(Due notice: I'm reactivating this solely because I want somewhere to post random fandom thoughts, and LJ is still Russian.)

I just reread the Tiffany Aching books, and realised how strongly "I Shall Wear Midnight" was written to be the *last* Tiffany book. Sir Pterry absolutely did not expect to write another. He wraps up her entire emotional plotline and gives her a proper sendoff.

... and then he didn't die as soon as he expected, and wrote (most of) "The Shepherd's Crown". And that's good! And it's a shame it wasn't quite finished - the biggest gap is that we spend far less time actually in Tiffany's head than in her other books. But ultimately, it was an *extra* book - one he never expected to write at all.

(Same goes for "Snuff", by the way - I'm pretty sure "Raising Steam" was intended to be The End Of Discworld, and then... he was still going, so he gave us another wonderful Vimes book.)

"Alas," thought I, "I just need to complain, but I have nowhere I can do so."

Oh wait. Yes I do.

~

Last Monday, I strolled out at ten to 8 to put the children in the car. That gets them both to school at the right time, and then I can drive straight to work, get there about ten minutes early.

Only when I looked down, one of my tyres was completely flat and doing its best puddle impression. NOT good.

Cue the fastest tyre change I've ever pulled off (about 20 minutes, and that's with the dodgy wheel nut that I had to get a hammer to fit the spanner over). Spare fitted, bundle the kids in, and I STILL got them to school in time. Phew!

Luckily, there's a garage right by work, so I took the car round there and said, "Uh, tyre, flat." They took a look, pumped it back up, and told me it didn't seem to be leaking air, and could someone maybe have let it down? I went "errrrrr," because why would someone deflate /one/ of my tyres in my driveway at the end of a dead-end road? But I couldn't rule it out. No charge, I thanked them and went to work.

(Half an hour late, but thankfully my manager understood.)

That lunchtime, I swapped the tyres back and measured the pressure - fine. The following morning, measured it again, it was down from 31 to 29 PSI. But, y'know, it was cold, and pressure drops with temperature, so I wasn't convinced it was a real thing. It was fine all week, and over the weekend.

Cut to this morning. Stroll out, turn the car on, and... >>>Tyre Pressure Warning<<< Oh no. Take a look - yep, it's gone again.

This is fine. celebestel wasn't at work today, so I switched to her car and did the school run. Working from home, so I said I'd switch the wheel over at lunchtime.

I did not. I used her car to do the school pickups, then waved her off for her night shift saying yes, I'd do it right away.

Got all the stuff out. Jacked the car up. Looked for the locking wheel nut.

No locking wheel nut.

(If you're not familiar with these things: one of the five nuts holding my wheel on requires a special thing that fits in the spanner. Without it, you can't turn the nut. Even with pliers. I tried.)

I check the car, the house, the driveway. Nothing. I have a sudden sinking vision of leaving it by the side of the car when I put the wheel back on at work.

No need to panic, I've got a foot pump for exactly this situation. I'll pump it up, drive over to work - it's only five minutes away - pick up the nut which will no doubt be exactly where I left it. Nobody uses that part of the car park anyway.

Get the pump. Fit the pump. Pump the pump. Pressure stays at zero.

I have literally no options at this point. The five minute drive to work is an hour's walk, and it's already 8pm. The only thing I could do is wait until celebestel gets back at about 9 tomorrow, and take the kids in late in her car.

... or, I could phone my dad, who lives half an hour away. ^_^

Bless him, he drove down with a functioning foot pump, then drove me to work to look for the locking nut. Which WAS NOT THERE. We searched the entire car park - I even snuck in and looked on the reception desk in case someone had picked it up. Nothing. Did it go down the drain? Did it get eaten by a giant magpie? I have no idea. I doubt I ever will.

The one thing that went right is that Dad's foot pump worked. Tyre is currently inflated; I'll check the pressure in the morning, refill if necessary, then I guess I'm taking an unscheduled work-in-the-office day and taking it to the garage to say a) tyre go squish and b) pls to remove stupid pointless fancy nuts. If someone wants my wheels that badly, they can have the sharding things.

~

"I assume the garage can remove them without the locking nut. I assume it's not like, 'You have lost a £5 piece of metal; now your car must be scrapped." ~ me, borrowing trouble.

"Anyway, I don't believe in Caroc cards," he muttered. "All that stuff about it being the distilled wisdom of the universe is a load of rubbish."

