Athenian Punk Rockers Meet 300!

Outside the city …

I am finally away from my Greek Island and the “five star” resort with no internet access, so I am able to resume blogging. Yesterday evening I arrived in Athens for a three day stay, and as is my wont in a new city, the first thing I did was go out for a wander. My hotel has a rooftop bar with a view direct to the acropolis, which is pretty amazing, and is on the temple slopes so it’s a short walk to the old town. Walking through the old town one can catch regular glimpses of the acropolis from the streets, and also experience the pleasures of a summer night in the city. The streets were heaving with people, all out to enjoy the evening air. All the restaurants in Greece seem to be open to the sky, and alfresco dining is the norm, so everywhere you look people are enjoying eating under the stars. I passed a Suleimanese punch-and-judy show, where the puppets are dressed in Persian-style pantaloons and curled hats (but still beating each other) and the horde of gathered children scream at the villain in Greek. I passed a concert being held in an old temple ruin, all lit up with red spotlights. Every square was full of people sitting chatting and drinking; the main square was absolutely heaving with young people in groups just enjoying the night air. The weather was dry and warm, the temperature perfect, the sky a million miles away and clear and the whole balmy evening cupped within the bowl of the distant mountains, with the Acropolis the gleaming jewel set in the middle of that frame, seen occasionally between buildings and lit up against the night sky.

I found a stylish open restaurant in the old town, that served excellent food and had a massively camp Swiss host. They serve a chicken cooked whole inside a loaf of bread and cut up on your plate for you, and an exquisite lemon-flavoured pumpkin soup garnished with little cthulhu-esque octopuslets. I didn’t have my camera with me so didn’t order the cockerel; I may return to experience this strangeness this evening. I have to say, the way Greek people use lemons in their cooking – and the predominance of citrus throughout their cuisine – is excellent and commendable.

After dinner I wandered a little more, enjoying the chaos and light-heartedness of the city. I found myself in the area just west of the Syntagma square, which is supposedy full of bars and night clubs, and in front of a rock bar called Six Dogs. They were hosting an American band called The Shrine, some sort of classic heavy rock outfit that I’ve never heard of, so in I went, for my first experience of Greek punk/metal fans.

What is on your playlist, Archilokos?

The band was average, I have to say, and somewhat hamstrung by the fact that their singer has exactly the same accent as the weird zoo-owner from the Mighty Boosh. They were a pacey, hard rocking classic metal outfit with a bit of skate-punk overtone, so pretty likeable overall. The crowd, however, were fascinating. First of all they were really lively and cheerful, bouncing around with way more energy than the band deserved, and managing to do spontaneous crowd-surfing efforts even though there were only about 50 of them. This meant that whenever one of their number wanted to go up, he had to get the others to lift him, and then a group of 10 or 15 fans would go charging around the room in a little chaotic loop, carrying the surfer aloft, and then drop him. It’s not quite lollapalooza, is it? But they were really into it. But the best thing about them was the way they looked so … classical.

I think every second rocker in the crowd was basically a classical Greek stereotype, come to life then covered in tattoos and stuffed into a pair of skate-punk shorts and a band t-shirt. They all had the broad shoulders and narrow waste of the classic Greek pottery or statues, and that particular style of Greek beard that you see in the classic pictures: the one that is cropped close to the skin along the jaw and near the ears, but extends to a block or point out from the chin, and merges in a perfect gradient with short-cropped hair. It works perfectly with the classical Greek profile of aquiline nose and strong jaw. The rockers also had the same classical hair style, that is neatly cropped at the back but then a little unruly or longer and forward-pointing near the front.

It was like moshing with the guys from 300, if they had bothered to put on t-shirts. It was one of those classic moments, like when a French waiter pulls a 110% expressive face, or a German man says very precisely about one of his most memorable experiences, “it was in general perfect” with German precision, or a Japanese person bows on the phone – one of those moments where the person you are talking to is subconsciously channelling a million years of cultural history and to the rest of the world they’re a stereotype of fantastic proportions, but to them it is so completely normal that they would never realize they were doing it, even if you could play them a video of the moment. So it was that these Greek rockers were moshing not to the tune of an ordinary Venice Beach band, but to a couple of thousand years of classical Greek history. The Pelopennese war through hardcore, or something. I think I will dub this style of Greek counter-culture “300-core.” I hope to see more of it as I wander this city of romance and history!

