lategaming

Anaxippos removed his golden breastplate and greaves and started to unpack his kitbag. He opened the cap of the spiced oily lotion he had prepared and began kneading it into his tired limbs. Even from another building he could hear the raucous laughter of the men as they settled in for the night. Hesiod’s laugh echoed off the walls of the peaks as they relieved themselves and made crude comments about the womenfolk of the village. Soon they would be asleep, Hesiod with his leather cap reversed and pulled down over his eyes, Zakary curled up into a foetal position clutching his backpack. Del, fearful of the night, would be huddled close to his friend, Turtle, for warmth and comfort.

He arranged his pack as a pillow and stretched out on the cloth pallet which served as the smallest boundary between him and the smoothed rock floor. Countless generations had worn this floor smooth as they walked and sat and slept upon it and for a moment, Anaxippos felt he could hear the hustle and bustle of bygone generations before he slid into darkness.

He woke to hear the creak of the door. Silhouetted in the red light of the moon stood a young child clutching a crudely hewn wooden figurine. Anaxippos reached out to rise but felt his legs pinned. The child stepped forward and as fear gripped him, he summoned the spirit memory given to him by Sahlan back in Pavis. The tip of his spear began to glow with the light of Yelmalio and the child started.

The light of Yelmalio shone and dismissed the gruesome luminscence of the Lunar’s moon but Anaxippos saw the flesh of the child was squirming as if tentacles writhed beneath. The eyes, blackened sockets, struck him cold and then it spoke.

“Save us…”

Anaxippos woke alone. There was no child, the door was closed. But the tip of his spear glowed bright. He shivered and knew the chill he felt would not leave him until morning.

Meanwhile, not far away in the darkness, a ochre-stained baboon looked balefully at the peak and muttered to himself in Firespeech, “Light me….brothers”

Okay, I got this from Michele Neylon’s blog: It explains everything. XKCD link

The Internal Security Department manages all aspects of security aboard an Explorer. In a 24 hour period, a security officer is expected to juggle his duties between leisure time, passive duty and active duty.

While on Passive Duty, the security officer is on standby, expected to be available for duty quickly. They will constantly receive the latest security feeds from the onboard Experts but are not expected to act on them unless there is an Emergency or Disruptive Element.

Active Duty, requires the security officer to walk the halls as well as actively monitor and respond to any security issues which may arise.

Emergencies will bring all of the security officers on board to Active Duty and require that all staff attend their stations or remain in their quarters for the duration unless instructed otherwise. Coordination of the movements of security personnel is managed by the Security Expert in accordance with Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).

Disruptive Elements also bring all security officers to Active Duty. After that, the coordination is down to the Executive Staff as all Experts on board will be deployed to contain the Element. Due to the nature of Disruptive Elements, there can be no SOP, but in the absence of guidance, Emergency SOP would be followed.

An Explorer craft typically carries 30 security personnel, consisting of 25 Security Officers and 5 support staff. There are commonly five 5-man Security teams (known as “Fives”) in operation though the deployment will depend on the preferences of the Security Expert.

The Support Staff consists of three Systems Security Officers and two Tactical Staff.

The Systems Security Officers are charged with maintaining the security of internal systems rather than the physical security of the halls, rooms and crawlspaces.

Tactical Staff are usually seasoned veterans, they take care of the training and wellbeing of the Fives acting in an NCO role answerable only to the Security Expert and Command Executive.

The role of Security Officer is physically demanding as it is required that they be in peak condition in order to be competitive with the standards set by Explorer-class crews (who in their own roles are expected to be in tip-top shape). They are expected to be the lead in defensive actions, combat-rescue and investigations. Security Officers are all well-trained, combat-hardened and are picked from the cream of all Explorer applicants. They are given all the best training in evaluation skills because they will likely be the individuals to decide whether a situation is friendly, hostile or disruptive.

Standard uniform is no different to the fatigues of other staff save for departmental colours and insignia. Manufactured from Active Cloth, the only differences with Security Officers are and additional suite of electronics woven into the systems which permit the SO to communicate with all designated staff and, to a degree, direct them. Active Cloth is a matrix of nanotubes and active electronics woken throughout the cloth, powered by the movement of the human body as well as able to obtain power from solar radiation. If all staff are wearing Active Cloth then all will be escalated to the same threat level as the SO which will automatically engage health monitors, adaptive camouflage, electronic countermeasures, temperature regulation and threat detection. The SO will feed all of this information to the Security Expert or, if out of contact, will make educated decisions based on the information.

Security Officers are armed with Brilliant weapons - homing, intelligent, stabilised, self-powered projectiles. These are aimed and fired and post-firing, controlled using a HUD display projected on the retina of the SO. An individual Brilliant projectile may be used as an armour-piercing slug, an anti-personnel flechette or an explosive depending on the deployment. While the use of Brilliant projectiles is limited in alien environments, the chances of friendly fire are down to an infinitesimally small percentage.

