New life on the blogging front

"A bit political on yer ass!"- my alternative blog about society and stuff. Enter at your peril. Enjoy. Oh, don't forget to update your bookmarks to follow. ;)

Adventures in cabbage #1: "Go for your greens!"

I blog therefore I am

It is a truism that our hyperconnected world — this mighty engine of commerce, knowledge and communication in which codebots endlessly war over the dupes, the data and the users' processing power and into whose coffers even our free activity is given — a truism that this incredible techo-social spectacle- the crowning scientific and technical achievement of the 20th century; that this is the original Cyberpunks' mid-80s low-life visions made virtual flesh (virtual by virtue of the lack of ubiquitious direct neural jacking with its resulting sensory immersion- that emotionally empty screen so beloved of the trolls who soil and poison the social networks). When my pal's copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer circulated round to me back in 1984 little did I realise that I was about to experience with unsurpassed intensity a delicious cultural trope- getting in ahead of the avalanche unleashed by a new voice at the cutting edge of a genre-redefining honest-to-god artistic revolution. No sudden impact this. It was a slow-burning mind-bomb the full impact of which only became evident when, after a month's apparent indifference, I suddenly realised that I couldn't get the damn book out of my mind.

"It's electrifying!"

Confessions of a one-time would-be career gamer

“He’s not dead yet!”

By the power of
necromancy!

Emerging later than usual from the incommunicado of the long darkness of my annual slough of despond, I found myself drawn back into social networking via BoardGameGeek, as is my wont. One thread which attracted my attention was Deep or Wide: What kind of wargamer are you?, to which I added my tuppenceworth, you can be sure (deep, as we shall see). Before I knew where I was I’d been prompted to make an unexpected return to the keyboard for the benefit of my readers here at RD/KA!.

Never mind the depth, feel the width?

The original and
still the best?

‘Deep’ play- ie. playing a game many times to experience the full breadth of its content and to master its nuances, has been a strong characteristic of my gaming geek since I was a young adult. A quick survey of my 10 most played games shows how strong. Look at my 5 all-time favourite wargames:

Black Hearted Press: classic supernatural re-imagined and sociopathic Significant Others

A small confession

When, last month, I wrote thanking “John and David of Black Hearted Press for the small gesture of faith they showed in an unknown blogger” I was talking about the free review copies they’d given me of comics published by their Glasgow-based independent comics publisher, Black Hearted Press. There I was just sitting quietly in the Scotia when Jim Stewart- of The Astounding Ganjaman fame, pointed this guy in my direction, telling John (for John Farman it was) that I was someone he should talk to. The next thing I knew I had 3 free comics and an article to write. My introduction to David Braysher soon followed, and a fourth comic had been added to the pile of what was my first officially commissioned review.

My geeking summer #1: "Oop north"

Land of the White Rose

England, York, &
the White Rose

I mentioned last time that I was holidaying with family in York after a trip to Bradford. I’m back home now and reality has finally reasserted itself, so it’s back to the old bloggery. Where better then to begin than with a geek’s eye tour of my wee visit to the legendary county of Yorkshire (no prizes to readers who offer suggestions, constructive or otherwise!- NB, that’s no prizes, not ‘No Prizes’, OK?)?

Blast-off in Bradford

The geeks

The expanding Hive

The convention I attended in Bradford wasn’t a geek-con as such, but it was hoaching with geeks of all kinds. I’d been hoping to get some gaming in (I even took along a few cardgames for that very purpose) but the gaming area wasn’t very well organised, so that turned out to be a bogey. Still, I had fun handing out my card, which turned out to be a great way of smoking out the other games geeks (not that they needed much encouragement). Among the highlights of those encounters were:

This is not a blogparty…

A last gasp?

Today is RD/KA!'s 7th birthday, one I honestly barely expected to celebrate after the fiasco that was the 5th birthday blogparty. But here I am, although it’s just a quiet night in this time.

The past couple of weeks have been crazy busy for me, what with 3 games sessions, another foray into the hustle and bustle of Glasgow’s thriving indie comics scene, a visit to the hottest happening in the Scottish gaming scene in longer than I can remember- plus another Claymore; on top of all of which I’ve just landed with family after a whirlwind of a long weekend at a convention in Bradford, where I met a host of new fellow games and comics geeks.

So I’ve got loads of material and a lot to celebrate, but I’m totally exhausted and on holiday to boot. No promises then to those who’re wondering when promised articles will appear, other than that they will appear, and as soon as possible.

The usual suspects?

I had all sorts of things in mind for today's celebration post. Frankly though I'm so tired I just can't be arsed. So I'll just say this: as proud as I am to be celebrating 7 years in the blogosphere, this really isn’t about me, it’s about you- my readers. Cheesy? No doubt, but it’s the knowing that you’re out there- each and every one of you, that picks me up and keeps me going. Thank you all, my dear readers, from your ‘humble’ scribe. ;)

A long time coming

Sorting out unfinished business

Still crazy after
all these years!

