Like I could stop myself.
> Please repeat away Dave!!!!
>
> Matt
> Please repeat away Dave!!!!
>
> Matt
Thread: Re: Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
20 posts.
Well, that's annoying. Yahoo has completely scrambled its site again and
made it impossible (for me) to find my groups. The last shake up made it
easier to find My Groups, but that couldn't last.
Searches on groups "Traveller" and "TNE" come up empty.
But that's my problem.
Yes, I remember generally the picture you're talking about, and I had the
same reaction, it's kind of "the lost illo" that we never used again, and
should have, because we normally did.
Brad McDevitt drew it, and I think he also named it "Prince Caspian." The
idea, if I recall was that we were going to roll out some more specific
models of battle dress, and he gave the name Prince Caspian to either the
standard look of the RC battledress we had established, or a slight
variation, but when the illo got apparently misplaced I guess the reminder
to do that did as well. I think Rob Lazaretti (sp?) may have drawn the
original version of the RC battledress, but Brad did some refinement and
codifying of it, which is the sort of attention to detail that I like to
follow up on. A lot of artists don't like tech, and fake and fudge their
way through it. You'd be surprised at the amount of time I spent sitting
with them getting them to understand what they were drawing: pistols,
artillery, ships, so that they wouldn't draw them wrong so that they
obviously wouldn't work. Things like automatic pistol slides that
obviously wouldn't slide because there were obstructions in their path,
artillery where somehow the trails were connected to the recoil mechanism.
I bought little models and toys for them to use as well. But Brad was the
kind of artist (like Bryan Gibson as well) who liked tech, and figured out
how it would work, and worked out the details so he could draw it better.
When you've got an in-house artist like that, you definitely want to take
advantage of it and unlock and ride his creativity. But that lost illo
represents sort of a missed opportunity.
Did that picture also have the back end of a couple Type S scout variants
up in the corner, or am I remembering something else? I want to say that
the illo included a couple of designs that we deliberately included in
there, to give us a "hook" to detail and expand from later, but that never
happened. Full-page illos like that took a fair amount of time to make, so
re-using them was always the intent.
Good eye, you've uncovered another lost TNE tragedy. :-(
> It is of RC Heavy Battledress. The illustration is superimposed over what
> appears to be some data and text - the text calls it "Prince Caspian"
> armour, something I'd never seen elsewhere. I've put a picture of it into
> the Photos section of the yahoogroup site.
made it impossible (for me) to find my groups. The last shake up made it
easier to find My Groups, but that couldn't last.
Searches on groups "Traveller" and "TNE" come up empty.
But that's my problem.
Yes, I remember generally the picture you're talking about, and I had the
same reaction, it's kind of "the lost illo" that we never used again, and
should have, because we normally did.
Brad McDevitt drew it, and I think he also named it "Prince Caspian." The
idea, if I recall was that we were going to roll out some more specific
models of battle dress, and he gave the name Prince Caspian to either the
standard look of the RC battledress we had established, or a slight
variation, but when the illo got apparently misplaced I guess the reminder
to do that did as well. I think Rob Lazaretti (sp?) may have drawn the
original version of the RC battledress, but Brad did some refinement and
codifying of it, which is the sort of attention to detail that I like to
follow up on. A lot of artists don't like tech, and fake and fudge their
way through it. You'd be surprised at the amount of time I spent sitting
with them getting them to understand what they were drawing: pistols,
artillery, ships, so that they wouldn't draw them wrong so that they
obviously wouldn't work. Things like automatic pistol slides that
obviously wouldn't slide because there were obstructions in their path,
artillery where somehow the trails were connected to the recoil mechanism.
I bought little models and toys for them to use as well. But Brad was the
kind of artist (like Bryan Gibson as well) who liked tech, and figured out
how it would work, and worked out the details so he could draw it better.
When you've got an in-house artist like that, you definitely want to take
advantage of it and unlock and ride his creativity. But that lost illo
represents sort of a missed opportunity.
Did that picture also have the back end of a couple Type S scout variants
up in the corner, or am I remembering something else? I want to say that
the illo included a couple of designs that we deliberately included in
there, to give us a "hook" to detail and expand from later, but that never
happened. Full-page illos like that took a fair amount of time to make, so
re-using them was always the intent.
Good eye, you've uncovered another lost TNE tragedy. :-(
> It is of RC Heavy Battledress. The illustration is superimposed over what
> appears to be some data and text - the text calls it "Prince Caspian"
> armour, something I'd never seen elsewhere. I've put a picture of it into
> the Photos section of the yahoogroup site.
Anyway, I left us partway through "nuance," (between Star Vikings and
Longships) mostly sitting around the conference table in the main room
where we held the production meetings. In many other organizations this
space would have been called something else, and I am pleased to say no
one at GDW ever uttered that term, because I dislike it.
Because my mind is there I am going to let it remain there, although this
is keeping us at the beginning of TNE rather than moving towards its "end"
as Bardbear asked. They feel related, and we'll get there. When I was
talking about nuance that kind of skipped a logical step that I need to
re-insert, although to some extent they were concurrent.
These talks went on for a while, but not too long, really, maybe a couple
of months. Off the top of my head I'd say TNE won the GAMA award in 1994
for best SF RPG rules of 1993 and that Survival Margin came out in 1992.
What I can no longer pull out of my head is when releases came out in
months of a year. And in one round of office moves I foolishly threw away
all of my old production schedules and warehouse reports, so I can no
longer reconstruct that. But I do know that I wrote Survival Margin over
my Christmas "vacation" in my little brother's old bedroom, so if it was
published in 1992 it was written during Christmas 1991. If not, and it
came out in 1993, then it could have been Xmas 92 as well. I know that PLS
came out in 1992, the year after the war, because I spent that spring
doing playtesting from my old house in Maryland (another act of mercy from
Darlene File, you have no idea how hard it is to sell a house when you are
getting advice from realtors in IL and your wife is getting advice from
realtors in MD). If you compared the SM and PLS ISBNs that might show the
relative order of their release. On the other hand, we would sometimes
assign an ISBN early to a scheduled product so they could get out of
order.
When I was hired it was clear that there was going to be a new edition of
Traveller to replace MT, and in developing/editing Hard Times I wanted to
get a handle on where Traveller was intended to go. It turned out that
there was a bit of a vacuum where you would expect a creative team. Marc
was no longer working at GDW (he was still an owner), DGP had already
announced that they were ceasing their Traveller support in favor of their
own "A.I." nanotech/magic game (in a sad irony the DGP letter announcing
their departure from Traveller was already in circulation when I got to
GDW, but it didn't get published for a year or so, which made it look like
a slam against TNE), and there was no one at GDW who knew the MT system.
GDW had apparently always been sending all of the rules questions to Joe
and Gary at DGP as they were the MT authors, and they were no longer
supporting that, which was another one of the reasons Frank wanted to redo
Traveller with "House Rules" so we could support it.
When I asked, "what are our plans?" there were two answers, 1) a number of
ideas Frank had floated over the past year or so at Cons (a big event,
like Virus, Star Vikings) which were not all well-received, especially the
Virus thing, and 2) some manuscripts being written out-of-house, and HT
was the first of these. Actually three answers, we did know that the Core
system was going to the "House"(T2K) system--note that at that time the
House System was still D10, the D20 system did not finally emerge until
later, after Les published an interim D20 system as a DC folio which we
discarded, I want to say that it was Les who came up with the key concept
of uprating the D10 to the D20 system, the additional two named success
levels, I remember the meetings around it, but I'm not sure--but that
didn't get at the "storyline" plans, so doesn't really count.
The out-of-house material was based on an arc following the maps of
gradual destruction and decline in Rebellion Sourcebook, and had the
Imperium slowly dying with players trying to hold off the night. You can
see in HT that it was developing some new vocabulary, and it looked like
"starmercs" was going to be the term instead of "Star Vikings." In this
line things were going to bottom out at some point, maybe in the 1130s,
and then start climbing back up without there having been a "long night"
(appropriated from Poul Anderson). We were having significant difficulty
with out-of-house manuscripts and I began making the case that for
something as significant as a new edition of Traveller (in reality there
were a number of semi-generations in the CT "LBB" era, with changes that
were pretty serious, and were only identified by printing dates, as well
as re-combinations like The Traveller Book which pulled some of these
changes together, but these were not identified as "new editions") GDW
needed to have direct creative control of the direction of the new edition
(at that point we had six full-time designers on staff, so we had the
personnel to handle it). One of the main--and legitimate--complaints about
MT was that GDW (or GDW and DGP) introduced this giant historical change
to arguably "open up" the game, but that this huge change was utterly
unsupported by material which would help refs and players run campaigns in
it. (The other complaint was the extensive [excessive?] errata in the
rules set, especially starship design [Fighting Ships of the Shattered
Imperium]. Also, arguably, the way the "Rebellion" "opened up" the
campaign was seen to work opposite to opening it up, by dwarfing the
players with these vast wars, or at least the way the Rebellion setting
was supported/not supported.) We were already hearing remarks from
players/fans, "They screwed up supporting MT, so they're going to screw up
this next one too. Why should I trust them and buy this new one when they
didn't care about the last one?" For any new Traveller edition to be
successful we had to clearly show the commitment of GDW to get behind it
completely, and the best way to do that was to put the force of extensive
in-house design behind it. Traveller, as a GDW flagship, deserved no less.
(I will not say Traveller was THE GDW flagship, it was not. GDW had T2K,
wargames, miniatures rules, etc. But Traveller certainly was A GDW
flagship. Contrary to Star Trek and cruise line ignorance, real fleets
have multiple flagships, not just one.)
Those were basically the arguments that I made that we needed to pull it
back in-house, and everyone agreed, so we did. (I think this decision was
inescapable. For comparison, try the opposing arguments, "Traveller is
really important to us. Let's have it designed by people out-of-house,
because we've got other things to do," or "Let's have it run by guys that
don't work for us, because it's not important enough for us to take direct
leadership of ourselves.") But if anyone wants to blame GDW for reeling it
in, that was my doing.
And now, having filled the logical step (GDW is now writing it) at top, we
can go back to the "nuance" of "how are we writing it?"
Thinking back, I would say this decision would have been made by late
1991, so I wrote SM over Xmas 91, but I could be wrong. I know that all of
the MT stuff we put out after HT (A:V, AGtD, AV) was setting the stage for
TNE, and I did those from pieces of the MS that would have come after HT
(I think it was maybe called "Diaspora"). One of the pieces of
conventional wisdom that I think was actually wrong was that "it's
quicker/easier to rewrite something someone else has already written"
compared to writing from scratch yourself. I actually think it's the
reverse. When you're rewriting you always trying to "save" what's there,
and if it's built on a bad structure or a structure which no longer
applies, it's harder to figure out how to re-purpose the pieces than to
just write what you know you need. But there is also the counter-point,
which is "we've already paid for this, we need to get some value out of
the sunk cost." And the reason for pointing that out is this explains why
the RC was where it turned out. The Diaspora work included all of that
sector information, and UWPs are pretty time-consuming to proof and edit.
It's what, 20-30 digits? In prose that would be 4-6 words which you can
read in less than a second, but in UWPs you have to look at all of the
digits individually, interpreting what they mean, and making sure they
make sense together. So we kept the Diaspora data, accepted the fact that
the products were "pulling the players' attention" down that direction,
and I put the RC into Old Expanses to trailing. That also allowed us to
have them closer to the Hivers and bring the Hivers into the game which is
something we really wanted to do.
So that brings us back up to where I can continue the "nuance" discussion
in the next installment.
End of section.
> So, with that as background to how the road to envisioned TNE future was
dynamic,
>
> 1. Yes, there would have been a reformed "Imperial" civilization. It
probably would have been named in the Imperial style. I think if you look
> at the various quotes from the "future" history books looking back at
the
> "Star Viking" era you can probably get a flavor of that civilization
from
> the names of the publishers or something. I think one of them was
"Imperial Press."
