grimthorpe

Gene-X adventures

2009-12-17T21:36:04Z

As mentioned in my last post, I'm now playing in an RPG group.

We're playing Mutants & Masterminds, a Superhero game based on the d20 system.

My character, Joe Bardley, has lots of psychic powers, as well as being able to fly.

The background to the world is that several years ago everyone blacked out at the same time. When they awoke some people started to find that they had special abilities that they didn't have before. There are rumours that anyone who shows that they can do stuff are being taken away by mysterious black cars.

The first week the characters didn't know each other. We had all received scholarships to an exclusive school based in Scotland, where after a bit of messing around we all got summoned to the headmistresses study, which is where we finally all met up.

Since the headmistress wasn't around the super-brain decided to hack her computer, and found the instructions for getting down to the secret underground lair.

When we finally made it into the lair it turned out that we had been invited to the school by the headmistresses dead sister (the previous headmistress), who's essence / spirit / memories had been captured in a computer, and was able to create stuff in the lair in a holodeck kind of way.

She gave us special watches and told us our mission was to find other mutants like ourselves and bring them back to the school to save them from the sinister forces.

A depressing point of view

2009-12-17T21:24:41Z

I know hardly anyone bothers to read this, but I need an outlet of my thoughts.

About 2 months ago I started to realise that I was suffering really badly with depression. It kind of coincided with the anniversary of Humblehope's death, but its been brewing for several years now.

So I'm now on happy pills, been referred to counselling, and trying to cope with life. Most mornings I'm fine, but around 2-3pm I start to get shaky. On the occasions that I've ignored the initial signs I've been really bad to the point that I've driven home feeling rather unsafe.

Anyway, the main point of this outpouring is that I realise that I'm lonely, feel trapped at home, and have no motivation to do anything that could occupy my spare time. Recently there hasn't been any drive to work on the UglyMUG code, and although I have ideas for projects I seem to get bogged down in over-analysing small details of implementations.

As a partial remedy to all of this was to find a group of people with similar gaming interests as me.

I tried a local Magic group, but realised that to play Magic at the moment means spending lots of money on new cards, which is kind of pointless because they come up with a new mechanic for summoning monsters with each new release. It just ends up in spending more and more money to keep up.

I've now joined an RPG group based in Milton Keynes. I've been going there for a few weeks now, and things look as if I'm being happily accepted - certainly the GM was nice enough to let me join his group despite him being over-subscribed with players.

Almost a year and I still miss him

2009-10-21T12:20:45Z

It has been almost a year since Humblehope died.
It is already over a year since I last talked to him.

And I'm still beating myself up about not trying more actively to get in contact with him in those last 9 days.

Gone, but definitely not forgotten.

Train fairs?

2009-09-08T16:54:33Z

For reasons beyond explanation quickly I have to catch the train home tonight.

So I thought I'd check when they were, and how much it would cost.

£5.00 Off-Peak, or £4.90 'Any Time'.

Off-peak tickets can only be used (as the name implies) at off-peak times, and are generally restrictive.

Any Time tickets can be used on any train going in the right direction, allow you to get off at any station between your start and end stations and then back on again, and in general are rather flexible.

So why are the more restrictive tickets more expensive? Can they not see that it is stupid to do this?

It was all good fun in the end...

2009-04-22T10:22:25Z

Sorry about the ramble, but several people asked me where I was last week. This is the story.

About 6 months ago I got a caravan for free off FreeCycle.

Since it was being given away rather than being sold, it meant that there were a few problems with it, but nothing disastrous.
After me not wanting to use it whilst it was extremely cold and wet, we finally got round to a trial weekend about a month ago, which didn't go amazingly well. But that might have been because it was a very cold, windy and wet weekend.

This was all good experience - I managed to get the internal electrics working off battery power and external hookup, got the water pump sorted, forgot the tin opener (but only discovered that after we'd bought all the food in tins).

All this was preparation for the main event - a LARP weekend in Exeter just after Easter. We'd decided to turn it into a week-long holiday with the kids, turning up at the LARP site on the Thursday.