A few years ago I made a couple of passing references—one, writing about my Penumbra’s Talons; the other, writing about GW’s mighty Space Hulk 3rd edition—to a project which involved a nameless friend and a Space Hulk set. I am pleased, at long last, to be able to tell you that this friend- Matt Forbeck, who I met at Bill King’s wedding back in 2005, will soon be getting his hands on that set of Space Hulk 3 he’d almost, but not quite, forgotten about (who could forget Space Hulk 3?).

My first Truly Epic
RPG campaign

I can’t take much of the credit here- it’ll be a long time before I revive and renew my miniatures’ craft skills to the point where I can paint my own Space Hulk set let alone one for someone else. No; credit—for the fact that Matt and his kids will soon be enjoying playing Space Hulk with their own fully-painted set—starts with Andy, who gave me the recommendation which finally broke this years-old logjam. And who did Andy recommend when I spoke to him about contracting-out this paint-job? None other than Brian, who regular readers will remember as Siegfried- murderous lowlife with a heart, from my Ashes of Middenheim campaign back in the glory days of Green Ronin’s stewardship over WFRP2.

Hail, and farewell

Spencer James Warner
Master Craftsman
3rd Feb 1968 - 14th July 2012

Proper and fitting
We laid Spencer Warner to rest yesterday. The loss of this genial man will weigh down for a long time to come upon all who knew him. As ever with all that is best in life, you can’t really appreciate ‘it’ until it’s gone. Spence’s obvious great human qualities aside, Glasgow gamers are grappling with that ‘it’ being his quiet indispensability, the simple secret of which Spence explained to me not long after G3 brought us together:

1. Always be early.
2. Always have something to do.

Spencer was, and he did, and our community of gamers is better off for that.

Shining moments

I sadly can’t remember if I ever talked with Spence about this, but G3 is the proudest achievement of my life. Among all the friends who helped me during the trials and tribulations of the early days of our mad endeavour, Spence is the one whose very character left the magnitude of his true contribution quietly obscure, as befits the modesty of his peculiarly patient brand of indispensability. Spence was our rock, our foundation, as we learn with each new day since his passing. Approaching our club’s 15th anniversary without our Founding President at our side to share in our everdays—not to mention our pride—is a wrong we can’t bear but which we just can’t right.

And so, to all who knew Spence: his legacy is our endurance now he’s gone. Let us gamers who were such a part of Spence’s life honour our friend so as to continue to bring comfort to his family, who meant so much to him.

The last words will be Spence’s. Rest easy big man.

A fond memory

One night many years ago, when G3 was still in the small hall at Woodside, I got Spence and his son Steven to join me in a game of Gunslinger, an old favourite of mine from back in the day, which I was delighted to get to play again- a rare treat. Spence won, quietly ripping me a new one in the process. As the 3 of us walked away from the table afterwards I was enthusing about what a great game it had been and I overheard this exchange:

Steven: “I don’t get it, John got beat and he’s saying it was a great game?”
Spencer: “You’ve got to understand son, for some people it’s all just about playing the game.”

Spence's last laugh!

In the lair of the White Bear

A chance encounter

A studious White Bear

I first met the White Bear last summer, in the guise of her secret identity (who shall remain nameless, naturally enough). For the purposes of this article though, I can tell you that the White Bear hails from Copenhagen, which is why, on my asking what had brought her to Glasgow, she told me that she was working on an art project funded by Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA). Intrigued but wary- because of my philistine tendencies when it comes to modern art, I soon warmed to the White Bear’s theme when she explained to me that it had been inspired by a quotation from Fyodor Dostoyevsky (who regular readers will remember is my favourite writer from the pantheon of 19th century Great Russians):

“Try and set yourself the task not to think of a white bear, and the cursed thing comes to mind every minute"
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 1863
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Listening to the White Bear explain how she had escaped from inside the head in which she had been trapped by Dostoyevsky’s thought-experiment; and how she was now travelling around the world to “examine the ideas and consequences of the dichotomy [between] inner beast and shallow surface, and [to] investigate the profound impact [that] the idea of a true inside and a merely representative exterior has on all kinds of fields”, I found any lingering prejudices melting away.

Wargames, politics and ethics #1: Ah, that old bugbear

Reality bites

They're just games, yes?

