Easily Pleased

I have been tinkering with some numbers and things for a possible game tweak, and I realised that what I really need for this is a 4-sided die or two - 2D4, in fact.

This caused me a little sinking feeling, since I have a few D4's, and they are the most user-hostile, unpleasant things to handle - they have sharp, jaggy corners and they absolutely refuse to roll in a satisfying manner.

It would be wonderful, I mused, if I could get some 8-sided dice marked 1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4 - they roll much better and are a lot more comfortable. I decided that if I could get some blank D8's (are they still D8's when blank?) I could mark them up myself. To my surprise I found an online shop that has blank D8's - good so far - but then I found that they also have 8-sided D4's! Hey!

Excellent (though that may be August's good break used up already). Anyway, I've ordered a couple - the firm is UK based, so the total hit on PayPal is about £3 - can't be bad. I realise that you may well have drawers full of the things, which  is why you are yawning, but I haven't seen them before - I had merely thought what a great idea it would be.

The online shop is new to me as well, but they look very impressive - worth a browse. Just the place to buy those weird dice you never realised you wanted. The Dice Shop - good name too, eh?

Hooptedoodle #184 – Donkey Award – Edinburgh Residents’ Parking

Righto – two things right up front:

(1) I lived in Edinburgh for nearly 30 years, though I rarely drive into the city these days. Outdated knowledge of a place is confusing – you have to accept that you are a stranger, and read the traffic signs carefully, as a stranger would.

(2) I have very little patience with the eternal chorus of whingeing on behalf of the poor, oppressed motorist; I take my share of the collective blame, but our environment and (especially) our cities are being steadily destroyed by the motor car – something has to change soon, though I’m not convinced the things which are done at present achieve much beyond producing short-term revenue for the authorities.

This week I drove my van into Edinburgh City Centre on two occasions. Parking is a nightmare, which is hardly a surprise, but I was struck by a strange anomaly [I should be more careful – these anomalies get everywhere]. Edinburgh is a bit unusual since a lot of the central areas are residential – i.e. people live there (like). During the working day it is evident that there are a lot of empty parking spaces, but they are all marked PERMIT HOLDERS ONLY, which means residents.

I am intrigued by this. A large (and expanding) area of the city contains apartments and blocks of flats which have no gardens or garaging, and parking on the street requires a permit from the City Council. The cost depends on the location, and also on the size and emission level of the vehicle. It will normally be hundreds of pounds for a year – a vehicle of 3 litres or over will cost about £450 for a year’s parking. Application for a second vehicle for the same household costs 125% of the normal rate. You get the idea.

This is a hefty outlay – what the residents get for this is not an earmarked space, but a notional share in a number of parking spaces which is deemed adequate for the street. You have no control over who parks outside your house, but the detailed permits should be clearly displayed in the vehicles, and – in theory – there should be enough spaces available somewhere around.

Ah, but...

The PERMIT HOLDERS ONLY regulation applies between 7am and 6:30pm Monday to Saturday, and not at all on a Sunday. If one of the permit holders drives away to work, only another permit holder for that street will be allowed to occupy the space he has vacated. This means that, in areas where most residents drive to work, there is a lot of unuseable parking space of this type during the day – as I saw on my visits.

It also means, since anyone can park in these spaces after 6:30pm (the regulations stop at that time), anyone arriving home from work after 6:30pm will find that his street is full of parked cars, which do not require a permit, and thus he should not expect to get a space. Many of the parked cars will belong to permit holders from other streets, who arrived home a little earlier to find that their own street was full.

Therefore an outlay of some hundreds of pounds can be expected to result in an empty, unused space being available somewhere near your house during time when you are likely to be at work, and no space at all during the evening when you get home. I’m sure I haven’t quite thought this through, but there is something counter-intuitive about this arrangement.

Presumably this parking permit deal exists in other parts of the world beyond Edinburgh?

Summer Prize Competition 2015 - Results

Well, I received some wonderful, well thought-out and often very entertaining entries. Out of a total of 19 entries, 7 identified the Amalfi area in Italy. Winner is Steve Curry, who produced a near-flawless answer:

Righto Foy, you bastard, this is driving me crazy. I've wasted three days on this puzzle already and if I don't send an entry I'll go mad picking at it.

