Rough Night Kid?

I haven’t been sleeping so good lately. I don’t know if there’s something on my subconscious mind, or if it’s something that I’ve been eating, but it’s making me feel a bit crazy. I’ve been roasting hot too, hotter than I felt even in the height of summer, hot even to the extent that I feel as though I’ll break out into a sweat at any minute.

I woke up eight times last night in a fairly odd span. The first time was just before midnight and I was totally disorientated, as though something had knocked me awake before I could fully perceive it. I can remember fumbling around in the dark with my vision blurring and trying to figure out what the hell was going on. It wasn’t a pleasant experience and I can only really compare it to the sensation you probably feel if you’re blind drunk and staggering about with a pair of back to front ski boots on. Thankfully it only really lasted for what seemed like a heartbeat or two, but it was unnerving to say the least. The waking up at random is bad enough, but I’ve started having odd dreams that I can only partially remember.

I feel asleep and had an odd fleeting dream where I was standing outside an old style American diner on a street with no other buildings. The place was brightly lit but there was nobody inside. I leaned against a lamppost for a bit until an old man wandered up to me and said, “There ain’t but a thousand stars a twinkling tonight young fella.” I just nodded, shook his hand and watched as he tottered off down the street into the distance.

The trouble with being in dreams is that you can’t really tell how long they last. They’re so subjective, and fleeting you can’t really gauge how long you’ve been asleep. Sometimes I even wonder if I’m actually asleep as some of them seem more like the fevered products of a half baked mind. The dream with the old man seemed to last only a few seconds, maybe a minute, but I woke up suddenly and it was about quarter to one in the morning, more than hour since I first woke up with that odd sensation. I was a bit more alert this time, but still groggy and over warm for having been asleep. I grabbed a glass of water and went back to bed determined to get some sleep.

I remember specifically looking at the clock to see what time it was.

The next one was just about as odd. I was in Woodland’s Store on Woodlands Road standing in a queue to be served when I noticed that a bunch of chickens were hiding out at the back of the store beside the cold drinks. I sidled over to see what they were up to, but by the time I got there they had escaped through a locked manhole in the floor. I have no idea what the chickens were about.

I woke up again after that, it was about two in the morning by then and I was getting past the annoyed stage and into pure exasperation. Not exactly the state to be in when you’re trying to sleep. I flicked on the lamp and read a bit of Genghis Khan by John Man to try and slow down my overactive brain, and it seemed to work. I started to get sleepy again and put the book down, rolled over and went to sleep.

I woke up a few times after that at random times, but not for long. I still don’t know what’s causing it, but I was paying for it this morning as I felt as though I hadn’t slept in days. Hopefully things will improve tonight and I can get a decent rest before my fridge box flat gets too cold to sleep in.

The Not So Silent Hunter

If you cast your mind back into the ether of history you might remember me writing that I was keen to get one of the Silent Hunter games (link here if you can’t remember). El Kat was good enough to buy me a copy of Silent Hunter 4 a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been playing it quite a lot since.

The game is difficult to get to grips with at first. Submarine tactics do not come easy when you know next to nothing about their capabilities and limitations. This is confounded in the version that I have by the total lack of an included manual. The sole content of the DVD case is one of those accursed registration cards that seem to come with everything. There is a PDF manual included on the disk thankfully, but you have to go looking specifically for it. I think the lack of the manual is a particular quirk of the specific cheap edition that I got rather than a general thing across all the available versions. Seemingly the collector’s edition came with a spiral bound ship identification book, fancy manual and even a cloth patch to sew onto your clothes.

As an aside I really miss the old days of computer games when the disk came in a big cardboard box with hundred page manuals and a dozen bits of paraphernalia.

There are tutorial levels, but they lack any decent direction or instruction in the operation of the submarine and they’re especially lacking in giving any kind of insight into how to fight a war inside one. Without a manual the learning curve is steeper than the north face of the Eiger, and twice as deadly. The Japanese forces are totally unforgiving and seemingly remorseless in their desire to turn your fragile submarine into a cigar shaped steel coffin. Even at flank speed on the surface it’s impossible for a sub to outrun a warship, and there’s no chance of outgunning one either.