The first card, smoke-yellowed and age-crinkled, was...

It should have been The Star. But instead of the familiar round disc with crude little rays, it had become a tiny red dot. The old woman muttered and scratched at the card with a fingernail, then looked sharply at Rincewind.

"Nothing to do with me," he said.

She turned up the Importance of Washing the Hands, the Eight of Octograms, the Dome of the Sky, the Pool of Night, the Four of Elephants, the Ace of Turtles, and - Rincewind had been expecting it - Death.

-Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

(Part of a not-quite-complete art project, but it just felt necessary to share this one now.)

On the southern limits of the Shire (Oxfordshire, specifically) lie the Berkshire Downs, part of the greater North Wessex Downs. It is stated in various sources that J.R.R. Tolkien visited this area - once on a hiking trip in 1912, and later with his family while working on either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings - and that it inspired the haunted Barrow Downs of LotR. This week, I got a chance to visit the area, and let me tell you, I am entirely convinced.


Image: Google Street View

The Downs are a world without a horizon. The landscape is all gently rolling hills, and other than the trees which stud them there's no indication of how far away any given green mound is. If it weren't for the road, it would be shockingly easy to become lost, wandering the hills until darkness took them.

Their way wound along the floor of the hollow, and round the green feet of a steep hill into another deeper and broader valley, and then over the shoulder of further hills, and down their long limbs, and up their smooth sides again, up on to new hill-tops and down into new valleys. There was no tree nor any visible water: it was a country of grass and short springy turf, silent except for the whisper of the air over the edges of the land, and high lonely cries of strange birds. - J.R.R. Tolkien, Fog on the Barrow-Downs

And not all the hills are natural. The seven barrows of, uh, Seven Barrows lie right alongside the road, and I'm certain I saw others crowning distant hills. I can imagine mist rolling between them, a silver carpet studded with green featureless mounds.

One thing Tolkien did not mention is the shocking suddenness with which the Downs fall away. From where we eventually parked, the south view was the gentle hills of the Downs; the north was flat countryside, stretching for more miles than I can count.

We turned out backs on that green country, heading up into the wild lands. Specifically, we took the ancient Ridgeway, following it down a shallow dip and back up the far side. A line of trees marked the roadway ahead of us, but our course took us beyond it: to the top of a shallow rise, where the Great Barrow waited.

Suddenly he saw, towering ominous before him and leaning slightly towards one another like the pillars of a headless door, two huge standing stones.. - J.R.R. Tolkien, Fog on the Barrow-Downs


Image: Own work

This is Wayland's Smithy, a burial mound dating back eight thousand years. At one time it was revered among the Saxons as the forge of the gods; later it was overgrown, a cave in the woods. But at all times it has been a place of power - tucked away on its hillside, like something out of another world.

And you can picture Tolkien coming up here with his children, and them playing around the 60 foot grassy mound. You can picture them clambering into the small chambers between the great leaning stones, and calling out "help, help, the monster has got us!". And then along comes Tolkien and peeks the head of a raggy Dutch doll over the stones: "Fear not - Tom Bombadil is here to rescue you!" You can see it, when you stand by the barrow.

When you leave the Barrow, the Middle-earth connections become if anything even stronger. Ahead of you, as you walk east along the ancient road of the Ridgeway, lies Uffington Castle - a great Iron Age hill-fort, with its entrance facing you: two great earthen banks, and a cut between them like a grand gateway.

Certainly the distances had now all become hazy and deceptive, but there could be no doubt that the Downs were coming to an end. A long valley lay below them winding away northwards, until it came to an opening between two steep shoulders. Beyond, there seemed to be no more hills. - J.R.R. Tolkien, Fog on the Barrow-Downs

And beyond that? Beyond that lies the Uffington White Horse, a chalk-carved figure of a galloping or rearing horse. A sign of a prancing pony, if you will, though there is no inn on the hilltop. Beyond that, on the very edge of the Downs, stands Dragon Hill - a flat-topped hill set apart from the rest of the uplands. It is said that Christopher Tolkien believed the area of White Horse Hill inspired Weathertop, and Dragon Hill certainly looks the part (even if it is a little small).


Image: Own work

The correlations aren't exact. Tolkien wasn't one to transpose our world directly into Middle-earth. But driving and walking through this ancient landscape, it's hard not to feel like one has at least one foot on the Barrow-Downs.