At some time or another, many wargamers will have found themselves pondering the political and/or ethical implications of their passion for revisiting the past, present and future battlefields of the world with their maps and little counters. This reflection leads some to create boundaries and/or preferences: periods they won't game, sides they always prefer to play, and so on. For me this began in my teenage-tankie youth, when I drew a boundary at 1945. My reasons for this were twofold:

• In the late 70s and early 80s- with Thatcher and Reagan's 'second' Cold War at its height, modern warfare was too closely linked to the spectre of global thermonuclear holocaust for it to have any appeal to me.
• I felt uncomfortable with the idea of playing games about wars the casualties of which would be actual people living in my own time.

I abandoned this boundary as I grew older. That's not to say that I 'grew out of it', because that would be to imply that there's something immature about the choice to draw and to exercise such boundaries. I've no wish to be so insulting to others who've made these choices.

A bit of this and a bit of that

Technical problems stop the Panzers in their tracks

Just don't aim for
the window...

Badger came round last night for what was supposed to be another session of Fighting Formations and perhaps some Combat Commander. Unfortunately events were to intervene in the form of the shiny new desktop PC which I had taken delivery of just the previous day. I hadn't had time to set everything up that Thursday, so on the Friday I decided just to wait for Badger's arrival so that he could offer his assistance. It's not that I'm a complete tech-idiot or anything but there are always risks associated with transferring your old system to a new machine, so I felt it would be useful to have Badger on hand.

Just as well too it turned out.

Changes, changes

Old habits die hard: tabletop miniatures games

"Very pretty John, but
what does it mean?"
(Damned if I know BTW)

When you're depressed you often become withdrawn to the point of being reclusive. The resulting emotional disconnection from so much of your life means that a period of depression really isn't the best time to make decisions of any consequence about your life, not least because coming out of depression means that you face putting back together everything which has been disrupted when you were down. So you could easily dispose of things or give up on activites which are really important to you because you take your depressive emotional disconnection at face value, when you're really just expressing your dread of the effort it'll take to get everything sorted out when you're feeling better.

Memories, sigh

All of which is by way of preamble to an explanation of some changes in my gaming tastes and habits which have come upon me in recent months. First and foremost is that I'm giving up tabletop miniatures gaming. This is something of a painful break, and even as I type this I'm struck by a sense of unreality, not to mention wistful nostalgia. After all, my life as a hobby gamer started nearly 40 years ago when my brother and I made up our own rules for playing proper games with our Airfix 1/72^nd Napoleonic toy soldiers.

"Another fine mess..."

Woah, a tale of woe
Well, it was kind of a close run thing this time but here I am, back at the keyboard. There are several reasons why I almost succumbed to the urge just to disappear from the pages of RD/KA!. I'm just going to let them lie. I will however briefly explain why this particular bloglag was so long (at 9 months it's been the longest ever).

Sometimes people just won't own up...

It'll come as no surprise to my regular readers that a serious depression was to blame. Why so serious? Long story short: a home support worker who'd been visiting me for some 4 years took the huff with me one day and indulged in some unprofessional behaviour. The next time we met he manipulated me into withdrawing from the support service against my will. With hindsight I realised that saving his job was surely his primary motivation for being such a shit. We'd talked often of the difficult funding situation in his workplace and of how staff were worried about their jobs. So I think he feared a black mark if I was to ask for him to be replaced, which would've led to questions being asked about why I no longer wished to work with him (which I didn't, naturally enough).

"Kick Ass!" 5th birthday blogparty #4. The final countdown

Life's little ironies or, "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to"
What's a man to do? I mean to say, after some ups and downs you finally hit your blog's 5th anniversary and manage to put together an impressive bunch of prizes for your readers. Just how can you follow that? Ah, I know. How about taking a mood downswing and disappearing from the site for a month? Yeah, that's a really good idea. Really.

Anyway, here I am. I'm not swanning about in sunny Acapulco with all that lovely swag offered up by my generous donors (chance'd be a fine thing). Nope. I'm living la vida loca in the slough of despond in rainy Glasgow. There've been games at least, a lot of games, Dominion especially. So it's not been all bad. But that's not really the point of this post, oh no. This post is about prizes (remember those?).

Meeting Richard Williams

The best laid plans
Unfortunately last Saturday's planned trip to Claymore fell through. I'm in a bit of a downswing just now and my main symptom is sleep disturbance, typical phase 1 for me. And so Friday night dragged on into Saturday morning leaving me facing 2 hours sleep before I was supposed to get up to catch an early bus to Edinburgh. The result was inevitable. Ah well, c'est la vie.

But still...
I did manage to make it to GW Glasgow on Friday afternoon to meet Black Library author Richard Williams. Richard proved friendly and easy-going as you'd expect and I passed a pleasant hour or so sharing his company with the other fans who'd turned out to meet him.

The inevitable signage
I'd taken along my copy of Liber Chaotica as planned. I'd thought that'd be all but Steve- the local manager, had managed to rustle up some copies of the currently out of print Reiksguard, in search of which I'd visited the store only the previous day and which had then been strangely absent from the shelves; so I bought that. As William and I prepared to pose for a couple of photos I figured that it'd be churlish not also to pick up a copy of the latest- and current, BL book in which Richard's writing has seen print: the anthology Legends of the Space Marines.