I’ve so far utterly failed to sink a single Japanese warship in the game. In fact at the beginning I was so poor at submarine warfare that I’ve probably made every mistake that it’s possible to make. I set out assuming that I could just said about on the surface until I spotted some enemy ships then dive to periscope depth, sneak up on them, whack a couple of torpedoes into them and sneak away again.

In essence my assumption was correct, but I didn’t take into consideration a lot of the characteristics of submarine warfare. Firstly a submerged submarine is very slow. There’s no chance that you can chase down a merchantman that’s doing anything more than five or six knots. In reality you have to carefully plan your attacks, checking the enemy’s course continually through the hydrophones, periscope and the sonar as you creep towards an intercept point somewhere along their heading. Lesson one is simple, submarines are not active hunters, they’re ambush predators that lurk underwater and strike from a concealed position.

Secondly the faster you go the more noise your engines, propellers and everything else make which is a huge no-no in underwater as sound travels further and faster in water than in does in air and enemy warships are ALWAYS listening on their hydrophones.

Due to the lack of a manual I had no idea what the maximum safe depth I could reach was so I tended to either stay at periscope depth or no deeper than a hundred feet. It turns out that almost all of the submarines modelled in the game have a safe diving depth of at least three hundred feet. Worse it turns out that at periscope depth in the clear waters of the pacific the submarine is entirely visible to aircraft flying overhead. A submarine at such a shallow depth is virtually as visible to warship sensors as it would be on the surface. Worse periscope depth is just the right depth for a passing destroyer to snap the conning tower right off a submarine as it passes overhead. This is usually fatal for the destroyer of course, but it’s just as deadly to the submarine down below.

It turns out that many of the islands in the Philippines and the Japanese home islands have shore emplacements to ward off enemy shipping. I only realised this after I tried sailing through the narrow straits of Selat Sunda between Lampung and Java with the time compression on. I don’t think my men even saw what killed them as the shore emplacements don’t show up on radar or sonar. Strangely their attacks don’t seem to cause the time compression to switch off, or maybe they just got in a lucky shot that sunk the sub the instant before it turned off.

At first I didn’t realise that the Q key floods the torpedo tubes and opens the outer torpedo hatches. If you don’t do this it takes about twice as long to fire the torpedo and as a result you miss whatever you’re aiming at nine times out of ten. In my first patrol I fired sixteen torpedoes and didn’t hit a single ship.

I also thought that Japanese patrol aircraft were only a minor threat to my submarine, until I was sunk twice in a row by a lone A6M Zero fighter bomber. The third time I got away but half of the deck watch were killed, my periscopes were smashed and I had to return to PearlHarbour for a refit.

I made the daft mistake of assuming that all merchantmen were unarmed and surfaced to attack one with my deck gun. Unfortunately for my hapless sub it turns out that quite a lot of them have guns on them. Their gun crews aren’t the best, but a submarine has next to no armour compared to a warship. Yet another short sharp lesson that ended with a trip down to Davy Jones’ locker.

I pressed the wrong button while sitting three hundred feet beneath a Japanese task force that was steaming leisurely towards the Solomon Islands. I’m not sure who was more surprised when I blew the ballast tanks and crashed into the bottom of a battleship them or me. Sadly I learned that battleship armour beats flimsy submarine hull every time and I had plenty of time to reflect on this hard won knowledge as my sub went down to her watery grave.

My skills have slowly improved with each harsh lesson, and I’ve become more confident in the capabilities of my submarine. I’m still making crazy mistakes and taking stupid risks with the lives of my simulated crew, but gradually they’re transforming from sheer lunacy to calculated madness. So far I’ve managed to sink quite a few merchantmen of various sizes, and even a destroyer by accident, but my ultimate ambition is to sink a battleship.

I’ll put up some pictures later showing the game, as it looks cracking with all the setting set on high.

Pricey Pages

I spotted this on play.com earlier while looking for a decent book about submarines in the Pacific during WWII. I have no idea why anyone would charge two grand for a book unless it was actually made out of submarine bits. The seller seems to have 95% positive feedback so I assume they’re not a pirate jakey.

F**K Civilization

I’m in a foul mood today. I’ve just found out that one of my friends from The Work has been “dismissed” for, and I quote, “ongoing Attendance Management issues and failure to comply with said policy.” In tribute to his love of dance music I’m going to refer to him as Mr. C for the duration of this post lest someone out there finds it and it counts against either of us in the future. I’m not sure how much he’ll thank me for drawing links between him and The Shamen, but I enjoy the wordplay too much to change it now.