Murder mysteries are rubbish.

I don't mean the books or the TV shows, which are of the usual variable quality. Nor do I mean live-action shows, whether the actors interact with the audience or not. No, I'm referring to the ones where you get a box full of booklets, assign your friends and family to the roles, and act out the mystery yourself.

My mother owns a lot of these, from several different series, and they all fall into much the same pattern:

-Everyone reads a very stilted script. Mostly these are filled with utterly appalling puns on the theme of the game.

-There are optional characters (for when you have too many people) who are blatantly optional, with very few lines and totally out-there personalities. Weirdly, they're often religious personages; our last two had a Catholic priest, a medium, and a Buddhist(?) monk.

-You're directly told what probing questions you should ask, and what answers you should give to them. You're not given any other information, so if someone tries to dig deeper, you just hit them with 'I don't know'. We had 'Why did you steal the money?' at our last one, with the response being '... I was a bit short that month?'.

-There is a tape or video with a dodgy knock-off Poirot recapping what was just said.

-Everything hinges on some random bit of trivia, regardless of whether the person it implicates actually has a decent motive. One time, the only way to identify the murderer was a brief mention that she played polo.

-The murderer doesn't know they did it until the very end. In our last one, I found out I did it on the very last page, right as we were about to make our guesses. I'm still not clear on why I did it, or what made me look particularly suspicious.

I get that there's a need to cater for people who don't know what sort of questions to ask. I get that you want there to be lots of different guesses at the end. I get that not everyone has watched a dozen different crime/mystery TV shows and learnt exactly how this is supposed to work - but we kind of... have?

So - and I'm still not 100% sure how - I've wound up making custom murder mysteries for family gatherings. I've made four so far, all very different, and have refined the idea each time.

1 - The Pharaoh's Tomb - Ancient Egypt
&
2 - No Longer At This Address - Stamp Collecting

The first pair, nearly 10 years ago, were designed to be Lunchbox Mysteries: something you can do with three or four people over 15 minutes on your lunch break. Each player had a single sheet of paper, which mostly followed the pattern of the games we'd played: you have two rounds, prescribed questions and answers, and evidence you get to read out. You also had secrets, which you wanted to keep (including in one case You Are The Murderer).

One thing I did drop was the stilted scripts. Your sheet tells you who you are - you can introduce yourself from that, you don't need hand-holding.

I don't really know how well they worked - my parents did one of them when I wasn't there. After that, I dropped the idea for a good few years.

3 - Hogwarts: A Mystery - Harry Potter

I revived it last year, wanting to let my children take part in a murder mystery before we did an official one without them in the evening. Now I had to work out something for nine people, including myself. Creating something I had to work to solve proved... challenging.

I started with a theme, and drew on the Al-Salazar theory to create a coherent account of the Hogwarts founders as 10th century British wizards. Gryffindor is King's Wizard to Aethelred of Wessex, Hufflepuff is from the Welsh tribes, etc etc. This time I crafted the booklets into, well, booklets, with the traditional 'don't turn the page yet' rules. Once again, there was very little scripting - everyone playing knew enough about Harry Potter to slip easily into character (including the 6-year-old!).

In order to let myself play, three of the characters actually had variable booklets. I printed out three copies of the page that contained their secrets (the first page after the cover - I have no truck with hiding the murderer from themselves), and randomly selected one. That page also included their alibis, which meant I could tweak them accordingly so that the guilty party was the person without one.

It worked... okay. The three possible thieves all looked pretty much equally guilty, so people had to pay attention to precisely the right trivia to guess correctly. It was fun (I played the Sorting Hat; I had poems ^_^), but I could do better.

4 - Murder on the Gwernol Express - Victorian Wales

This murder mystery, played out this week, is the culmination of all my experience so far. Like the Lunchbox Mysteries, each player had only a single sheet of paper, with all their information visible from the start; I really prefer it that way, as it allows you to play things how you want to, not how the gamemaker wants. Like 'Hogwarts: A Mystery', I provided pieces of evidence as separate pages - but, like the Lunchbox Mysteries, everyone gets one. These ranged from the obscure (a photo of a miner's tools) to the overwhelming (a log of everyone's movements around the village).

For this game, I did away with scripts entirely. Each player had a description of their character, their day, and which of the other players they knew; a subject they like to talk about (usually, though not always, unrelated to anything, and just there for flavour) and a description of their evidence; and their secret, which they tried to greater or lesser degrees to keep secret.

