Well this is a bit of a train-spotting post, but it’s interesting to me because Farringdon is the station I commute to and from.

For a couple of years now, a new extension to the station has been under construction, intended to lengthen the Thameslink platforms to take 12 carriage trains. Construction projects sometimes seem to reach their finish with bewildering rapidity, and this one was no exception. It wasn’t that long ago that it seemed to be just a big hole in the ground. And when I was last in work, a week and a bit ago, I’m sure it was still at that “concrete shell” stage.

Then this morning, my train drew to a halt… in a different station from the one I’ve always got off at. No more cramped Victorian brick structure, hello sleek and cavernous white underground space.

I went back at lunchtime and took some pictures (click on them to get larger versions).

There’s a huge white entrance, opposite the existing entrance (which is currently closed while they complete the rebuilding work, but which will then also still be in use).

And that leads to a huge concourse area:

And you then go down to some nice open platform areas, much roomier than the rest of the station:

These are just the platform extensions. You can go back to the original platform area (which is still in use for 8 of the 12 carriages) by walking under what was once the bridge at the end of the station (this is also how you get to the Underground platforms for the Metropolitan, Circle and Hammersmith & City lines):

Finally, they’ve put up a nice couple of posters showing the “before” picture, and the “where they are now” picture:

People are often very cynical about modern things, but I think this is a really nice development. And of course, when Crossrail is completed, Farringdon’s going to be very well connected.

A thought the other day got me thinking about all the computers I’ve owned in my life – and in particular just how many of them there have been. I thought it might be fun to look over them, and see just how much things have changed. Of course, that’s if I can remember them all.

And just to clarify, I’m only including things with a querty keyboard here. I know that smartphone’s now are basically computers, but given that a modern microwave oven probably has more computing power than Apollo 11′s LEM, if I listed everything with a CPU I’d be including my last few phones, my car, and half the white goods in my kitchen.

#1 Commodore VIC 20

When: 1982

Type: All-in-one unit connected to TV

OS: Not applicable

This was it, the first computer I owned, if not the first that I used. (That honour going to a ZX81 that an after school technology club had purchased the year before). I seem to recall getting it pretty soon after it came out in the UK. This was before the ZX Spectrum and I think possibly before the BBC Micro. (The computer magazines were still full of adverts for the Acorn Atom, the BBC’s predecessor).

It had a simple version of Basic built in, but it was rather crude. (To change the colour of the screen you had to “POKE 36879”, and no I didn’t have to look that up, and yes, I am rather geekily proud of myself for remembering – assuming I remembered it right of course, which is not necessarily the case, given that I genuinely haven’t looked it up).

Depending on your age, you may or my not be able to believe that the VIC came with 3.5 Kbyte of RAM. (To put that into context, it’s less than 0.0002% of the memory on the laptop I’m typing this on, which itself is not that impressive by modern standards).

I had a lot of fun on the VIC, and made a (small) start in programming. I wouldn’t say it’s been the favourite of all the computers I’ve owned, but I suppose it would be up there. But unfortunately, newer better computers quickly arrived (Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro) and it soon went from being an object of pride to an object of slight embarrassment.

(Yes, kids are both fickle and ungrateful and I was a kid).

#2 Acorn Electron

When: Christmas 1984

Type: All-in-one unit connected to TV

OS: Not applicable

When I look back through my “exes”, I’m afraid this is one of the ones that tends to be overlooked. In some way, it was the wrong computer bought for the wrong reasons. It’s perhaps interesting to note that while I bought an Acorn Electron (well my parents did, it was a Christmas present), not many other people did – the Electron was a debacle that drove Acorn into bankruptcy.

The problem was that I wanted a BBC Micro, as three of my friends (Stuart, Ric and Rich) already had – but at £399 that was way above my “present buying budget”. So when Acorn came out with a cut-down version of the BBC I asked for that. At £199, it was still more than my parents would normally have been able to afford, but I argued that I could use it to do coursework for my O’Level Computer Studies (one of the few O’Levels that did have coursework).

The problem was that it wasn’t the BBC. Although I really enjoyed playing Elite on it (one of the few computer games I’ve ever got really into), that joy was slightly tempered by my BBC owning friends pointing out all the features that Acornsoft had needed to cut from the Electron version of the game in order to make it run on the lower-powered machine.