Now the fact is that Mr. C is a gentle, happy soul that hasn’t done anyone an iota of harm in his life. He’s always been happy to have a laugh, a joke and shoot the breeze with anyone. Sure his health hasn’t been the best in recent months, and his sickness record has been fairly poor, but I believe that a common root lies with the way The Work and employers in general treat their workers. The team leaders and managers at The Work seem to have a very definate idea of what kind of person they want in Mr. C’s old department and I can break it down like this: Woman, aged between twenty and thrity, blonde or bottle blonde hair, neddy voice and a can-do, in your face attitude. In short they seem to be trying to construct some kind of 1950’s era typing pool rather than a modern skills based office.

Fundamentally Mr. C didn’t, and really couldn’t have, fit the mould of the kind of person The Work is looking for. Now that he’s been “dismissed” they can return to the status quo of talking endlessly about the X Factor, Lady Gaga and all the other mass market crap that they all enjoy so much, and I feel a little sadder that a good friend and a good man has been forced out of his job. All the whispering, droning on about time keeping and so on eventually got to Mr. C and his health has been suffering for a while as a result. The office seems a little poorer, a little quieter and a little dimmer without his happy go lucky smile bobbing around.

So here’s to Mr.C. May you find a better path, and a cause to smile everyday. He says what he thinks and means what he says. His only real crime in the eyes of The Work appear to be that he differed from their accepted ideas of fitting in.

Just Jabber

I’m alternately amused and annoyed by the problem pages in newspapers. On the one hand many of the letters and emails are so trivial or half-witted you can’t help but laugh at the idea that a real person could end up in such a predicament. Then on the other hand I get annoyed with the way things are described or phrased in the problems.

One phrase that commonly shows up is the idea of person X “finding” themselves in bed with person Y. Another variation is person X before they know it kissing/cuddling/doing the monkey with Person Y.

I can’t see how it’s possible to “find” yourself in bed with someone. To find something implies to me that it was lost beforehand. The only way I can conceive that someone could “find” themselves in bed with someone is through the liberal use of roofies, but that’s a whole other situation. I accept and acknowledge that in the heat of passion things can move fast, but not so fast or out of control that the people involved lose all perception of themselves and what they’re doing. Surely if they blacked out as the phrase almost suggests they wouldn’t remember any of the “mind blowing sex” or the “amazing lover” that they’ve been with. The simple fact is that in a rush of sex hormones, and inflammed passion and the evolutionary reproductive pressure of a million years of evolution weighted the decision to one side. I belive however that the decision was still there to be made. It might have been a split second thing, maybe as long as it takes for your pants to hit the bedroom floor, but ultimately you made the decision.

Fundamentally I suppose this is about how I perceive the world. I’ve always believed in free will, self determination and personal responsibility. Put simply I have a fundamental belief that human beings have free will, and that everything that happens to us is as a result of those choices. To say that you “found” yourself in bed with someone implies that you had no control over the situation. It’s not an attempt to convey the passion of the situation, but instead is an attempt to excuse yourself from taking responsibility for doing what you shouldn’t have been doing. Let us be honest here, if you’re writing to a problem page about this you’re either boasting about the whole thing or you’re suffering from a level of guilt about the situation.

I suppose that some of you will disagree with me, and maybe even point out that human beings are not machines. That they can’t be expected to think logically in the heat of passion. Well sorry, but thinking and logic are what seperates us from animals in the first place.

I’m not saying that people can’t have regrets about their actions, and the effects of their actions. Regret is one of those things that you have to learn to live with as you grow up, but so is responsibility, and that’s what this is all about.

Now sorry if I appear to be making a mountain out of a molehill here, but I truly believe that fully half of the so called “problems” that seem to grace the problem pages in a given week could be simply solved by people taking responsibilty for their lives, making the correct choices and thinking, for even one nano-second, about what the reprecussions of their actions could be.

Or maybe I am a robot after all…?

I believe

El Kat and I watched the outstandingly funny Boat That Rocked at the weekend, and there’s one scene in particular that has awakened an old memory in my dusty old mind. Roughly halfway through the crew are all sitting out on deck drinking beer and talking. They play a game where one person says something beginning with the words “raised you’re hands if you’ve never…” and then says an action or scenario, usually something embarrassing, and the others have to raise their hands if they’ve done it. They take it in turns to go around the group choosing actions and telling embarrassing stories. It’s a funny scene that does a lot to help get to know the characters within their world.

