The Green Goblin Blog

I'd just plodded through the BBC's "100 things we didn't know this time last year" on their website and found at position 100:

100. Musical instrument shops must pay an annual royalty to cover shoppers who perform a recognisable riff before they buy, thereby making a "public performance".

Fantastic! Instant recall of the "No Stairway to Heaven" regulation at the music store in Wayne's World.

This Blogging gets so much more easier every time I have a browse through the Settings - they seem to add some thing new every time. Now I can just ping off an email to Blogger.com and the Blog gets updated automagically. Huzzah!

I'm a big fan of AvantGo (mainly because they are free to use but also as their downloads have helped pass the time on some dull train journeys). I'm also a big fan of SmartPhones (mainly because they are free - when I get a loan phone from work - and also because they help pass the time ... you get the idea...)
	So I'm now the proud owner of an Orange SPV (the original PC20A running SmartPhone 2002) which I bought from work in a charity sale for a pittance. Being a tight-arse (as you no doubt noticed), I don't want to spend money surfing the net from my phone (it's using a severly malnourished Virgin PAYG SIM) so I was hoping to use AvantGo to top it up with content when connected to my PC so I can read it later when I'm bored.
It seems that the client for the SmartPhone has been "coming soon, next year" since November 2004 and it is - finally - only in Q1 2006 that a beta version is coming out. Can't wait!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/health/fightingfat/bodymass.pl

Your BMI result is: 32.10 You are in the range that is classified as obese and your health would greatly benefit from a life-long reduction in weight.

To get down to just plain "overweight" I need to grow to become 6 feet high. Are they crazy? OK, I could also lose a stone in weight. Hmmmmm.... Maybe growing another 3 inches taller isn't so crazy...

Låt mig berätta om Sverige / Enda landet där molnen intresserar / Storebror säger det är stället för dej

För mycket tid att tänka / För lite att göra
För mycket tid / För lite att göra
Jag är insnöad pa östfronten

Förändringen är på minimum / Hypokondrisk gravsten / Känslan för humor är förlorad nånstans

Cumulus numbus för dej

Förändringen är på minimum / Hypokondrisk gravsten / Storebror säger det är stället för dej

Jag är insnöad på östfronten

Labels: Sweden

Swedes, are they sex-crazed blondes as the porno film industry would have us believe (apparently) or instead teetotal assassins skilled in the art of poisoning their prey?

Take this innocent hotel room in Stockholm...

Notice the primitive models in the cases?

And it gets worse.

Hanging on the wall in a cosy Visby hotel was:

But nothing prepared me for this scene of wanton debauchery:

 

And the evidence for the opposing view (teetotal killers)? Check this scene
of horror:

Where's the bloody beer? Are they mad? A hard day at the customer site and I come back to some mineral water? It's enough to drive a man to drink. Maybe a snack until it's tea time... No luck there either:

Don't the staff check the rooms at all?

Labels: Stockholm, Sweden, Visby

It has been MANY a year since I ventured to London and Dragonmeet, once a highlight of my teenage RPG calendar along with GamesFair and GamesDay. As my time in the role-playing wilderness has been at an end for a while, I'm re-discovering all the delights of my youth.
Today I was queuing outside Kensington Town Hall with a bunch of other like-minded people - a good range of (mainly) blokes, usually overweight and wearing gamer/heavy metal T-shirts. My kind of people!

After paying to get in, the first step is to fight your way to the table with the forms where you sign on to games - Call of Cthulhu for me (run by the Phoenix Games Club) which took a fair chunk of the day (10:30am-2pm). Matt Nixon ran "Cheap Seats" where "The Marquis de la Mort invites you to a performance of The Bazaar of the Bizarre - a fine show filled with such wonderment and whimsy that you will never forget !!!" Good balance of sexs in the players - 3 male, 2 female and a male tranny :-) The start had a very visual environment - a small theatre in London where the exits on each floor disappeared to be replaced by chalk drawings on the walls of what should have been there. Of course, being a Cthulhu game, it started getting weird after that.

After a quick browse through the stalls I jumped into a Paranoia game run by Team8. John ran a classic game - all the components were there... nobody could, or would, trust each other; accusing fingers would be pointed in nanoseconds; the computer (who was our Friend, of course) was magnanimously unhelpful; players NEVER knew what would happen next. Hours of fun. Here are the PostIts that we passed to the GM. John's favourite (as mentioned on their forum) was "Just look at me. Smile and say No." I distinctly remember that occurring during the game and having NO idea what it meant.
The plot was that were taking a group of young citizens on a tour of a nuclear power plant with a purge reprogramed nanny bot. Thankfully, although we got through several troubleshooter clones, not one young citizen was injured and they were all returned in time for bed. In the photo I'm in the beige top; John the pony-tailed GM is helpfully labelled; the most devious player is wearing the glasses in the middle - note how he is scanning the players instead of watching the GM. :-)
When the game eventually finished, the convention was starting to run down and traders were starting to pack up. On a whim I picked up "Races of Stone" as I wanted the statistics for the Giant Crossbow (what an indulgence but at least it wasn't full price). I was looking forward to the Charity Auction but still had time to kill. Amongst the near-empty tables was Thud! (Discworld boardgame) being demonstrated by Mongoose Publishing. I'd received this as a present last Christmas, I think, from Sue - we'd tried one game and were slightly disenchanted but then neither of us had played before. This time I was able to play under the watchful eye of someone who knew what they were doing and things went much better.
I enjoyed the Charity Auction although I didn't win anything. There were a couple of reasons for this: everybody bid higher than me, and I'm a tight bastard when it comes to stuff I don't really want and definitely don't need. A stirling effort raised £1,200, a princely sum considering the relatively small number of people. Apparantly Irish auctions are MUCH better - no doubt the bidders are much more pissed on Guiness than we were! Charities benefiting included Alström Syndrome UK (£600).
I did meet up with someone I knew (a bit) from WAY back in the mists of time, Sound and Fury fanzine editor-as-was, James Wallis who was the auctioneer. It made me proud that, 20-ish years on, James was still in the business and now director of Hogshead Publishing, showing that it is perfectly possible to make a career out of a hobby you love. Good luck to him, and may his taste in T-shirts never diminish.

The convention over, I went on a stroll to find a pub to while away a quite moment. Centre of London - "no trouble". I didn't want one of the touristy ones on Kensington High Street so randomly went off down Wrights Lane which was basically across the road from the Hall. Half a mile gets me to the Devonshire Arms - nice pub, out of the way but still busy (was a Saturday night so no surprise). A couple of pints and then home for the night.

Labels: Dragonmeet