Thanks to your clue in the follow-up post I believe I've got it:

The photo is taken from within the grounds of the Villa Cimbrone, looking down onto the town of Ravello, which is on the Amalfi Coast not far from Salerno, the target of Operation Avalanche.

The Villa Cimbrone is a mock pile built by the rather brilliant Ernest Beckett, 2nd Baron Grimthorpe, described by Michael Holroyd as 'a man of swiftly changing enthusiasms ... a dilettante, philanderer, gambler and opportunist. He changed his name, his career, his interests and his mistresses quite regularly.' I would love to have met him, but not to have lent him money!

No doubt among many other connections between Ravello and Whitby, the towns were both visited by Wilkie Collins, the author and great friend of Charles Dickens. He visited Ravello as a child with his father the painter William Collins during their two-year stay in Italy (and about which he wrote in a memoir). Dickens introduced Collins to Whitby, where he stayed in 1862 while working on his novel No Name.

More importantly, Whitby is a sister city of Porirua, New Zealand, where I was born (and which is also famous for being the site of New Zealand's first McDonald's restaurant).

I can sleep now.

PS I may have omitted the key fact that Ernest Beckett was the MP for Whitby between 1885 and 1905, during which time "his name was rarely mentioned in Hansard", suggesting that if he ever bothered to show up it was only to sleep off a hangover.

Very nice, Steve – if I ever used words like “awesome”, this would be the time to use them.

My photo is taken looking over the handrail of the last terrace at the Villa Cimbrone, Ravello.

Ravello is a remarkable town, it is about 1 km inland from the astonishing Amalfi Drive, along the Northern shore of the Gulf of Salerno, and is also about 350 metres above sea level, so the road to get up there is, shall we say, interesting. I have visited the place since then, but my photo was taken in 2000. We are looking straight down the gorge towards Atrani, where the road up to Ravello leaves the coast. Atrani, these days, is just the eastern end of the ancient town of Amalfi. The terraces and the twisting road are apparent – meeting the local bus on this road when driving a car is not recommended. I have, let it be said, walked down this same valley – I am delighted to say I came back up by bus.

Down at the edge of the sea you can see one of the old Martello-type towers which were built to watch for the approach of the Saracens, Turks, Greeks, Normans, Carthaginians, or whoever the enemy of the week was. This is the garden of Europe, my friends, and it has been open for pillage since the dawn of time.

As Steve has identified, the link with Whitby is Lord Grimthorpe.

Ernest, 2nd Baron Grimthorpe, sometime MP for Whitby

Ravello, of course, was also where DH Lawrence wrote much of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and where Wagner finished off the production details for Parsifal, but that’s all a bit cultured for this blog – I’ll leave that for other, more worthy poseurs.

Here's a picture taken 10 years later, looking the other way along the coast - with
the terrace of the Hotel Palumbo in the foreground, we are looking towards the
resorts of Minori and Maiori - Salerno and the invasion beaches are somewhere
away in the mist round the headland

Steve, if you can send me a comment with your postal address, I won’t publish it and I’ll get your parcel away to you forthwith.

The shortest entry came from Vance, who simply asked, "Is it a photo of Whitby?"

Among the “special mentions” are Jacko, who tells me that he visited the area a few years ago, in part to see the area where his grandfather was seriously wounded during WW2, and, most especially, Chris Grice, who got the place entirely wrong, and in support of this included a piece of what he dismisses as doggerel, but which by the standards of this blog is a very significant piece of high art:

“I’ve up and writ this story,” the Yorkshireman declared,

“’bout blood and bats and big black dogs. It’s sure to leave thee scared.

But I need a place to set it.” Bram Stoker then imparts.

“There’s no scary names in Yorkshire like they ‘ave in foreign parts.

I’ve wandered round the continent, ate foreign food and such,

but I found no inspiration ‘mongst the Belgians and the Dutch.

I even thought of Chateau Foy to set my tale of blood,

but the French said they pronounce it fwa, so that’s no bloody good!

At last I’m in Romania, atop a gret big ‘ill,

wi’ a castle that’s just perfect! In fact I think I will

use this very same location as the setting for me tome.

Pray tell to me, your countship, what t’name is of your ‘ome.”

“It’s Cetatea Poenari,” said the nobleman with pride.

“It has been mine for centuries, well, since my father died.”