I’m sure that it’s not a great stretch to say that nearly everyone has played the game Truth or Dare at some point in their lives. I wonder however if any of you have ever heard of a game that a few of us invented as students while out for the night at Jim’s Bar in the Queen Margaret Union circa 1998.

Maybe it was the product of one Carlsberg too many, or maybe it was just a by-product of the urge to expose philosophy, moral indignation and personal views while under the influence.

The rules are fairly simple. Everyone takes a turn to say two facts about themselves. The facts must stated in a certain way: The first must be “I believe…” and the second “I do not believe…” followed by whatever you believe or do not believe in. The only other rules are that these must be statements of actual belief, and not just jokes specifically at one of the other player’s expense.

I suppose there isn’t really a point to the game, it’s just a kind of variation on truth or dare.

Given our states of mind, and the philosophical nature of our debates the game often focussed on religious, moral and social topics. I’ve included a few of my own below to give you an idea of how it works.

I believe that nothing worthwhile is ever easy
I do not believe that the ends justify the means

I believe that all human beings should be free and equal
I do not believe that human rights can be given or taken away

I believe that any human can be a monster by their own choice I do not believe that an entity like “The Devil” is the cause of all evil in the world

I believe in God
I do not believe in the way that he is portrayed by religion

I believe religion is a social construct to control humankind I do not believe that we can comprehend or communicate with God

I believe that all gods are the same God
I do not believe that any faith is less valid than another

I believe that all humans have an equal capacity for good and evil I do not believe that

I believe that human greed is the root of all evil
I do not believe that human greed will ever be satiated

I believe the world will end when the sun dies
I do not believe the world will end if humans die

I believe we are the sum of our actions, words and choices
I do not believe that humans are born sinners

The Great Potato Skin Fail

Has anyone else noted that onions, and specifically red onions, seem to be creeping into every facet of the restaurant and fast food business? I can’t seem to get anything today without some bit of stingy, crunchy onion turning up inside it.

The worst offender so far has been Frankie and Benny’s Restaurant chain. It’s a shame because I love going to Frankie and Benny’s to take in the faux Italian-American décor, good food and generally friendly service.

OK that’s mostly bullshit.

The main reason I love going to Frankie and Benny’s specifically because I adore their roasted potato skins with cheese and bacon bits. I could eat them all day long and never get bored.  They were simple, straightforward and no doubt fattening as f**k, but they’re tasty so that doesn’t matter. Every visit I made to F&B’s would begin with some potato skins despite El Kat’s prompting that maybe I should try something different. I say, NO! As long as we’re in Frankie and Benny’s I’ll be whacking back the potato skins, or so I thought.

Frankie and Benny’s had other ideas it seems, and suddenly one day I cheerfully demanded Loaded Potato skins from the friendly waiter only for him to apologise profusely that they no longer served them. So it was with a heavy heart that munched down some chicken things and refused to return to F&B’s until my favourite starter was restored to its rightful place on the menu.

El Kat, who is ever tolerant of my foible and idiosyncratic ways, shrugged and said OK have it your way you six foot pest.  Of course she said this in full knowledge that my daft taboo did not apply to her if I was there, and while out with some of her family at F&B’s she spotted the return of potato skins to the menu.

Naturally upon hearing this news I demanded that we go straight there this weekend, and I fired in trying to order potato skins even before we were properly seated. The friendly waiter duly obliged and a familiar plate of three potato skins appeared in front of me. They looked better than ever with each one looked stuffed to the gunwales and coated with mighty layers of cheese. I grabbed the first and took a giant enthusiastic bite, and that’s when I got what we in Ayrshire refer to as “a gunk”.

A crunching, mashing, distinctly organic texture assailed my senses. I sensed a great disturbance in the force. There was more to those loaded potato skins than just cheese, bacon and potato. Truth be told the taste of the entire thing was overwhelmed by the presence of GOD DAMNED RED ONION. I put them down in disgust. I couldn’t bring myself to eat another bite. This wasn’t what I signed on for! I wanted potato, bacon and cheese, not some damn miniature salad mixture sneaking about disguised as my sacred starter.