>
> That stuff, by the way, was to nuance some of the expectations from the
rumors between MT and TNE. I got to GDW on September 29, 1991, a Sunday
(actually would have gotten in the night before after a 10 or 12 hour
drive from Maryland) and playtested Sands of War. I actually began work on
> Monday the 30th on Hard Times. The cover had already been printed and
all
> of the interior art had also been completed, but no one had looked at
the
> MS, except for the art director (Kirk Wescom, I think) who pulled out
some
> text blocks to send to the artist (Darryl Midgette, I think) for
inspiration. Frank and I began talking right away about the direction the
> Traveller line was to take. MT was a remnant from the period when the
Imperium was going to gradually decline but never have a defining "boom"
event, and then gradually climb back up.
>
> Frank described some of the ideas he had had and floated at some Cons,
most of them apparently to some negative response, especially Virus. Also
> at this time he still firmly liked the idea of the Star Vikings in their
Longships as a mythic sort of force for rebuilding. So what I tried to do
> was take the concepts he was already excited about and make sense of
them
> in my own head. "Star Vikings" was the first thing. While Scandinavian
"Viking" culture did do a lot of exploring and trade and economic
expansion in Europe, and was therefore a "civilizing" force, the typical
idea that most people today have of "Vikings" is violence: raiding,
plunder, and burning Irish monasteries. To assert a more rarefied, nuanced
> meaning of "Viking" in an interstellar civilization 6000 years from now
when 99.99999% of the population doesn't live on Earth and could give a
fig what the "Vikings" were REALLY like didn't make sense to me. Why would
> they have a more fine-tuned sense of Earth history than we do today?
More
> likely they would have our 1991, degraded, caricatured sense of what
"Viking" means, i.e., a violent, anti-civilizing force. So "Star Viking"
had to be a pejorative term placed on them by someone else, either
contemporaries trying to discredit them, or later generations, happily
misunderstanding them. But that is NOT what they called themselves. In
quizzing Frank on his ideas, he explained the Star Vikings' results, he
described it as "a reformation." Being a Lutheran, that is a "name to
conjure with" (as Loren always said), so I took that and it became the
Reformation Coalition. "Reform" also has that sense, like "reforming
criminals," that there is something wrong with the status quo that must be
> fixed. So that also became part of the RC ethic. "RCES" was easily
degraded as "Arses," which started to add some color and attitude to hang
> your hat on, and so on.
>
> So, back to the nuance. At this point it had already been decided by the
great rumor mill that the next edition of Traveller was going to be "dark"
> and post-apocalyptic, because "Frank is dark and apocalyptic, he wrote
T2K
> after all, and we don't like that." "Dark" games were all the rage then,
and we could have easily gone that way to try to tap into that, but I
don't like dark games, and Frank doesn't like dark games. All of this
"evil is sexy" crap is annoying and trite. The sort of game we wanted to
make was where people striving for a higher cause could make a
difference.
> Sure, it could be against a darker background because that is when such
acts are most needed, and when they can make the most difference, but that
> doesn't mean the game is dark. The game is about people in a dark place
bringing light to it. And that is what we set out to do in TNE, and I
think everyone on this list gets that. However, there were a lot of people
> who had already made up their minds what their opinion of (Next
Traveller)
> was going to be, and they just stuck with that, never read it, and never
allowed their prejudices to be changed.
>
> BUT, as I said, we already knew that was the brush we were going to be
tarred with, so were trying to make some distinctions. So "Star Vikings"
is what they were called by their contemporary competitors, who became the
> Guild, and future generations later who misunderstood them. Hmm, if
future
> generations misunderstood them, then that must mean that they are no
longer around to set the record straight.
>
> Also, I mentioned above about RC and RCES that you had to start getting
"attitude" about an idea. One of the things I did back then was make music
> mix tapes for games I was working on, like little movie soundtracks for
the story I was trying to tell. I had them for Assignment Vigilante,
Raging Dragon (never finished, we did Phase Line Smash instead) and so on.
> I thought that I would make a typical multi-artist mix tape for TNE as
well, but as it turned out, the touchstone for me for TNE/RC/Star
Vikings
> was Pete Townshend's "White City" album. So "White City" is the Star
Viking soundtrack. If you listen to it you can probably hear where lots of
> stuff came from. Another aspect of attitude was creating characters who
would speak different themes or points of view that you wanted the players
> to be hearing, like Norris for the Regency, Kuligaan (sp?) for the RC,
etc., Craig for another POV, and obviously all of that was starting in the
> late MT period, which is why I think of all of those as "transitional
TNE"
> products, because we were setting the stage.
>
> Let me also say that we established two groups in the early thinking,
and
> in the rules: The Guild and the Free Traders. These were holdovers from
the Star Viking board game that we were going to put out. When GDW was
still flush with all of the Gulf War Factbook money (which allowed me to
be hired and new Macs bought for us) our print buyer, Darlene File (Marc
Miller's wife) bought up a bunch of materials for hard-map board games,
which included several thousand map boards and plastic pieces. You can see
> these map boards and pieces in Minion Hunter. The other game that was
supposed to be made with the remaining boards was Star Viking, a
"strategic" board game of re-taking space. There would have been four
players: the Star Vikings (RC), a player who played all of the little
TEDs, The Guild, and the Free Traders, and they all would have had
different cross-cutting victory conditions. The pieces were supposed to be
> injection-molded plastic. We persisted with the hope that we would be
able
> to do that, but the Desert Storm Factbook (what's the opposite of
windfall?) crater and the re-investment in "the Carpenter Project" (DJ)
eventually took away the possibility of affording that.
>
> I say that not just because it happened, but because I'm thinking that
although we fully intended to put out a Guild sourcebook and Free Trader
sourcebook product to support those aspects of the campaign, I expect that
> they would have fallen by the wayside due to all the other things we
were
> trying to show, and the FTs would have disappeared more so than the
Guild,
> which was showing up in other products, but mostly as an opponent rather
than a "campaign." And that's another example of "where we envisioned
going" doesn't necessarily work out that way, as you find yourself
focusing on different things instead.
>
> I am going to break again, still partway through nuance. Do not expect
more of this until tomorrow.
>
> Dave
>
>> Having gotten that out of the way, let me first ask specifically what
> you
>> mean by "would Virus stabilize?" I think I'll get at that below, but
> maybe
>> you have something specific in mind.
>> First, the usual caveats and usual examples.
>> These "plans" or "ideas" or "intents" are just that, concepts for where
> we
>> intended to go and how we thought we'd get there. As a practical
matter,
> we would try to come up with production schedules about a year out, but
even those were subject to great change if a new idea or opportunity came
>> up. Examples of this include Twilight:2000 Version 2.2 (T2KV2.2) which
> we
>> put together really fast to have a GenCon release, as having a GenCon
> release was a big thing. The TNE stuff we had in the works wasn't going
to
>> be ready in time, and we didn't want to rush those, and T2K was coming
> due
>> for a reprint but was still in the D10 system and updating it to be
more
> fully compatible with TNE was something we wanted to do. So we stayed up
for a week and knocked that out. Sometimes we'd have something on the
schedule being written out of house and it would come in in bad shape and
>> we'd have to push it back and put something else in. Also remember that
> through much of this period we were also supporting Dark Conspiracy,
Dangerous Journeys, miniatures lines, etc.
>> So ideas we had about storyline developments were generally "paced" by
> products to be released, which mostly would have been the 64 or 80 page
book. 80 was about the usual target if I recall correctly, but you could
look at page numbers and tell me if that's true.
>> In the long run, the idea was to tell a bunch of stories to about five
> years out. By five years out we would have had the RC and Regency making
first contact, but it might perhaps have happened before that. I'm pretty
>> sure we moved up the Regency Source Book because we got the sense that
> the
>> Imperial fans needed to start seeing something for them, so that may
> have
>> pulled forward the RC-Regency meeting as well.
>> Now, what year in game-time would that be? I don't know, we would have
> calculated it out to be sensible. We didn't have a big timeline with
target years, and even if we had, we would have been changing it all the
time. And one of the reasons for changing it all the time was that things
>> would come up.
>> For example, one day, probably a Monday, Frank came in. He had been
> consulting the "ships per planet" algorithms we published somewhere, and
he had discovered, "Oh, crap! Solee! This RC expansion stuff isn't going
to be as easy as we thought." We could have hand-waved it away, but I
don't think we ever really considered that. Whether it was a commitment to
>> following the rules we had laid out, or that moment in a game when the
> ref
>> makes a die roll that really screws up the plan and he is tempted to
> fudge
>> the roll and go along with preconception but realizes, "no, this may be
> more interesting," or the fact that we thought it was fun that the game
could surprise us, we never really considered hand-waving it out.
>> But that realization led to at least three things.
>> 1. The RC isn't going to be able to expand as fast, building up
strength
> to take on Solee is going to take some significant time. We're going to
be
>> down here for a while. I think this probably led to moving up the RSB,
> because it was going to be clear to players that things down in RC
territory were slowing down, so we had to open up the other setting for
those who wanted to play in the Regency rather than the RC.
>> 2. Frank asked me how the heck the RC was going to beat Solee. I said
> that
>> the RC was going to eventually get itself some tame Vampire ships (in
> order to eventually torque off the Regency) and these would provide a
great advantage in combat, as well as being a way to rapidly increase
available fleet tonnage. And that led to Vampire Fleets coming out when it
>> did, to set up that development.
>> 3. That also led to my telling Frank about the Virus shipyard out in
> (Diaspora?), which led to the Guilded Lilly (a deliberate corruption of
the common phrase in both words) "Epic Adventure" trilogy. You may note
that I said "telling Frank about," implying that he did not know about it,
>> because he didn't. Which is another insight into how we didn't have a
> giant GDW blueprint. As Traveller line manager I spent the most time
researching and prepping TNE stuff, Frank spent the most time thinking
about Command Decision and boardgames, Les knew where he wanted to go with
>> Dark Con, etc., and there was never time to brief each other on all of
> the
>> details that we were working out. But obviously we'd bring each other
up
> to speed when it was a good time for it, and that was one of those
cases.
>> Although we obviously practiced some specialization, when it was time
to
> start making things, we were self-consciously a "workshop" where we
tried
>> to make sure everything benefited from inputs and suggestions from the
> whole stuff.
>> While I said above that we did not have a big blueprint or timeline on
> the
>> wall, what I did have on my wall was a floor-to-ceiling map of all of
> Charted Space, photocopied out of Imperial Survey and taped together and
with all of the J1 "mains" colored in with magic marker so you could spot
>> traffic patterns. Similarly, I did the same thing for J2 access (but
> only
>> for about 6 or 8 sectors spinward of the RC because a J2 map is more
> time-consuming to make), and that's how I found the isolated world where
I
>> placed the Vampire shipyard. I think the J2 map was more useful because
> it
>> better exposed unusual gaps and chokepoints, and is closer to an
average
> jump.
>> I'm going to break here, more later.
>>> ( I'm a relative new comer to the group, and may have missed some of
>> Dave's prior info on this topic, so feel free to point me to the proper
> channels for finding old information. )
>>> I would really like to know what the short range and long range (and
>>> medium range, if you recall) timelines were for the New Era universe.
>> Would the Imperium eventually reform? Would Virus eventually
stabilize?
> Inquiring Duke ('88) guys want to know. :)
>
>
>
>
Longships) mostly sitting around the conference table in the main room
where we held the production meetings. In many other organizations this
space would have been called something else, and I am pleased to say no
one at GDW ever uttered that term, because I dislike it.
Because my mind is there I am going to let it remain there, although this
is keeping us at the beginning of TNE rather than moving towards its "end"
as Bardbear asked. They feel related, and we'll get there. When I was
talking about nuance that kind of skipped a logical step that I need to
re-insert, although to some extent they were concurrent.
These talks went on for a while, but not too long, really, maybe a couple
of months. Off the top of my head I'd say TNE won the GAMA award in 1994
for best SF RPG rules of 1993 and that Survival Margin came out in 1992.