 

Rhodes, Beppu, Tourism and Decline

Yesterday I arrived in Rhodes, Greece on a two week work-related trip. Rhodes is a very nice spot, and Greece generally excellent, after a day here I can recommend it to anyone looking for a warm, pleasant and friendly place to spend a little time. And really, what could be a better way to spend two weeks of work time than on a Greek island? However, as soon as I arrived in Rhodes I was struck by a hint of something going wrong in Greece, something which I think may not be the fault of ordinary Greek people, and which maybe serves as a harbinger of all of Europe’s fate. I thought I’d blog on my first impressions of Greece, with perhaps a little added opinionating about how Greece’s economic problems are presented by the pro-austerity gang who are in the ascendant in America and Europe. I’ve only been here a day so nothing I say is even worth of elevation to the level of considered opinion; it’s just idle musings on my first impressions of one (very rural) part of Greece.

Before I came I had visions of the islands from Porco Rosso, and pretty much everything else I knew about Greece I got from Gerald Durrell and sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, so I think it’s safe to say that I was arriving here with a pretty blank slate as far as cultural expectations go. However, Greece has been in the news a bit recently, with its economic woes being seen as a barometer for the trouble spreading over all of Europe. So I was interested, given my limited knowledge of life in Greece, to see how the land of capricious gods compares with the scary stories and hype that are broadcast across the western print media.

The first thing that I have to say is that everyone I have met (except the scary tattooed guy on the plane) has been friendly and warm, and embarrassingly multilingual. The food is excellent and the weather perfect – the only noticeable drawback of May weather in Greece appears to be that it is bone dry, and I really don’t know where the water for the hotel pool is coming from – I have seen precious little evidence of any water that isn’t in the sea. And there is a lot of sea, cobalt blue and amazingly pure. But then, I am on an Island… and the sea wasn’t very kind to me. Within minutes of dipping my toe in, I was stung by something.

However, as soon as I arrived in Greece I noticed a kind of neglect and decay that I really wasn’t expecting from a European nation. I don’t think it’s new either, and I have a suspicion that what I see hereabouts has very little to do with the global financial crisis and its effects on Greece. I think it’s part of an older, deeper malaise that is moving through all of Europe and just happens to have affected Greece first. Amongst the countries I’m familiar with, I think it will hit Britain next (or already has). What I see in Greece makes me think of many of the things I see in Britain, only without the patina of aggressive British defensiveness, and with sunshine.

This decay was obvious at the airport, which is a kind of cute but crumbling 70s relic, with holes in the ceiling through which the wiring can be seen, those low and oppressive ceilings so common in 70s public architecture, and a barely functioning arrivals lounge – there is no passport control, but it hardly matters anyway because the doors for non-EU passport holders are broken and don’t open. Once you’re outside that and out into the sunshine, you’re greeted immediately by a site that is quite rare in most of the rest of Western Europe and certainly very rare in Japan or Australia: a horde of extremely old passenger cars. They’re tiny, dusty relics from before the era of pollution controls – 80s and early 90s vehicles mostly, and battered, obviously heavily used. The taxis are all new Mercedes, but ordinary passenger vehicles are often much older than I am used to seeing in Europe. The city bus is also very old and battered, the seats obviously replaced many times and the shell battered and scuffed.

The next thing I noticed, once in my taxi, was how overgrown and neglected the countryside looks. Thick, wild shrub and grasses that were obviously untended reached right up to the roads (which are also in quite bad shape), and there was rubbish everywhere. It doesn’t appear that any effort has been made to maintain the unused land near roads and public facilities, and it’s turned into a kind of wasteland. I don’t think this the Greek government, local city authorities, or residents intend to let the countryside go wild, and in a dry and fire-prone area like Greece it’s probably not a very good idea to allow wild shrub to encroach on roads to the extent that they do here. I think this is neglect, and this sense is only enhanced by the state of the buildings I saw on my journeys through Rhodes.

Rhodes is littered with abandoned, half-finished buildings, and also with the deserted shells of abandoned businesses – especially hotels. Many of these buildings are obviously in the early stages of construction, and obviously no one is coming back to them. Some appear to have been abandoned a long time ago, not as far as I can tell during Greece’s most recent economic problems. This reminded me of Beppu, which is also a town undergoing a collapse in tourism revenue, and also has abandoned hotels and pachinko parlours scattered across the urban landscape – as well as areas of overgrown landscape that should be (and probably once was) carefully tended. It’s as if the Greek municipal authorities don’t really care about the impression that their town gives when people first arrive, or don’t have the money to do anything about it, or both.

We hear much about the infamous Greek government’s “profligate” spending and taxing policies, but looking around Rhodes I don’t see much evidence that ordinary Greek tax-payers are getting much bang for their buck. Whatever municipal services Greece provides don’t seem to be showing up in the most obvious and immediate way – rubbish disposal and parks management. I suspect that there are many Greeks who observe the same thing, and wonder why they’re suddenly having to tighten their belts when they don’t get much in the way of visible public services to start with.

