While poking around a second-hand shop, I found a copy of the Deadlands RPG. It
pitches itself as a “Weird West” game: take the wild west, add horrible
things from beyond and folks who won’t stay dead, and you’ve got a
pretty interesting place to tell a story. Mad scientists build
steam-powered machines that run on “ghost rock”, a strange mineral that
appeared after “The Reckoning” let spirits back into the world (and blew
up California). Inventing things channels said spirits, which turns the
scientist insane. Hoyle’s writings on card games are secretly books of
eldritch lore, and if you look closely you can see the cards appear in a
huckster’s hand as he casts his hex. It’s a really cool setting, and if
I had the time and players, I’d watch a few spaghetti westerns, tinker
with the mechanics and play a couple of sessions.
My recent
rant briefly appeared on the front pages of HN and /r/haskell, to a largely negative
response. Most of the comments either accused me of having
autotools-Stockholm-syndrome or insulted my reasoning ability. Since I
still stand by what I said, I will respond to those main criticisms.
I was going to write a new version of metscrape in C that supported
plugins, so people could contribute modules for their local weather
services. C is still one of the best ways to go for portable programs,
and a plugin system means you don’t need to build in support for unused
countries.
But.
I wanted to write my plugins in Haskell, mainly because HXT is
peerless when it comes to slicing and dicing XML.
So.
The Haskell FFI is pretty good. Actually, it’s one of the best I’ve
used: you declare functions “foreign export” and can fiddle around with
things, preserve objects from the garbage collector and so on.
Today was the 2013
King of the Derwent Yacht Race. Some years, the tall ships get their
own race. There wasn’t a race for us this year, but that wasn’t going to
stop us getting out on the water! We were handling sail for almost all
of the day, trying to get the most out of the ship. By the time I’d
noticed the fleet sailing towards us and got the camera from my cabin,
they’d all rounded the mark and were sailing away. Even so, I did manage
to get this lovely shot of Tasmania’s other tall ship, Lady Nelson.
That was the last of our daysails from Waterman’s Dock. Once the
racing yachts and temporary fixtures are cleared out, we’ll move back to
our usual berth at Elizabeth Street. It’s been an interesting couple of
weeks. Because the berth is so narrow, it’s easier to ferry the linesman
in with the powerboat than try to have him jump ashore from the ship.
I’ve been doing the boat driving, and it feels really good to be able to
use my ticket. If the wind’s unfavourable, I need to make like a tug and
give the ship a shove. It must’ve looked pretty funny from the wharf,
but it worked.