The Yorkshireman, crestfallen, grunted, “Bugger, that’s a shame.

I’d never sell me novel if I used THAT for the name!

So perhaps I’m back to Whitby as the place to set my plot

but I shall ne’er forget thee and t’reception that I got

at thy castle on a mountain, wi’ a vista so spectacular.

I’ll even name t’book after thee, my dearest Count Vlad – what was your name again?”

*******

Thanks again to everyone who took part, including those who did not send an entry, but restricted their input to abusive/helpful comments. I had a lot of fun with this – I hope you found it interesting!

Hooptedoodle #183 - The Revenge of The Typing Pool

This morning I have nothing to offer but a brief rant. I shall make some token attempt to pick my words carefully, because it is a subject area where I have little intuitive feel for the expected degree of political correctness, and I fear that I may be guilty of providing insufficient balance in my views. I seek no comfort, and I offer no solutions – I wish merely to let off steam for a moment and then move blithely on, and let us hear no more about it.

When I was a young man, setting out on my professional career, I was required to be courageous and wise – sometimes beyond my years and experience. That in itself was a little stressful, but by far the most terrifying thing I used to have to do was to venture into The Typing Pool. In there, the smoke pollution and noise levels were very high, and the chatter was approximately a musical fifth above the pitch I was used to elsewhere. None of this in itself was too dangerous, but if you had ever caught even a hint of the conversation in there you would have rushed out screaming. If your brain was not actually destroyed on the spot you were still likely to run away to sign up for some silent order or other – preferably on a remote island.

The chatter was completely – and I do mean completely – without any import or redeeming merit. It was talk of shoes, and shampoo, and the trashiest of TV programmes, and endless, outrageous, poisonous gossip about anyone and everyone. I still shudder to think of it.

Well, the years pass, and one writes these things off to experience, and after a while I didn’t have to go in there any more. Rank does have its privileges. Eventually, technology changes actually meant that The Typing Pool was a thing of the past, and I began, in idle moments, to wonder:

(a) could it really have been as bad I remembered?

(b) whatever happened to the people who used to work in there? – what else could they possibly do? – were they all right?

I still ponder this occasionally, but as time passes I have become convinced that the people from The Typing Pool (or their direct descendants) are doing very nicely, thank you, and they now run the newspapers and the TV companies. It is now beginning to dawn on me that they have taken over my Internet Service Provider too.

My new-look email service from BT Internet now opens up with the glories of Yahoo News – there is no escape. If someone put a tabloid newspaper through my letterbox bearing the same trash I would chase them down the path with a garden hoe, but I am expected to grit my teeth and live with this as part of my everyday email presentation. I realise that BT (or Yahoo, or probably both) make advertising money from this garbage, and I’m sure they have some clever marketing people who know exactly how to optimise customer satisfaction and ad revenue, but it is also worth remembering that I do pay rather a lot of money for the service, and their choice of news and adverts does not sit well with me, given that our rural broadband speed is struggling to cope with the things we actually want.

Could you possibly have Schwartzheim’s Disease? – Doctors make shock discovery – that is a damned lie.

See intimate shots of Kate and William at Garden Party – no – give me a break.

This cute kitten was rescued from the Thames – it will probably die anyway.

Guide to 10 things your body language says about you – take our test – no – my body hasn’t said anything for years.

Watch the worst open-goal miss in the history of Egyptian league football – no.

Would you wear this £10 dress to Ascot? – no – bugger off.

See the 20 biggest dress mistakes from the BAFTAs! – no – bugger off.

Watch this video of a motorcyclist falling into a vat of glue – no – bugger off.

See this 50-year-old-woman who has discovered astonishing anti-wrinkle trick – no – bugger off.

And much, much more. You can’t fool me – it was long ago, but I have had glimpses of this level of sophistication and good taste before, in the distant past.

Just out of interest – is there an ISP out there with any class at all? I am very much afraid that mine is one of the better ones. No wonder I get depressed.

Jamie the Postie Is Doing a Good Job

Our friendly postie has been doing stout service in wet conditions once again. Yesterday he turned up with an excellent parcel of S-Range Minifigs Spaniards very kindly sent to me by Matt - all the way from New Zealand (no wonder Jamie looks tired). I knew these were coming, but was delighted to see their condition, and they are painted, and there are enough of the fabled SN1s figures here to produce an 1812 Spanish light infantry battalion with very little work. There are also some 1809-period grenadiers who may well be the start of the first battalion of Granaderos Provinciales, if I can raise some matching friends for them. Thanks again, Matt!