I think Rhodes has in common with Beppu a long-term collapse in its main industry – tourism. This isn’t a novel, post-GFC phenomenon, but is a long-term, sustained trend that isn’t going away and reflects a brutal reality for peripheral tourism towns in developed nations. These towns grew during the boom eras of population growth and tourism, before globalizaion, and in the period when the working class of the developed world had relative purchasing power and free time. These factors combined meant that it was easy for these towns to sustain a huge tourist industry, and areas like Beppu or Rhodes grew rapidly on tourist money. But after the purchasing power of the working and middle classes began to decline, and as Asia developed, I think these tourist towns began to run into trouble. They had to compete with Asian countries for tourists, but comparatively they aren’t a great deal cheaper – travelling to Beppu, for example, costs a Japanese worker only half as much as a trip to Thailand or Cambodia, but hotels cost more. I suspect the same is true for Europeans, who now have options in Eastern Europe (places like Latvia and Croatia) for short trips, and Asia for longer trips. In such a situation, former tourist towns have to either adapt and find new industries, or they will become fading remnants. Beppu may adapt or may fade, depending on the success of its new university; but Beppu has easy road and rail connections with population centres like Kokura and Fukuoka that have huge industrial bases and thriving economies. Rhodes is an island in a country that doesn’t have a large industrial base to start with. What is it going to do?

This is another example of how the GFC may be a symptom of a bigger economic shift, and of western nations’ inability to find a solution to that shift. Industry and economic growth is heading East, and with the development of the East huge sections of traditional western economic activity are being hollowed out. In response to this the west has tried to sustain its economic growth through bubbles, and each successive collapse has simply destroyed more jobs. Greece’s economic problems aren’t solely caused by the GFC, which is simply a symptom of the desperate measures western economic policy-makers have taken to try to deal with the loss of real economic power. The result of this long-term economic decline in Rhodes is a countryside festooned with abandoned, half-finished buildings and sad, empty hotels. The same phenomenon is hitting the UK now, but instead of too many buildings unfinished, the UK has too few buildings, and too many ordinary people up to their eyeballs in debt trying to keep hold of the home they have. They do have the empty businesses though, as whole towns lose their retail sectors and corporate lending dries up.

I’ve got no idea what western policy-makers should do to stave off this change. I don’t know if they can, but I think that “wait for Asia to collapse” is not a policy option, and neither is it wise to seek new and innovative ways to reinflate the housing bubble. I think that maybe they need to revitalize industry policy: pick things they’re good at and make them work. Spend taxpayer money on finding ways to make stuff again. Industry policy is what made Japan, Korea and Thailand successful, and the fruit of that policy can be seen in their theft of western business. But fighting off Asia is going to mean a return to deficit spending, an acceptance of government debt, and a recognition that the market doesn’t just pick winners: it strangles losers. And currently, Europe and the USA are looking like the losers. Rhodes is the sign of things to come, and I think the UK is next if they can’t begin to reflect on the underlying causes of the GFC, and the best way of coming to terms with the new world order.

 

In Praise of Excel

Recently a major economics paper was found to contain basic excel errors, among other problems, and an amusing storm of controversy is growing around the paper. The controversy arises because the paper was apparently quite influential in promoting the most recent round of austerity politics in the western world, and the authors themselves used it actively in this way. The authors even managed to find a magic number – 90% – at which government debt (as a proportion of GDP) throttles growth, a threshold that many small government activists and “sustainable deficit” types have been seeking for years. It’s like manna from heaven!

There’s been a lot of hilarity arising from this, about how woeful the economics field is and about how vulnerable policy-makers on crucial issues like government spending can be to even quite terrible research that supports their agenda. But there has also been some criticism on statistics and academic blogs about the use of excel for advanced analysis, and what a bad idea it is. Andrew Gelman has a thread debating how terrible excel is as a computational tool, and Crooked Timber has a post (with excellent graphic!) expressing incredulity that anyone would do advanced stats in excel. While I agree in general, I feel an urgent need to jump to the defense of MS Excel.

MS Excel is great. It’s much, much more convenient than a calculator, and it can be used to do quite complex calculations (as in sums and multiplications) in multiple directions that would take ages on a calculator. On most computers now the calculator is buried or, if you’re a windows user, crap, and if you need anything more than addition it’s much more convenient to drag out excel. Sure it takes a moment to load compared to your calculator function, but it is so much easier to compare numbers, to calculate exponents and logs, and to present simple results in excel than in a calculator. As a simple case in point: if you get regression coefficients from Stata you can copy and paste them into excel and exponentiate to get relative risks, etc.; then you copy the formulas below, run a new regression model (with, e.g. random effects that weren’t in the previous one) and paste the results to enable you to compare between models quickly and easily. Similarly, if you’re checking a paper to see if they calculated odds ratios or relative risks, you can chuck those numbers into excel and do the comparisons with the contingency table right there in front of you. It offers a simple, graphically convenient way to visualize numbers. This is especially useful when the task you’re approaching is conceptually very simple (like a contingency table) but takes a bit of time to do on a hand calculator, and takes a bit of time to convert to the file formats required in Stata or R. In the time it takes me to think about how to structure the problem, input four lines of data to R, and then write the code to calculate the odds ratios, I can do the whole thing in excel, have the contingency table in front of me to check I’ve made no transcription errors from the paper, and fiddle quickly with changing numbers.

