Happy New Year, Everybody!

As 2012 finally, painfully, draws to a close, I thought I'd drop this on you all, to mark the transition.

For some of us, 2012 has been a delightful, surprising, joyous, amazing year. But for a huge majority, this year has been one of pain, fear and joylessness, persecuted by a government we set up to protect us but which turned out to have been infiltrated and suborned by the corrupt, the venal, the evil, the stupid, the moronic and the blunt, the brutish and the cruel.

Let's hope 2013 is the year we ring time on them all. There are two comets coming this year - one at the beginning, and a huge one sun-grazing at the end, with luck. If you were superstitious, you could hope that these comets presage the deaths of princes - or the overthrow of corrupt governments whose time has come and long gone, and who now need to be put down permanently as the mad dogs they all are.

Here's to 2013. Hope it's the day we get to apply some antiseptic to the stinking, suppurating, festering corruption that passes for power. Let's lance some septic boils in this coming year.

13 Must See Stargazing Events for 2013

From this post:-
13 Must See Stargazing Events for 2013
 — Listed In Chronological Order

1) January 21 — Very Close Moon/Jupiter Conjunction

A waxing gibbous moon (78% illuminated) will pass within less than a degree to the south of Jupiter high in the evening sky. Your closed fist held out at arms length covers 10 degrees. These two wont get that close again until 2026.

2) February 2-23 — Best Evening View of Mercury

The planet Mercury will be far enough away from the glare of the Sun to be visible in the Western sky after sunset. It will be at its brightest on the 16th and dim quickly afterwards. On the 8th it will skim by the much dimmer planet Mars by about 0.4 degrees.

3) March 10-24 — Comet PANSTARRS at its best

First discovered in 2011, this comet should be coming back around for about 2 weeks. It will be visible low in the northwest sky after sunset. Here are some sources predicting what the comets may look like in the sky; 1, 2

4) April 25 — Partial Lunar Eclipse

A very minor, partial lunar eclipse (not visible in North America) where only about 2 percent of the moon’s diameter will be inside the dark shadow of the Earth.

5) May 9 — Annular Eclipse of the Sun (“Ring of Fire” Eclipse)

It will be visible in Northern Australia and parts of Papua New Guinea but mostly within the Pacific Ocean. See all the solar eclipse paths for 2001-2020 here.

6) May 24-30 — Dance of the Planets

Mercury, Venus and Jupiter will seemingly dance between each other in the twilight sky just after sunset as they will change their positions from one evening to the next. Venus will be the brightest of all, six times brighter than Jupiter.

7) June 23 — Biggest Full Moon of 2013

 It will be the biggest full moon because the moon will be the closest to the Earth at this time making it a ‘supermoon’ and the tides will be affected as well creating exceptionally high and low tides for the next few days.

8) August 12 — Perseid Meteor Shower

 One of the best and most reliable meteor showers of the year producing upwards of 90 meteors per hour provided the sky is dark. This year the moon won’t be in the way as much as it will set during the evening leaving the rest of the night dark. Here is a useful dark-sky finder tool.

9) October 18 — Penumbral Eclipse of the Moon

Visible mostly in Asia, Europe and Africa, at this time the 76% of the moon will be covered by the penumbral shadow of the Earth.

10) November 3 — Hybrid Eclipse of the Sun

A Hybrid Eclipse meaning, along its path, the eclipse will turn from Annular to Total and in this case most of the path will appear to be Total as there will be a slight ring of sunlight visible near the beginning of the track. This one will begin in the Atlantic (near the East Coast of the U.S.) and travel through Africa. See the path here. The greatest eclipse (with 100 seconds of totality) will appear in Liberia, near the West Coast of Africa.

11) Mid-November through December — Comet ISON

The second comet this year, ISON, could potentially be visible in broad daylight as it reaches its closest point to the Sun. It will reach that point on November 28 and it is close enough to the Sun to be categorized as a ‘Sungrazer’. Afterwards it will travel towards Earth (passing by within 40 million miles) a month later.

12) All of December — Dazzling Venus

The brightest planet of them all will shine a few hours after sundown in the Southwestern sky and for about 1.5 hours approaching New Years Eve. Around December 5th, a crescent moon will pass above the planet and the next night Venus will be at its brightest and wont be again until 2021.