What I can no longer pull out of my head is when releases came out in
months of a year. And in one round of office moves I foolishly threw away
all of my old production schedules and warehouse reports, so I can no
longer reconstruct that. But I do know that I wrote Survival Margin over
my Christmas "vacation" in my little brother's old bedroom, so if it was
published in 1992 it was written during Christmas 1991. If not, and it
came out in 1993, then it could have been Xmas 92 as well. I know that PLS
came out in 1992, the year after the war, because I spent that spring
doing playtesting from my old house in Maryland (another act of mercy from
Darlene File, you have no idea how hard it is to sell a house when you are
getting advice from realtors in IL and your wife is getting advice from
realtors in MD). If you compared the SM and PLS ISBNs that might show the
relative order of their release. On the other hand, we would sometimes
assign an ISBN early to a scheduled product so they could get out of
order.
When I was hired it was clear that there was going to be a new edition of
Traveller to replace MT, and in developing/editing Hard Times I wanted to
get a handle on where Traveller was intended to go. It turned out that
there was a bit of a vacuum where you would expect a creative team. Marc
was no longer working at GDW (he was still an owner), DGP had already
announced that they were ceasing their Traveller support in favor of their
own "A.I." nanotech/magic game (in a sad irony the DGP letter announcing
their departure from Traveller was already in circulation when I got to
GDW, but it didn't get published for a year or so, which made it look like
a slam against TNE), and there was no one at GDW who knew the MT system.
GDW had apparently always been sending all of the rules questions to Joe
and Gary at DGP as they were the MT authors, and they were no longer
supporting that, which was another one of the reasons Frank wanted to redo
Traveller with "House Rules" so we could support it.
When I asked, "what are our plans?" there were two answers, 1) a number of
ideas Frank had floated over the past year or so at Cons (a big event,
like Virus, Star Vikings) which were not all well-received, especially the
Virus thing, and 2) some manuscripts being written out-of-house, and HT
was the first of these. Actually three answers, we did know that the Core
system was going to the "House"(T2K) system--note that at that time the
House System was still D10, the D20 system did not finally emerge until
later, after Les published an interim D20 system as a DC folio which we
discarded, I want to say that it was Les who came up with the key concept
of uprating the D10 to the D20 system, the additional two named success
levels, I remember the meetings around it, but I'm not sure--but that
didn't get at the "storyline" plans, so doesn't really count.
The out-of-house material was based on an arc following the maps of
gradual destruction and decline in Rebellion Sourcebook, and had the
Imperium slowly dying with players trying to hold off the night. You can
see in HT that it was developing some new vocabulary, and it looked like
"starmercs" was going to be the term instead of "Star Vikings." In this
line things were going to bottom out at some point, maybe in the 1130s,
and then start climbing back up without there having been a "long night"
(appropriated from Poul Anderson). We were having significant difficulty
with out-of-house manuscripts and I began making the case that for
something as significant as a new edition of Traveller (in reality there
were a number of semi-generations in the CT "LBB" era, with changes that
were pretty serious, and were only identified by printing dates, as well
as re-combinations like The Traveller Book which pulled some of these
changes together, but these were not identified as "new editions") GDW
needed to have direct creative control of the direction of the new edition
(at that point we had six full-time designers on staff, so we had the
personnel to handle it). One of the main--and legitimate--complaints about
MT was that GDW (or GDW and DGP) introduced this giant historical change
to arguably "open up" the game, but that this huge change was utterly
unsupported by material which would help refs and players run campaigns in
it. (The other complaint was the extensive [excessive?] errata in the
rules set, especially starship design [Fighting Ships of the Shattered
Imperium]. Also, arguably, the way the "Rebellion" "opened up" the
campaign was seen to work opposite to opening it up, by dwarfing the
players with these vast wars, or at least the way the Rebellion setting
was supported/not supported.) We were already hearing remarks from
players/fans, "They screwed up supporting MT, so they're going to screw up
this next one too. Why should I trust them and buy this new one when they
didn't care about the last one?" For any new Traveller edition to be
successful we had to clearly show the commitment of GDW to get behind it
completely, and the best way to do that was to put the force of extensive
in-house design behind it. Traveller, as a GDW flagship, deserved no less.
(I will not say Traveller was THE GDW flagship, it was not. GDW had T2K,
wargames, miniatures rules, etc. But Traveller certainly was A GDW
flagship. Contrary to Star Trek and cruise line ignorance, real fleets
have multiple flagships, not just one.)
Those were basically the arguments that I made that we needed to pull it
back in-house, and everyone agreed, so we did. (I think this decision was
inescapable. For comparison, try the opposing arguments, "Traveller is
really important to us. Let's have it designed by people out-of-house,
because we've got other things to do," or "Let's have it run by guys that
don't work for us, because it's not important enough for us to take direct
leadership of ourselves.") But if anyone wants to blame GDW for reeling it
in, that was my doing.
And now, having filled the logical step (GDW is now writing it) at top, we
can go back to the "nuance" of "how are we writing it?"
Thinking back, I would say this decision would have been made by late
1991, so I wrote SM over Xmas 91, but I could be wrong. I know that all of
the MT stuff we put out after HT (A:V, AGtD, AV) was setting the stage for
TNE, and I did those from pieces of the MS that would have come after HT
(I think it was maybe called "Diaspora"). One of the pieces of
conventional wisdom that I think was actually wrong was that "it's
quicker/easier to rewrite something someone else has already written"
compared to writing from scratch yourself. I actually think it's the
reverse. When you're rewriting you always trying to "save" what's there,
and if it's built on a bad structure or a structure which no longer
applies, it's harder to figure out how to re-purpose the pieces than to
just write what you know you need. But there is also the counter-point,
which is "we've already paid for this, we need to get some value out of
the sunk cost." And the reason for pointing that out is this explains why
the RC was where it turned out. The Diaspora work included all of that
sector information, and UWPs are pretty time-consuming to proof and edit.
It's what, 20-30 digits? In prose that would be 4-6 words which you can
read in less than a second, but in UWPs you have to look at all of the
digits individually, interpreting what they mean, and making sure they
make sense together. So we kept the Diaspora data, accepted the fact that
the products were "pulling the players' attention" down that direction,
and I put the RC into Old Expanses to trailing. That also allowed us to
have them closer to the Hivers and bring the Hivers into the game which is
something we really wanted to do.
So that brings us back up to where I can continue the "nuance" discussion
in the next installment.
End of section.
> So, with that as background to how the road to envisioned TNE future was
dynamic,
>
> 1. Yes, there would have been a reformed "Imperial" civilization. It
probably would have been named in the Imperial style. I think if you look
> at the various quotes from the "future" history books looking back at
the
> "Star Viking" era you can probably get a flavor of that civilization
from
> the names of the publishers or something. I think one of them was
"Imperial Press."
>
> That stuff, by the way, was to nuance some of the expectations from the
rumors between MT and TNE. I got to GDW on September 29, 1991, a Sunday
(actually would have gotten in the night before after a 10 or 12 hour
drive from Maryland) and playtested Sands of War. I actually began work on
> Monday the 30th on Hard Times. The cover had already been printed and
all
> of the interior art had also been completed, but no one had looked at
the
> MS, except for the art director (Kirk Wescom, I think) who pulled out
some
> text blocks to send to the artist (Darryl Midgette, I think) for
inspiration. Frank and I began talking right away about the direction the
> Traveller line was to take. MT was a remnant from the period when the
Imperium was going to gradually decline but never have a defining "boom"
event, and then gradually climb back up.
>
> Frank described some of the ideas he had had and floated at some Cons,
most of them apparently to some negative response, especially Virus. Also
> at this time he still firmly liked the idea of the Star Vikings in their
Longships as a mythic sort of force for rebuilding. So what I tried to do
> was take the concepts he was already excited about and make sense of
them
> in my own head. "Star Vikings" was the first thing. While Scandinavian
"Viking" culture did do a lot of exploring and trade and economic
expansion in Europe, and was therefore a "civilizing" force, the typical
idea that most people today have of "Vikings" is violence: raiding,
plunder, and burning Irish monasteries. To assert a more rarefied, nuanced
> meaning of "Viking" in an interstellar civilization 6000 years from now
when 99.99999% of the population doesn't live on Earth and could give a
fig what the "Vikings" were REALLY like didn't make sense to me. Why would
> they have a more fine-tuned sense of Earth history than we do today?
More
> likely they would have our 1991, degraded, caricatured sense of what
"Viking" means, i.e., a violent, anti-civilizing force. So "Star Viking"
had to be a pejorative term placed on them by someone else, either
contemporaries trying to discredit them, or later generations, happily
misunderstanding them. But that is NOT what they called themselves. In
quizzing Frank on his ideas, he explained the Star Vikings' results, he
described it as "a reformation." Being a Lutheran, that is a "name to
conjure with" (as Loren always said), so I took that and it became the
Reformation Coalition. "Reform" also has that sense, like "reforming
criminals," that there is something wrong with the status quo that must be
> fixed. So that also became part of the RC ethic. "RCES" was easily
degraded as "Arses," which started to add some color and attitude to hang
> your hat on, and so on.
>
> So, back to the nuance. At this point it had already been decided by the
great rumor mill that the next edition of Traveller was going to be "dark"
> and post-apocalyptic, because "Frank is dark and apocalyptic, he wrote
T2K
> after all, and we don't like that." "Dark" games were all the rage then,
and we could have easily gone that way to try to tap into that, but I
don't like dark games, and Frank doesn't like dark games. All of this
"evil is sexy" crap is annoying and trite. The sort of game we wanted to
make was where people striving for a higher cause could make a
difference.
> Sure, it could be against a darker background because that is when such
acts are most needed, and when they can make the most difference, but that
> doesn't mean the game is dark. The game is about people in a dark place
bringing light to it. And that is what we set out to do in TNE, and I
think everyone on this list gets that. However, there were a lot of people
> who had already made up their minds what their opinion of (Next
Traveller)
> was going to be, and they just stuck with that, never read it, and never
allowed their prejudices to be changed.
>
> BUT, as I said, we already knew that was the brush we were going to be
tarred with, so were trying to make some distinctions. So "Star Vikings"
is what they were called by their contemporary competitors, who became the
> Guild, and future generations later who misunderstood them. Hmm, if
future
> generations misunderstood them, then that must mean that they are no
longer around to set the record straight.
>
> Also, I mentioned above about RC and RCES that you had to start getting
"attitude" about an idea. One of the things I did back then was make music
> mix tapes for games I was working on, like little movie soundtracks for
the story I was trying to tell. I had them for Assignment Vigilante,
Raging Dragon (never finished, we did Phase Line Smash instead) and so on.
> I thought that I would make a typical multi-artist mix tape for TNE as
well, but as it turned out, the touchstone for me for TNE/RC/Star
Vikings
> was Pete Townshend's "White City" album. So "White City" is the Star
Viking soundtrack. If you listen to it you can probably hear where lots of
> stuff came from. Another aspect of attitude was creating characters who
would speak different themes or points of view that you wanted the players
> to be hearing, like Norris for the Regency, Kuligaan (sp?) for the RC,
etc., Craig for another POV, and obviously all of that was starting in the
> late MT period, which is why I think of all of those as "transitional
TNE"
> products, because we were setting the stage.
>
> Let me also say that we established two groups in the early thinking,
and
> in the rules: The Guild and the Free Traders. These were holdovers from
the Star Viking board game that we were going to put out. When GDW was
still flush with all of the Gulf War Factbook money (which allowed me to
be hired and new Macs bought for us) our print buyer, Darlene File (Marc
Miller's wife) bought up a bunch of materials for hard-map board games,
which included several thousand map boards and plastic pieces. You can see
> these map boards and pieces in Minion Hunter. The other game that was
supposed to be made with the remaining boards was Star Viking, a
"strategic" board game of re-taking space. There would have been four
players: the Star Vikings (RC), a player who played all of the little
TEDs, The Guild, and the Free Traders, and they all would have had
different cross-cutting victory conditions. The pieces were supposed to be
> injection-molded plastic. We persisted with the hope that we would be
able
> to do that, but the Desert Storm Factbook (what's the opposite of
windfall?) crater and the re-investment in "the Carpenter Project" (DJ)
eventually took away the possibility of affording that.
>
> I say that not just because it happened, but because I'm thinking that
although we fully intended to put out a Guild sourcebook and Free Trader
sourcebook product to support those aspects of the campaign, I expect that
> they would have fallen by the wayside due to all the other things we
were
> trying to show, and the FTs would have disappeared more so than the
Guild,
> which was showing up in other products, but mostly as an opponent rather
than a "campaign." And that's another example of "where we envisioned
going" doesn't necessarily work out that way, as you find yourself
focusing on different things instead.