If you’re doing cost-effectiveness analysis in TreeAge (shudder) or R, excel is a really useful tool both for outputting results to something that is vaguely attractive to use, and for doing ballpark calculations to check that your models are behaving reasonably. This is especially useful if you’re doing stochastic Markov models, that can take hours or days to run in TreeAge, because you can’t trust software like that to give you the correct answer if you try to treat your stochastic model as a simple decision tree (because of the way that TreeAge faffs around with probability distributions, which is non-intuitive). Make a few simple assumptions, and you can do approximate calculations yourself in excel, and fiddle with key numbers – cohort size or a few different parameters – and see what effect they have.

Recently I was helping someone with survival analysis and she was concerned that her definition of time to drop out was affecting her results. She conducted a sensitivity analysis in Stata to see what effect it was having, and although with correct programming she could have produced all the material she needed in Stata, the time it takes to do this and debug your code can be time-consuming if you aren’t a natural. It’s much easier with modern machines to just run the regression 10 times with different values of drop-out time and plot the output hazard ratios in excel.

So, I think excel is a very useful tool for advanced modeling, precisely because of its ease of use and its natural, intuitive feel – the properties that recent excel bashers claim make it such a terrible device. While I definitely think it should not be used for advanced models themselves, I find it a hugely valuable addition to the model-building process. Reproducible code and standardized tools are essential for publishable work, but unless you are one of those people who never does any fiddling in the background to work out what’s going on in your model, excel will turn out to be your go-to tool for a wide range of support tasks.

In any case, the bigger problem with Rogoff and Reinhart’s work was not the excel error. Even if they had got the excel code right, their results would still have been wrong because their modeling method was absolutely appalling, and should never have seen the light of day, even at a conference. The main flaws in their work were twofold:

• They binned years together, essentially giving different years different weights in the final model
• They stripped the years out of their time series context, so crucial information contained in the time ordering of deficits and growth was lost

I think the second flaw is the most specifically terrible. By using this method they essentially guaranteed that they would be unable to show that Keynesian policies work, and they stripped the cause-effect relationship from all data collected in the Keynesian era (which lasted from the start of their data series to about 1970). In the Keynesian era, we would expect to see a sequence in which deficit increases follow negative growth, so unless the negative growth periods are very short and random, Reinhart and Rogoff’s method guarantees that this looks like an association between negative growth and higher deficits. If Keynesian policies actually work, then we would subsequently see an increase in growth and a reduction in deficits – something that by design in Reinhart and Rogoff’s model would be used to drive the conclusion that higher debt causes lower growth.

In short, no matter what package they used, and no matter how sophisticated and reproducible their methods, Reinhart and Rogoff’s study was designed[1] to show the effect it did. The correct way to analyze this data was through the presentation of time series data, probably analyzing using generalized least squares with a random effect for country, or something similar. Using annual data I think it would probably be impossible to show the relationship between debt and growth clearly, because recessions can happen within a year. But you could probably achieve better, more robust results in excel using proper time series data than you could get in R from Reinhart and Rogoff’s original method.

The problem here was the operator, not the machine – something which should always be remembered in statistics!

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fn1: I use the term “was designed” here without any intention to imply malfeasance on the part of the authors. It’s a passive “was designed”.

 

Top of the Lake: Crime and Secrets at the Edge of the World

Going feral at the ends of the earth

Top of the Lake is a seven part television series about misogyny and violence, set at the southern tip of New Zealand. It was directed by Jane Campion, director of the Piano, another movie about misogyny and violence in New Zealand that was very well received when it was released. In her return to New Zealand for this show, Campion has moved her setting from the lush fern forests of the North Island to the desolate peaks and wilderness of the far South Island, and has skipped in time from the colonial era to the modern – though looking at the behavior of the protagonists in this movie, it’s hard to find much of a civilizing influence of modernity.