13) December 13-14 — Geminid Meteor Shower

This is another great (if not the best) annual meteor shower. This year put on a show at about 120 meteors per hour and in 2013 it won’t be much different so expect another fantastic show. However, the moon - as it is a few days before full phase - will be in the way for most of the night obscuring some of the fainter meteors. You might have to stay up in the early morning hours (4am) to catch the all the meteors it has to offer. If you missed 2012’s Geminid Meteor Shower, here are some great photo-sets; 1, 2, 3

Deaths In 2012, Part 2: July - December

The second half of this year will go down as the year Death went into overdrive.

July 1        Alan G. Poindexter, 50, American NASA astronaut, jet ski accident

July 3        Andy Griffith, 86, American actor

July 4        Eric Sykes, 89, British comedy writer (The Goon Show) and actor

July 16        Stephen Covey, 79, American writer (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)

July 17        Morgan Paull, 67, American actor (Blade Runner)

July 20        Sir Alastair Burnet, 84, British broadcaster (guess he got his knighthood)

July 21        Angharad Rees, 68, Welsh actress (Poldark)

July 23        Sally Ride, 61, American physicist and astronaut, first American woman in space

July 24        Chad Everett, 75, American actor (Murder, She Wrote, Diagnosis: Murder etc)

July 26        Mary Tamm, 62, English actress (Doctor Who)

July 27        Geoffrey Hughes, 68, English actor (Coronation Street, Keeping Up Appearances)

July 30        Maeve Binchy, 72, Irish novelist, columnist and public speaker

July 30        Jonathan Hardy, 71, New Zealand actor (Farscape), voice of Dominar Rygel XVI

July 31        Gore Vidal, 86, American playwright, novelist, political commentator

August 6    Sir Bernard Lovell, 98, British astronomer, builder of Jodrell Bank

August 9    Mel Stuart, 83, American film director (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)

August 10    Carlo Rambaldi, special effects artist (Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial)

August 11    Sid Waddell, 72, British darts commentator

August 12    Joe Kubert, 85, Polish-born American comic book artist

August 15    Harry Harrison (Make Room! Make Room!, The Stainless Steel Rat)

August 16    William Windom, 88, actor (Murder She Wrote, Star Trek)

August 18    Scott McKenzie, 73, American singer ("San Francisco")

August 19    Tony Scott, 68, British film director (Top Gun, Unstoppable) and producer (Numb3rs)

August 20    Phyllis Diller, 95, American comedienne and actress

August 23    Jerry Nelson, 78, American puppeteer (The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock)

August 25    Neil Armstrong, 82, American astronaut, first person to walk on the Moon

August 31    Max Bygraves, 89, British singer, variety performer, and TV game show host

September 1    Hal David, 91, American lyricist ("Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head")

September 3    Michael Clarke Duncan, 54, American actor (The Green Mile, Armageddon, Daredevil)

September 3    Sun Myung Moon, Moonie cult leader

September 6    Terry Nutkins, 66, British TV presenter and naturalist

September 12    Derek Jameson, 82, British journalist and broadcaster

September 23    Winrich Kolbe, German-born American television director and producer (Star Trek)

September 25    Andy Williams, 84, American singer ("Moon River") and entertainer

September 27    Herbert Lom, British actor (The Pink Panther, Spartacus, Gambit, The Ladykillers)

September 28    Michael O'Hare, 60, American actor (Babylon 5)

September 30    Turhan Bey, 90, Austrian-born American actor (also appeare in Babylon 5)

October 14    John Clive, 79, English actor (A Clockwork Orange, The Italian Job, Yellow Submarine)

October 18    Sylvia Kristel, 60, Dutch actress (Emmanuelle), model

November 5    Stalking Cat, 54, American body modifier

November 6    Clive Dunn, 92, British actor (Dad's Army) and singer ("Grandad")

November 9    Bill Tarmey, 71, British actor (Coronation Street)

November 23    Larry Hagman, 81, American actor (Dallas, I Dream of Jeannie)

December 9    Sir Patrick Moore, 89, British astronomer and broadcaster (The Sky at Night)

December 11    Ravi Shankar, 92, Indian musician

December 22    Mariam Amash, 124 (claimed), supercentenarian, claimant to title, oldest living person

December 24    Jack Klugman, 90, American actor (Quincy, M.E., The Odd Couple, 12 Angry Men)

December 26    Gerry Anderson, (Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons)

December 26    Fontella Bass, 72, American singer ("Rescue Me")

December 27    Harry Carey, Jr., 91, American actor (Gremlins)

December 27    Jesco von Puttkamer, 79, German-born American aerospace engineer and NASA manager

December 27    Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr., 78, American general, "Stormin' Norman"

December 30    Mike Hopkins, 53, New Zealand sound editor (LoTR, The Two Towers)

If anyone famous dies on December 31, I'll be sure to note it down here before New Years'.

