Where Worlds Collide

I’ve been a user of last.fm for a while - most of the time it’s a great way of getting to hear new music. It works by ‘scrobbling’ whatever music you’ve been listening to on your computer, and then allows you to stream a personalised internet radio station with songs similar to the sorts of things you’ve been listening. I’ve discovered several bands, including Pineapple Thief and Alestorm

Unfortunately there’s one big thing wrong with it. They’ve made a major database design screwup, in which they defined the unique identifier for an artist as being the artist name. This may work perfectly well for major label artists, but once you get into the “long tail” it’s more common to find multiple bands sharing the same name, often for bands in different countries, or bands sharing the same name as a long-defunct outfit. This has now happened to Panic Room, who now find themselves sharing a last.fm page with an Italian nu-metal band.

Last.fm’s hopelessly broken solution is to treat multiple artists as if they were one, and all the songs and photos are jumbled up with no indication as to which ones belong to which band. Sometimes one band is vastly more well-known than the other, so it doesn’t matter except for the other band which gets marginalised. But when you get two very different artists of roughly similar popularity, it creates a lot of animosity, with energy wasted in pissing contests between fans of the two bands over who’s first in the wiki, who’s photo is shown first, etc.

Last.fm have got to get their finger out and fix this - and I’m sick and tired of hearing excuses as to why it can’t be done. I work in IT, I’ve got a lot of database design experience - I know full well that they’re bullshitting when they say it’s “impossible”. If it requires a major database redesign, then so be it. They really can’t afford not to.

Even if the fix isn’t perfect, and might take some sort of manual intervention to determine which ‘new’ tracks belong to which band, anything is preferable to the present mess. I’m sure find fans will be prepared to spend time and energy if there’s any manual disambiguation required.

If last.fm doesn’t fix this, and fix this soon, then people are going to be abandoning last.fm for rival sites.

Phil Masters visits the Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain exhibition at the Science Museum in London, and ponders the associated social history.

The problem for an exhibition like this, I fear, is that it has to deal with the persistent scent of failure that hangs over its subject-matter. The Hi-Tech Britain of which this exhibition speaks meant a motor industry whose management and workforce alike were all too stuck in old ways; it meant Comet airliners which crashed, and lost us that crucial lead to Boeing; it meant shiny new diesel and then electric trains, running on essentially Victorian tracks. There was some brilliance there, but too much of it was necessary ingenuity, improvisation around ingrained habits, bad decisions, and the problems of a country still recovering from its involvement in an expensive war.

Harold Wilson’s “White Heat of Technology” from the sixties now seems terribly, terribly dated, especially when people use imagery from that era decades later. I remember a logo in the 1980s featuring a stylised image of an electric train passing the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. It was meant to promote industry and modernity, but left me with an impression of an organisation stuck two decades in the past. The worst irony was the locomotive, one of the unsuccessful first-generation machines from the 1955 modernisation plan, which turned out to be hopelessly unreliable and destined for the scrapheap after a relatively short life.

Phil concludes that Dan Dare himself wasn’t so much a man of the future as a man of the recent past:

But not only is Dan Dare not flying the spacelanes in our defence, he’s never going to, whatever may happen in space research. We’re unlikely ever to see his sort again, and perhaps a big symptom of Britain’s problems in the 1950s was the idea that the hi-tech future would lie with a square-jawed pilot who wouldn’t have been out of place in the Battle of Britain, backed up by a comedy Yorkshire sidekick and a gruffly paternalistic staff officer.

Read the whole thing.

So they’ve finally announced the decision to electrify the Great Western Main Line. And they’ve going right through to Swansea rather than stopping at Cardiff, which is a sensible decision. No mention of Plymouth or Penzance, although keeping the wires up on the sea wall might be an engineering challenge!main

While I have to applaud the decision, I do have to ask why this wasn’t done 20 years ago. The last major electrification project was the East Coast Main Line, which British Rail completed in 1988. So why did they disband the electrification teams rather than carry on with the next project.

In retrospect, the answer is simple: Privatisation happened. Because of the ideologically-driven need for short-term profits, it was no time for long term investment projects. So Britain continues to lag behind the rest of Europe, with a significant proportion of main line trunk routes operated by diesels.

