can brief then on the situation. Understood? Good?”

“Yes, brother”, Valneth replied, as he turned to leave.

---

“So, what have we learned?”, Brogan asked his fellow across round the campfire, “Are the Academy of Life just growing bigger and better turnips, or is there something more sinister going on?”

“Perhaps the turnips are the sinister goings on?”, asked Qeelu, the solidly-built woman who acted as his second-in command. “Perhaps those rumours really are true”.

Brogan laughed. “What? Turnips that render humans infertile?”

“Don’t dismiss it out of hand”, Qeelu responded, “We don’t really understand the magic of the Academy of Life. Our reconnaissance did pick up a lot of Academy of Life comings and goings to and from the village”

“And the barns we torched were full of turnips”, added Grodd, a small wiry man who acted as the scout for the group. “We all know how the kandar fear the rate at which we breed”.

“You’re both expecting me to believe this nonsense”, snorted Brogan, “Turnips are cover; they have something nastier in the works”.

“Which we’re not going to find out about unless we raid their research complex at Guvil Bridge, Grodd replied, “Which is too well defended, and will bring the legion down on our heads if try a fool stunt like that”.

“And I’m no fool”, Brogan stated firmly, “Guvil Bridge is off-limits; but I know enough about the Academy of Life to know their black projects are never based at their publicly known facilities. There’s something going on at or near Gavuis Hill, that needs a stop putting to. And I intend to find out what it is”.

---

I could do with a few new players for Kalyr PBeM. As some regular readers will know, it’s set in my own science fantasy setting that owes a lot to the writings of Jack Vance, amongst others.At the moment it’s running on the mailing list at The Phoenyx, but may move to a web forum running on the same site in the future.Anyone interested leave a reply here, or contact me at tim (at) kalyr.com, and I’ll send you a up-to-date .pdf of the Fudge build I’m using, including the character generation rules and an overview of the setting.I’m looking for people who can write well, and are prepared to engage with the setting.

I’m still spending far too much time listening to last.fm, but I think I’ve discovered a flaw.

I’ve been listening to last.fm’s Radio ‘Spill, which initially came up with an eclectic mix of music, but subsequently degenerated into playing the same dozen or so artists over and over again. You can get very sick of Cornershop’s “Brimful of Ahsa” after a while.

I think I’ve realised what’s been happening; too many people were listening to the group radio station and were scrobbling at the same time; the result was that over time people’s last.fm libraries got homogenised. And a random selection of songs, some by quite obscure artists, that just happened to get played to a lot of different people in a short space of time went high up the group chart and thus got served up to everyone else. And so long as people kept scrobbling while listening to streaming radio, those songs got into more and more libraries and got served up more and more.

I think the solution is to scrobble only when I’m playing CDs, not when streaming.

Being from the Guardian’s Readers Recommend community, Radio ‘Spill seems to be heavily biased towards 60s r’n'b and scratchy 80s post-punk anyway, neither of which are really my kind of music. My attempts to educate the Guardian readers into the delights of Breathing Space, Panic Room and The Reasoning don’t seem to have borne much fruit.

As as for those bands that haven’t put any of their music on last.fm at all, thus missing out on a chance to get their music heard - Odin Dragonfly, I’m looking at you.

Just to annoy Steven Wells’ stoat-eyed acolytes, The Guardian Music Blog has a thread in which we are invited to nominate our favourite cult albums.

There’s some discussion in the resulting comment thread about the definition of a cult album, and one person stated that “cult” is just a synonym for “obscure”. But it isn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

A lot of stuff is obscure for a very good reason; it’s rubbish. I don’t think many people are going to consider Sledgehammer’s one and only album as cult album. I may be wrong, and there’s still a dedicated band of Sledgehammer diehards in Slough, but somehow I doubt it.

Cult albums should those you love even though they’re not that well-known. Often they’re the records that push all your personal buttons; since we’re all different, they’re likely to sell in smaller quantities than the mass-market stuff aimed at the lowest common denominator.

I remember an article in Sounds years ago that commented (correctly) that the huge-selling albums are always the good ones, not the great ones.

So here’s the list I posted to the thread. I would guess anything by any prog band that formed since punk forced the genre underground is ‘cult’ by definition, at least according to the mainstream; and all this list comes from that genre, or at least it’s penumbra. As you would expect, the York/Swansea scene features prominently.

Twelfth Night - Fact and Fiction
IQ - Subterranea
Marillion - Brave, Afraid of Sunlight
Spock’s Beard - Beware of Darkness, Snow
Dream Theater - Metropolis II
Porcupine Tree - Lightbulb Sun
Ordinary Psycho - The New Gothik LP
Mostly Autumn - The Last Bright Light
Karnataka - Delicate Flame of Desire
Pure Reason Revolution - The Dark Third
Odin Dragonfly - Offerings
Breathing Space - Coming Up for Air

The last two are probably too recent to qualify, since they only came out last year.