I say 'they', because for this one I gave myself the role of the Inspector; it meant I could push the conversation along without having to resort to scripting. Players were allowed to do whatever they wanted with their evidence, though all of it - and all the secrets - came out by the end of the game.

In contrast to the Hogwarts mystery, almost everyone picked the murderer as, well, the murderer. The main culprit for this was the aforementioned log of events, which was passed around and repeatedly examined. I had considered saying evidence could be read out but not shown, which would probably have averted that issue, but decided against it to help out the children (7 and 9 years old). Apart from that, people seemed to focus very tightly on who had the opportunity to be the murderer; motive and means were mostly ignored (there was no actual evidence that the killer had the means to commit the murder).

Where Next?

There are clearly a few changes needed from the Victorian mystery, but I do feel it was an improvement over its predecessors, and its boxed inspirations. I'm buzzing with ideas for new settings - anything from medieval sieges to Doctor Who to parodies of detective TV (all of it) - and expect to try out new game mechanics, too. One idea I've had is that you're given a character to try and get other people to suspect, and a second character to divert suspicion from; I'm sure there will be other concepts to play with. (We also play a lot of One Night Werewolf; you can sort of tell.) Another is to give players one or more secret goals to accomplish, while at the same time finding the murderer. I'd love to find a way to let myself play again, too, though that may wind up being impossible.

Ultimately? It's fun, it's probably going to keep being fun, it's a heck of a lot better than the prepackaged ones, and I'll keep making the things as long as people keep playing them. :)

There is a certain irony in the fact that one of the last major things I did before moving jobs was to argue vehemently against moving away from using Safety Data Sheet management software... but in my new job, I'm spending much of my time crafting Safety Data Sheets in MS Word.

The situation is completely different, of course, but still; my reward for preventing one company doing something stupid is to move to a company which has always done it that way? Eesh.

Today is the last day. Today, we finally reach the end of this long process: Britain is leaving the EU. Brexit is accomplished. The struggle is over.

Ha! Only kidding. Brexit has never been a single day: Brexit is the period which starts on that day. So far, despite the political anguish, we haven't seen too many actual consequences of the decision to Leave, but believe me, there are consequences, and they are heading our way.

Very little is actually expected to change today: the current situation is that we have a Withdrawal Agreement which will keep the UK effectively part of the EU, but without representation in the EU, until the end of the year (or until a final deal is made). This is happening because the government has been utterly unable to agree a deal on what the final relationship between us and the EU should look like, and I have no expectation that they will manage to do so in the next 11 months. So a Crash-and-Burn ("No-Deal") Brexit is still not only possible, but likely at that time.

So what does that mean for the people on the ground? Oh, there'll be all sorts of stuff about Single Markets and Free Movement of People, but for the actual British people, what are the consequences going to be?

( The consequences )

On January 14th, the Amazon 'Lord of the Rings' show revealed its first? main? fifteen cast members. In the absence of any other information, I thought it'd be fun to guess who (or mostly what) they might be playing.

My initial assumptions, before looking at any of the actors: the series will take place in the Second Age, centring on the island of Numenor and its contacts with Middle-earth proper. Given the title, it's likely the story will involve Sauron and the creation of the Rings - and given the nature of the media, I suspect that we'll see some very racially-homogeneous cultures. Specifically, I predict Numenoreans to be vaguely Mediterranean, Haradrim to be black, Elves to be as white as snow, and Dwarves to be... well, 'to look dwarvish', really. Someone will probably also be playing Sauron in pretty mode.

So with that aside, let's check out the cast.

( In order of... well, in order )

Some time ago, my daughter decided it would be fantastic if everyone had the same birthday (I think she just wanted presents on someone else's). That got me thinking: what would it actually be like if that happened? As I see it, there are three major effects:

( 1/ How does that happen, anyway? )

( 2/ What would that do to our medical systems? )

( 3/ What will this do to Christmas? )

Dear LJ/knockoff LJ:

For the first time in a very long time, I have found myself intentionally staying up to half 1 in the morning. The last time I did this regularly, it was because my girlfriend lived in the US and this was when I could talk to her.

We've been married for 11 years. This time, I'm stuck waiting for my parents to get through the traffic to bring my children back from their holiday.

The nore things change...