UK Games Expo'10 #2. Once more unto those hex-and-counter battlefields

The best laid plans
My experience of- and the feedback from, CC@UK Expo'09 had led me to reconsider the tournament's format, which had been very open last year: players just paired up at their own convenience and chose whichever scenario they wished. This had worked well; even so I was wondering if it might be worth experimenting with a more structured format.

My final decision so to do was forced to a degree by space constraints. Last year we had essentially just squatted as many tables as we could get away with in the Strathallen's main opening gaming room. This meant that we occupied space which could easily've accomodated twice our number or more so I wasn't at all surprised when Richard Denning- with whom I was liasing for CC@UK Expo'10, asked me about space requirements so that he could allocate us a specific room of our own.

The result of all this was that CC@UK Expo'10 was set up with 6 preselected scenarios to be played in seeded rounds. The scenarios were:

• 8: Breakout Dance.
• 13. Tussle at Maleme.
• 19. Metaxas Season.
• 21. Saint Agatha (@RD/KA! here).
• E. West Tank Barrier.
• K. Burning Buna.

In the event this format was abandoned on Saturday in favour of last year's because players were having to sit around for too long waiting for others to finish so that the next round could begin. This was pointless, the main aim of the tournament being to play as much Combat Commander as possible.

Playing catchup

Turnover has been slow here at RD/KA! lately. My mood hasn't been great, as old hands might already've imagined. More important than that though- and a contributory factor too no doubt, is the fact that I've been living for several months with the burden of undiagnosed type 2 diabetes, which has left me tired and lacking in motivation. Now that I'm know I'm hoping that management of the condition will soon get me rolling again.

In brighter news I returned last night from UK Games Expo 2010. I had a great time and will be getting to work soon on my report. Meanwhile here are some bits and pieces.

Prizes! Prizes!
The response to my Waste World prize draw was sufficient to make a draw necessary so that's a result I guess! I am pleased to announce the results of the draw:

• Grand prize: the Waste World rules and the Hydra sourcebook go to Josef.
• Consolation prize: the A Fistful of Credits starter set goes to the Gnome.

Congratulations gents! If you'd like to email me your addresses I'll get your goodies off to you as soon as possible. Commiserations to those of you who didn't win. Keep haunting ebay and remember: this was the first RD/KA! prize draw.

Local talent takes off

The discovery
My friend and neighbour Sioux is- to paraphrase an old Scottish expression, a lass of many parts. Pen and ink line illustration is Sioux's latest hobby, one she started last year as a diversion in a period of enforced idleness. I'd seen some of her early work and liked it. It turns that I wasn't alone in that.

Sioux: the artist

Sioux exhibited a few of her illustrations at the Glasgow Art Fair last March. A tad intimidated by the fact that she was the only artist showing black and white line illustrations at the 2010 Fair, Sioux was quite gobsmacked when she was promptly offered a deal by the Art Exposure Gallery here in Glasgow. And you could've knocked Sioux over with a feather when the gallery owner told her that she was to be launched with a private viewing to which she could invite family and friends.

A singular honour

A belated Easter surprise
The names Paul D. Selman and iL-Logic should already be known to site-visiting readers who have the habit of checking out the various lists of links in the sidebar here at RD/KA!. Paul is a freelance artist with whom I've become friendly after we hooked up online because the guys at EMOTIONALLY FOURTEEN are his buddies, and iL-Logic is a new webcomic written by Adam Di Stefano- who blogs at 52 Short Stories, and with art by Paul.

I've enjoyed following Paul's blog since we hooked up last year. His artwork is always interesting; sometimes hits me right between the eyes; and has lately forced me to rethink my longstanding and largely blind prejudice against abstract art, something which had sometimes made me feel uncomfortable because of the philistine company I would often find myself keeping. I also enjoy reading iL-Logic, checking it out regularly in a way I stopped doing some time ago with all my other favourite webcomics simply because I found myself too busy to keep up with them.

Mad March roundup #2. Grand geek gathering!

The place
Conpulsion 2010 took place last weekend in the Teviot Row students' union at Edinburgh University, as Conpulsion always does. The "oldest purpose built student union building in the world", Teviot Row is a place of which I have fond memories from the 1980s: I used to play a lot of Defender there- badly; the student wargames club used to have monthly games days there; and it was there- at a FilmSoc showing, that this lifelong fan of classic Trek first saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Teviot Row: the front entrance

You can imagine then, dear readers, that I was keen to see what Conpulsion made of this place so redolent of memory for yours truly. The short answer is that I was impressed.