My sadness and disappointment were almost palpable, and El Kat reassured me that the mean proprietors of Frankie and Benny’s would be punished when the revolution came. I nodded in sage agreement and we departed from that place of culinary betrayal determined to fight on against the ever encroaching forces of the onion invaders.

The Scottish Personality

I’ve often wondered if a nation, or at least a culture, could be said to have a personality.  Is it possible, for example, to describe the entire Scottish Nation as though it were a single, homogeneous, person with distinctive character traits.

We’re all familiar with the idea of stereotypes of course, and with the stereotypical Scot: He of lank ginger hair and sickly pale skin. Constantly drunk, abusive, aggressive and tight-fisted but at the same time generous and warm hearted. Normally dressed in a Tam O Shanter bunnet, kilt and munching on a raw haggis.It’s an image that’s travelled the world, and it’s quite often there to meet we Scots however far we roam. God help us if we make first contact with intelligent alien life. They’ll probably claim to be descended from someone on sky and then try to copy the accent.

How much of this is true though, and how much of it is invention. I can count on one hand the number of ginger people I’ve met, and I’ve lived in Scotland all my life. Drunken, aggressive Jakes are a fact of life in every urban area whither you’re in Kelvinside or Kathmandu.

Stereotypes aren’t personality though.

If I were to try to describe the personality of Scotland I would say we’re stoic, serious and dour like a church of Scotland minister on a wintry Sunday morning. We’ll bear indignities that other nations would tear themselves apart over. We’re proud of ourselves, proud of our people and proud of the people that left Scotland and change the world no matter how small a part of the world they changed. We’re patient, slow burning and wise in our judgements, but we can be hot headed and quick to anger when the touch paper is lit. We know in our hearts that no man is our better, and that all are deserving of respect. At times we see the world with a fatalism that is at odds with our inventiveness, inquisitiveness and the optimism that hides in our heart.

The Metro – Recycling News for the Worker Drones

I don’t know why I keep picking up abandoned copies of The Metro that the commuter types bring into the work as every time I open it up I start to get the rage. Many people get annoyed about the number of adverts in it, but I don’t have a problem with that. The paper is free after all, and they’ve got to pay for it somehow. I’m not even all that bothered by the fact that their journalism wavers unpredictably through the spectrum between half decent and the worst level of journalism that’s possible without being an editor at an English tabloid.

OK so that stuff annoys me too, but more than than any of that I’m annoyed by the fact that half the stories in the metro are blatantly recycled from that appeared on the internet the day before. Let me be clear that I don’t mean that they’ve stolen the text of an article off the reuters news site, or reworded an article on the BBC news. I mean they’ve taken a story that was well known and publicised on several widely known sites such as digg, the BBC News, Wikipedia or CNN and printed it up in the physical paper edition of the metro. Worse half the time there’s a lag between these events appearing on the main sites and the subsequent reporting in the metro.

I’m beginning to think that the Metro news office is really just a bunch of folk sitting waiting for forwarded news from email contacts to arrive in their inbox so they can throw it onto the page. You get what you pay for I guess.

In the interests of science I’ve started trying to spot these time lagged articles whenever I can get hold of a copy of the metro for study.

Campaign Ideas: The Rise of Evil

I often regret that I haven’t had more of a chance to indulge in playing RPGS. Unfortunately as I’ve said in previous posts there tends to be a lot of wariness on the part of most people to take part in such a thing. It’s annoying that those selfsame people have no problem with making a fool of themselves playing Wii-Sports or warbling out I Will Survive at the pub karaoke. I’ve never let the lack of players stop me from coming up with ideas for campaigns and scenarios to play through should I ever manage to somehow acquire a new gaming group. My ideas don’t go to waste of course, but they do tend to get half scribbled into a notepad or a half started short story and forgotten for years.

One of the ideas that I’ve had bouncing around for as long as I can remember is a campaign called “The Rise of Evil“.

Most RPG scenarios are needlessly clichéd and episodic. The players and their characters stumble from one loosely related adventure to the next, killing monsters and taking their treasure. Eventually they’re richer and more powerful than most of the kingdoms in their world, but by then most campaigns have petered out through players moving on, or simple loss of interest in proceedings.