I did use it to do my O’Level project on, which was handy, as those who were using the computers at school all failed after someone formatted the single disk that was being use to hold everyone’s code. But I have a horrible feeling that once I’d got Elite out of my system (and no, I didn’t get up to “Elite” – I think “Dangerous” was as far as I got) the Electron was largely discarded.

(And yes, I know I am sounding very ungrateful at this point).

#3 Amstrad PCW 8256

When: ?198x

Type: Combined computer/monitor

OS: CPM, I think?

In some ways this is interesting, because it was bought at a time when my interest in computers was probably at an all-time low. I had no interest in either “playing” with a computer, not making a career out of them. The interest that drove the purchase of this (which I think might have been a birthday present, perhaps combined with something else) was writing.

The PCW (which at the time was a huge seller) was marketed very much as a typewriter replacement. It was a “word processor”, not a computer, coming as a complete package with word processing software (Locoscript) and a printer. Like modern Apple products, it just “worked”, allowing computer novices to be quickly up and running.

I know I did at least some college work on it, and I can recall using it to write at least one short story (“Living Stones”, set on a future terraformed moon). But I think it too gradually fell out of use as I lost confidence in writing, entering a period of apathetic writer’s block that would last some years.

#4 Reeves 286/20 (later 386/25)

When: 1990

Type: Desktop

OS: MS DOS 3.x (later Windows 3.0)

A couple of firsts here: the first PC, and the first computer I’d paid for myself.

After college, I’d got myself a job working as a digital cartographer (map-making using computers), working on a pair of what, for the time, were monster Compaqs. They had top-of-the line 386/25 processors, something like 4 Mbytes of RAM, and 300 Mbyte hard drives – when I used to tell friends of this they would accuse me of being a monstrous bullshitter.

(At the time, MS DOS couldn’t handler a drive of more than 30-something megabytes, so to avoid having to partition the hard-drives up into C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L, Compaq had produced a modified version of MS DOS, 3.31, that could handle these giant sized drives).

My new PC wasn’t as powerful as these, of course. It was based on the older 286 chip and had 2 Mbyte of RAM and a 40 Mbyte hard drive (partitioned into two 20 Mbyte drives). The 2 Mbyte of RAM was a bit pointless, as DOS could only access the first 640k (you could use the next 384k with a bit of faffing around), so I set it up to use a 1 Mbyte RAM disk (where a bit of memory appears to the system as a very fast hard drive called E, which you can set applications to use for temporary files).

One of things I find interesting when looking through my computer history is that while owning a computer has been a constant in my life since 1982, the reason for owning a computer has changed several times over this point. (By contrast, I have owned a total of four televisions since around that time, and every single one has been purchased for the exact same, single reason: to watch television on).

My previous PCs had been bought for reasons of first general fun and games, and then word processing. Later PCs would be bought to access the Internet. But I bought this PC for two quite specific, and different, purposes. The first was to teach myself to program. The second was to serve as a desktop publishing platform.

I was quite an activist with the Liberal Democrats in those days (I’m am still sort of a Lib Dem supporter, but now much more of the, “Well now, look, yes, I mean obviously I’m not happy with an awful lot of things, and I’m not saying I’d actually call myself a supporter now, I seem to recall my membership’s lapsed, and I actually tactically voted Green at the last parliamentary and council elections, but obviously, it’s difficult, things are difficult, you have to work with what you’ve got, even if they are Tories, and well, hey, Greece, eh! Wooh! So, do you think it will snow?” type), and a big part of the Lib Dems in those days was producing leaflets, both for internal party communications and for external political purposes. At the time, we were producing leaflets by printing out the stories on separate sheets, cutting them out, and prit-sticking them onto one master sheet, which the printers who printed the leaflets could photograph. (i.e. We were literally doing “cut and paste”).

I’d seen adverts in the Lib Dem party newspaper for a company who were supplying complete DTP packages: a PC, a high-end dot-matrix printer, and some software called TimeWorks Publisher. TimeWorks was a really nice package, both simple and effective. It ran on the GEM GUI platform, although later versions (renamed to PressWorks) ran on Windows. This company also sold packs of Lib Dem themed clip-art. Put together, the whole package was capable of producing some really nice leaflets.

I’d like to think that the people whose letter boxes had our leaflets stuffed through them appreciated the jump in quality. (I’m sure they didn’t, but I’d like to think they did).

To teach myself programming, I bought a couple of compilers, ending up with the final, pre-Visual C++ version of the Microsoft C/C++ compiler. This was still a basic DOS product, but it did have the first version of MFC. I know a lot of people hated MFC, but I really liked it, and together with a copy of Charles Petzold’s classic “Programming Windows”, I was able to make my first (baby) steps into Windows programming.