Explorer vessels do not commonly carry higher armament than this for individuals. The Explorer mission is not a military mission and higher level threats are expected to be noticed before they get close to personnel, permitting the Explorer vessel armament to take it to pieces first.

Though they are trained in all aspects of security, including boarding actions - they are dedicated to the security and integrity of Explorer vessels which is a massive undertaking with such a small staff and this dedication, along with Human Unity’s non-aggression policies mean they do not publicise or promote boarding actions except as a last resort.

I think it has everything to do with being a parent.

I’ve never been a fan of Godzilla movies but I do like action/horror/disaster movies as a whole. Cloverfield is excellently executed and it left my head filled with “what would I do” thoughts (which all good horror/disaster movies do). As a parent you worry about more than just yourself and that’s what M. Night Shyamalan touched on with Signs. When you’re a parent, it’s more than just you in the horror.

The presentation of camcorder footage worked for Blair Witch and, to be honest, works even better for Cloverfield though the cameraman obviously has some sort of disorder because most people would ditch the camera early on. Even if recording it from the point of view of seeing “how it all went down”.

I can’t tell you much about the content itself without introducing too many spoilers. The shaky handheld footage does get irritating at times when you just want to get a bloody good look at something.

To be honest, if you’re old enough, go and see this movie. I don’t know if it needs to be seen in a cinema at all - I’m pretty hacked off with the bullshit about the “cinema experience”. Watching cinema in Northern Ireland consists of listening to slightly muffled sound, watching a screen that proudly displays the human detritus of heavy petting sessions in the projection room and listening to the beeps of mobile phones, the rustling of packets, the slurping of smoothies, having to uproot yourself because some idiot can’t get to his seat “from the other side” and sitting in a seat that is solely designed to stop you falling asleep.

Despite all of that, Cloverfield is a great film. It makes me shiver in anticipation for J.J.Abrams version of Star Trek (now delayed for a Summer 2009 release) and look forward to a possible sequel to Cloverfield.

Interestingly, most people don’t stay to the end of the credits. They miss out.

From IMDB:

A genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between “Jumpers” and those who have sworn to kill them.

I enjoyed this movie. Hayden Christensen was pretty good though I think they could have kept Max Thieriot as the protagonist even though it might have made the film either more kiddie-friendly or perhaps more dark, who knows.

There were a lot of loose ends, lots of things that went unexplained - like how this is all a secret when there are 5 year olds teleporting around - Marvel went with the puberty thing because, let’s face it, teens undergoing puberty are already alienated from society.

One tiresome detail though was the war that has been raging for centuries. Of course, now Jumpers are the REAL reason for the Crusades, the witch hunts, the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto, the reason for concentration camps, Stalin’s purges, the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the Great Fire of London. I’m exaggerating here but if you ignore the “paladins” thing and just assume they’re just the next logical extension of HomeLand Security, things go a lot better.

The real “deal killer” for me was sadly Samuel L. Jackson. He’s gone the way of Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro and every other Hollywood actor who now completely believes his own hype. Apart from the ridiculous hair dye job, he’s a crazy insane preacher who uses a signature hunting knife to viscerally gut people. And this is a 12A? Load of bollocks really. They should have made more use of Diane Lane rather than a few cameo pieces. I think she’d make an excellent head honcho and an even better foil for our hero.

That said, deal-killer or not, it’s not a bad film. I think they have expended a lot of their juice in the first film and if it were me I’d already have Jumper 2 ready for casting.

I never thought I’d live to see the day when the BBC News would have the headline:

Okay, it’s not quite as glamourous as all that but it’s still cool.

This came in to the jabber channel from Aidan at an opportune moment. Religion survives in Frontier, writing about it now.

Jens Alfke pointed out The Loneliness Engine and also linked to his own We Had Black Boxes.

Great stuff.

When Patry Francis was first diagnosed with colon cancer, she didn’t want anyone to know. “I wanted to be able to have lunch with people and not have them wonder if I was going to drop dead on the spot,” says Francis, the 52-year-old author of The Liar’s Diary, a sexy whodunit about self-deception, murder and motherhood out today in paperback. Francis, who lives in Cape Cod with her husband of 25 years and is in close contact with her four adult children, found a different refuge for her own dark places: simplywait.blogspot.com.
…
Cohen is just one of about 300 writers - including Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, and Neil Gaiman, the scribe behind Stardust - who plan to promote The Liar’s Diary on their own blogs today online. Because Francis is unable to do a conventional book tour to promote the book, her new friends and fellow authors will be doing it for her online. While some will simply write about The Liar’s Diary and their friendship with Francis, others, such as Cohen, will also write about cancer, sickness and a healthy dose of publishing-world dish.

And here’s the link to the story.

This blog about strange maps is just fascinating.