>
> I am going to break again, still partway through nuance. Do not expect
more of this until tomorrow.
>
> Dave
>
>> Having gotten that out of the way, let me first ask specifically what
> you
>> mean by "would Virus stabilize?" I think I'll get at that below, but
> maybe
>> you have something specific in mind.
>> First, the usual caveats and usual examples.
>> These "plans" or "ideas" or "intents" are just that, concepts for where
> we
>> intended to go and how we thought we'd get there. As a practical
matter,
> we would try to come up with production schedules about a year out, but
even those were subject to great change if a new idea or opportunity came
>> up. Examples of this include Twilight:2000 Version 2.2 (T2KV2.2) which
> we
>> put together really fast to have a GenCon release, as having a GenCon
> release was a big thing. The TNE stuff we had in the works wasn't going
to
>> be ready in time, and we didn't want to rush those, and T2K was coming
> due
>> for a reprint but was still in the D10 system and updating it to be
more
> fully compatible with TNE was something we wanted to do. So we stayed up
for a week and knocked that out. Sometimes we'd have something on the
schedule being written out of house and it would come in in bad shape and
>> we'd have to push it back and put something else in. Also remember that
> through much of this period we were also supporting Dark Conspiracy,
Dangerous Journeys, miniatures lines, etc.
>> So ideas we had about storyline developments were generally "paced" by
> products to be released, which mostly would have been the 64 or 80 page
book. 80 was about the usual target if I recall correctly, but you could
look at page numbers and tell me if that's true.
>> In the long run, the idea was to tell a bunch of stories to about five
> years out. By five years out we would have had the RC and Regency making
first contact, but it might perhaps have happened before that. I'm pretty
>> sure we moved up the Regency Source Book because we got the sense that
> the
>> Imperial fans needed to start seeing something for them, so that may
> have
>> pulled forward the RC-Regency meeting as well.
>> Now, what year in game-time would that be? I don't know, we would have
> calculated it out to be sensible. We didn't have a big timeline with
target years, and even if we had, we would have been changing it all the
time. And one of the reasons for changing it all the time was that things
>> would come up.
>> For example, one day, probably a Monday, Frank came in. He had been
> consulting the "ships per planet" algorithms we published somewhere, and
he had discovered, "Oh, crap! Solee! This RC expansion stuff isn't going
to be as easy as we thought." We could have hand-waved it away, but I
don't think we ever really considered that. Whether it was a commitment to
>> following the rules we had laid out, or that moment in a game when the
> ref
>> makes a die roll that really screws up the plan and he is tempted to
> fudge
>> the roll and go along with preconception but realizes, "no, this may be
> more interesting," or the fact that we thought it was fun that the game
could surprise us, we never really considered hand-waving it out.
>> But that realization led to at least three things.
>> 1. The RC isn't going to be able to expand as fast, building up
strength
> to take on Solee is going to take some significant time. We're going to
be
>> down here for a while. I think this probably led to moving up the RSB,
> because it was going to be clear to players that things down in RC
territory were slowing down, so we had to open up the other setting for
those who wanted to play in the Regency rather than the RC.
>> 2. Frank asked me how the heck the RC was going to beat Solee. I said
> that
>> the RC was going to eventually get itself some tame Vampire ships (in
> order to eventually torque off the Regency) and these would provide a
great advantage in combat, as well as being a way to rapidly increase
available fleet tonnage. And that led to Vampire Fleets coming out when it
>> did, to set up that development.
>> 3. That also led to my telling Frank about the Virus shipyard out in
> (Diaspora?), which led to the Guilded Lilly (a deliberate corruption of
the common phrase in both words) "Epic Adventure" trilogy. You may note
that I said "telling Frank about," implying that he did not know about it,
>> because he didn't. Which is another insight into how we didn't have a
> giant GDW blueprint. As Traveller line manager I spent the most time
researching and prepping TNE stuff, Frank spent the most time thinking
about Command Decision and boardgames, Les knew where he wanted to go with
>> Dark Con, etc., and there was never time to brief each other on all of
> the
>> details that we were working out. But obviously we'd bring each other
up
> to speed when it was a good time for it, and that was one of those
cases.
>> Although we obviously practiced some specialization, when it was time
to
> start making things, we were self-consciously a "workshop" where we
tried
>> to make sure everything benefited from inputs and suggestions from the
> whole stuff.
>> While I said above that we did not have a big blueprint or timeline on
> the
>> wall, what I did have on my wall was a floor-to-ceiling map of all of
> Charted Space, photocopied out of Imperial Survey and taped together and
with all of the J1 "mains" colored in with magic marker so you could spot
>> traffic patterns. Similarly, I did the same thing for J2 access (but
> only
>> for about 6 or 8 sectors spinward of the RC because a J2 map is more
> time-consuming to make), and that's how I found the isolated world where
I
>> placed the Vampire shipyard. I think the J2 map was more useful because
> it
>> better exposed unusual gaps and chokepoints, and is closer to an
average
> jump.
>> I'm going to break here, more later.
>>> ( I'm a relative new comer to the group, and may have missed some of
>> Dave's prior info on this topic, so feel free to point me to the proper
> channels for finding old information. )
>>> I would really like to know what the short range and long range (and
>>> medium range, if you recall) timelines were for the New Era universe.
>> Would the Imperium eventually reform? Would Virus eventually
stabilize?
> Inquiring Duke ('88) guys want to know. :)
>
>
>
>
Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
> Remember me?
>
> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
days
> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
.NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
running
> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this moving.
>
> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
myself of where I was and send it out.
>
> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still haven't
answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
damn)
> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5
Seniors
> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny "Where39;s
my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
"They39;re
> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men."
>
> But on the topic, I've established
>
> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs,"
which
> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
be
> writing history
>
> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
we
> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about
>
> 3. Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the late
MT MSs
>
> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
going to be unsupported the way MT was
>
> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
affect
> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
so
> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>
> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other things
I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>
> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
if
> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>
> More soon.
>
>> Anyway, I left us partway through "nuance," (between Star Vikings and
> Longships) mostly sitting around the conference table in the main room
where we held the production meetings. In many other organizations this
space would have been called something else, and I am pleased to say no
one at GDW ever uttered that term, because I dislike it.
>> Because my mind is there I am going to let it remain there, although
> this
>> is keeping us at the beginning of TNE rather than moving towards its
> "end"
>> as Bardbear asked. They feel related, and we'll get there. When I was
> talking about nuance that kind of skipped a logical step that I need to
re-insert, although to some extent they were concurrent.
>> These talks went on for a while, but not too long, really, maybe a
> couple
>> of months. Off the top of my head I'd say TNE won the GAMA award in
1994
> for best SF RPG rules of 1993 and that Survival Margin came out in 1992.
What I can no longer pull out of my head is when releases came out in
months of a year. And in one round of office moves I foolishly threw
away
>> all of my old production schedules and warehouse reports, so I can no
> longer reconstruct that. But I do know that I wrote Survival Margin over
my Christmas "vacation" in my little brother's old bedroom, so if it was
published in 1992 it was written during Christmas 1991. If not, and it
came out in 1993, then it could have been Xmas 92 as well. I know that
PLS
>> came out in 1992, the year after the war, because I spent that spring
> doing playtesting from my old house in Maryland (another act of mercy
from
>> Darlene File, you have no idea how hard it is to sell a house when you
> are
>> getting advice from realtors in IL and your wife is getting advice from
> realtors in MD). If you compared the SM and PLS ISBNs that might show
the
>> relative order of their release. On the other hand, we would sometimes
> assign an ISBN early to a scheduled product so they could get out of order.
>> When I was hired it was clear that there was going to be a new edition
> of
>> Traveller to replace MT, and in developing/editing Hard Times I wanted
> to
>> get a handle on where Traveller was intended to go. It turned out that
> there was a bit of a vacuum where you would expect a creative team. Marc
was no longer working at GDW (he was still an owner), DGP had already
announced that they were ceasing their Traveller support in favor of
their
>> own "A.I." nanotech/magic game (in a sad irony the DGP letter
announcing
> their departure from Traveller was already in circulation when I got to
GDW, but it didn't get published for a year or so, which made it look
like
>> a slam against TNE), and there was no one at GDW who knew the MT
system.
> GDW had apparently always been sending all of the rules questions to Joe
and Gary at DGP as they were the MT authors, and they were no longer
supporting that, which was another one of the reasons Frank wanted to
redo
>> Traveller with "House Rules" so we could support it.
>> When I asked, "what are our plans?" there were two answers, 1) a number
> of
>> ideas Frank had floated over the past year or so at Cons (a big event,
> like Virus, Star Vikings) which were not all well-received, especially
the
>> Virus thing, and 2) some manuscripts being written out-of-house, and HT
> was the first of these. Actually three answers, we did know that the
Core
>> system was going to the "House"(T2K) system--note that at that time the
> House System was still D10, the D20 system did not finally emerge until
later, after Les published an interim D20 system as a DC folio which we
discarded, I want to say that it was Les who came up with the key
concept
>> of uprating the D10 to the D20 system, the additional two named success
> levels, I remember the meetings around it, but I'm not sure--but that
didn't get at the "storyline" plans, so doesn't really count.
>> The out-of-house material was based on an arc following the maps of
> gradual destruction and decline in Rebellion Sourcebook, and had the
Imperium slowly dying with players trying to hold off the night. You can
see in HT that it was developing some new vocabulary, and it looked like
"starmercs" was going to be the term instead of "Star Vikings." In this
line things were going to bottom out at some point, maybe in the 1130s,
and then start climbing back up without there having been a "long night"
(appropriated from Poul Anderson). We were having significant difficulty
with out-of-house manuscripts and I began making the case that for
something as significant as a new edition of Traveller (in reality there
were a number of semi-generations in the CT "LBB" era, with changes that
were pretty serious, and were only identified by printing dates, as well
as re-combinations like The Traveller Book which pulled some of these
changes together, but these were not identified as "new editions") GDW
needed to have direct creative control of the direction of the new
edition
>> (at that point we had six full-time designers on staff, so we had the
> personnel to handle it). One of the main--and legitimate--complaints
about
>> MT was that GDW (or GDW and DGP) introduced this giant historical
change
> to arguably "open up" the game, but that this huge change was utterly
unsupported by material which would help refs and players run campaigns
in
>> it. (The other complaint was the extensive [excessive?] errata in the
> rules set, especially starship design [Fighting Ships of the Shattered
Imperium]. Also, arguably, the way the "Rebellion" "opened up" the
campaign was seen to work opposite to opening it up, by dwarfing the
players with these vast wars, or at least the way the Rebellion setting
was supported/not supported.) We were already hearing remarks from
players/fans, "They screwed up supporting MT, so they're going to screw
up
>> this next one too. Why should I trust them and buy this new one when
> they
>> didn't care about the last one?" For any new Traveller edition to be
> successful we had to clearly show the commitment of GDW to get behind it
completely, and the best way to do that was to put the force of
> extensive
>> in-house design behind it. Traveller, as a GDW flagship, deserved no
> less.
>> (I will not say Traveller was THE GDW flagship, it was not. GDW had
T2K,
> wargames, miniatures rules, etc. But Traveller certainly was A GDW
flagship. Contrary to Star Trek and cruise line ignorance, real fleets
have multiple flagships, not just one.)
>> Those were basically the arguments that I made that we needed to pull
it
> back in-house, and everyone agreed, so we did. (I think this decision
was
>> inescapable. For comparison, try the opposing arguments, "Traveller is
> really important to us. Let's have it designed by people out-of-house,
because we've got other things to do," or "Let's have it run by guys
that
>> don't work for us, because it's not important enough for us to take
> direct
>> leadership of ourselves.") But if anyone wants to blame GDW for reeling
> it
>> in, that was my doing.
>> And now, having filled the logical step (GDW is now writing it) at top,
> we
>> can go back to the "nuance" of "how are we writing it?"