I can’t say I ever produced anything of any great complexity, but I did learn enough that when I got made redundant from my digital cartography job at the start of 1994, I was able to talk my way into a job as a C++ programmer.

I kept this PC for a quite a few years, upgrading it a couple of times, including getting a one-man PC repair outfit to replace the entire motherboard and CPU. But eventually, even with extra RAM and two extra hard-disks, it was starting to show its age.

#5 Reeves 486/33

When: 1993

Type: Tower

OS: Windows 3.1

And now we come to number five, and the most expensive computer I have ever owned, costing something over £2,800 (£3,988 in today’s money, or $6,361). At the time, it was a monster. It had almost the faster processor you could then buy (a 33 MHz 486 DX, something like 8 or 16 Mbytes of RAM, and I think something like a 200 Mbyte hard drive. But the bit that I was most proud of was its hard drive controller card, which had its own 286 chip with 2 Mbytes of cache RAM.

It meant that I could say that not only was my PC more powerful than all the PCs in my workplace – my hard-drive controller card was more powerful than most of them. (They were 286s with 1 Mbyte of RAM).

I can’t remember much of what I did with this machine. Programming initially, although I think that tailed off once I was programming for a living. I played some games (Doom and Quake come to mind), but I was never hugely into games.

This PC might have been my first Internet connected machine, or it might not. I know I was using the Internet at work from early 1995 onwards, but I think it was about a year before I made the jump to getting a home account. (It seems incredible now that we once had PCs without an Internet connection, when being able to use the Internet is often the reason why we might have a PC. A PC without an Internet connection now seems like a car without an engine.)

#6 Reeves Pentium 100

When: 1996

Type: Desktop

OS: Windows 95

I can’t remember very much about this machine. Whilst its predecessor had been an expensive boy’s toy, this was a much cheaper and utilitarian affair, better that the machine it was replacing, but not by as much as the three year gap might imply.

#7 iMac (1st Generation)

When: 1998

Type: Combined computer/monitor

OS: Mac OS 8.5

There was no real reason for me to switch to Macs at this point. Whilst it’s UI was still pretty cool (despite not having been significantly enhanced in more than ten years), the underlying OS wasn’t terribly good. While Windows 95 now had proper, pre-emptive multi-tasking with memory protection, the Mac OS still had only co-operative multi-tasking of the sort that Windows 3.1 had enjoyed.

(In layman’s terms, if one application locked up for several seconds, then all applications locked up. And if one application crashed, the entire machine – all other applications plus the OS – crashed).

I bought it simply because I fancied a change, and the machine looked gorgeous. Today, in an era of sleek flat-screen monitors, the original iMac looks bulky and old-fashioned. But at the time, it was a revelation – perhaps the first PC that actually looked good, designed to sit proudly in your living room not hide in your spare-room-cum-office.

This was the machine I wrote the early issues of Critical Miss on.

It was my first Mac, although not my first Apple product (believe it or not, but I had a Newton). But it didn’t convert me into an Apple fan. It was fun, but not really more than that.

#8 Dell PC

When: 2001

Type: Desktop

OS: Linux (with KDE desktop)

By this time, we’d started using Linux on some of the work machines. I liked the idea of an operating system that wasn’t from Microsoft, and I was interesting in getting into Linux more. So I got this Dell PC, and put a copy of Red Hat on it, adopting the KDE front-end (instead of Gnome) purely because at the time, it had anti-aliased fonts.

I suspect that if I hadn’t got into Macs, I’d still be using Linux now.

One interesting point: this was the last desktop machine I ever owned. (And quite possibly, the last desktop machine I ever will own).

#9 Hewlett Packard? Laptop

When: 2003 or 2004

Type: Laptop with built-in base-station

OS: Linux (with KDE desktop)

By this point, I was writing a monthly column for Mongoose Publishing’s Signs & Portents magazine, and to be honest, I was finding it a bit of a grind. I’d spend an entire weekend procrastinating over doing it, and then four weeks later, I have to do another one.

Then it occurred to me that I spent eighty minutes every day sitting on a tube (train), and that if I had a laptop, I might be able to use that time to write. Now you have to remember that I had no idea whether or not this would be feasible. I might have sat down and found that I was completely unable to concentrate on writing. I might have found that after five minutes, the movement of the train and the bouncing of the screen was making me feel sick. So I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on something that might well have turned out to be a complete waste.