The basic story of Top of the Lake is an apparently straightforward investigation of child abuse. A 12 year old girl called Tui (pictured) is pregnant and a cop from Sydney called Robin is brought in to investigate the case. The story is set in the fictitious town of Laketop, near Queenstown. Robin grew up in this town but moved to Australia to work, and has returned to Laketop temporarily because her mother has cancer, so she’s ideally placed to investigate the crime. Unfortunately, things don’t proceed simply: Tui is the daughter of a singularly malicious and nasty man, Matt Mitcham, who is a Scottish migrant and the dodgiest thug you’ve ever seen (well, at least until you meet some of his associates in episode 5). He is singularly unhelpful in the case, and Tui is also being very unhelpful – it’s not clear if she even understands what has happened to her, and soon after the show starts she disappears. Furthermore, Robin has her own dark history in Laketop, and pretty much every other person you meet is entangled in something dark and horrible: wherever you turn you see a suspect or their conspirator, and it’s really hard to believe that this town is not deeply enmired in misogyny, sexual violence and repression. Through all of this, Robin is trying to find and help Tui, and the rest of the town are taking a singularly colonial-era and feral approach to Tui’s problems, with almost no one seeming to be aware that it’s dangerous for a 12 year old girl to be pregnant, and dangerous for her rapist to be at large.

Campion’s exploration of the setting really helps to give this impression of a town that hasn’t worked out what modernity is, or updated its attitudes towards women accordingly. Queenstown is a famous tourist town and playground of the rich and famous, but we never see that side of the area: as far as we can tell, Laketop is a rundown and wild place in the middle of nowhere, a little cluster of huts hanging off of freezing, windy mountains and staring out at nothing. The children are wild, playing in canoes and on horses, keeping bones in their homes and wandering wild over the hills and forests, and Tui herself is feral to the point of being fey. The adults are also wild, but in a much nastier and ferocious way. Matt Mitcham, his family and associates cast a long shadow over the town, and he is a violent, sinister presence, completely unreformed and often more like a force of nature than a human. His direct children are ill-mannered, stupid thugs; another of his sons lives in a tent by the lake and spent eight years in a Thai prison; Tui is his daughter by a different woman, and there are children in his house who he doesn’t even really seem to know. The people of the town ride horses and hunt, and Mitcham’s associates use severed deer’s heads on poles as an emblem. The police in the town have a very vague understanding of what crime is or what their purpose is as police. The chief of the police, Al – played with incredible subtlety by David Wenham – alternates between being an urbane and intelligent modern policeman and a quietly dangerous, selfish and very sinister figure. The only apparently “normal” people in this show are a group of women from America and Australia who have formed a commune by the side of the lake, but these women are just as touched as the rest of the place: they live in shipping containers on the edge of the lake, they’re all deeply damaged in some way, and their guru GJ is a remote, harsh and judgmental woman who doesn’t appear to have any kind feelings for her charges at all – and these women also don’t seem to have any conception of the importance of protecting Tui or finding out who raped her. All these people are presented against the backdrop of a wild, silent and unforgiving landscape, cold and windy and desolate but stunningly beautiful, that acts as a perfect counterpoise for the wild, strange character of the people we meet.

Just as in The Piano, Campion uses the landscape to stunning effect as a backdrop to the story. It is beautifully filmed and presented, and in our various excursions to the top of the lake and the mountains beyond it we lose all sense that we are in the modern era. Watching the show makes you feel a kind of sympathetic chill as if you were experiencing the wind and rain and cold of the South Island yourself, but it’s impossible not to be amazed by the harsh beauty of the place. In The Piano, the wilderness offered a lush and sensual backdrop to the corrupted sexuality of the main protagonists; in Top of the Lake the chill, serene lake and cold, distant mountains reflect perfectly the sinister secrets of the town and the impenetrable wildness of the town’s main victim, Tui.

The acting in this television series is also exemplary. Robin is played with fine skill by Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men, who does a brilliant job of portraying her human vulnerability and professional strength, as well as her bravery in the face of a town that seems determined to destroy her. Her slow unraveling over the course of the story is brilliantly done. David Wenham gives a master class in his potrayal of the chief policeman, Al, whose motives and allegiances are extremely suspicious, and the other major characters – Johnno and Matt Mitcham and his daughter Tui – are all perfectly cast.

The story is fairly simple and well told, without a real twist but with just enough red herrings and dead ends in its development that you aren’t sure you are right about the key points until the very end, and even then a few things are not fully resolved. It’s essentially a story about corruption and the extent to which a few evil men’s influence can completely corrupt a small community, and although it comes to the resolution one would hope for once one knew the facts, it remains deeply disturbing. It’s even more disturbing if anywhere in New Zealand is actually like the place depicted. My main complaint about the plot is that the commune by the lake plays a big role in the show, but is largely irrelevant to the plot and seems like a kind of boutique side story that Campion put in just to please herself. I think this commune should have been given a different, more satisfying role in the plot or should have been dropped, and I can’t work out exactly why it was important. But aside from that, the story is well told and has that feeling of completeness where nothing stood out as wrong or confusing, and the only unresolved parts were unresolved because the characters couldn’t know the answers, not because there were no answers or because of some plot incoherency. Quite a lot happens for just seven episodes, and it’s an impressively tightly coiled story.