>> Thinking back, I would say this decision would have been made by late
> 1991, so I wrote SM over Xmas 91, but I could be wrong. I know that all
of
>> the MT stuff we put out after HT (A:V, AGtD, AV) was setting the stage
> for
>> TNE, and I did those from pieces of the MS that would have come after
HT
> (I think it was maybe called "Diaspora"). One of the pieces of
>> conventional wisdom that I think was actually wrong was that "it's
> quicker/easier to rewrite something someone else has already written"
compared to writing from scratch yourself. I actually think it's the
reverse. When you're rewriting you always trying to "save" what's there,
and if it's built on a bad structure or a structure which no longer
applies, it's harder to figure out how to re-purpose the pieces than to
just write what you know you need. But there is also the counter-point,
which is "we've already paid for this, we need to get some value out of
the sunk cost." And the reason for pointing that out is this explains
why
>> the RC was where it turned out. The Diaspora work included all of that
> sector information, and UWPs are pretty time-consuming to proof and
edit.
>> It's what, 20-30 digits? In prose that would be 4-6 words which you can
> read in less than a second, but in UWPs you have to look at all of the
digits individually, interpreting what they mean, and making sure they
make sense together. So we kept the Diaspora data, accepted the fact
that
>> the products were "pulling the players' attention" down that direction,
> and I put the RC into Old Expanses to trailing. That also allowed us to
have them closer to the Hivers and bring the Hivers into the game which
is
>> something we really wanted to do.
>> So that brings us back up to where I can continue the "nuance"
> discussion
>> in the next installment.
>> End of section.
>>> So, with that as background to how the road to envisioned TNE future
> was
>> dynamic,
>>> 1. Yes, there would have been a reformed "Imperial" civilization. It
>> probably would have been named in the Imperial style. I think if you
> look
>>> at the various quotes from the "future" history books looking back at
>> the
>>> "Star Viking" era you can probably get a flavor of that civilization
>> from
>>> the names of the publishers or something. I think one of them was
>> "Imperial Press."
>>> That stuff, by the way, was to nuance some of the expectations from
the
>> rumors between MT and TNE. I got to GDW on September 29, 1991, a Sunday
> (actually would have gotten in the night before after a 10 or 12 hour
drive from Maryland) and playtested Sands of War. I actually began work
on
>>> Monday the 30th on Hard Times. The cover had already been printed and
>> all
>>> of the interior art had also been completed, but no one had looked at
>> the
>>> MS, except for the art director (Kirk Wescom, I think) who pulled out
>> some
>>> text blocks to send to the artist (Darryl Midgette, I think) for
>> inspiration. Frank and I began talking right away about the direction
> the
>>> Traveller line was to take. MT was a remnant from the period when the
>> Imperium was going to gradually decline but never have a defining
"boom"
> event, and then gradually climb back up.
>>> Frank described some of the ideas he had had and floated at some Cons,
>> most of them apparently to some negative response, especially Virus.
> Also
>>> at this time he still firmly liked the idea of the Star Vikings in
> their
>> Longships as a mythic sort of force for rebuilding. So what I tried to
> do
>>> was take the concepts he was already excited about and make sense of
>> them
>>> in my own head. "Star Vikings" was the first thing. While Scandinavian
>> "Viking" culture did do a lot of exploring and trade and economic
> expansion in Europe, and was therefore a "civilizing" force, the typical
idea that most people today have of "Vikings" is violence: raiding,
plunder, and burning Irish monasteries. To assert a more rarefied,
nuanced
>>> meaning of "Viking" in an interstellar civilization 6000 years from
now
>> when 99.99999% of the population doesn't live on Earth and could give a
> fig what the "Vikings" were REALLY like didn't make sense to me. Why
would
>>> they have a more fine-tuned sense of Earth history than we do today?
>> More
>>> likely they would have our 1991, degraded, caricatured sense of what
>> "Viking" means, i.e., a violent, anti-civilizing force. So "Star
Viking"
> had to be a pejorative term placed on them by someone else, either
contemporaries trying to discredit them, or later generations, happily
misunderstanding them. But that is NOT what they called themselves. In
quizzing Frank on his ideas, he explained the Star Vikings' results, he
described it as "a reformation." Being a Lutheran, that is a "name to
conjure with" (as Loren always said), so I took that and it became the
Reformation Coalition. "Reform" also has that sense, like "reforming
criminals," that there is something wrong with the status quo that must
be
>>> fixed. So that also became part of the RC ethic. "RCES" was easily
>> degraded as "Arses," which started to add some color and attitude to
> hang
>>> your hat on, and so on.
>>> So, back to the nuance. At this point it had already been decided by
> the
>> great rumor mill that the next edition of Traveller was going to be
> "dark"
>>> and post-apocalyptic, because "Frank is dark and apocalyptic, he wrote
>> T2K
>>> after all, and we don't like that." "Dark" games were all the rage
> then,
>> and we could have easily gone that way to try to tap into that, but I
> don't like dark games, and Frank doesn't like dark games. All of this
"evil is sexy" crap is annoying and trite. The sort of game we wanted to
make was where people striving for a higher cause could make a
>> difference.
>>> Sure, it could be against a darker background because that is when
such
>> acts are most needed, and when they can make the most difference, but
> that
>>> doesn't mean the game is dark. The game is about people in a dark
place
>> bringing light to it. And that is what we set out to do in TNE, and I
> think everyone on this list gets that. However, there were a lot of
people
>>> who had already made up their minds what their opinion of (Next
>> Traveller)
>>> was going to be, and they just stuck with that, never read it, and
> never
>> allowed their prejudices to be changed.
>>> BUT, as I said, we already knew that was the brush we were going to be
>> tarred with, so were trying to make some distinctions. So "Star
Vikings"
> is what they were called by their contemporary competitors, who became
the
>>> Guild, and future generations later who misunderstood them. Hmm, if
>> future
>>> generations misunderstood them, then that must mean that they are no
>> longer around to set the record straight.
>>> Also, I mentioned above about RC and RCES that you had to start
getting
>> "attitude" about an idea. One of the things I did back then was make
> music
>>> mix tapes for games I was working on, like little movie soundtracks
for
>> the story I was trying to tell. I had them for Assignment Vigilante,
> Raging Dragon (never finished, we did Phase Line Smash instead) and so
on.
>>> I thought that I would make a typical multi-artist mix tape for TNE as
>> well, but as it turned out, the touchstone for me for TNE/RC/Star
> Vikings
>>> was Pete Townshend's "White City" album. So "White City" is the Star
>> Viking soundtrack. If you listen to it you can probably hear where lots
> of
>>> stuff came from. Another aspect of attitude was creating characters
who
>> would speak different themes or points of view that you wanted the
> players
>>> to be hearing, like Norris for the Regency, Kuligaan (sp?) for the RC,
>> etc., Craig for another POV, and obviously all of that was starting in
> the
>>> late MT period, which is why I think of all of those as "transitional
>> TNE"
>>> products, because we were setting the stage.
>>> Let me also say that we established two groups in the early thinking,
>> and
>>> in the rules: The Guild and the Free Traders. These were holdovers
from
>> the Star Viking board game that we were going to put out. When GDW was
> still flush with all of the Gulf War Factbook money (which allowed me to
be hired and new Macs bought for us) our print buyer, Darlene File (Marc
Miller's wife) bought up a bunch of materials for hard-map board games,
which included several thousand map boards and plastic pieces. You can
see
>>> these map boards and pieces in Minion Hunter. The other game that was
>> supposed to be made with the remaining boards was Star Viking, a
> "strategic" board game of re-taking space. There would have been four
players: the Star Vikings (RC), a player who played all of the little
TEDs, The Guild, and the Free Traders, and they all would have had
different cross-cutting victory conditions. The pieces were supposed to
be
>>> injection-molded plastic. We persisted with the hope that we would be
>> able
>>> to do that, but the Desert Storm Factbook (what's the opposite of
>> windfall?) crater and the re-investment in "the Carpenter Project" (DJ)
> eventually took away the possibility of affording that.
>>> I say that not just because it happened, but because I'm thinking that
>> although we fully intended to put out a Guild sourcebook and Free
Trader
> sourcebook product to support those aspects of the campaign, I expect
that
>>> they would have fallen by the wayside due to all the other things we
>> were
>>> trying to show, and the FTs would have disappeared more so than the
>> Guild,
>>> which was showing up in other products, but mostly as an opponent
> rather
>> than a "campaign." And that's another example of "where we envisioned
> going" doesn't necessarily work out that way, as you find yourself
focusing on different things instead.
>>> I am going to break again, still partway through nuance. Do not expect
>> more of this until tomorrow.
>>> Dave
>
>
>
>
>
> Remember me?
>
> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
days
> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
.NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
running
> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this moving.
>
> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
myself of where I was and send it out.
>
> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still haven't
answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
damn)
> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5
Seniors
> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny "Where39;s
my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
"They39;re
> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men."
>
> But on the topic, I've established
>
> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs,"
which
> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
be
> writing history
>
> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
we
> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about
>
> 3. Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the late
MT MSs
>
> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
going to be unsupported the way MT was
>
> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
affect
> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
so
> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>
> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other things
I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>
> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
if
> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>
> More soon.
>
>> Anyway, I left us partway through "nuance," (between Star Vikings and
> Longships) mostly sitting around the conference table in the main room
where we held the production meetings. In many other organizations this
space would have been called something else, and I am pleased to say no
one at GDW ever uttered that term, because I dislike it.
>> Because my mind is there I am going to let it remain there, although
> this
>> is keeping us at the beginning of TNE rather than moving towards its
> "end"
>> as Bardbear asked. They feel related, and we'll get there. When I was
> talking about nuance that kind of skipped a logical step that I need to
re-insert, although to some extent they were concurrent.
>> These talks went on for a while, but not too long, really, maybe a
> couple
>> of months. Off the top of my head I'd say TNE won the GAMA award in
1994
> for best SF RPG rules of 1993 and that Survival Margin came out in 1992.
What I can no longer pull out of my head is when releases came out in
months of a year. And in one round of office moves I foolishly threw
away
>> all of my old production schedules and warehouse reports, so I can no
> longer reconstruct that. But I do know that I wrote Survival Margin over
my Christmas "vacation" in my little brother's old bedroom, so if it was
published in 1992 it was written during Christmas 1991. If not, and it
came out in 1993, then it could have been Xmas 92 as well. I know that
PLS
>> came out in 1992, the year after the war, because I spent that spring
> doing playtesting from my old house in Maryland (another act of mercy
from
>> Darlene File, you have no idea how hard it is to sell a house when you
> are
>> getting advice from realtors in IL and your wife is getting advice from
> realtors in MD). If you compared the SM and PLS ISBNs that might show
the
>> relative order of their release. On the other hand, we would sometimes
> assign an ISBN early to a scheduled product so they could get out of order.
>> When I was hired it was clear that there was going to be a new edition
> of
>> Traveller to replace MT, and in developing/editing Hard Times I wanted
> to
>> get a handle on where Traveller was intended to go. It turned out that
> there was a bit of a vacuum where you would expect a creative team. Marc
was no longer working at GDW (he was still an owner), DGP had already
announced that they were ceasing their Traveller support in favor of
their
>> own "A.I." nanotech/magic game (in a sad irony the DGP letter
announcing
> their departure from Traveller was already in circulation when I got to
GDW, but it didn't get published for a year or so, which made it look
like
>> a slam against TNE), and there was no one at GDW who knew the MT
system.
> GDW had apparently always been sending all of the rules questions to Joe
and Gary at DGP as they were the MT authors, and they were no longer
supporting that, which was another one of the reasons Frank wanted to
redo
>> Traveller with "House Rules" so we could support it.
>> When I asked, "what are our plans?" there were two answers, 1) a number
> of
>> ideas Frank had floated over the past year or so at Cons (a big event,
> like Virus, Star Vikings) which were not all well-received, especially
the
>> Virus thing, and 2) some manuscripts being written out-of-house, and HT
> was the first of these. Actually three answers, we did know that the
Core
>> system was going to the "House"(T2K) system--note that at that time the
> House System was still D10, the D20 system did not finally emerge until
later, after Les published an interim D20 system as a DC folio which we
discarded, I want to say that it was Les who came up with the key
concept
>> of uprating the D10 to the D20 system, the additional two named success
> levels, I remember the meetings around it, but I'm not sure--but that
didn't get at the "storyline" plans, so doesn't really count.