So I went to Morgan, and spent something like £300 on a reconditioned Hewlett Packard laptop, which I immediately, as per my ideological principles, nuked, and reinstalled with Linux.

This laptop is never going to go down on my list of favourite computers. I was never particularly fond of it. I never really managed to get the Linux power-saving / sleep functionality fully working on it, with the result that I had to shut down at the end of each writing session and then restart it at the start of the next – which wasted around five minutes of writing time (reboot plus starting Open Office). And getting the data off the laptop onto my desktop Dell, which was still my primary machine, was a bit of a hassle.

But I guess I owe this computer a lot, because in getting me started writing on trains, it revolutionised the way I write. (Of every single thing I’ve written since then, around 90% – including this very blog post – has been written on a laptop, on a train).

#10 Apple iBook (G3 PowerPC processor)

When: Early 2005

Type: Laptop

OS: Mac OS X (came with Panther, later upgraded to Tiger)

I’d had no plans to move back to Apple. I was vaguely aware that the Apple OS had moved on, with the Unix based OS X replacing the earlier OS. But I was happy in my Linux world. Then, a few months after I bought the HP laptop, I flew to Edinburgh for Conpulsion with my best mate LucidDestiny/Bubba, and he bought his new Powerbook with him.

It was brilliant. Smooth. Good looking. Not Microsoft. And a seriously impressive battery life, resulting in a laptop that was genuinely mobile. But the thing that sealed the deal for me was the way it handled sleep. Finished working? Just close the lid. Want to start working again? Open the lid, and there it is, as you left it. Instant. No selecting options, or pressing buttons, just close lid, open lid.

I knew by now that working on a train worked for me, and so I was ready to make the jump completely to a laptop as my primary machine.

So I bought myself an iBook (the PowerBook’s cheaper cousin, intended for home and student use). I loved it. The new Mac OS (OS X) was a hell of a lot more stable than the predecessor I’d run on my old iMac of several years before.

The iBook was great, and I was more then happy with it. I got quite a bit of writing done on it, including my last set of Signs & Portents columns, and the first chapter of Game Night. I was forced to upgrade it after a relatively short period of time for one reason only – something went wrong in the hinge area, causing the screen to only occasionally work when it opened up. I suspect one too many bouncing runs (on the train) through the fast Hammersmith section of the Piccadilly Line was to blame.

#11 Apple MacBook (Intel processor)

When: End 2006

Type: Laptop

OS: Mac OS X (Tiger, later upgraded to Snow Leopard)

In appearance, the MacBook was identical to its iBook predecessor – although I think it was a little wider, 13” rather than 12”. Since I’d bought the iBook, Apple had switched to Intel processors and renamed their product range, from iBook and PowerBook to MacBook and MacBook Pro.

This was the book I wrote the bulk of Game Night on (all but Chapter One). And it’s still a machine I use.

#12 Apple MacBook Air

When: Early 2008

Type: Laptop

OS: Mac OS X (Leopard)

And now we come to number twelve, the last, but most definitely not the least. This was something of an extravagant purchase. I’d no need for a new laptop of any sort. But I’d fallen in love with Air from the moment I’d seen the advert video of it being taken out of an envelope, had just received a bonus, and my darling wife told me I should treat myself.

Extravagance aside, it has proved a perfect match for me needs. I do nearly all my writing on the train (I’m writing this now on a First Capital Connect train to Bedford, currently just passing through the Southern suburbs of Croydon) and the Air is exactly what I need. A full sized querty keyboard and screen squeezed into the smallest, thinnest, lightest form factor possible.

I’ve had twelve computers in my life, and for me now, the best of them all is this, the twelfth. They’ve all been different, and I’ve liked them to varying extents in different ways, but none has felt quite so much an extension of my thoughts as this one.

Number twelve.

* * * * *

So that’s my number. What’s yours?

Yesterday, we watched the sixth and final episode of the BBC’s Planet Dinosaur. Entitled “The Great Survivors”, the episode featured one dinosaur I’d not previously heard of, Nothronychus (Wikipedia entry). It instantly became my new vegan hero. Why?

Well a clip on the BBC’s website explains:

CLIP: Although a close relative of the meat-eating tyrannosaurs, this pot-bellied dinosaur has completely changed its diet and turned into a strict vegetarian.