The other electrification project announced is the George Stevenson’s Liverpool to Manchester line, opened in 1830 as the first main line in the world. At first glance this is an odd choice; the only trains using it’s entire length nowadays are a handful of local trains; even the Liverpool to Manchester expresses use another route. But at Newton-le-Willows there are connections both north and south with the main London-Glasgow line. These connections will enable electric to run directly between Liverpool or Manchester to Scotland, and serve as a diversionary route between Liverpool or Manchester to London when the more direct routes are closed for engineering work.

So hopefully we’ll see the end of the class 185 “Lardarse Express” diesel trains operating under the wires for 90% of the journey on Manchester to Edinburgh services. Although seeing Virgin Trains using diesel Voyagers 100% under the wires between Glasgow and Manchester doesn’t exactly convince sceptics of the value of electrification. Neither does the percentage of freight on electrified routes hauled by diesels.

Why do people still take the Mercury Music Prize seriously? In it’s early years it may have picked a few innovative and creative acts, but recently it’s become nothing more than an extension of the music industry PR machine. The shortlist makes depressing reading with it’s over-hyped usual suspects and entirely predictable absence of entire genres.

As commenter Jonana puts it:

Anyway, what are you talking about, other genres of music? I thought nothing outside timid electronica and ‘indie’ pop-rock, with a token folk presence, was produced by anyone anywhere ever.

Naturally the sheeple don’t realise there’s anything else out there than what’s spoon-fed by mainstream media. This is falsely presented as ‘real music’ in opposition to Simon Cowell’s gunk. They don’t seem to realise it’s another product from the same sausage factory.

Sometimes I wonder who are the Mercury judges are. I’m guessing they’re Jo Whiley, Conor McNicholas, Simon Cowell, Michael Eavis and one randomly-selected 11-year old.

I’ve lost count of the number of Stabcon’s I’ve been to now.

Stabcon is the twice-yearly games convention now held at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport. It’s small enough that I recognise all the regulars year after year; in that respect it’s almost like a Mostly Autumn gig. Come to think of it, it’s a very similar demographic…

Although the emphasis is on board games, there are also plenty of RPG sessions over the weekend. The organisation is very informal, with nothing booked in advance. GMs put prospective games up on the notice board, players sign up to them on a first-come-first-served basis. This does mean that popular games tend to fill up by the Friday night, but there does seem some form of self-balancing between players and GMs over the weekend. I see very few games fail to run for lack of players, and additional games always seem to appear on the board whenever all the other games are full. This year I ended up playing four RPG sessions over the weekend, more than I have done in many conventions.

Friday night’s game was GURPS Reign of Steel. The setting was a Terminator-style near-future; the robots had won, and the survivors of humanity are either fighting a guerilla war, or just lying low and hoping the robots ignore them. The plot had the PCs as members of the SAS, the last surviving military unit serving the last surviving government in Europe, and involved Frenchmen stealing Britain’s last remaining nukes, the Channel Tunnel rail link, and this exchange:

GM: The robot manages to dodge the combine harvester.
Me: I’ll turn and try to ram it again - I guess it will take a couple of rounds to circle round.
GM: It’s a cinematic game!
Me: OK them, make that a handbrake turn…

Saturday, after a few card games, was another GURPS game, this time a Diskworld dungeon adventure, run by Phil Masters. I played the stereotypical Hubland barbarian, as we hacked and slashed our way through sewer-slugs and skeletons. The last fight seemed to go on for ages as we had yet another example of my appallingly bad convention die rolling, although my biggest criticism of GURPS nowadays is that fights sometimes go on for too long.

By the evening, things started to get very silly, with InSpectres, which is basically Ghostbusters with the serial numbers filed off. I’ve played this game at Stabcon before; a very rules-lite system designed to encourage player creativity, and played strictly for laughs, of which there were many; when we had player characters with combat origami, our ghost containment device was a wet paper bag, and our vehicle was a mutant hybrid of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost armoured car and a bendy-bus. You get the idea? We had to deal with a demonically-possessed teddy bear, four escaped tigers (due to an accident with the rocket launcher), and how to dispose of a dead elephant stuck half-way up the stairs.

Paranoia on Sunday was the only way to top that. Paranoia is one of those games I’ve always wanted to play, but up until now nobody had ever run at a con I’d been to. The Computer is your friend! Denounce your comrades as Commie Mutant Traitors! You do not have security clearance to eat blue M&Ms! And are you questioning the skills of R&D with the L-shaped gun for shooting round corners? Report now for termination!

The next Stabcon will be the first weekend in January 2010. I’m already paid and signed up.