>> The out-of-house material was based on an arc following the maps of
> gradual destruction and decline in Rebellion Sourcebook, and had the
Imperium slowly dying with players trying to hold off the night. You can
see in HT that it was developing some new vocabulary, and it looked like
"starmercs" was going to be the term instead of "Star Vikings." In this
line things were going to bottom out at some point, maybe in the 1130s,
and then start climbing back up without there having been a "long night"
(appropriated from Poul Anderson). We were having significant difficulty
with out-of-house manuscripts and I began making the case that for
something as significant as a new edition of Traveller (in reality there
were a number of semi-generations in the CT "LBB" era, with changes that
were pretty serious, and were only identified by printing dates, as well
as re-combinations like The Traveller Book which pulled some of these
changes together, but these were not identified as "new editions") GDW
needed to have direct creative control of the direction of the new
edition
>> (at that point we had six full-time designers on staff, so we had the
> personnel to handle it). One of the main--and legitimate--complaints
about
>> MT was that GDW (or GDW and DGP) introduced this giant historical
change
> to arguably "open up" the game, but that this huge change was utterly
unsupported by material which would help refs and players run campaigns
in
>> it. (The other complaint was the extensive [excessive?] errata in the
> rules set, especially starship design [Fighting Ships of the Shattered
Imperium]. Also, arguably, the way the "Rebellion" "opened up" the
campaign was seen to work opposite to opening it up, by dwarfing the
players with these vast wars, or at least the way the Rebellion setting
was supported/not supported.) We were already hearing remarks from
players/fans, "They screwed up supporting MT, so they're going to screw
up
>> this next one too. Why should I trust them and buy this new one when
> they
>> didn't care about the last one?" For any new Traveller edition to be
> successful we had to clearly show the commitment of GDW to get behind it
completely, and the best way to do that was to put the force of
> extensive
>> in-house design behind it. Traveller, as a GDW flagship, deserved no
> less.
>> (I will not say Traveller was THE GDW flagship, it was not. GDW had
T2K,
> wargames, miniatures rules, etc. But Traveller certainly was A GDW
flagship. Contrary to Star Trek and cruise line ignorance, real fleets
have multiple flagships, not just one.)
>> Those were basically the arguments that I made that we needed to pull
it
> back in-house, and everyone agreed, so we did. (I think this decision
was
>> inescapable. For comparison, try the opposing arguments, "Traveller is
> really important to us. Let's have it designed by people out-of-house,
because we've got other things to do," or "Let's have it run by guys
that
>> don't work for us, because it's not important enough for us to take
> direct
>> leadership of ourselves.") But if anyone wants to blame GDW for reeling
> it
>> in, that was my doing.
>> And now, having filled the logical step (GDW is now writing it) at top,
> we
>> can go back to the "nuance" of "how are we writing it?"
>> Thinking back, I would say this decision would have been made by late
> 1991, so I wrote SM over Xmas 91, but I could be wrong. I know that all
of
>> the MT stuff we put out after HT (A:V, AGtD, AV) was setting the stage
> for
>> TNE, and I did those from pieces of the MS that would have come after
HT
> (I think it was maybe called "Diaspora"). One of the pieces of
>> conventional wisdom that I think was actually wrong was that "it's
> quicker/easier to rewrite something someone else has already written"
compared to writing from scratch yourself. I actually think it's the
reverse. When you're rewriting you always trying to "save" what's there,
and if it's built on a bad structure or a structure which no longer
applies, it's harder to figure out how to re-purpose the pieces than to
just write what you know you need. But there is also the counter-point,
which is "we've already paid for this, we need to get some value out of
the sunk cost." And the reason for pointing that out is this explains
why
>> the RC was where it turned out. The Diaspora work included all of that
> sector information, and UWPs are pretty time-consuming to proof and
edit.
>> It's what, 20-30 digits? In prose that would be 4-6 words which you can
> read in less than a second, but in UWPs you have to look at all of the
digits individually, interpreting what they mean, and making sure they
make sense together. So we kept the Diaspora data, accepted the fact
that
>> the products were "pulling the players' attention" down that direction,
> and I put the RC into Old Expanses to trailing. That also allowed us to
have them closer to the Hivers and bring the Hivers into the game which
is
>> something we really wanted to do.
>> So that brings us back up to where I can continue the "nuance"
> discussion
>> in the next installment.
>> End of section.
>>> So, with that as background to how the road to envisioned TNE future
> was
>> dynamic,
>>> 1. Yes, there would have been a reformed "Imperial" civilization. It
>> probably would have been named in the Imperial style. I think if you
> look
>>> at the various quotes from the "future" history books looking back at
>> the
>>> "Star Viking" era you can probably get a flavor of that civilization
>> from
>>> the names of the publishers or something. I think one of them was
>> "Imperial Press."
>>> That stuff, by the way, was to nuance some of the expectations from
the
>> rumors between MT and TNE. I got to GDW on September 29, 1991, a Sunday
> (actually would have gotten in the night before after a 10 or 12 hour
drive from Maryland) and playtested Sands of War. I actually began work
on
>>> Monday the 30th on Hard Times. The cover had already been printed and
>> all
>>> of the interior art had also been completed, but no one had looked at
>> the
>>> MS, except for the art director (Kirk Wescom, I think) who pulled out
>> some
>>> text blocks to send to the artist (Darryl Midgette, I think) for
>> inspiration. Frank and I began talking right away about the direction
> the
>>> Traveller line was to take. MT was a remnant from the period when the
>> Imperium was going to gradually decline but never have a defining
"boom"
> event, and then gradually climb back up.
>>> Frank described some of the ideas he had had and floated at some Cons,
>> most of them apparently to some negative response, especially Virus.
> Also
>>> at this time he still firmly liked the idea of the Star Vikings in
> their
>> Longships as a mythic sort of force for rebuilding. So what I tried to
> do
>>> was take the concepts he was already excited about and make sense of
>> them
>>> in my own head. "Star Vikings" was the first thing. While Scandinavian
>> "Viking" culture did do a lot of exploring and trade and economic
> expansion in Europe, and was therefore a "civilizing" force, the typical
idea that most people today have of "Vikings" is violence: raiding,
plunder, and burning Irish monasteries. To assert a more rarefied,
nuanced
>>> meaning of "Viking" in an interstellar civilization 6000 years from
now
>> when 99.99999% of the population doesn't live on Earth and could give a
> fig what the "Vikings" were REALLY like didn't make sense to me. Why
would
>>> they have a more fine-tuned sense of Earth history than we do today?
>> More
>>> likely they would have our 1991, degraded, caricatured sense of what
>> "Viking" means, i.e., a violent, anti-civilizing force. So "Star
Viking"
> had to be a pejorative term placed on them by someone else, either
contemporaries trying to discredit them, or later generations, happily
misunderstanding them. But that is NOT what they called themselves. In
quizzing Frank on his ideas, he explained the Star Vikings' results, he
described it as "a reformation." Being a Lutheran, that is a "name to
conjure with" (as Loren always said), so I took that and it became the
Reformation Coalition. "Reform" also has that sense, like "reforming
criminals," that there is something wrong with the status quo that must
be
>>> fixed. So that also became part of the RC ethic. "RCES" was easily
>> degraded as "Arses," which started to add some color and attitude to
> hang
>>> your hat on, and so on.
>>> So, back to the nuance. At this point it had already been decided by
> the
>> great rumor mill that the next edition of Traveller was going to be
> "dark"
>>> and post-apocalyptic, because "Frank is dark and apocalyptic, he wrote
>> T2K
>>> after all, and we don't like that." "Dark" games were all the rage
> then,
>> and we could have easily gone that way to try to tap into that, but I
> don't like dark games, and Frank doesn't like dark games. All of this
"evil is sexy" crap is annoying and trite. The sort of game we wanted to
make was where people striving for a higher cause could make a
>> difference.
>>> Sure, it could be against a darker background because that is when
such
>> acts are most needed, and when they can make the most difference, but
> that
>>> doesn't mean the game is dark. The game is about people in a dark
place
>> bringing light to it. And that is what we set out to do in TNE, and I
> think everyone on this list gets that. However, there were a lot of
people
>>> who had already made up their minds what their opinion of (Next
>> Traveller)
>>> was going to be, and they just stuck with that, never read it, and
> never
>> allowed their prejudices to be changed.
>>> BUT, as I said, we already knew that was the brush we were going to be
>> tarred with, so were trying to make some distinctions. So "Star
Vikings"
> is what they were called by their contemporary competitors, who became
the
>>> Guild, and future generations later who misunderstood them. Hmm, if
>> future
>>> generations misunderstood them, then that must mean that they are no
>> longer around to set the record straight.
>>> Also, I mentioned above about RC and RCES that you had to start
getting
>> "attitude" about an idea. One of the things I did back then was make
> music
>>> mix tapes for games I was working on, like little movie soundtracks
for
>> the story I was trying to tell. I had them for Assignment Vigilante,
> Raging Dragon (never finished, we did Phase Line Smash instead) and so
on.
>>> I thought that I would make a typical multi-artist mix tape for TNE as
>> well, but as it turned out, the touchstone for me for TNE/RC/Star
> Vikings
>>> was Pete Townshend's "White City" album. So "White City" is the Star
>> Viking soundtrack. If you listen to it you can probably hear where lots
> of
>>> stuff came from. Another aspect of attitude was creating characters
who
>> would speak different themes or points of view that you wanted the
> players
>>> to be hearing, like Norris for the Regency, Kuligaan (sp?) for the RC,
>> etc., Craig for another POV, and obviously all of that was starting in
> the
>>> late MT period, which is why I think of all of those as "transitional
>> TNE"
>>> products, because we were setting the stage.
>>> Let me also say that we established two groups in the early thinking,
>> and
>>> in the rules: The Guild and the Free Traders. These were holdovers
from
>> the Star Viking board game that we were going to put out. When GDW was
> still flush with all of the Gulf War Factbook money (which allowed me to
be hired and new Macs bought for us) our print buyer, Darlene File (Marc
Miller's wife) bought up a bunch of materials for hard-map board games,
which included several thousand map boards and plastic pieces. You can
see
>>> these map boards and pieces in Minion Hunter. The other game that was
>> supposed to be made with the remaining boards was Star Viking, a
> "strategic" board game of re-taking space. There would have been four
players: the Star Vikings (RC), a player who played all of the little
TEDs, The Guild, and the Free Traders, and they all would have had
different cross-cutting victory conditions. The pieces were supposed to
be
>>> injection-molded plastic. We persisted with the hope that we would be
>> able
>>> to do that, but the Desert Storm Factbook (what's the opposite of
>> windfall?) crater and the re-investment in "the Carpenter Project" (DJ)
> eventually took away the possibility of affording that.
>>> I say that not just because it happened, but because I'm thinking that
>> although we fully intended to put out a Guild sourcebook and Free
Trader
> sourcebook product to support those aspects of the campaign, I expect
that
>>> they would have fallen by the wayside due to all the other things we
>> were
>>> trying to show, and the FTs would have disappeared more so than the
>> Guild,
>>> which was showing up in other products, but mostly as an opponent
> rather
>> than a "campaign." And that's another example of "where we envisioned
> going" doesn't necessarily work out that way, as you find yourself
focusing on different things instead.
>>> I am going to break again, still partway through nuance. Do not expect
>> more of this until tomorrow.
>>> Dave
>
>
>
>
>
yahoo flagged your last couple as spam ... I was able to clear this one, the other is hung up ... will try clearing it again later.
Regards,
Tim
Regards,
Tim
Any idea why? Characteristics of the content, size, specific words on a
filter list?
> yahoo flagged your last couple as spam ... I was able to clear this one,
> the other is hung up ... will try clearing it again later.
> Regards,
> Tim
>
>
filter list?
> yahoo flagged your last couple as spam ... I was able to clear this one,
> the other is hung up ... will try clearing it again later.
> Regards,
> Tim
>
>
Was there any mention of enhancing someone's manhood or getting their debit
problems under control? Strephon I'm looking in your direction.