I've been doing well on the donations front of late - I also was recently sent a very nice stash of unpainted SN1s chaps by my mysterious painting friend, Goya, so the 1812 Spaniards are kept bubbling along. I have only very rarely met a free parcel of soldiers which I didn't like.

Jamie also brought me a slightly off-the-wall addition to my non-collection of buses. This is a Commer (Rootes Group, Chrysler...) minibus in the colours of Crosville - the destination is Ynys Station, which was on a now-defunct railway line running south from Menai, in North Wales, through Caernarfon to Afon Wen. The bus companies used to run minibuses like this in country areas which were too sparsely populated for a full coach service; the minibuses also took a role in handling post and parcels. I must say the model (by Oxford Diecast) looks absolutely tiny, but it is 1/76 - the normal HO model railway scale - the same scale as the double deckers I have already in the non-collection, so I guess minibuses must have been a lot smaller than buses. That's probably where they got the name from. [Duh.]

The number plate ending in a B dates this vehicle from around 1964 - any North Welsh readers remember these little chaps? The railway closed in 1964 (thank you, once again, Dr Beeching!), and Crosville provided a bus service to replace it, so the full-size original of this van must have been provided new for the start of that service. I imagine these little buses would operate as feeders for the main bus service - so this would be a local shuttle running passengers into Ynys to connect with the (bigger) Caernarfon/Menai run. Note that the vehicle has a raised roof to allow passengers to stand up. The sheep would not be allowed on the seats, I guess.

Original rail route-map of Menai to Afon Wen service

Lasalle - I'm Doing It Again...

Ever since it was published, I’ve strongly fancied having a serious shot at Sam Mustafa’s Lasalle Napoleonic game. I was enthusiastic about his earlier Grande Armée (and the incomplete Fast Play version of the same), though my enthusiasm extended only to borrowing ideas from these rules – I was rather put off by some of the activation and command procedures, which added a lot of labour for marginal benefit. The fact that I didn’t just adopt Grande Armée as my main Napoleonic rules for ever afterwards is not necessarily a criticism of the game – it was merely another in a long series of rule sets for which my complete devotion did not survive a full reading.

Where Mustafa did impress me especially, though, was in the commonsense department – the Grande Armée booklet contains a wealth of footnotes which explain the logic of how he produced a playable game from the chaos which was the reality of horse and musket warfare, and much of what he said turned on a few lightbulbs for me in rationalising game mechanisms. There is a discussion of routing troops, for example, which makes sense to me – I have, like everyone else, spent many hours of my life moving defeated units towards the rear in accurate 2D6-inch steps, or whatever. Mustafa says that routing troops are not actually anywhere – shepherding them to the rear like this is not realistic – routers are nowhere – they do not hold a formation, they are not identifiably in a particular position on the battlefield. Good – I like that. That seems to me like commonsense.

Lasalle got a fair amount of advance publicity, and looked very promising. I was a little put off by the hefty cost of buying the official book from the USA, but managed to get a cheaper secondhand copy from eBay in the UK. It looked very good. At the time I got it I did not have the time to get properly involved in it – I was in the process of applying Commands and Colors to my Napoleonic games. It did seem to me that Lasalle would give a useful complementary set of rules, to cover smaller, more tactical actions. When I originally read it through, of course, I considered whether it would be a simple tweak to change it to fit a hex grid (no, of course not - idiot), and I had a few concerns about basing and unit sizes, but it still looked very promising, and I still do have the intention to give it a good try-out when the time is right. I also gave myself a slap and told myself firmly that when the time came I should set out with the objective of adopting the game as tested and published, not some mutant version which I cobbled together myself, based on prejudices and things I once used to do as a boy.

Recently I got the book down off the shelf, considering whether now was the time, and for the last few evenings it has been my bedtime reading. I also got myself a little notebook and a fresh pencil, to record “thoughts and issues” - areas of the rules which gave me concerns, or where I thought I might have problems getting my existing armies to work without re-basing them.

I wrote, very carefully, right at the top of the page, “DO NOT ALTER THE GAME UNLESS YOU HAVE TO”. I know myself only too well, I think.