My grandmother, a keen gardener, used to describe slugs as “the Devil’s creatures”, after they’d eaten the seedlings she’d carfully planted yet again.

While I have no interest in gardening whatsoever, I’m beginning to wonder if she had a point. When I returned from holiday, the living room carpet was covered in slimy trails, when the wretched little things had been crawling all round the room in the two weeks I was away.

So I vacuumed the carpet. And the very next morning, there were a fresh set of trails.

There’s is no evidence of poltergeist activity, so I don’t believe it’s ectoplasm…

Because my CD player has been out of commission lately, I’ve been listening to music on my laptop instead - which means that I can sign up to Last.fm. You can download an application that keeps track of what CDs you play (it doesn’t upload or file-share them, so the Entertainment Cartel goons won’t be breaking down your door). It then compiles an internet radio station tailored to your tastes. I find a lot of my online and offline friends are on there too, including the likes of HippyDave, Tiggereh, DarceysDad and Graeme.

If you look at my profile, it tells you precisely what I’ve been listening to. It’s a mixture of what CDs I’ve been playing, and whatever the internet radio throws up. It’s unintentionally hilarious Portuguese Hammer Horror Metal from a band called “Moonspell” at the moment.

Just to annoy that idiotic Steven Wells, I’ve had yet another go at ye olde Seven Songs Meme.

Just list seven songs you’re really into at the moment.

Opeth - Burden
Opeth - Coil
Panic Room - Apocalypstick
Fish - Milos de Besos
Marillion - Neverland
Magenta - Blind Faith
Mostly Autumn - Second Hand

This one is really a list of the songs that have ended up being stuck in my head recently. Yes I know there are two from the same album, Opeth’s magnificent prog-metal masterpiece “Watershed”. The more I listen to this one, the better it gets. May well end up as album of the year.

Anyone reading this, consider yourself tagged.

I commented in a post on the Fish Forum about Tribute bands, which attracted the ire of a member of Dutch Marillion tribute band Lords of the Backstage.

While there is probably a place for some tribute bands, and I don’t know the situation in The Netherlands, over here in Britain there are far, far too many tribute bands. They’re dominating the club circuit to the extent that bands playing their own material are finding it increasingly difficult to get gigs, if they play a style of music that isn’t generic indie.

I’ve heard the argument that tribute bands aren’t in direct competition with the likes of Breathing Space or The Reasoning, in that they appeal to non-overlapping audiences. I’m not convinced by that argument myself. Is there really nobody out there who might listen to something new if it wasn’t for the inexhaustible supply of bands willing to pander to lazy audiences who haven’t listened to anything new since 1985?

Am I right, or am I “talking a load of crap”?

Nick wants anti-war songs. I suggested Marillion’s “A Few Words For The Dead”

Somewhere in history you were wronged
Teach your children to bang the drum
Tell all your family, tell all your friends
Teach your brothers to avenge

It carries on

Or you could love
You could love

Much more profound that John Lennon’s platitudes. Well, I think so, anyway.

It’s frustrating when you arrive at your destination two hours late because of missed train connections; it happened to me twice on holiday; contrary to popular belief, German trains don’t run on time (unlike those in Switzerland). But it’s nothing on planes.

Psycho Chicken has a real horror story of the sort of thing that happens to air travellers when things go pear-shaped. Imagine if Virgin Trains did something like that. You’d never hear the end of it.

…was the end of standard-gauge steam on Britain’s railways. It would probably have been bad taste to have worn my DEMU “No Kettles” t-shirt into work today. But this evening my N-gauge Restormel has witnessed “Clun Castle” on the St.Erth to West Ealing milk train. The rake of Chocolate and Cream Mk1s is stored somewhere upstairs, so the “Cornish Riviera” will have to await another day, probably when I get my hands on a Farish Warship diesel to pull it

The Guardian’s Andrew Martin wistfully wonders if a new generation of higher-efficiency steam trains could return to Britain’s rails - personally I think that’s sentimental nonsense; it’s perfectly possible to restore the ‘romance of railways’ with well-designed modern trains that don’t try to pretend to be aircraft or buses.

Cold Spring Shops notes that a great many steam locomotives have survived into preservation, but neglects to mention one reason for their survival is the huge number of locomotives purchased by Dai Woodhams of Barry, who lacked the resources to cut them up, his scrapmen spending the next decade breaking up goods wagons instead. Pictures from the early 70s show hundreds of rusting hulks of Bullied pacifics, 9F 2-10-0s and assorted GWR classes. Almost every single one was eventually bought for preservation.

I shall refrain from rising to the bait when it comes to the subject of GM Grey Squrrels.