And of course that is where things started to go wrong.

* Numberplate: couldn't find the one that we'd had made a couple of years ago for towing trailers. Couldn't find the V5 for the car. Eventually found that the tax renewal form would do.
* Tyre: needed to get one tyre replaced. Didn't try to get it done until Easter weekend. Eventually got it replaced on Tuesday afternoon.
* Going down the A1(M) at 60mph, the gas canister cover decided to spring up.
* Told the SatNav we were a van instead of a fast car, and realised that we'd just have time to get to the caravan site if there weren't any delays.
* Got to St. Albans, filled up at the cheap petrol station by J21A of M25. Noticed water dripping from the radiator. Chucked in some RadWeld and hoped it would stick.
* Pulled out of petrol station onto roundabout, only to be stuck in a queue of traffic. After a couple of minutes a police car tried to pull round the roundabout (now completely blocked). Turns out that a car had overturned on the next roundabout, and they were closing the road. Fortunately I knew the backrounds around there (I grew up there!), and made it to the next junction.
* SatNav now says we'll be 30 minutes late for the deadline of getting to the site.
* Got on the M25. Then M4. Then M5. Everything was going too well, and we'd even made up time on the SatNav! (Ok, I was doing 65mph!)
* Half way down the M5 decided to stop at the services to get food and let the dog out for a walk. Discovered that the Jockey wheel that I had replaced a couple of days earlier was now destroyed as it had been dragging on the ground. Turns out that I hadn't fitted it high enough. Managed to get it in better shape.
* End of the M5, SatNav says its going to take 30 minutes to drive 10 miles. Fortunately by this time we'd made up 20 minutes on the previous time, and I didn't believe it was going to take that long.
* Followed the SatNav. True to form it lead us to the middle of a field. Phoned the caravan site and they said it was a couple of minutes away.
* Got to the caravan site at 7.50pm - 10 minutes to spare.
* Got everything set up quite quickly. Even the broken jockey wheel didn't cause us problems.

Had a relatively relaxed stay at the caravan site - it was a bit overcast, and rained overnight, but nothing major. Stayed for 2 nights. Packed everything away, it all fitted back in, and we went on to the LARP site.

Had a slight problem on the way - we realised that the spare gas cannister was actually empty. So we tried to get a refill, and discovered that Julia's card wasn't working. Turns out that a cheque she'd put into her account had bounced, and the other cheque she'd posted to someone had been paid out earlier than expected.

Now the LARP site. Its a scout camp, not designed for caravans. Plus we were asked to set up as far away from the buildings as possible in the car park. Not a major problem, as we were the first there (with all the fun of working out what the number we'd been given actually unlocked), the jockey wheel still didn't cause us grief when positioning the caravan, but the car park was on a slight slope.

I tried to level the caravan. The part of the car park we were on was actually grassy, so the first problem was how to stop the feet from digging into the ground. I managed to sort out some lumps of wood and chipboard.

Then I lowered the rear leg on the lowest part of the slope. It was going OK, nearly got the caravan level then 'clunk'. The bolt now turned really easily and the foot refused to move. I'd snapped the bolt in half!
Fortunately the broken side was holding fine, so I thought I'd just leave it alone and get some heavy LARPers to counter-balance the caravan when taking it down.

The event went well - it was the most fun I've had at a LARP event for a long time.

I used the car jack to raise the caravan off its broken leg, and then discovered that the broken bit (that the leg was completely supported on) wasn't held on to anything. Had it shifted slightly the whole thing would have collapsed!.
The last remaining problem was then to hold the broken leg up for the journey home, which was easily done with some rope.

Everything else went really easily, and we even got home by 1am!

Deep and meaningful?

2008-10-30T15:11:23Z

(from UglyMUG)

[Reality has been created from XX.XX.XX.XX]

who Reality:

Reality is a new arrival on UglyMUG.

Thats just too profound to contemplate properly.

Do you remember when???