I was surprisingly deeply affected by this show. It’s beautiful, the acting is powerful, the story is disturbing and the characters are amazingly engaging. It also tells a story about a side of New Zealand that maybe doesn’t really get shown much internationally in amongst all the Hobbitons and Rivendells that have emanated from there recently. It’s not always easy going, though it’s not openly brutal, and at times it is breathlessly tense, but in an enjoyable rather than an overly terrifying way. This is a good show to watch for anyone who is interested in crime stories, thrillers and mysteries – especially if you’re interested in seeing those stories unfold in a very unique and almost magical setting.

 

What Kind of Spellcaster was Margaret Thatcher

A Facebook campaign running in England at the moment is driving the song Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead up the charts, in celebration of Margaret Thatcher’s death. This has the right-wing media up in arms, and has led to an open case of attempted censorship of the BBC. But old school role-players should also be up in arms with outrage at this attack on the legacy of the ’80s: although Margaret Thatcher is clearly a spellcaster of some kind, the Witch was not an authorized character class in the 1980s role-playing canon! Nothing is more frustrating than to see important aspects of the original system mis-used in the popular press, and so in the interests of accuracy, I think we should tackle the question of what kind of spellcaster Margaret Thatcher actually was. Being an ’80s phenomenon, Margaret Thatcher has to be fitted into the character class options of the old school canon: that is, she has to be either a magic-user, druid, cleric, paladin or ranger.

First of all, we know that “the lady’s not for turning,” so she can’t be a cleric or paladin. She doesn’t seem to have been very out-doorsy, and I think it’s safe to say she wasn’t true neutral, so druid is out. And by examining her history of spell-casting, we can rule out ranger.

So what spells did Maggie cast? First and most obvious is Mass Hypnosis, a fairly high level spell. Many northern newspapers claim that she destroyed whole areas of industry in the north, so maybe she could cast Earthquake as well. Along with Ronald Reagan (who was surely a Paladin!) she could use Detect Evil – before they joined to cast that spell, no one (no one!) knew that the Soviet Union was an evil dictatorship. It’s also fairly clear that she regularly used the Domination spell on members of her cabinet, and her resistance to assassination attempts suggests the use of Contingency and possibly also Resist Fire. From this list we can see that she had access to spells that were outside the ranger list. Thus we can conclude that she must have been a magic-user.

Finally, however, there is one additional power she had that suggests the ’80s was being run as a house-ruled boutique campaign. Many editorialists are claiming that Margaret Thatcher created Tony Blair; but Tony Blair is clearly a Vampire, and as far as I know there is no spell that can be used to create Vampires. So either she was so powerful that the GM had to create a whole new set of spells for her, 1980s Britain was being run based on an obscure supplement of Dragon magazine, or the entire industrial and economic wasteland that was the UK from 1978 to 1990 was being run on a unique set of house rules.

So, based on the available evidence, Margaret Thatcher was an extremely high level magic-user character being run in a homebrew post-apocalyptic UK campaign. And definitely not a witch.

 

Steampunk Warhammer Session 6: The Spa Goblins

What party happened under these wattles?

At the end of the last session, our heroes had successfully destroyed a disease cult near Separation City, though at a high cost in disease and wounds, and without capturing its ultimate leader. They now knew, however, that this leader could be found somewhere in the distant town of Store, and had a better idea of his plans for Separation City.

In this session, we find our PCs at loose ends for the first time since they arrived in Separation City. Greeted as heroes by the residents of the town and having restored the healers to their rightful place, the PCs were able to relax and receive some much-needed healing, as well as take part in a great Steamlands tradition: the wattle-viewing party. All around Separation City the wattle trees had come into bloom, and the city had turned golden in the reflected light of their heavy blossoms. Parties were held under stands of these trees, and the PCs were invited to every party they passed on account of their heroic deeds. In between visits to the healers, the whole party was able to remain constantly drunk and fed.

Unfortunately, most members of the party were too sick to travel, and so after three days of convalescence it fell to only two of the group – the elven scout, Laren and the dwarven troll-slayer Azahi – to leave town on their next mission, while the other party members rested to recover from the ghoulpox they had been inflicted with in the previous adventure.

The next mission began easily enough: as part of their reward for freeing the town of its disease cult, the party had been offered the services of a single healer, to live permanently at their onsen. Laren and Azahi took on the responsibility of escorting the healer to the onsen, and also checking their onsen was still functioning well. They took with them the 10 monkey-men who they saved from pustulent death, for these monkey-men had now bound themselves to the party and would not leave them.

Laren and Azahi and their charges reached the onsen with no trouble after a short journey, and soon had the healer resting in the onsen. The monkey-men they dispatched to the steam valley to the rear of their spa, with the intention of establishing a new village there. The monkey-men would grow mangoes and keep watch over the narrow valley.