I think you can guess why I thought that was pretty awesome. Here’s a picture (from Wikipedia) of the chap:

The World Wide Fund for nature uses a panda for its logo. If I ever start some sort of vegan organisation, I’ll know what I’ll be using for my logo!

I’ve previously mentioned that I have a short story in Stone Skin Press’s forthcoming anthology of iconic heroes, The New Hero.

It is 1987. With outposts from the frozen moons of Saturn to the burning plains of Mercury, the sun never sets on the British Empire. Peter “Pete” Stone is a member of the Royal Space Force who, together with their allies in the United States Aerospace Force, keep the space-lanes safe from the ever-present Soviet threat.

As a member of the RSF’s Special Investigation Bureau, Pete Stone uses his courage, his clear-thinking, and his arrogant conviction in his general superiority to dispatch the enemies of the Empire with a blend of style, brutality and wit.

Well the cover has just been revealed, and my protagonist Pete Stone is there, along with every one of the fourteen iconic heroes.

I think it looks great!

After a wait of five and a half years, the fabled eleventh issue of my roleplaying humour webzine Critical Miss has arrived.

Click here to read it.

The answer, incredibly, appears to be no.

The Boy Scouts of America are very blunt about it. Their web site first makes it very clear that child members really do need to believe in a God:

In the Scout Oath, a Scout promises to do his “duty to God,” and in the Scout Law he promises to be “reverent.”

The Boy Scout Handbook (11th ed.) explains a Scouts’ “duty to God” as “Your family and religious leaders teach you about God and the ways you can serve. You do your duty to God by following the wisdom of those teachings every day and by respecting and defending the rights of others to practice their own beliefs.”

The Handbook explains “reverent” as “A Scout is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties. He respects the beliefs of others.”

All levels of advancement in the Scouting program have requirements recognizing “duty to God”.

…before becoming very explicit when it comes to adult organisers:

Boy Scouts of America believes that no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God. Accordingly, youth members and adult volunteer leaders of Boy Scouts of America obligate themselves to do their duty to God and be reverent as embodied in the Scout Oath and the Scout Law. Leaders also must subscribe to the Declaration of Religious Principle. Because of its views concerning the duty to God, Boy Scouts of America believes that an atheist or agnostic is not an appropriate role model of the Scout Oath and Law for adolescent boys. Because of Scouting’s methods and beliefs, Scouting does not accept atheists and agnostics as members or adult volunteer leaders.

http://www.bsalegal.org/duty-to-god-cases-224.asp

The UK scouts appear to be less blunt, in that if you do a search for “atheist” on their website you get no results, but the effect is still the same. They say:

The Scout Movement includes members of many different forms of religion. The following policy has received the approval of the heads of the leading religious bodies in the United Kingdom.

All Members of the Movement are encouraged to:

make every effort to progress in the understanding and observance of the Promise to do their best to do their duty to God

belong to some religious body

carry into daily practice what they profess

[link]

Now they might say that “encouraged” is not the same as “required”, but children are required to swear an oath to God to join the scouts. There is no opt out allowed.

This is something that the British Humanist Association is protesting against.

Now, some might say that atheists have no right to complain, that this would be like complaining that atheist children aren’t allowed to go to Sunday School. But I’d say that the two are not comparable. Sunday Schools are inherently religious organisations. Their entire purpose it for children to be worship and be educated in a particular religion.

The scouts are not a religous organisation and being a scout isn’t about religion. After all, people of all religions can join. They have an entirely secular purpose: educating and entertaining children with the goal of helping them grown into responsible citizens.

They just don’t let atheists join.

Religious people might say that atheist parents should just let / tell their children to make the oath. They might ask what they harm is, or say that the parents are selfishly stopping their children doing something nice simply over a point of principle. But would those same people instruct their children to make an oath to a different religion (Christian children swearing an oath involving Mohammed, say)? I suspect not.

People might also say that since I haven’t bothered to get involved and help out as a scout master, I have no right to criticise those who do devote their time and effort to what’s a very noble task. I feel this would be very fair criticism to make of me were it not for the fact that if I did decide I wanted to volunteer, I couldn’t.

Because I’m an atheist.

It’s also a bit weird knowing that if my wife and I do have children, those children will not be able to join the scouts, simply because they don’t happen to be followers of a religion.

Oh well, sod it. I think I’d much rather they joined the Woodcraft Folk (basically, hippy scouts), anyhow. Then all they’d be required to pledge would be:

This shall be for a bond between us,
That we are of one blood you and I;
That we shall cry peace to all,
And claim kinship with every living thing;
That we hate War, Sloth and Greed,
And love fellowship.
And that we shall go singing to the fashioning of a new world.
PEACE

Can’t see how anyone could disagree with that!