2008-02-18T22:30:47Z

For a while now I've been trying to work out how to get UglyMUG to be more popular, or at least be a bit more active. We've been losing players and its coming to the point that nothing will be said in the publicly available areas (ie the pub) for hours on end.

So as I was wandering around the net looking for interesting stuff to do, I came across the Wikipedia 'MU* Servers' category, which was missing us. Since we claim to be one of the oldest MU*s in the UK, I thought we'd be worth at least a mention. Now of course Wikipedia requires references to back up such claims, so I thought I'd try to hunt it down.

I came across some interesting stuff, including Larnen's History of Elephant MUD, which makes reference to stuff I'd forgotten about. However thats not good enough, because its a vague reference to 1993.

So then I thought I'd google for 'uglymug spec0', and through a bit of messing around with URLs eventually came across this: Mudlist Vol.2 Number 5, dated 31st January 1992, UglyMUG's first available reference in a mudlist.

Anyway, since I've found this stuff I'd like to get together a brief timeline of critical events in UglyMUG's life.

From memory, we have:

1991: UglyMUG starts on spec0.ee.man.ac.uk (also known as snow_white)
November '91: Grimthorpe is created after ReaperMan asks me for help.
92: UglyMUG is moved to a new home (A sparcstation of some kind, probably IPC)
93: UglyMUG moves again to an HP machine, with the horrors of HP-UX!
94: UglyMUG moves again to 'wyrm', a Sparc IPC.
(Some time in the wilderness)
wyrm dies, Joel gives us free machine hosting, we have a few changes of hardware, Joel then asks for the space back and we go virtual to our current home.

Waking up to a power cut...

2007-05-30T09:08:33Z

This morning I woke up. I didn't feel tired (which is unusual), it seemed a suitable time, but I had no idea what the time was because the bedside clock was off.

First thought: power cut.
Second thought: Why would there be a power cut now? Perhaps a fuse had gone. Since I have an ancient power supply in my house (the lights dim when I turn the shower on), this isn't as unlikely as you may think.

So I checked everywhere in the house - no power.

Just in case it was the main fuse I checked that as well. Nothing.

So how do I find out who to call? Fortunately my mobile phone was working, and I located the emergency phone line for power cuts in my area. I phoned it, and the really awful recorded message told me what I already knew: There was a power cut. It also told me when it happened: At the same time that I woke up.

Getting old...

2007-03-27T14:41:40Z

I looked in the mirror a couple of days ago, and realised that my hair was going grey. Now don't get me wrong here - I've had the odd grey hair, but this was different. There were lots of them. Well, more than before. Still, at least I haven't suffered from a receeding hairline yet.

The other thing I've noticed is that I double-take time spans. For example talking to my eldest son about when I first started playing with computers. Its about 30 years ago. That truly is frightening (and for those of you who do know or could guess at how old I am that is true, I had extremely early access to this modern technology, including dial-up access to a network).

Stupid salesmen!

2007-03-13T15:31:38Z

Why is it that salesmen never check what they're going to demonstrate to important customers until minutes beforehand?

I admit that part of the problem they encountered was my fault (and I worked out how to fix it for them as well), but it is very frustrating when the software has been in place for over a month without any changes.

Changing the uglymug code

2007-02-26T13:23:19Z

Over the last few days I've added some features to the uglymug code.
The thing is, is it really worth it any more?
Does anyone care about changes (other than the one person who has asked for them)? Does it make uglymug a better place? Are we ever going to use this stuff?

I'm tempted to give up on my latest changes (improving the lua script support), because I can't see anyone wanting to use it. Our most prolific builders are happy (well, comfortable) with the current language, and although I'd like a decent language to code in the game, I don't have the time or the ideas to do anything.

First post!

2006-09-12T10:59:34Z

Well, I guess the time has come to start a livejournal.

Its peer pressure mainly. Every now and then I think 'wouldn't it be nice to share X with the world', followed a couple of seconds later by 'no, that's completely dull or irrelevant to most of the world'.

But when you're trying to keep up to date with friends on-line, it is hard to avoid their blogs, mainly because they keep referring to each others' entries elsewhere!