It has been a bloody fucking year. So many people known and loved, who've gone past the Great Beyond.

Notable Deaths in 2012, Part 1: January - June

January 6    Bob Holness

January 12    Reginald Hill, 75, British crime writer (Dalziel and Pascoe)

January 20    Etta James, 73, blues singer ("At Last"), leukemia

February 3    Sam Youd, 89, British science fiction author, aka John Christopher (The Tripods)

February 9    Adam Adamowicz, video game concept artist (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 3)

February 11    Whitney Houston

February 22    Frank Carson, Irish comedian

February 28    Hal Roach, 84, Irish comedian

February 29    Dennis Chinnery, actor (Doctor Who, The Champions etc)

February 29    Davy Jones, singer, The Monkees

February 29    Violet Wood, 112, British supercentenarian, oldest person in the UK

March 1        Phillip R. Allen, 72, actor (Capt. Esteban in Star Trek III)

March 5        Philip Madoc, 77, Welsh actor (Doctor Who, Lifeforce, dozens of shows)

March 10    Moebius, aka Jean Giraud

March 16    M. A. R. Barker, 83, fantasy novelist, and role-playing game creator, who inspired Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson to create D&D and start the whole tabletop RPG phenomenon

March 20    Noboru Ishiguro, 73, Japanese animator and animation director (Space Battleship Yamato, Macross)

March 24    Jocky Wilson, 62, Scottish darts player

March 27    Garry Walberg, 90, actor (Quincy, M.E., The Odd Couple, in both of which he worked alongside Jack Klugman)

April 18    Dick Clark, 82, television host and producer

April 19    Greg Ham, 58, Australian musician (Men at Work)

April 29    Joel Goldsmith, 54, film and television composer (Stargate), son of Jerry Goldsmith

April 29    Roland Moreno, 66, French inventor, creator of the smart card

April 30    George Murdock, 81, actor

May 4        Adam Yauch, 47, musician (Beastie Boys)

May 8        Maurice Sendak, 83, author and illustrator (Where the Wild Things Are)

May 9        Vidal Sassoon, 84, British hairstylist, anti-fascist

May 11        Tony DeZuniga, 79, Filipino comic book artist and co-creator of Jonah Hex

May 17        Donna Summer, 63, American singer

May 18        Peter Jones, 49, British drummer (Crowded House)

May 18        Alan Oakley, 85, British designer of Raleigh Chopper bicycle

May 20        Robin Gibb, 62, British singer and songwriter (Bee Gees)

May 22        John Moores, Jr., Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University (1994–1999)

May 24        Lee Rich, television executive and producer (The Waltons, Dallas), co-founder of Lorimar Television

June 5        Ray Bradbury

June 5        Caroline John (Liz Shaw, Doctor Who)

June 17        Rodney King

June 18        Victor Spinetti, Welsh comic actor (A Hard Day's Night, Help!, Magical Mystery Tour)

June 19        Richard Lynch, 72, American actor (Star Trek: TNG, Murder, She Wrote, BSG)

June 24        Lonesome George, 100+, Pinta Island tortoise endling

June 25        Norman Felton, British-born American television producer (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.)

Out Of Left Field Gaming Thoughts

The things I come up with when I dream ...

Traveller:-

- Way stations between the stars. 250 million ton stationary outposts carved out of planetoids, tended by tankers displacing 2 million tons, which scoop fuel from gas giants in the nearest system. The way stations are usually surrounded by fleets of sublight craft, including protective squadrons of system defence boats and monitors. The tankers themselves are mostly fuel storage - half of their two million ton mass is fuel containment, with 200,000 tons of cargo storage, mostly bulk freight and mail.

- 20 ton passenger modules for cargo bays. Any large enough ship can set aside cargo space for these sealed modules. 3 staterooms, 3 tons of life support capable of supporting extended travel times up to six months, and five tons of cargo. Capacity, six people in double occupancy, paying middle passage. Usually, two tons of the cargo capacity is set aside for luxuries, so the passengers don't get bored. Passengers could, of course, get out and stretch their legs and see the rest of the ship, but these modules are designed so that passengers don't have to.

More specialised kinds of cargo module:-
...  Cold Sleep Module: used for colony transports, medical rescue and penal transports, these modules hold 30 cold sleep modules, life support to keep them running up to six months at a time, and monitoring equipment. No cargo space.

... Lab Module: instead of staterooms, each module houses three laboratories, which can be customised for various purposes.

