**>> SPYNET BULLETIN **>> EARTHDATE 92.05.17 **>> AN H-by-A SERVICE **>> Compiled by Hazed plus a team of specialist newsdroids **>> your news and gossip and get paid good groats! **>> GENIE MAY FAIRE The next "Special Event" in the Fed calendar is the GEnie May Faire - and we need your help for it! On Saturday May 30 from 6.00 pm to 9.00 pm (eastern), many GEnie products will be running discussions, games, competitions and talks about their areas, in a special Faire held in the National Real-time Conference area. Each room in the conference will become a "booth" at the Faire, and Fed will be setting up shop in a booth for the entire three hours. The idea of the event is that people can come and find out about areas in GEnie they haven't yet visited, and since the Faire will be free they can take their time to ask all the questions they want. Each booth will have six half-hour events. We've decided that the best way to tell people about Fed is to hold six discussions about the different aspects of Fed. The discussions will be: 1. GETTING STARTED: Do's and Don't for Newbods 2. FUN IN FED: Drinking, tickling, partying and role-playing 3. TRADING: How to get rich quick 4. PLAYER-PLANETS: Visiting other systems (and building your own) 5. FIGHTING IN FED: The art of offence and defence 6. FREE-FOR-ALL: General questions about Federation. This is where we need your help. We'd like some volunteers to actually run the discussions - after all, the players are far better qualified to talk about these aspects of the game than any of the Federation team! Hazed will be calling for volunteers in the MPGames BBS, in the Special Events and Promotions topic. If you can help us with this, please read the topic and contribute your ideas and help. **>> CONFERENCES IN MPGAMES Krell is continuing to run her RTCs twice a month. Once a month she holds an informal dicussion conference, and once a month a "School" talking about a particular aspect of the game. Next week (May 24th) will be the Drinking School (don't ask us, we just print what we are told) at 3.00 eastern time. We assume Krell herself will be hosting this one... she is, after all, eminently qualified. Whether any representatives of Hazed-by-Alcohol will be sober enough to show up remains to be seen. The following RTC will be another school - the long-awaited Fighting School! On Sunday June 14th you'll get a chance to blow each other to bits with absolutely no risk whatsoever! The Fighting School will start in the RTC, with a theory session. Your class leader will go through all the boring facts and figures, like how much damage you can do, what kind of ship to buy, and who you should never shoot at. This will be followed by a practice session in Fed, and for the duration of the School the persona file will be "frozen". This means you can blast away at each other to your heart's (or equivalent's) content, safe in the knowledge that any damage or deaths will be wiped out later by Our Illustrious Leader! More details about the Fighting School will be published nearer the event. **>> WEDDING OF THE WEEK We're choked. Really choked. We had it all set up - our newsdroid had disguised itself as a potted plant and was ready to sneak into the church to witness the wedding of Mirth and Buskirk and collect all the sordid details - but it couldn't get into Fed Data Space! Even Oxcart, the organist (what a good word for him!) couldn't get to the wedding. Many people were turned away with the message "All channels to Fed full, please try later". Yes, it was a bug. An unforseen side-effect of the new command got out of control, and restricted the number of people who could access the game to just 10. Jolly bad timing, that it should hit just as everyone wanted to go to church! The bug has now been fixed, so perhaps Mirth and Buskirk would like to hold another wedding for all those who missed the first one? Thank you to everyone who contacted us to tell us there was a problem. Please, if you think you have found a bug in the game, let us know about it - don't assume that someone else will tell us! We'd rather receive ten letters telling us about a bug than not know at all; and we'd rather someone told us about something that turned out not to be a bug, than didn't tell us at all! Either use the command to tell Bella that there is a problem, or use the "Feedback to Federation" option on the Fed front page to send us mail about it. So because of this, we have no official report of the wedding! We have heard several rumours about the Galactic Administration's Consumer Protection officials trying to stop the wedding because the bride wore white, which they claimed was false advertising. Oxcart is apparently offering large sums of groats to someone who will marry him. Rezrov