From: []
On Behalf Of
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:23 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
Any idea why? Characteristics of the content, size, specific words on a
filter list?
> yahoo flagged your last couple as spam ... I was able to clear this one,
> the other is hung up ... will try clearing it again later.
> Regards,
> Tim
>
>
problems under control? Strephon I'm looking in your direction.
From: []
On Behalf Of
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:23 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
Any idea why? Characteristics of the content, size, specific words on a
filter list?
> yahoo flagged your last couple as spam ... I was able to clear this one,
> the other is hung up ... will try clearing it again later.
> Regards,
> Tim
>
>
Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking. Every once in a while--but I
can't think of any specific examples--I will notice that when describing
some situation using specific jargon sets (whether game or military) I
will wind up with a sentence that "looks dirty" and deliberately change
it.
Fortunately as we know that there is no sex in Traveller that's not a real
danger.
> Was there any mention of enhancing someone's manhood or getting their
> debit
> problems under control? Strephon I'm looking in your direction.
>
>
>
> From: []
> On Behalf Of
> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:23 AM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
>
>
>
>
>
> Any idea why? Characteristics of the content, size, specific words on a
> filter list?
>
>> yahoo flagged your last couple as spam ... I was able to clear this one,
>> the other is hung up ... will try clearing it again later.
>> Regards,
>> Tim
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
can't think of any specific examples--I will notice that when describing
some situation using specific jargon sets (whether game or military) I
will wind up with a sentence that "looks dirty" and deliberately change
it.
Fortunately as we know that there is no sex in Traveller that's not a real
danger.
> Was there any mention of enhancing someone's manhood or getting their
> debit
> problems under control? Strephon I'm looking in your direction.
>
>
>
> From: []
> On Behalf Of
> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:23 AM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
>
>
>
>
>
> Any idea why? Characteristics of the content, size, specific words on a
> filter list?
>
>> yahoo flagged your last couple as spam ... I was able to clear this one,
>> the other is hung up ... will try clearing it again later.
>> Regards,
>> Tim
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
Guys--
I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the problem
it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
today.
> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>
>> Remember me?
>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
> days
>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
running
>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
moving.
>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
> myself of where I was and send it out.
>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
haven't
> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
damn)
>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5 Seniors
>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
"Where39;s
> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
"They39;re
>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
on the topic, I've established
>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs," which
>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
> be
>> writing history
>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
> we
>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
late
> MT MSs
>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
going to be unsupported the way MT was
>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
> affect
>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
so
>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
things
> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
> if
>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>> More soon.
I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the problem
it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
today.
> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>
>> Remember me?
>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
> days
>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
running
>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
moving.
>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
> myself of where I was and send it out.
>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
haven't
> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
damn)
>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5 Seniors
>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
"Where39;s
> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
"They39;re
>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
on the topic, I've established
>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs," which
>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
> be
>> writing history
>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
> we
>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
late
> MT MSs
>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
going to be unsupported the way MT was
>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
> affect
>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
so
>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
things
> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
> if
>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>> More soon.
I thought Virus broke Promise.
From: []
On Behalf Of
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
To:
Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
Guys--
I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the problem
it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
today.
> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>
>> Remember me?
>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
> days
>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
running
>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
moving.
>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
> myself of where I was and send it out.
>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
haven't
> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
damn)
>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5 Seniors
>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
"Where39;s
> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
"They39;re
>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
on the topic, I've established
>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs," which
>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
> be
>> writing history
>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
> we
>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
late
> MT MSs
>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
going to be unsupported the way MT was
>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
> affect
>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
so
>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
things
> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
> if
>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>> More soon.
From: []
On Behalf Of
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
To:
Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
Guys--
I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the problem
it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
today.
> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>
>> Remember me?
>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
> days
>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
running
>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
moving.
>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
> myself of where I was and send it out.
>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
haven't
> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
damn)
>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5 Seniors
>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
"Where39;s
> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
"They39;re
>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
on the topic, I've established
>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs," which
>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
> be
>> writing history
>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
> we
>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
late
> MT MSs
>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
going to be unsupported the way MT was
>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
> affect
>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
so
>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
things
> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
> if
>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>> More soon.
Thanks, Derek.
I had to look at that for a second before the sentence parsed, but then it
was laugh-out-loud funny.
> I thought Virus broke Promise.
>
>
>
> From: []
> On Behalf Of
> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
>
>
>
>
>
> Guys--
>
> I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
> and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
> just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the problem
> it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
> today.
>
>> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>>
>>> Remember me?
>>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
>> days
>>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
>> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
> running
>>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
> moving.
>>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
>> myself of where I was and send it out.
>>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
> haven't
>> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
> damn)
>>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
>> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
> actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5 Seniors
>>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
> "Where39;s
>> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
> them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
> "They39;re
>>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
> on the topic, I've established
>>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
>> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
> how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs," which
>>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
>> be
>>> writing history
>>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
>> we
>>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
> Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
> late
>> MT MSs
>>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
>> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
> going to be unsupported the way MT was
>>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
>> affect
>>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
>> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
> so
>>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
> things
>> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
>> if
>>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
>> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>>> More soon.
>
>
>
>
I had to look at that for a second before the sentence parsed, but then it
was laugh-out-loud funny.
> I thought Virus broke Promise.
>
>
>
> From: []
> On Behalf Of
> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
>
>
>
>
>
> Guys--
>
> I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
> and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
> just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the problem
> it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
> today.
>
>> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>>
>>> Remember me?
>>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
>> days
>>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
>> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
> running
>>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
> moving.
>>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
>> myself of where I was and send it out.
>>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
> haven't
>> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
> damn)
>>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
>> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
> actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5 Seniors
>>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
> "Where39;s
>> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
> them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
> "They39;re
>>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
> on the topic, I've established
>>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
>> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
> how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs," which
>>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
>> be
>>> writing history
>>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
>> we
>>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
> Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
> late
>> MT MSs
>>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
>> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
> going to be unsupported the way MT was
>>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
>> affect
>>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
>> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
> so
>>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
> things
>> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
>> if
>>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
>> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>>> More soon.
>
>
>
>
Tim--
I know this is silly, but I'm testing a theory about the spam flag. Can
you tell me if this one gets flagged?
Dave
> Thanks, Derek.
>
> I had to look at that for a second before the sentence parsed, but then it
> was laugh-out-loud funny.
>
>> I thought Virus broke Promise.
>>
>>
>>
>> From:
>> []
>> On Behalf Of
>> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
>> To:
>> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Guys--
>>
>> I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
>> and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
>> just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the
>> problem
>> it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
>> today.
>>
>>> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>>>
>>>> Remember me?
>>>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
>>> days
>>>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing
>>>> a
>>> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
>> running
>>>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
>> moving.
>>>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
>>> myself of where I was and send it out.
>>>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
>> haven't
>>> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
>> damn)
>>>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
>>> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
>> actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5
>> Seniors
>>>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
>> "Where39;s
>>> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said
>>> of
>> them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
>> "They39;re
>>>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
>> on the topic, I've established
>>>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
>>> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
>> how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs,"
>> which
>>>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going
>>>> to
>>> be
>>>> writing history
>>>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
>>> we
>>>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
>> Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
>> late
>>> MT MSs
>>>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
>>> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
>> going to be unsupported the way MT was
>>>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
>>> affect
>>>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point
>>>> I
>>> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
>> so
>>>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>>>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
>> things
>>> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>>>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the
>>>> resumption,
>>> if
>>>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
>>> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XYZ thing you said."
>>>> More soon.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
I know this is silly, but I'm testing a theory about the spam flag. Can
you tell me if this one gets flagged?
Dave
> Thanks, Derek.
>
> I had to look at that for a second before the sentence parsed, but then it
> was laugh-out-loud funny.
>
>> I thought Virus broke Promise.
>>
>>
>>
>> From:
>> []
>> On Behalf Of
>> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
>> To:
>> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Guys--
>>
>> I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
>> and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
>> just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the
>> problem
>> it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
>> today.
>>
>>> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>>>
>>>> Remember me?
>>>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
>>> days
>>>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing
>>>> a
>>> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
>> running
>>>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
>> moving.
>>>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
>>> myself of where I was and send it out.
>>>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
>> haven't
>>> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
>> damn)
>>>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
>>> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
>> actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5
>> Seniors
>>>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
>> "Where39;s
>>> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said
>>> of
>> them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
>> "They39;re
>>>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
>> on the topic, I've established
>>>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
>>> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
>> how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs,"
>> which
>>>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going
>>>> to
>>> be
>>>> writing history
>>>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
>>> we
>>>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
>> Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
>> late
>>> MT MSs
>>>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
>>> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
>> going to be unsupported the way MT was
>>>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
>>> affect
>>>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point
>>>> I
>>> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
>> so
>>>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>>>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
>> things
>>> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>>>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the
>>>> resumption,
>>> if
>>>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
>>> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XYZ thing you said."
>>>> More soon.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
I'm here all week. Try the veal.
Trying to wrap my noodle around writing again, it doesn't help that I have
yet to find a decent writing program for the iPad, I want something that I
can transfer back and forth from my computer to my iPad and do you think
there's something . noooooo.
From: []
On Behalf Of
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 9:28 PM
To:
Subject: RE: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
Thanks, Derek.
I had to look at that for a second before the sentence parsed, but then it
was laugh-out-loud funny.
> I thought Virus broke Promise.
>
>
>
> From: []
> On Behalf Of
> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
>
>
>
>
>
> Guys--
>
> I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
> and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
> just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the problem
> it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
> today.
>
>> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>>
>>> Remember me?
>>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
>> days
>>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
>> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
> running
>>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
> moving.
>>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
>> myself of where I was and send it out.
>>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
> haven't
>> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
> damn)
>>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
>> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
> actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5 Seniors
>>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
> "Where39;s
>> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
> them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
> "They39;re
>>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
> on the topic, I've established
>>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
>> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
> how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs," which
>>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
>> be
>>> writing history
>>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
>> we
>>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
> Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
> late
>> MT MSs
>>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
>> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
> going to be unsupported the way MT was
>>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
>> affect
>>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
>> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
> so
>>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
> things
>> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
>> if
>>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
>> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>>> More soon.
>
>
>
>
Trying to wrap my noodle around writing again, it doesn't help that I have
yet to find a decent writing program for the iPad, I want something that I
can transfer back and forth from my computer to my iPad and do you think
there's something . noooooo.
From: []
On Behalf Of
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 9:28 PM
To:
Subject: RE: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
Thanks, Derek.
I had to look at that for a second before the sentence parsed, but then it
was laugh-out-loud funny.
> I thought Virus broke Promise.
>
>
>
> From: []
> On Behalf Of
> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
>
>
>
>
>
> Guys--
>
> I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
> and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
> just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the problem
> it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
> today.
>
>> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>>
>>> Remember me?
>>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
>> days
>>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
>> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
> running
>>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
> moving.
>>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
>> myself of where I was and send it out.
>>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
> haven't
>> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
> damn)
>>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
>> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
> actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5 Seniors
>>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
> "Where39;s
>> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
> them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
> "They39;re
>>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
> on the topic, I've established
>>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
>> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
> how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs," which
>>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
>> be
>>> writing history
>>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
>> we
>>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
> Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
> late
>> MT MSs
>>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
>> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
> going to be unsupported the way MT was
>>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
>> affect
>>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
>> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
> so
>>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
> things
>> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
>> if
>>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
>> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>>> More soon.
>
>
>
>
This one came through
Tim
On Saturday, March 22, 2014 10:49 PM, "" <> wrote:
>Tim--
>
>I know this is silly, but I'm testing a theory about the spam flag. Can
>you tell me if this one gets flagged?
>
>Dave
>
>> Thanks, Derek.
>>
>> I had to look at that for a second before the sentence parsed, but then it
>> was laugh-out-loud funny.
>>
>>> I thought Virus broke Promise.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> From:
>>> []
>>> On Behalf Of
>>> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
>>> To:
>>> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Guys--
>>>
>>> I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
>>> and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
>>> just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the
>>> problem
>>> it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
>>> today.
>>>
>>>> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>>>>
>>>>> Remember me?