... Medical Module: Two 4-ton sickbays, one intensive care sickbay module, eight cold sleep berths and internal life support. The rest of the space is medical supplies.

Legend:-

- The characters earn the respect of a sorcerer who enchants special armour for them all.

The armour is Enamelled (4AP, 2 ENC per hit location, +10% to Influence tests, but also +10% for onlookers to spot the characters (adds to their Perception rolls to defeat any Stealth rolls the characters make).

And now here's the fun part.

... The armour pieces are each enchanted to provide a total of 8 AP of protection, 4 of which are magical. That's more protection than plate or Brigandine armour.

... Each suit is built specifically for its wearer; a process requiring many fittings during downtime.

... They have been enchanted with the following:- Abjure Fatigue, Damage Enhancement (unarmed attacks), Damage Resistance (8 points), Enhance Str +4, Enhance End +4, Enhance Dex +4, Enhance Cha +4, Haste.

... Each of the sorcery matrices carries the following conditions:- continuous, only for designated wearer, only when whole suit worn.

... The sorcerer gets the requisite Magic Points from the adventurers, using a combination of various Tap spells (Tap Str, Tap End, Tap Pow) and Restoration. The sorcerer has a continuous Enhance POW matrix to double his already prodigious POW rating, enabling him to store massive amounts of Magic Points to dedicate as part of the enchantments.

As I said, I have weird dreams.

Merry Christmas!

Now, Traveller

Let's first set the stage. I indulge in writing for roleplaying games. Fan supplements, adventures, modules. All of it compatible with the games, and all of it entirely unofficial.

Also, all of it entirely my weird take on the game universes. And weird it is, too, because among other things, I love writing about psionics in the SF adventure game Traveller. You know - telepathy, clairvoyance and so on. Mind Over Matter and the like.

So I've been defending psionics on the Mongoose Traveller forum against some people whose capacity for imagination I shall not impugn here, save to say that they only seem to want to approach Traveller with some sort of Puritanical mindset; that's the best I can describe it. Their arguments all sound the same - "Psionics is hogwash!" which, on the surface, sounds reasonable to say. However, the undercurrent is "Faster than light travel - I can accept that. Gravity deckplates on Starships - I can accept that. Humanoid sentient aliens - I can accept that. Telepathy, however, is too much like black magic, and I can't accept the Devil in my stories."

I have to say that Traveller doesn't seem to allow a lot of sex, of any sort, or women, or transgendered individuals, or gays, or bisexuality, in the milieux either, and all of the complainers to date have been men. Every. Last. One of them. Cockblocking the psi like tweed-jacketed pipe-smoking grey-haired maths professors, "Oh, come come, you know that the world doesn't work that way."

Of course it doesn't, but I don't see you hopping a shuttle on Sunday to blast off to visit your auntie on the Jump transfer point off Io, drop by for a spot of Sunday tiffin and back again for Monday either.

I've written a choking great load of pro-psi stuff within the science fiction genre, and it keeps getting dismissed by the critics - which proves the old adage, "Some minds rest best asleep. Stir not those who would not waken otherwise." Some of it I have reproduced here, but this is my current response.

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I teach Physics for a living. I still wouldn't dismiss Traveller as not being science fiction though. There is a lot of good stuff in there that, certainly for kids, gets people to think in scientific terms a lot more than some other material I be can't bothered to mention. You're mileage will vary as to how much real science you want to bring into the game, but the avenues are there for you to do that, with the caveat that it is a fictional universe it is representing.
You could teach kids about mathematics, logic and science in Legend, given the right scenario. Even in a rampant fantasy, cause always precedes effect - even if the connection, the means, is outlandish, such as a spell or telekinesis. The cause is weird, but it's still a cause - someone did something, and something else happened as a direct result.

In Traveller, for example, the reason why there are staterooms rather than acceleration couches on board Starships is because deckplates, and they work because magic. It's fiction. But it's consistent. The workings are pure technobabble - you might rip open one of those deckplates and find that they contain nothing but flour sacks stuffed with Cavorite.

A man waves his hand upon a rooftop, and a King dies. Magic - or a perfectly mundane code signal sent to an assassin observing the man through high powered lenses? A young woman predicts that the crops will fail in the Autumn. Sorcery, or a solid understanding of local weather patterns and ecology, and the knowledge that the local farmers have not been rotating their crops and letting fields lie fallow as they are supposed to?

I've read fantasy stories where the character manages to solve a puzzle based entirely on the knowledge of how metals expand and contract with changes in temperature. He used science to reason how to release an iron metal pillar from the brass collar holding it, by cooling one so it would contract. He then used magic to reduce the temperature.