is pondering the offer... but what will Reg say? We've also been told that not too many days after the wedding, Mirth was seen consorting with a well-known Fed female other than his wife! Obviously Buskirk keeps Mirth on a very long lead. But other than that... nothing. No gossip at all. Not even the smallest bit. But wait! What's this! In the nick of time, just before we go to press (or whatever the electronic media equivalent of a press is... a modem, perhaps? Yes, that's more like it...) just before we go to modem, a scrap of paper is pushed under the door of our high-tech office, bearing the legend: **>> FROM THE THROAT OF POISON PEN The headline social event of the week was, of course, the much-publicised wedding of Mirth and Buskirk. Unfortunately, the whining little newsthing which writes our social pages was unable to attend, as something apparently went terribly wrong with the stasis field generator and it simply refused to materialise more than ten people [or equivalent] in the whole of Federation Dataspace that evening! Complaints have been filed, in quadruplicate, with the Galactic Administration, not that it ever does a bit of good, though it does give the bureaucrats another stack of paper to shuffle around. If any of you have ever wondered why we poor citizens still have to fill out all those bloody government forms, and why the GA doesn't just get a computer like a proper modern government should, we snooped about the office a bit and came up with some answers: It seems they DO have a computer - two, in fact. One, however, is continually engaged in keeping track of all the details of all our lives and making sure every penny of tax is properly collected in the Solar System; and the other seems to be constantly in use by members of the Fascist Bully-Boy Death Squads playing 'Lemmings'. But we digress. We cannot give a report on the wedding, so you will all have to count on the inferior journalistic capabilities of our competitors for that, but we were given a somewhat interesting report of the sordid activities that went on afterwards in that fancy-schmancy bar on Muse. We weren't given all the details - either our sleazy informants are getting lazy, or as usual were simply too drunk to remember - but we can tell you that the fountain [Yes, there's a fountain in the bar. A terribly tacky one, with statues and things standing around in it. What can we say? At least the place is clean, so it's rather nice so long as one's sense of aesthetics is not easily offended.] was emptied of water and filled with quite a copious amount of champagne, and somehow everyone ended up swimming in it. Who is 'everyone', you ask? The revelers appeared to include Darknight, Mirth, Dane, Krell, Rezrov [Who was reportedly dressed in a getup that made him look as if he had taken a wrong turn on the way to Orb Wars], possibly Illyra, or someone who looked like her; Blindman and his dog, Lady, who lapped up quite a bit of champagne herself; a rubber ducky and a rubber chicken, which may or may not have been Reginald. It seems that just about everyone kept their clothes on, wwith the exception of Lady, who doesn't wear clothes to begin with, and Rezrov, who kept lifting up his robes to pose for photographs. [We don't know who has the negatives, but Krell was apparently taking most of the pictures, so perhaps you should ask her.] Now, on to other assorted rumours... It seems Logan has returned once again! Well, it seems that way... or... err... well, what we mean is, the Logan who has returned - well, not really _returned_, let's just say the one who's here now - doesn't seem to be the same Logan. We don't mean Logan has changed, we mean just what we said, this appears to be a person who has no connection to the legendary pirate and wielder of rusty egg-beaters, but who just happens to have the same name. Does this mean that the Dread Pirate Logan will no longer be seen in Federation Dataspace??? Before you all start giving three cheers and sighing in relief and proposing toasts and all that, we would like to remind you all that this does not mean that Logan's relatives won't show up! If you have not had the dubious pleasure of meeting any of them, well, give silent thanks to the deity, graven image, or lucky charm of your choice. Consider that we could be graced by the presence of Logan's evil twin, Lore... then again, don't consider it. It is simply too disturbing a possibility. Take our word for it, Lore makes Logan look like Mahatma Gandhi. We don't wish to speculate what Lore's reaction to the new Logan will be, if he shows up. All we can say is, you have been warned. Speaking of pirates, what has that nasty old Blackmark been up to? First, he seemed to have undergone a strange transformation, almost - but not quite - becoming a nice, civilised fellow. We have been told by one who knows such things that this change of heart may have been a result of realising that it would be rather difficult to ever advance his upcoming planet if no one ever goes there except Oxcart, Occy, and Tony. Now, Blackmark seems to have made himself rather scarce. Our spies have reported rumours that he is holed up in a hideout somewhere in the inaccessible regions of Zippy, conducting evil scientific experiments on household pets while giving remote orders to the squads of stormtroopers who are presently engaged in trying to impose some sort of orderly regime on his planet, which apparently exists but has not yet been linked to the Federation, perhaps because the unruly populace persists in hanging the ambassadors from the nearest lamppost and burning down the trade exchange. And on a final note, here's something for all you conspiracy theorists to speculate on: One of our more daring newsthings, while loitering about with the shadiest of characters in the seediest of bars, has uncovered a rumour that there exists some sort of alliance of Federation citizens known as the 'Dark Side'. Apparently, no one has the slightest idea of the intents and purposes of said group [Or at least no one would talk... These informants always seem to get some sort of cheap thrill out of making life difficult for our poor reporterdroids!] but from the name, we can only assume that it is a group somehow dedicated to the Forces of Evil! [Cue a bit of ominous music in a minor key here] We cannot help but wonder if this reputed group has anything to do with the apparently-defunct D.I.E.. As there don't seem to be many former members of that dubious organisation still mucking up the interplanetary wastes [except in the form of debris], and as we have no idea who the reputed members of the reputed 'Dark Side' could possibly be, we really cannot speculate here. But our newsdroids are working on it around the clock, and we have promised a large box of chocolate willies to any who can come up with some sort of coherent information on this, or at least make up a good story. We love conspiracies, as they give us something to write about at times when everyone persists in not doing anything interesting. So until next time... Would everyone please get out there and start doing something interesting, so we can write about you? Of course, if you don't do anything interesting, we will probably write about you anyhow if we have nothing else to do, so if you do something, at least you have some control over the situation. In fact, we have several very juicy little stories created by our more creative reporterthings, just waiting for us to fill the names in... and if we can't find anything else to say about you, _your_ name could be filled in! As usual, you have been warned.... **>> LIES, DAMNED LIES AND NEWS REPORTS Last week we claimed that Dyars and Morgana had been having a jolly old time in assorted bars around Fed Data Space. Hazed received a message from Dyars, saying that he denied the vicious rumours about him and Morgana. Poor old Dyars must have had several spybeams trained on him, because immediately following that message, both Oxcart and Darknight sent a message to Hazed denying his denial!! There's no privacy anywhere. **>> PROMOTIONS NEWS Khan and Blindman have both solved the JP puzzle and can now get ready to die lots more when they tackle the GM puzzle. Condor has made it to Merchant, congratulations. Well done to a trio of new Adventurers - Fellatrix, Serge and Zapptapper. They can now venture out of the Solar System and find many new and interesting ways to die. **>>CONTACTS The following information will appear at the end of every News Bulletin, so you don't have to read it if you already know it. In the event of a problem or question, you can: * talk to Hazed or Bella in the game * leave a message in the game log * a message to Hazed or Bella * send mail with the Federation Feedback option from the main menu You can order a copy of the unexpurgated printed Idiot's Guide to Federation by typing ORDER at any GEnie menu. Cost - a mere $12.95. (New edition will be available shortly!) Federation has several category in the new MPGames RT. To get there, type M1045,1 from any menu prompt and SET category 13 (for information, instructions, questions and answers) or 14 (for general chat and discussions). The Federation Leader in the bulletin board is Krell (Mail ID: K.HILLYER). There are also private categories for Explorers, run by Krell, and for the Conclave run by Oddball (Mail ID: D.STALZLE). The MPGames RT also has a Federation library in the files area, Library 5. Library 18 holds the Federation News Archives. **>> BULLETIN ENDS