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that at the end of July, my Campaign For Real Monopoly article from issue 10 of Critical Miss went viral, being read by something like 40,000 people in just a few days. In total, it was viewed 75,015 times during the month of July.

I don’t know quite where it started from. I think a lot of people found out about it from this post in Ezra Klein’s Washington Post blog:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/…

That wasn’t the first mention of it though. It was mentioned by various people on Twitter, but the oldest mention I found was this one on a computer gaming forum called NeoGAF. And the most recent was probably this one on Inside Gaming (found via Josh Wein on the Critical Miss Facebook page).

I’ve just checked out the server logs today, and it seems that while things have quietened down quite a bit, there is still a good trickle of people coming in: in August, that one article’s had 15,646 views. To put that in context, in June, the highest rating article was one about “Semi-Sentient Bipedal Pack Animals” with 310 views, with the entire site itself getting 2073 unique visitors (which is itself not bad considering that the site hasn’t been updated for more than five years).

I don’t think this article going viral’s likely to make much difference to me in the long term. Most people coming to read it will be coming simply to read an article someone’s linked to. They’ll probably not even notice the site it’s on, let alone who wrote it. (Although if anyone is reading this having found me via this article, I’d love it if you could let me know).

So what does it look like when a post goes viral? Well a bit like this:

And this:

I’ve fancied doing some GMing (games mastering) for quite a while. (In roleplaying, the GM is the one who sets the overall storyline and runs the game). I needed something that would suit my style and my abilities, as well as hopefully working when done via a Skype video link.

This is what I’ve pitched to the guys, and the cool thing is that they’re pretty keen.

Furtown

The sky above the starport was the colour of television, tuned to a cable radio station. It was three hours to midnight, and the last of the salary dogs were heading home with shiny briefcases clutched in clawed paws, fur glistening from the driving rain, snouts already twitching at the thought of an evening meal of meat and biscuits. Behind them, the rats were emerging from their day-time hideaways, some with hairless tails casually wrapped around their wares, others with neon signs above advertising their services. Expensively coiffeured cats stepped out of sleek aircars, seeking thrills and kicks, the crueller the better. A dog could lose himself here, end up just one more dead hound when the sun returned the morning after the night before.

Furtown was not a place for the pure of paw.

The Elevator Pitch

Furtown is an anthropomorphic cartoon series, with a vaguely noire / cyberpunky theme. (Think Bladerunner with fur). It has a witty, ironic, satirical tone, aimed as much at unemployed slackers as the children it supposedly targets.

The three PCs are the joint proprietors of a private detective agency who find themselves hired to investigate a mystery deeper and more dangerous than they could possibly have imagined. This single story line will be told over the course of an entire series.

(This will not be an open-ended campaign. It will be one big story, like a novel, with a beginning, middle and end. Although we could then go on and do a second “series”, with a new story, if we wanted.)

System

The system I would use is Toon, from Steve Jackson Games

Reasons

I want a system that is very fast and abstract. This is partly because that’s the sort of system I want, but also because if I’m doing this via Skype, it really needs to be very simple and straightforward. I also want to focus on story, with combats being resolved quickly. (There will actually be a proper mystery plot to be solved, but it’s what comes after combat that I’m interested in – either you knock them out and then question them, or they knock you out, and either run away and capture you).

By doing it as an ironic cartoon that plays with the tropes and clichés of noire mysteries, I can (metaphorically) sketch quickly with a broad brush, and avoid getting bogged down in details. And I can also put in some humour without detracting from the tone.

Furtown

Furtown is a star port city that may be either on Earth, or on another world. (This is never defined). It is entirely inhabited by anthropomorphic animals. There no humans. There’s no reason, hidden or otherwise, for this. It’s just the way Furtown is.

Furtown’s system of government is never specifically defined, but is strongly implied to be a harsh and corrupt republic of some kind. (It would be a cynical Californian liberal Democrat’s view of what the USA would be like, some years down the line).

Races of Furtown

Dogs

Dogs are the largest group in Furtown, forming the bulk of the middle-classes as well as the “old-money”, paternalistic rich and the respectable working classes.

They always walk upright.

Upper class dogs are always pedigrees, whilst mongrel’s tend to be more lower class. (There’s no reason for this, it’s just the way it is – if you want an explanation, it’s that the animators drew upper class dogs as good-looking pedigrees, and lower-class dogs as tufted, mongrel scruffs).