In another part of the same story, he summoned a demon from the netherworld, a tiny little mote of an imp, and set it a task to channel hot air out of one end of a tube, and icy air out of the other. The imp revealed that it had last been summoned to serve "a great wizard" called Maxwell.

And need I go into The Phantom Tollbooth, and its long, wonderful paean of praise for mathematics, as well as Lewis Carroll's legendary Alice fantasies?

The other day, one of my oldest friends told me that he roleplays World of Darkness stuff to get away from science. All his player characters are scientists.

The thing about Traveller is that while a lot of the correspondents immerse themselves in the setting and think that it's about the science, nobody's realised that the other half of the phrase "science fiction" has to have its due, too. There is a narrative flow to a Traveller adventure, things get done not through following some scientific principle but because drama.

Drama, the part that brings the game to life, follows its own rules, its own logic. It involves people - the players, the NPCs - and the story is about what the player characters do unto others and what those others do unto the player characters.

People. Not things. Not concepts. Traveller is not a scientific laboratory. It is a story about adventure; about people who, against all rationality, derelict their duties and head off to explore the universe and maybe seek their fortune. And against all rationality, the Referee has to ensure that they get what they want - all the happily ever afters the human imagination can deliver.

You might as well put full stops between the first three words of "Science Fiction Adventure In The Far Future," because inasmuch as Traveller focuses on science, those other two elements - fiction and adventure - have to have equal time on stage, too.

So stuff happens in Traveller that looks like nonsense to you. Fine. The universe of Traveller just did something it shouldn't. A lightning storm in space. A hole opening up into the past, or another dimension. A man waving his hand, and his enemy flies back against a wall, pinned there by a force he cannot see.

The fiction part, the part that seems to defy science, is stuff happening that should not be happening - but it does, so what are your characters going to do about it?

Or maybe it isn't defying science - it's using some principles of a science you are not currently aware of. The biggest part about suspending disbelief is the knowledge that you do not know everything there is to know - that nobody does, or even can, know everything there is. Suspension of disbelief, the essential component of getting into Traveller and into roleplaying games and science fiction as a whole, comes from indulging in that gap in your understanding; in wholeheartedly exercising the faculty for fabrication and fabulation to imagine how something can happen that doesn't seem to have any logic behind it ... but which nonetheless still has a cause.

A psionic phenomenon has to have had some psionic agency or mind behind it, whether present, past or future; and the laws of drama - like Chekhov's Gun - pretty much require that the Referee reveal the cause to the player characters during the course of the adventure, so even if you the player don't know how it happened, the player characters do, the psion does, and you the player can have your characters respond accordingly - such as pumping five rounds rapid into the man who slammed your team buddy against a wall with telekinesis.

The one thing that Referees have to do, in Traveller as in any other roleplaying game or work of fiction, is to keep it consistent. If someone uses telekinesis through a solid wall in one story, you know that it can be done - so if you encounter a locked room mystery in the next story you would have to show that there is no way that the murder could have been done via telekinesis through a solid wall like last time. If you encountered teleporters in one story, you have to show that the killer in the locked room mystery could not have used teleportation. Tough row to hoe, but that's the way it is.

You're thinking like real world scientists, and not letting go of your disbelief enough. The universe you and I live in is crazier than Traveller can ever be - if anything, psionics isn't crazy enough for this real world. But because it's consistent, it's a useful narrative tool in fiction, which is useful for Traveller because it adds an exotic element to your roleplaying adventure.

If you want adventure that is pure science and no "hogwash" ... book a visit to the Adler Planetarium or something, or go and watch Neil deGrasse Tyson or Mythbusters.

And let's not forget one other thing.

You don't play Traveller to teach people about science! If you're a scientist or an engineer, why do you think you'd want to drag the laboratory home with you and into your imagination? Roleplaying games are about adventure, nor learning. Don't expect the stuff I write about in Traveller to have to teach the players anything. I write stuff that will make their hearts pound against their sternums with excitement, if I pitch the adventure right and the Referee is half awake. When I write stuff for Traveller, I leave the agendas at home.

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I swear, they abhor psi not because of the lack of scientific proof - we have no proof that NASA will ever get their FTL drive working, and the existence of the Higgs boson may well prove that FTL really is impossible even with the Alcubierre drive - but because it's psi, and therefore it's black magic. Honestly, they're like Christians confronted with D&D. The psi frightens us. We banishes it.

When you sit down to play Traveller, you're there to have a good time - not to learn bloody science.

Honestly, I might as well have been writing about sex.