>>>>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
>>>> days
>>>>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing
>>>>> a
>>>> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
>>> running
>>>>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
>>> moving.
>>>>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
>>>> myself of where I was and send it out.
>>>>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
>>> haven't
>>>> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
>>> damn)
>>>>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
>>>> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
>>> actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5
>>> Seniors
>>>>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
>>> "Where39;s
>>>> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said
>>>> of
>>> them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
>>> "They39;re
>>>>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
>>> on the topic, I've established
>>>>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
>>>> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
>>> how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs,"
>>> which
>>>>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going
>>>>> to
>>>> be
>>>>> writing history
>>>>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
>>>> we
>>>>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
>>> Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
>>> late
>>>> MT MSs
>>>>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
>>>> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
>>> going to be unsupported the way MT was
>>>>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
>>>> affect
>>>>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point
>>>>> I
>>>> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
>>> so
>>>>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>>>>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
>>> things
>>>> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>>>>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the
>>>>> resumption,
>>>> if
>>>>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
>>>> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XYZ thing you said."
>>>>> More soon.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
>
Tim
On Saturday, March 22, 2014 10:49 PM, "" <> wrote:
>Tim--
>
>I know this is silly, but I'm testing a theory about the spam flag. Can
>you tell me if this one gets flagged?
>
>Dave
>
>> Thanks, Derek.
>>
>> I had to look at that for a second before the sentence parsed, but then it
>> was laugh-out-loud funny.
>>
>>> I thought Virus broke Promise.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> From:
>>> []
>>> On Behalf Of
>>> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
>>> To:
>>> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Guys--
>>>
>>> I "broke my promise" (below) because my messages weren't coming through,
>>> and I didn't see any point in sending out the next installment if it was
>>> just going to fall into some black hole. By the time Tim fixed the
>>> problem
>>> it was several hours later, so was too late. I will return to this later
>>> today.
>>>
>>>> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
>>>>
>>>>> Remember me?
>>>>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
>>>> days
>>>>> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing
>>>>> a
>>>> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
>>> running
>>>>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this
>>> moving.
>>>>> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
>>>> myself of where I was and send it out.
>>>>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still
>>> haven't
>>>> answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
>>> damn)
>>>>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
>>>> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
>>> actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5
>>> Seniors
>>>>> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny
>>> "Where39;s
>>>> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said
>>>> of
>>> them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
>>> "They39;re
>>>>> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men." But
>>> on the topic, I've established
>>>>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
>>>> that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
>>> how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs,"
>>> which
>>>>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going
>>>>> to
>>>> be
>>>>> writing history
>>>>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
>>>> we
>>>>> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about 3.
>>> Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the
>>> late
>>>> MT MSs
>>>>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
>>>> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
>>> going to be unsupported the way MT was
>>>>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
>>>> affect
>>>>> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point
>>>>> I
>>>> may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
>>> so
>>>>> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>>>>> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other
>>> things
>>>> I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>>>>> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the
>>>>> resumption,
>>>> if
>>>>> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
>>>> back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XYZ thing you said."
>>>>> More soon.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
>
and this one got flagged
Tim
Tim
One thing I noticed a while ago, was that some of my posts from my iPad were not getting through - presumably because it labels the mail as being from "Yahoo1", rather than my e-mail account.
--------------------------------------------
On Sun, 23/3/14, Tim O'Reilly <> wrote:
Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
To: "" <>
Date: Sunday, 23 March, 2014, 13:36
This one came
throughTim
On Saturday, March
22, 2014 10:49 PM, ""
<> wrote:
Tim--
I know this is silly, but I'm testing a theory about the
spam flag. Can
you tell me if this one gets flagged?
Dave
> Thanks, Derek.
>
> I had to look at that for a second before the sentence
parsed, but then it
> was laugh-out-loud funny.
>
>> I thought Virus broke Promise.
>>
>>
>>
>> From:
>> []
>> On Behalf Of
>> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
>> To:
>> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is
feeling Chatty
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Guys--
>>
>> I "broke my promise" (below) because my
messages weren't coming through,
>> and I didn't see any point in sending out the
next installment if it was
>> just going to fall into some black hole. By the
time Tim fixed the
>> problem
>> it was several hours later, so was too late. I will
return to this later
>> today.
>>
>>> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come
back through yet.
>>>
>>>> Remember me?
>>>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left
us partway through this several
>>> days
>>>> ago, and don't want to let it get too
stale. I'm in charge of testing
>>>> a
>>> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by
March 31, and time is
>> running
>>>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I
also want to keep this
>> moving.
>>>> I think what I'll do now is say a
couple of initial things to remind
>>> myself of where I was and send it out.
>>>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial
question (which I still
>> haven't
>>> answered yet--be careful what you ask for,
apparently I don't give a
>> damn)
>>>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was
good (or Duke isn't, your
>>> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in
the first round) I'm
>> actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school
that started 5
>> Seniors
>>>> all year. I think that's a wanted
corrective to all this Johnny
>> "Where39;s
>>> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home
of the disease). As K said
>>> of
>> them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie
halftime interview,
>> "They39;re
>>>> old and they're old together, they know
what to do. They're men." But
>> on the topic, I've established
>>>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from
and how we refined what it means, how
>>> that implies other groups in the same time
(Guild and Free Traders) and
>> how the RC is no longer around to tell people,
"don't call us SVs,"
>> which
>>>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the
Regency are probably going
>>>> to
>>> be
>>>> writing history
>>>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to
make it clear that although
>>> we
>>>> were already accused of being
"dark" that's not what this was about 3.
>> Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on
repurposing some of the
>> late
>>> MT MSs
>>>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit
itself to writing TNE to
>>> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and
allay fears that it was
>> going to be unsupported the way MT was
>>>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system,
but that doesn't really
>>> affect
>>>> the storyline, which is what the questions
were about. (At some point
>>>> I
>>> may digress into "why a storyline at
all?" but that's really off-topic,
>> so
>>>> I will try not to go into it too
deeply.)
>>>> I think that's about it, but I'll
probably remind myself of other
>> things
>>> I've recently said as I go, even if I
forgot them above.
>>>> So if any of you are reading this now
before I send out the
>>>> resumption,
>>> if
>>>> it looks like I'm about to forget to
touch on something I said I'd get
>>> back to, feel free to say, "Don't
forget the XYZ thing you said."
>>>> More soon.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
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--------------------------------------------
On Sun, 23/3/14, Tim O'Reilly <> wrote:
Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is feeling Chatty
To: "" <>
Date: Sunday, 23 March, 2014, 13:36
This one came
throughTim
On Saturday, March
22, 2014 10:49 PM, ""
<> wrote:
Tim--
I know this is silly, but I'm testing a theory about the
spam flag. Can
you tell me if this one gets flagged?
Dave
> Thanks, Derek.
>
> I had to look at that for a second before the sentence
parsed, but then it
> was laugh-out-loud funny.
>
>> I thought Virus broke Promise.
>>
>>
>>
>> From:
>> []
>> On Behalf Of
>> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12:40 PM
>> To:
>> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Since Dave N is
feeling Chatty
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Guys--
>>
>> I "broke my promise" (below) because my
messages weren't coming through,
>> and I didn't see any point in sending out the
next installment if it was
>> just going to fall into some black hole. By the
time Tim fixed the
>> problem
>> it was several hours later, so was too late. I will
return to this later
>> today.
>>
>>> Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come
back through yet.
>>>
>>>> Remember me?
>>>> I'm conscious of the fact that I left
us partway through this several
>>> days
>>>> ago, and don't want to let it get too
stale. I'm in charge of testing
>>>> a
>>> .NET MVC project that has to be completed by
March 31, and time is
>> running
>>>> out, so I have to get back to that, but I
also want to keep this
>> moving.
>>>> I think what I'll do now is say a
couple of initial things to remind
>>> myself of where I was and send it out.
>>>> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial
question (which I still
>> haven't
>>> answered yet--be careful what you ask for,
apparently I don't give a
>> damn)
>>>> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was
good (or Duke isn't, your
>>> call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in
the first round) I'm
>> actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school
that started 5
>> Seniors
>>>> all year. I think that's a wanted
corrective to all this Johnny
>> "Where39;s
>>> my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home
of the disease). As K said
>>> of
>> them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie
halftime interview,
>> "They39;re
>>>> old and they're old together, they know
what to do. They're men." But
>> on the topic, I've established
>>>> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from
and how we refined what it means, how
>>> that implies other groups in the same time
(Guild and Free Traders) and
>> how the RC is no longer around to tell people,
"don't call us SVs,"
>> which
>>>> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the
Regency are probably going
>>>> to
>>> be
>>>> writing history
>>>> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to
make it clear that although
>>> we
>>>> were already accused of being
"dark" that's not what this was about 3.
>> Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on
repurposing some of the
>> late
>>> MT MSs
>>>> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit
itself to writing TNE to
>>> demonstrate our commitment to the new line and
allay fears that it was
>> going to be unsupported the way MT was
>>>> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system,
but that doesn't really
>>> affect
>>>> the storyline, which is what the questions
were about. (At some point
>>>> I
>>> may digress into "why a storyline at
all?" but that's really off-topic,
>> so
>>>> I will try not to go into it too
deeply.)
>>>> I think that's about it, but I'll
probably remind myself of other
>> things
>>> I've recently said as I go, even if I
forgot them above.
>>>> So if any of you are reading this now
before I send out the
>>>> resumption,
>>> if
>>>> it looks like I'm about to forget to
touch on something I said I'd get
>>> back to, feel free to say, "Don't
forget the XYZ thing you said."
>>>> More soon.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
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#yiv9539463624
Let's see if the iPad origin of this post kicks it out.
Sent from my iPad
On 23 Mar 2014, at 22:56, <> wrote:
> and this one got flagged
>
> Tim
>
>
Sent from my iPad
On 23 Mar 2014, at 22:56, <> wrote:
> and this one got flagged
>
> Tim
>
>
I'm going to go with a no on that one.
Derek Stanley
Sent from my iPad
> On Mar 23, 2014, at 7:24 AM, Eamon Watters <> wrote:
>
> Let's see if the iPad origin of this post kicks it out.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>> On 23 Mar 2014, at 22:56, <> wrote:
>>
>>
>> and this one got flagged
>>
>> Tim
>
>
Derek Stanley
Sent from my iPad
> On Mar 23, 2014, at 7:24 AM, Eamon Watters <> wrote:
>
> Let's see if the iPad origin of this post kicks it out.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>> On 23 Mar 2014, at 22:56, <> wrote:
>>
>>
>> and this one got flagged
>>
>> Tim
>
>
Tim/DED--
Can't tell which one "this one" below is.
Dave
> and this one got flagged
> Tim
>
>
Can't tell which one "this one" below is.
Dave
> and this one got flagged
> Tim
>
>
Tim/DED--
This one also came through instantly. However, the two in between this one
and the one I just reported as "instantly" have not come through yet.
By the way, my reference to "I know this sounds silly, but I'm testing
this," I was looking through the text to see if I had something that a
spam filter might have been looking for. I had a variable with three
letter "x"s in a row, which is a common dirty movie term, so I replaced it
with "XYZ," but that message is the one that got held up for 9 1/2 hours,
for whatever that is worth.
This is the last thing that I will send for a while, I don't want to
clutter up people's in-boxes with this debugging stuff.
Dave
> Tim/DED--
>
> Can't tell which one "this one" below is.
>
> Dave
>
>> and this one got flagged
>> Tim
>>
>>
>
>
>
This one also came through instantly. However, the two in between this one
and the one I just reported as "instantly" have not come through yet.
By the way, my reference to "I know this sounds silly, but I'm testing
this," I was looking through the text to see if I had something that a
spam filter might have been looking for. I had a variable with three
letter "x"s in a row, which is a common dirty movie term, so I replaced it
with "XYZ," but that message is the one that got held up for 9 1/2 hours,
for whatever that is worth.
This is the last thing that I will send for a while, I don't want to
clutter up people's in-boxes with this debugging stuff.
Dave
> Tim/DED--
>
> Can't tell which one "this one" below is.
>
> Dave
>
>> and this one got flagged
>> Tim
>>
>>
>
>
>