RANDOM THOUGHTS #43
Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.
1. One of the problems I have in writing for Jean's approval is that I use a lot of commas. When I write, I think in terms of speaking aloud, and can actually hear myself reading the thing to an audience at Origins. Thus, I use commas when I take a breath, or for a "half a pause" which there is no punctuation for. (A dash is, of course, used for a dramatic pause in the spoken text, sort of a -- wait for it -- punchline.) Jean has never figured out that is what I am doing, and I don't really think she cares. She just follows the Rules of Punctuation that date from the Avignon exile of the papacy, or perhaps from Pope Peter I.
2. Jean does most of her corrections by phone, with Petrick or me listening to the speaker phone as she tells us "right hand column, fourth paragraph, third line, comma after 'photon' should not be there." I have a tendency to argue with her (sometimes in jest, other time for real) but I do what she says 99% of the time. It took her a while to figure out that when I ended the argument with "move on" that I had actually done what she said to do. (She thought, for months, that I had refused her orders to make the change. Only when she checked the printed pages did she realize that I did make the change, but that I just didn't want to discuss it any more.)
3. I buy canned cat food for my cats. They lick the gravy and leave the chunks of mystery meat. Maybe cat food companies should market cans of gravy?
4. Your best chance to get your name published in a product is to write a Federation Commander scenario using a tug or LTT, and get it to me as soon as you can. In Federation Commander, the only pods are cargo pods.
5. The residents of the city we know as Troy actually referred to their city as Willos.
6. Somebody asked me when Captain's Log #38 would be uploaded to e23. I don't know. Technically, we have no plans in place to upload any issues beyond #16 (or maybe #18) to e23, at least not anytime soon. Right now, I have to get beyond Origins before I can even think about it.
7. People have asked me when C3A will be uploaded to e23. We decided to do this about June 1st on the theory that nobody would be able to get the PDF faster than they could buy a hard copy in a retail store. Keeping the retailers (who see PDFs as cannibalizing their sales) happy is critical. We're still studying the issue of sequencing the releases of such things. Will a given product be put on e23 before, after, or a long time after the hard copy? No decision has been made on an overall policy, and it will probably be product line by product line, if not product by product. We did upload GURPS Federation before the print edition was done, but that was a special case on several levels. For one thing, SJG uploads GURPS stuff early, and GURPS players tend to expect it to be uploaded two months before the hard copy. The plan was to use that as an experiment and see how it affected sales. Sales of GURPS Federation were far below expectations, but that could just as easily be the overall market. (Sales are down 50-80% for every RPG company in the industry.) Remember that decisions and policies for any given product line do not necessarily define the decisions and policies for other product lines. We uploaded the Starmada stuff because Starmada had a policy of doing that long before Starmada became a part of the SFU.
8. I had never seen the movie TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE until the other night on Tivo. I found it excessively dirty but politically very clever. Even Petrick (who found the movie painful) agreed with me that Kim Jong-il stole the movie.
9. The "second story" for Captain's Log #43 is one I wrote about some Klingon gunboats assigned to conduct an infantry investigation of a planet that might have some Kzintis on it. (No one knew if the Kzintis were a few stranded colonists, some castaways from an earlier battle, or a clandestine Kzinti base behind Klingon lines.) As some asked when I mentioned it, this is NOT a good mission for gunboats. The story includes some "infantry tactics decisions" that are just crazy, but were obviously done by people who are not well versed in doing such things. The story doesn't really make any point of saying "The did this and it was stupid" but anyone who has carried a rifle while wearing a funny-colored shirt will recognize the mistakes. Posting the overwatch where the manual says to (without reading the part that assumes that the overwatch element will have weapons which were not assigned to the landing force), bumbling attempts to get troops lined up for the attack, sending the backup company to search a second area while the search company is still searching the primary area, the slowness of the operation, the sloppy formations, it's all part of "how this does not work." The story would have been condemned as just wrong had these navy guys conducted a perfect infantry operation without having the training for it.
