Aquarionics

This post is entirely useless.

I mean, you already know that Warren Ellis is writing a free webcomic, issues released every friday, called FreakAngels, don’t you?

And you already know he wrote Transmet, and various other important things like the novel Crooked Little Vein which you should also read if you haven’t.

You know all this, so there is no point in mentioning it.

Is there?

A while ago, I invented a concept of “Magic Trees”, named after the story of a vicar who chopped down a 140 year old tree and justified it by saying “A paedophile might have been hiding behind it”. This was later expanded to include invisible terrorists.

This morning a different story caught my attention. A social network site I’ve never heard of has recently banned a large number of its users over 36, possibly all of them, because:

Having discussed the use of our website with the home office and the police, and further some pretty serious crimes caused by older users, we were left with no option but to terminate a huge amount of accounts, and without notice, immediately. We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which – we can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.

Basically, there is the the new legislation requiring sex offenders to have their details held by the government (Under the “But we would never let that data leave officialdom” clause we know so well) and there is a blindingly stupid proposal to require social network sites to validate against a pre-existing list of known email addresses belonging to sex offenders. The original database is scary in and of itself, I have enough trouble getting off SMS spam lists, and those have a documented legal procedure. If your address – physical or metaworld – is in that database you’re many degrees of screwed, but the blindingly stupid addition of requiring email addresses?

I have currently got three email addresses I look at on a day to day basis. Without thinking too long about it, I can think of a dozen that will get to me eventually, plus another few that won’t anymore (like my old uni address, or my Evolving Media or BrowserAngel addresses) I could have signed up for another dozen in the time it’s taken you to skim-read this article.

Not only that, but this proposal is just that, a proposal yet to go though the bad ideas filter. Now, the social network providing this story, which is known as “Faceparty” and I’m not going to link to, claims they were dived upon by “A gang of paedophiles” who attacked their younger audience. If I was uncharitable, and I’m tending towards so, I’d wonder if this actually happened, or is a pre-emptive strike, or – even less charitably – if it’s all an attempt to get people to realise they exist. Browsing their site as a non-user, it does appear that they enjoy pushing a reputation for “edgy”. Their front page featured article links though to a page using the current-most-forbidden word (Four letters, begins with C, Rhymes with stunt, as in “Publicity”) as punctuation, and it’s all… very…

…interesting…

Of course, it’s entirely plausable that this is a genuine over-reaction to a genuine problem they were having with paedophiles and my cynical analisis that it’s all a publicity drive under the pretext of chopping down a magic tree could be entirely off the mark, but I’m not linking to them anyway.

When we reached the cliff face, we knew this was where we were supposed to be. Around us was the green grass and trees, the freshwater lake, the clean path from the mountains for the caravans to come though. The rocks behind us were Jet, and there was clay to the south and – unless my faithful hammer tap decieved me – oynx in further down. So we stopped, and we layed out our belongings and broke down the wagon for wood. Our fortress would begin here.

I personally struck the first blow into the mountainside, an honour I won from Offla – our miner – in the game of stones the night before. The rock disolved at the crack of my axe and I could hear Dwalin behind me marking out areas for the spoil to be placed. Within days we had our entrance hall and some workshops, within a week the door was sealed. That spring passed me by in a maze of late nights in the workshop – at least until Flalin finished the beds – and early mornings in the sunshine. Dwalin (our leader, another stones game) was also our primary source of food, with his fishing line and net. Between his fishing and Catlin’s meals, we did well. Even Slalin, trained as the jeweller we didn’t expect to need for many moons, found her niche as a decent miner and farming our clay-based indoor fields.

Spring flows into summer, and the crops harvested. Our food stocks high enough to last us to the winter, hopes were high. One day, as everyone else toiled deep in the fortress and by the lakes, I made my own mark on our home. Our great hall, where we slept of a night, was a wonderful piece of dwaven sparcity, but I took my chisel and my hammer and covered every inch of it with the best engraving I knew how to. Our great hall was finally somewhere to go home to, and that night we drank heartily.