The next morning the pair learnt that the onsen’s remaining guards had seen evidence of goblin patrols in the hills nearby. They set out immediately to find these goblins and destroy them. Azahi’s grudge against greenskins is so furious that he refused to wait for the convalescing party members, but insisted that just the two of them go to war, taking with them three monkey-men as support.

They soon found goblin trails, and Laren was easily able to track them to their lair, a small cave system in the hills a few hours’ march from the onsen. Even though these goblins appeared to have been resident for at least a year without causing trouble, Azahi refused to leave them be, and so they attacked. The plan was simple: Azahi moved as stealthily as he could to the cave mouth and attacked the two goblins on guard there, with Laren providing covering fire. The battle opened with the immediate death of the first goblin, but the second raised a ruckus and refused to back down, and as Azahi engaged him a giant spider descended from the cliff face above the cave mouth and attacked him from behind. Unfortunately, Laren’s first shot missed spider and goblin and skewered Azahi perfectly in the back, and before she could find her aim she had already badly wounded her own ally.

Fangs the size of milk bottles…

The battle lasted a couple of rounds, and though Azahi was in no danger of losing while Laren supported him, from deeper in the cave network they could hear more goblins preparing for battle. Azahi had only just dispensed with the spider and the remaining goblin when a mob of four more goblins came charging into the cave from a narrow tunnel at its darkest recess. These met their immediate doom on his falchion, and though he could hear more sounds from below, none charged up the stairs. He called in Laren, and they braced themselves for more battle.

A tunnel led from the rear of the cave deeper into the complex, heading down in a spiral to a lower cave in which they could hear eight goblins preparing for battle. Thinking it wise to act first, Laren used her elven trick shot, firing an arrow that curved perfectly down the spiraling tunnel to meet its mark somewhere in the deeper darkness. They heard a scream, a goblin yelling “no, don’t do that…” followed by a gurgle, smashing glass and a sudden explosion of flames. After some more screams and the sound of barrels of water being splashed around, the goblins came charging up the tunnel. Only six emerged into the top cave, and one of them obviously badly burnt; Laren and Azahi slaughtered them at the tunnel mouth, though not before Azahi took some more damage. Though they were winning, Azahi was taking wounds and refusing to back down, his expression grimmer than Laren had ever seen and his resolve firm. They would die here, or conquer.

They descended the tunnel and emerged into a scene of chaos. The cave at the tunnel bottom was a guard room, largely empty but for some weapon racks and a table. Lying on one side of the room were the badly burnt corpses of two goblins, surrounded by smashed lanterns and soaked in water. It was clear what had happened here: Laren’s trick shot had mortally wounded one, who had staggered into another. The arrow protruding from the first had penetrated deep into the second, and in his agonized flailings he had knocked over the lanterns that stood on a rack next to him, accidentally torching both of them and spilling some flaming oil onto a third. The remaining goblins had upended all their barrels of drinking water to douse the flames, and then in their rage they had all charged unthinking up the tunnel to their doom. The cave stank abominably of burning oil and roasted goblin, a stench that Laren had never experienced and Azahi remembered only from the time his family, starving, had been forced to grill a plague-ridden fox one winter. Both of them, gagging, fled the cave and headed deeper into the complex.

At the bottom of the tunnel they found a supply cave, common in many goblin complexes: an underground stream ran through the middle of it, and next to the stream was a pile of mouldering giant mushrooms, giving off a dim phosphorescent light. Crates of old loot and a few goat carcasses littered the room, but there was nothing of interest. However, Azahi remembered an old tale amongst dwarves, that with the right preparation the gobins’ mushroom lights could be rendered explosive; and Laren, using her nature lore, was able to come up with a rough concoction of urine, salt and blackpowder that would do the job. They prepared a single bottle of exploding goblin-mushroom, and followed the tunnels out of the storeroom into the deeper darkness.

Here they found their target: the goblin chieftain with the last eight warriors of his tribe. Azahi waited some way up the tunnel, and Laren threw her exploding mushroom bottle from the shadows. This landed right amongst the chieftain and his crew, exploding with a ferocious light and stench. Laren fled up the tunnel to take a position behind Azahi; moments later the eight goblins came charging up the tunnel, their chieftain behind them. Four of these goblins were badly burnt, but the chieftain was taking no chances. He sent them ahead urging them on at sword point. He was a huge beast of a goblin, fully half again the size of a normal man, decorated in a bizarre mix of stolen armour, heavily scarred and almost black with years and grime. His beady eyes shone with rage in a grizzled face twisted in a rictus of hate; his left shoulder-guard was covered with the dried skin of a dwarven face badly removed from its hapless owner. Smoke drifted from various parts of his burnt clothes and hair, and he screamed in rage as he ascended the tunnel.