The “issues” come in two broad groups. Group 1 consists of things related to base sizes, unit dimensions, the balance of the game – I am very keen that any fixes I have to put in here do not distort the way the game plays. Thus, for example, the game works comfortably with my infantry battalions of 4 bases, each of 6 men in two rows, and works pretty well with my cavalry basing – no problems there. Artillery is not such a good fit – I use 2-gun-model batteries, and Mustafa has one model equals two cannons, which would give 4-model batteries for the French. I worked out that I can tweak some of the numbers in Lasalle so that my 2-gun batteries behave the same as the 4-model Lasalle ones (and I have to admit to a certain dislike of the look-of-the-thing idea of 4 guns in a battery in a game where a battalion is only two dozen men, so – as long as it doesn’t spoil the game – a tweak to handle 2-gun batteries seems acceptable).

One of the notes in this first group is, in fact, based on a personal niggle, but it doesn’t alter the game, so I kept it in Group 1. Lasalle uses measurements in “base-widths”, or BWs. This is good for making the rules read sensibly for a variety of scale implementations, but the advantage is entirely to the benefit of the authors – to the user who has fixed on a single scale, the permanent use of the generic BW terminology is something of a pain. In fact my BW is 50mm, or 2 inches, so it makes more sense to me to simply double all measurements, and refer to the distances in inches. I refuse, point blank, to go on talking about BWs simply because they suited the author and simplified the publishing task. It also means I can use a ruler I bought in a shop rather than some home-brewed device.

There are a few more things like this, and they are going down in the jotter in Group 1. Things which are not stoppers – things where I simply have to tweak the game a little to get it to work as intended with my own armies. Dr Mustafa would be all in favour of Group 1, I’m sure.

Group 2 gets a bit more edgy – this is getting into bits of the game which I don’t like very much, to be blunt about it. Yes – I know, I know – I should just accept the whole game as is because it works like that, and it is what the originators developed, with all their wisdom and experience. Despite myself, I find that I am questioning things – cheeky beggar. I am all in favour of the mechanisms for handling skirmishers – there is an element of abstraction in there which comes pretty much from Grande Armée – anyone who likes placing individual skirmishers behind bushes etc will not like this section of Lasalle at all, but I do – as Mustafa points out, the abstraction avoids the game getting bogged down in what was a minority activity, beneath the attention of the generals, and in any case what real skirmishers did is not at all like what you are doing with your riflemen in the bushes, so it’s a fair cop. Good. Then I find with amazement that moving units – changing formation and front, for example – is complicated and, well, fiddly, and not very abstracted at all. When I see a diagram showing how I am to measure the outside circumference of a wheeling manoeuvre, and how to calculate the movement allowance in rough terrain, for example, I find that I have written two notes under Group 2 in the jotter – “manoeuvre – fiddly” and “George Jeffrey lives!”, and at this point Dr Mustafa would not be so happy.

And so it goes on – my notes say:

Discipline Tests – fiddly

Army Morale – fiddly

Rules for whether or not in cover – fiddly

Rules for crossing obstacles - fiddly

Rules for flank/rear – fiddly

At that point I stopped and put the book down. This isn’t going well. This is what happens each time I read rules with a view to using them – Group 2 becomes a big obstacle. I really don’t want to teach myself a game of which 50% is the famous and well-received Lasalle, created by the highly respected Sam Mustafa, and 50% is a hotch-potch of gluings and transplants inserted by the madman Foy. The chances of such a game working well are negligible, and it would potentially be unfair to the original and a waste of my time.

It isn’t a problem – I can slap myself again and go about this in a more businesslike manner, or I can promise I will come back to it when I’m more positively disposed. What really grates is that I find myself in the same position I have been in so often before. I got to about this point with Lasalle a year ago and shelved it, and I wouldn’t like to guess how many such episodes I’ve had with Shako, Napoleon’s Battles, Empire and so many others over the years. No matter – I’ll come back to it.

I still intend to have a proper go at Blücher, too, and though my track record shouldn’t really give me a lot of optimism, you would think, I suspect that (as was the case for Commands & Colors: Napoleonics) the game scale and the concept are sufficiently different from what I’ve done before to give a better chance of my keeping an open mind. I hope so, anyway.