As Summer gave way to autumn, our council hinted at the problems to come. Offla reported that his deep-shaft to the heart of the mountain had failed to hit the iron ore he was expecting. He suggested, and we agreed, that we should buy some metal from the trade caravan due in a couple of weeks. We drank to this, and it fell from our minds. We hadn’t bought any metal with us – it was bulky in the carts, and prevelant in the world beyond – save an iron anvil upon which to beat.

The caravan had no metal.

No bars, no ore, not even an iron bucket we could melt down. The only metal thing in the entire cart was a steel cage containing a donkey, which we couldn’t afford. We picked up some food from them, traded some mechanisms, and went back to our fortress, and drank ourselves to sleep.

The lake froze early that winter, and our supplies of water and drink did not last long. Without metal, Slatin – training as our blacksmith – couldn’t forge a chain with which we could build a well. We tried wooden and stone chains, but they splintered or cracked. We had no cloth for rope and it was too cold to for-go our coats. We all went onto mining duty, every one of us. We dug though the mountain looking for ore, and down looking for water, but found nothing but more Jet and Oynx. We could buy a lake with the stone we’re shifting out, but no traders come at this time of year. Nobody will come.

Catlin died last week, Flalin shortly afterwards, taking his secrets of woodwork with him. Important for us, because none of us know how to build coffins, and so they lay on the stone floor of a storage room designated a graveyard in a hurry. Dwalin, or fearless leader, died trying to dig though the ice. Slalin quietly in her sleep two nights past, never saying a word. Offla took her death personally, blaming himself for failing to find the ore that must be here, and started hammering with reckless abandon, digging though the mountainside desperatly. I believe he has driven himself mad – the thirst having taken us all part of the way – and I could hear him screaming down the echoing stone corridors around my workshop. That stopped a few hours ago, and I believe I will not speak to my friend Offla again in this life.

His work – and mine – will echo on in the engravings I made long after the rest of this place crumbles to dust. This will be found in the spring, I suspect, when our liason to the mountain returns with the promised steel.

Our fortress fell.

And that concludes my most recent game of Dwarf Fortress, unsuccessfully

I got back from work this evening at about 7ish, decided I couldn’t deal with socialness at the pub, and so fired up Ikariam, a web-based Civ-type game, where I am playing on Eta. I’m currently saving up for a new palace so I can build a new colony, which is going to require 50,000 bits of wood. So I set some more of my colonists to slave away in the newly upgraded lumber mill on my capital’s island and shut it down so they could get on with it, I’ll check it in the morning.

In Lord of the Rings Online, my main character – an elf hunter – is saving up for a house (life immitates art), so I spent a little while battling around the outskirts of Bree towards the Shire, beating up the occasional bear and harvesting the Ash Branches, the latter of which I can sell at the auction house in blocks of 50 for about 200 silver or so. Or I could work them myself into bows and sell those, but they don’t sell as well. Nobody was around for the group quests I’m working on, so I headed out.

I’ve recently gotten interested in Dwarf Fortress again, due to a combination of Mr Cooke mentioning it and Mr Requiem documenting his latest game in a way that is making me laugh. Plus, they’ve started making Mac builds, which makes me happy. Anyway, having started a new fortress and relishing the wonder that is not having to build a whole sodding irrigation system for farming (new fortress is partially on clay) I am aware that I’m harvesting the last of the wagon that my dwarfs arrived in for wood to build their beds (Dwarfs will not sleep on rock beds. Pansy bastards). So, I send out a fair percentage of my workforce into the wider area to cut down as many trees as we can find.

I’ve read a lot recently about the tendancy towards violence in modern video games and, given the above, have to wonder how many dryads are now working in the mass media…

Coding Horror – The Angle Bracket Tax vs. ESF, now coming up to its sixth birthday with no revision.

Coming up on Aquarionics:

* LARP
* Dante 01
* GTA4 & XBoxes
* Pareidol
* Your Interface Sucks.

… as soon as I get around to writing this stuff.