Dogs are generally decent and hard-working.

Cats

Cats are mainly in the upper-classes, although in more of the nouveau riche. They always walk upright. They are slightly smaller and slighter than dogs. But they have very sharp claws.

Cats are generally cruel, selfish and hedonistic, but intelligent and stylish.

Sheep

Sheep form the lower parts of the working class / underclass. They are stupid, superficial, and of often questionable morals. Most are on benefits, spending their time watching mindless TV quiz shows. When they do work, female sheep aspire to be hairdressers, males to be footballers.

They always walk upright, except for when they’re pissed (drunk), which is often.

Rats

Rats provide Furtown’s criminal underclass. They often live in the sewers andunderground tunnels. They make their money from petty larceny, businesses of dubious legality, and charging utility companies protection money. (“Nice fibreoptic cable you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”)

They stand upright, but often scuttle about on all fours. They are about half the size of dogs.

Rats are devious and amoral, but will often abide by some form of moral code. (It’s often said of Ron Rat and his twin brother Reg that they’re nice to their mother, and they keep the sewers in some kind of order).

Horses

Horses are a minority group. Traditionally, they worked in the transportation sector, initially in front of carriages, and then in the driver’s seat when the carriages were motorised. They have now started to enter other employment sectors, especially Shires, who typically work as bouncers or hired muscle.

They always stand on all fours, except when they are driving a truck or riding a motorcycle.

Horses are very heavily unionised, with many of those unions having links to the rat underclasses. They are generally trustworthy and decent, if a little slow.

Furtown Style

The typical dress of a Furtown inhabitant is a jacket and shoes and perhaps a hat, sometimes with trousers, sometimes without. (It’s a cartoon, that’s how they do it). Clothing and other items are a mixture of slightly futuristic and retrothirties.

Furtown Inhabitants

Mayor Butch Slobber

The mayor is a decent Labrador, liked by all, but generally regarded as a wellmeaning but essentially useless puppet. They Mayor is rarely seen in public without his assistant Felix Creep.

Felix Creep

Felix is a lithe tom cat, always nattily, if conservatively, dressed. He is widely regarded as the power behind the throne.

Frankie Skinartra

Frankie is a rat crooner rumoured to have links to Ron Rat and his brother Reg.

Ron Rat

Ron Rat is the leader of a large chunk of Furtown’s criminal underworld. He is aided by his twin brother Reg, and their other brothers Rik, Rich, Richie, Ralph, Rob, Randy, Ramsay, Ray, Reed, Reuben, Regis, Rhys, Reece, Rene, Rio, Robin, Roger, Rock, Rocky, Rod, Roddie, Rocco, Roland, Ronan, Rolf, Rory, Ruben, Rudolf, Ross, Rudy, Roy, Rufus and Ryan. (They were part of a very, very large litter).

Baabaara

Dim even for a sheep Baabaara shot to fame on the reality show Furtown Shore, followed by a stint on Celebrity Get Your Brother Out Of Here – in which she memorably declared to Border Collie chat show host Rex Clever her belief that sheep dogs were called sheep dogs because they were “wannabe” sheep (dogs who wanted to act like sheep).

She is a regular in the pages of Baaa! magazine.

The guys have already come up with some very cool character concepts, but an actual start for the campaign will have to wait for me to come up with the full plot. (At present I have some ideas, but they need fleshing out).

I’ve also sent out some emails to them giving further thoughts about the campaign, which I might format up into a later post.

At some point in the future, I’m going to write a post explaining the steps I had to follow to get my novel Game Night available on Amazon’s Kindle platform. (It was already available in the traditional “paper” format). But did just want to mention something that I realised / noticed today.

When you publish your book to Kindle, you can’t specify that it is the Kindle version of an existing paper book. Instead, you’re supposed to wait and allow the Amazon database to figure this out and link them together.  In my case, that didn’t seem to happen, resulting in me having to contact them, supply the details of the paper and Kindle versions, and ask them to do it – which they did.

The process takes several days and isn’t yet complete. When it is, reviews written about the paper version should appear on the Kindle version’s page (which is currently reviewless), and when going to the paper version’s page, you will be offered the option of purchasing the book on Kindle.

But there’s a third benefit, which didn’t occur to me until I was looking at the (now partially linked) Kindle page, and seeing how the price is displayed now that it is lined to the print version (click to make bigger):

Now I’m not an expert in the psychology of prices and pricing. But I think that might be quite cool.