1. One of the problems I have in writing for Jean's approval is that I use a lot of commas. When I write, I think in terms of speaking aloud, and can actually hear myself reading the thing to an audience at Origins. Thus, I use commas when I take a breath, or for a "half a pause" which there is no punctuation for. (A dash is, of course, used for a dramatic pause in the spoken text, sort of a -- wait for it -- punchline.) Jean has never figured out that is what I am doing, and I don't really think she cares. She just follows the Rules of Punctuation that date from the Avignon exile of the papacy, or perhaps from Pope Peter I.
2. Jean does most of her corrections by phone, with Petrick or me listening to the speaker phone as she tells us "right hand column, fourth paragraph, third line, comma after 'photon' should not be there." I have a tendency to argue with her (sometimes in jest, other time for real) but I do what she says 99% of the time. It took her a while to figure out that when I ended the argument with "move on" that I had actually done what she said to do. (She thought, for months, that I had refused her orders to make the change. Only when she checked the printed pages did she realize that I did make the change, but that I just didn't want to discuss it any more.)
3. I buy canned cat food for my cats. They lick the gravy and leave the chunks of mystery meat. Maybe cat food companies should market cans of gravy?
4. Your best chance to get your name published in a product is to write a Federation Commander scenario using a tug or LTT, and get it to me as soon as you can. In Federation Commander, the only pods are cargo pods.
5. The residents of the city we know as Troy actually referred to their city as Willos.
6. Somebody asked me when Captain's Log #38 would be uploaded to e23. I don't know. Technically, we have no plans in place to upload any issues beyond #16 (or maybe #18) to e23, at least not anytime soon. Right now, I have to get beyond Origins before I can even think about it.
7. People have asked me when C3A will be uploaded to e23. We decided to do this about June 1st on the theory that nobody would be able to get the PDF faster than they could buy a hard copy in a retail store. Keeping the retailers (who see PDFs as cannibalizing their sales) happy is critical. We're still studying the issue of sequencing the releases of such things. Will a given product be put on e23 before, after, or a long time after the hard copy? No decision has been made on an overall policy, and it will probably be product line by product line, if not product by product. We did upload GURPS Federation before the print edition was done, but that was a special case on several levels. For one thing, SJG uploads GURPS stuff early, and GURPS players tend to expect it to be uploaded two months before the hard copy. The plan was to use that as an experiment and see how it affected sales. Sales of GURPS Federation were far below expectations, but that could just as easily be the overall market. (Sales are down 50-80% for every RPG company in the industry.) Remember that decisions and policies for any given product line do not necessarily define the decisions and policies for other product lines. We uploaded the Starmada stuff because Starmada had a policy of doing that long before Starmada became a part of the SFU.
8. I had never seen the movie TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE until the other night on Tivo. I found it excessively dirty but politically very clever. Even Petrick (who found the movie painful) agreed with me that Kim Jong-il stole the movie.
9. The "second story" for Captain's Log #43 is one I wrote about some Klingon gunboats assigned to conduct an infantry investigation of a planet that might have some Kzintis on it. (No one knew if the Kzintis were a few stranded colonists, some castaways from an earlier battle, or a clandestine Kzinti base behind Klingon lines.) As some asked when I mentioned it, this is NOT a good mission for gunboats. The story includes some "infantry tactics decisions" that are just crazy, but were obviously done by people who are not well versed in doing such things. The story doesn't really make any point of saying "The did this and it was stupid" but anyone who has carried a rifle while wearing a funny-colored shirt will recognize the mistakes. Posting the overwatch where the manual says to (without reading the part that assumes that the overwatch element will have weapons which were not assigned to the landing force), bumbling attempts to get troops lined up for the attack, sending the backup company to search a second area while the search company is still searching the primary area, the slowness of the operation, the sloppy formations, it's all part of "how this does not work." The story would have been condemned as just wrong had these navy guys conducted a perfect infantry operation without having the training for it.
posted by Federation Commander at 8:55 AM
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