The eight goblins met Azahi with a thunderous crash, and in moments he had dispensed with four of them in a frenzy of short, savage chops of his falchion. Laren skewered several of them, but the chieftain charged into the gap Azahi had made, beating his own allies aside as he entered the fray. Unfortunately Azahi’s wounds were too great for him; before he could deliver the killing blow the chieftain felled him with a massive chop across the back of the head, leaving only Laren to finish the battle. As he stood baying his victory over the slumped troll-slayer, she shot him in the face. Even this didn’t kill him, but it did draw him back to his rage, so that instead of severing the head of his defeated foe he charged for the elf. She ran daintily up the tunnel, leading him back to the monkey-men where they stood guard; they surged past her to join combat, and she turned and fired back into the fray.

The chieftain was brave and brutal, but he was already badly wounded and no match for three enraged monkey-men. One he slew with a cruel and vicious slash to the shoulder, but then the other two were onto him, ripping and tearing and hooting and smashing, and they did not stop until nothing remained of him but a bloody smear. Laren stepped over the remains and ran to Azahi’s aid, relieved to find him still alive though bloodied. His injured state saved her from witnessing the grimmest part of a troll-slayer’s duty: had he been well at the end of battle he would have proceeded into the breeding caves at the rear of the complex and slaughtered all the women and children too, but he could only sit slumped in exhaustion against the wall and watch in helpless anger as those innocents fled up the tunnel to take their chances in the wilderness.

Laren and Azahi had prevailed, but at great cost: Azahi nearly dead and one monkey-man lost. They gathered up the goblins’ pitiful treasure and left the cave to return to the onsen, where their newly-installed healer would be able to repair Azahi. Laren was uninjured but for this, and for her first hasty shot into battle, there was bad blood between them, the old enmity of elves and dwarves briefly rekindled. Nonetheless, they had proven themselves a good team.

Back at the onsen they were greeted by a messenger from Separation City, who told them bad news: rumour was abroad of a stranger in the graveyards, and the lady von Jungfreud suspected a survivor of the disease cult still lurked about town. She wanted Azahi and Laren to return to town to investigate and capture this last survivor.

Truly there is no rest for the righteous; nor, indeed, for our heroes…

—

Photo credit: the image is by Andrew Babington.

 

Sudden Existential Crisis

The two inevitabilities in life: death and centripetal force

Iain M. Banks is dying: having seen off threats from militaristic empires and proto-gods, his galaxy-spanning, anarchist semi-utopian Culture has less than a year to live because of cancer. This marks the sad end of a great science fiction career, and a well-respected fiction writer.

My first encounter with Banks was his first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, which re-invigorated space opera for me. His Culture novels contain a combination of elements which, though present individually in other writer’s work, for me coalesce beautifully in his best science fiction. He takes the standard space opera tropes of technology-as-magic to its logical conclusion of post-scarcity economics, and is not scared to consider the full social and cultural ramifications of such a political culture. Simultaneously, he is willing to take on seriously the prospect of artificial intelligences (“Minds”) being vastly superior in capacity to humans, as close to gods as a physical object can be, and takes seriously the task of crafting stories in which many of the protagonists have close to godlike power. He also overlays his novels with a subtle political commentary, not usually overtly preaching in any direction and not necessarily coming to strong moral or political conclusions. His work is, in this sense, genuinely speculative, and a welcome addition to the canon.

He also invents great Ship names.

Iain Banks’s fiction novels are a stranger and more diverse affair, ranging from thrillers like Complicity to the semi-fantastic dreamscapes of The Bridge. His first fiction novel, The Wasp Factory (also the first of his fiction novels that I read) gained strong reactions, but I think is generally well-regarded. At the time perhaps his career prospects didn’t look good, though, because it was a radically weird work. At the Crooked Timber thread on Iain Banks they report this review from the Irish Times:

It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparalleled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it.

I guess his fiction is not as universally admired as his sci-fi, and certainly some of it I found uninteresting (I think I read the Crow Road and didn’t enjoy it at all).  I think he has also attracted some attention for his politics: in real life he is a staunch leftist in the Scottish tradition (more Burns and Adam Smith than Marx or Mills), liberal or anarchist in leaning and strongly critical of the major political movements in British life. Like another great leftist in science fiction, though, when his works are political they stand as a challenge to his own side of politics as much as his opponents, and his utopianism has more to say about the limits of anarchist political thought than it has criticism of modern conservativism. Compared to China Mieville I think he is more willing to put his politics forward in his work, but he does so sutbly and with a nice alloy of cynicism and realism that prevents it from being preachy. In fact, the most political book of his I’ve read, Dead Air, is more of a cynical cry for help than a screed, and the only other strongly leftist character in his books is an unhinged murderer (from memory).

So, it’s a sad day for science fiction as Iain M. Banks retires from the public eye to put his affairs in order. Let’s hope that he has a strong legacy, and his work remains influential for some time to come. It’s just a shame that he will Sublime before the Culture does …