See, if I had only a Kindle version, the price would be £0.70. A browser might come across this and conclude that it is “cheap”. But they might also conclude that it’s clearly not worth much. But now, they see that the price is £0.70 compared with a price for the print version of £7.99 – a saving of 91%. It’s no longer £0.70 for something worth £0.70, but £0.70 for something worth £7.99. I’m hoping that the word that will come to mind now will be “bargain” rather than “cheap”. (There is a proper name for this “price expectation” effect, but I can’t remember it now).

Well here’s hoping, anyhow.

My novel Game Night is now out on the Kindle, priced at what I’d consider to be a bargain launch price of just 99c (or 70p in the UK). I’m not sure what to expect or hope of this. It might prove to be a runaway success, going viral in the way that the paper version just didn’t quite manage, and selling tens of thousands of copies.

Or it might fizzle out and die, taking my hope and dreams with it.

There isn’t so much I can do to determine which of those two outcomes occur. But there is something that you can do. Two things in particular. It’s really quite cheeky for me to ask you to do them, but it’s really important to me, and I’m hoping you won’t mind.

Firstly, you can buy the Kindle version of Game Night, even if you’ve already got the paper version. You don’t need a Kindle. Amazon do free Kindle applications for Windows PC, Mac OS X, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android. These allow you to purchase and read Kindle books just as if you had an actual Kindle. (It’s pretty straight-forward, but I’ve put some instructions at the end).

During this initial launch period, it will only cost you 99c in the US, or 70p in the UK, which I’d like to feel is a small enough amount that I can ask you to do as a favour to me, albeit a rather considerable one for which I will owe you a drink. (In case you’re interested, the amount of money I’ll get out of that is 35c, but it will be worth far, far more than that to me).

Buying Game Night is pretty crucial. At present, if you type “Game Night” into Amazon you get a long list of books with Game Night in the title, not one of which is my one. If enough of you buy Game Night I’ll be at the top of that list. Sales will also give it a high Amazon ranking, which gives the book credibility with readers and will help it get into Amazon’s crucial recommendation system.

Secondly, assuming you’ve enjoyed reading Game Night, you can recommend it to people who follow you on social networks like Twitter and Facebook as well as the many forum sites out there. I’ll be doing tweets about Game Night. If you’re a twitter user and could retweet one of them (or even better do your own tweet), I’d be very grateful. When it comes to making Game Night really take off, I can light the fire, but it’s those around me who have to blow on the flames.

The best links to use are:

US: http://www.amazon.com/Game-Night-ebook/dp/B0057JPZSG

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Game-Night-ebook/dp/B0057JPZSG

Finally, as always, if you liked Game Night then I would be very happy if you did a short review, either on Amazon or your own blog, saying so. Alternatively, you can go to the Amazon pages for the book (the above links) and click on the “Like” button, to say that you like the book. (Assuming you do, or course!)

And it would be especially nice if you comment here, or on Twitter or Facebook, to say that you’ve bought or retweeted or posted.

I know this entire post is just a tad cheeky, but I really will be grateful for any and all help. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

HOW TO BUY A KINDLE BOOK (IF YOU DON’T ALREADY HAVE A KINDLE)

1) Download and install the appropriate app. If you have a Windows PC, you can download it here. If you have an Apple Mac, you can download it here (it will only work Macs bought within the last five years, as you need an Intel one and it needs to be running at least OS X 10.5 Leopard). Otherwise, if you have an iPad, an iPhone, a BlackBerry, or some kind of Android phone or tablet, you should download the “Kindle” app from whichever app store you normally use. In all case, it’s free.

2) Enter your Amazon account details into the app (i.e. you log in). US customers can enter their Amazon.com account details. UK customers can enter their Amazon.co.uk details.

3) Click on the “Kindle Store” button. This will take you to the Kindle Store. (Which is basically the Amazon website, but showing only Kindle titles).

4) Search for “Jonny Nexus”. Pick Game Night from the resulting list. (It should be either 99c or 70p, depending on whether you’re on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk).  Click that you want to buy it.

That’s it. It should then be automatically downloaded to whichever app you’re using to make the purchase. If you have multiple Kindle apps (on both your iPad and iPhone say, or Windows PC and Android phone) you can download it to the “other” app by going into the “Archived” section and selecting Game Night. (You only pay once, even if you read it on multiple devices).