The clichés aren’t restricted to the general plot and proceedings either. The villain of the piece is invariably an ancient evil dragon/necromancer/wizard/nobleman/vampire (delete as appropriate) that rules from an impossibly over fortified residence hidden somewhere like the Swamp of Death, Forest of Darkness or Mountains of Pointy. The place is invariably filled with illogical traps, monsters that are inside locked rooms where there’s not enough room for them to turn around, let alone live in comfort, and treasure left lying around in plain sight waiting for a gang of hapless adventurers to come along and steal it.

I wanted to run something a bit different, something that would give the players an involvement in their world and the events that shape it.

The first quest would, by necessity as well as design, be a low level one. A simple search and retrieve, or maybe hunt and slay, mission for a local worthy. Hopefully for tradition’s sake their job wont start out inside a local tavern with buxom serving wenches either.

I have always thought it would be best if the player characters started out as members of the local community. Farmers or artisans within their community rather than a bunch of itinerant adventurers wandering through town. It promotes some proper role-playing in that they have commitments and attachments to non-player characters and institutions that they wouldn’t otherwise have. There’s more of a motivation for the characters when they’re acting in the interests of their community rather than solely for gold and silver. There’s also a greater element of realism involved when they’re focused on a local area and feel a connection with it rather than the usual staple in adventuring where they’re focussed on gathering loot and gaining levels.

The first adventure would see the characters starting out on a fairly mundane day in their small village community. A sudden influx of low level monsters, or the disappearance of an important NPC, maybe both, would see the characters band together to investigate the source of the problem. They would find a forgotten crypt, or crumbling ancient temple in a desolate area of forest near the village and in the course of investigating they would come across several challenges from monsters and the crumbling environment of the ruin. Ultimately they would emerge victorious having removed the threat to the their village and having enriched themselves through gems, items and gold pieces in the process. Mixed into these pieces of loot, and throughout the ruin, will be vague hints of an ancient evil and prophetic statements about its return, ages of darkness, apocalypse, fire, brimstone and all that fun kind of stuff.

I know what you’re thinking: Other than the NPC community aspect this is a fairly generic start to a campaign. Well you’re right it is, but that’s part of the beauty. It lures the players, and as a consequence the characters, into a sense of false security. They believe that they know what’s what from the outset. They’ll naturally assume that the troubles and situations that they encounter are all interconnected and the work of some over arching evil menace that they’ll have to defeat to “win the game”.

Really though what I want to do is create something unique. To begin with there wont be an over arching force of evil in the world. There wont be a conquering army of undead, or a demonic apocalypse. There will just be a party of adventurers that increasingly find themselves called on by the locals to help them out when they encounter a situation that gets out of their depth. In return they bring in wealth and prosperity to their community. All fine and admirable for a group that aspires to be known as heroes.

The trouble, and the core of the campaign will develop slowly and methodically from the smallest seeds. The principle villain wont be an ancient vampire, or a mad wizard or a tyrant he’ll be a local merchant. A merchant made powerful, wealthy and influential by the influx of goods and materials that the characters unwittingly trade with him. His influence will spread slowly, like a black cancer through the community, encompassing murder, extortion, intrigue, theft and intimidation. The worst aspect of his rise to power will be the fact that at first he is an unassuming, country storekeeper with little interest in anything but tending his store and serving the community. The banality of this villian, and the slow rise of his evil would be the difference between this and other campaigns. He doesn’t spend his days cackling in a mountaintop fortress, or hunting down the scattered pieces of the Amulate of Ultimate Power, or even trying to overthrow the rules of the kingdom. He just uses his resoucefulness and lack of moral centre to futher his own petty ends of power and influence.

Mainly I’m taking cues here from figures like Chairman Mao, Mussolini and of course Adolf Hitler. Normal-ish human beings that have taken on monstrous proportions through power afforded to them via legal means. In essense the characters will indirectly create their own greatest opponent. One that is far more dangerous and insidious than a high level mage, and in his own strange way more powerful than a high level fighter all armed and supplied by their own cast offs.

It’s an odd idea, having such a banal villian in what is supposed to be a heroic, almost mythical saga, but I think it’s an interesting premise.

Having written this post I’m now starting to get an itch to start writing these ideas down, and maybe start developing the whole thing for use in the ever popular Dungeons & Dragons.

I wonder if there’s any fame and/or money in this stuff anymore…