WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS
Earthdate October 1999


INSIDE SCOOP


FED FUNNIES


OFFICIAL NEWS
by Hazed


What was in October 1999's Official News:

THE MONTH IN BRIEF
SOL EXPOSE: DR. FOGG
SOL EXPOSE: DIESEL
SOL EXPOSE: SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
SOL EXPOSE: KLEINBOTTLE WAY
SOL EXPOSE: MING THE MERCILESS

THE MONTH IN BRIEF

Another month, another example of the fragility of the Internet. This time it wasn't malicious hackers, or vicious weather systems, but incompetant contractors. A gas company in Ohio managed to cup through a bunch of fibre-optic cables which tore a big hole in the Internet.

Felina became the newest DataSpace Hostess.

Plans were laid for parties, contest and puzzle planets to celebrate the Fed Spooktacular at Halloween. Almandot solved the puzzle, and Satinsheets won the costume contest.

A fun bit of role-playing which was reported in the news was taken waaaay to seriously by some players. The story was that Icedrake would eat any planet which didn't conform to the new rules. It was a very funny incident, and made a very funny news article... but oh my, how gullible some people are! Hazed had to publish a disclaimer the following week reassuring them that it was not official policy to send a large mythical creature to eat any planet broke the rules - honest!

Otherwise, it was another quiet month, as you can tell from this rather skimpy yearbook!

SOL EXPOSE: DR. FOGG

Near the spaceport in Venus' Cargon City stands a somewhat dubious enterprise, presided over by a very dodgy character:

Dr. Fogg's Marital Arts Emporium
Ahead of you is a very artistic display of brightly colored Venusian forked condoms. To the left is a deluxe version of the breast mounted joystick.
To the right is a door through which you can see the offices of Dirty Boy Productions, where a man in a grubby raincoat is thumbing through a pile of dog-eared magazines. In pride of place is a bottle of WHOOSH!

The dubious Dr. Fogg presides over the whole shop.
Dr. Fogg is engaged in installing a new set of batteries into a motorized King Kong Ding Dong...

Who is the unsavoury Dr. Fogg and why does he have a shop in Federation?

Like much of the references in Fed, he dates back to Compunet, the UK network upon which Fed first made its appearance.

Compunet didn't have much in the way of structure, and gave its users an extraordinary amount of freedom in controlling the system. Unlike other systems of the time, which had formal message boards so users could post messages to each other, Compunet was in effect one big blank disk drive. We could make our own areas on the system and upload stuff to them - text, graphics, files, whatever. Many users took advantage of this; where else could you publish your own work in this way?

Of course, not everyone on Compunet wanted to upload stuff, and of those that did, much wasn't very good. Much like the Internet today. But some people became Compunet celebrities, providing excellent material. Dr. Fogg was probably the best of them all.

In real life, the person behind Dr. Fogg was an English farmer. But his online character was a mad scientist who came up with weird inventions, made outrageous statements, specialized in bad taste and sleaze, and was very, very funny. He invented the "breast-mounted joystick" - mentioned in the location description - a device enabling husbands who were hooked on their computers to carry on playing games without neglecting their wives, and the "clever dick", the equivalent for computer-mad wives. He was smutty and irreverent, something which is a great British comedy tradition.

Perhaps his most famous invention was a super-laxative, which has also found its way into Fed:

A brown bottle labeled 'WHOOSH (UK) Ltd.' lies abandoned in the corner.
The label reads: WHOOSH (UK) Ltd. (Est. 1984). Manufacturers of fine laxatives for humanoids through the centuries. WARNING: Contains GUTGRIPE X! Before ingestion stand with legs apart, and hold immovable object!

For those who would like to know more about Dr. Fogg, you will be delighted to know he now has his own web site, which reprints much of the material he wrote for Compunet. Warning: the material is rude and crude, and not suitable for young children or anyone who is easily offended.

Dr. Fogg's site is at http://members.aol.com/drfogg/index.html.

SOL EXPOSE: DIESEL

Writing this week's Sol Expose is a little odd, because in writing about Diesel, I am really writing about myself!

Diesel leans casually against the wall, baseball bat swinging idly to and fro.
Diesel makes a truly impressive sight! Her black leather one-piece creaks as various bulges threaten to burst out - thankfully (or not depending on your viewpoint) it fulfills its function admirably.

Diesel comes from Compunet, before there was a Fed. Diesel was my handle, or online alter ego. Like Dr. Fogg, I was a net celebrity and I wrote humorous articles and uploaded them, and people liked them.

At the time I was fairly punkish, and wore a lot of black leather. Yes, it did bulge alarmingly. Before Fed, I used to hang out in Compunet's chat room, Partyline, and it got pretty wild at times. As one of the very few women online in those days, I started using the baseball bat to beat off unwanted attention and keep those unruly males in line.

When Alan was writing Fed, he said he wanted to put in locations commemorating various Compunet celebs. When he asked me what I wanted, I decided to run a bar (with executive services on the side) so I wrote the text for the mobile and the location. The mobile descriptions remains the same, but the bar as been redecorated many times since. Originally it was a very rough bar, with broken chairs and tables from the frequent brawls; on the move to AOL I decided it was time to spruce the place up, and that's when the fountain, the pianist, and all the other tasteful decor were introduced.

Of course, being a mobile in Fed meant that when I actually started to play the game, I couldn't use my handle - I had to pick a different name! I chose Pugwash, who is currently one of my alts, the owner of the planet Deep.

The articles I wrote for Compunet haven't vanished into the bit bucket. You can read them on the Chez Diesel web site at http://www.chezdiesel.demon.co.uk, where they are accompanied by some wonderful illustrations by Robin Evans, who drew all our Fed artwork.

SOL EXPOSE: SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

This week, a catch-up of information I have discovered that is relevant to previous articles, or that I just left out at the time.

First, remember a few weeks ago I told of an ex- mobile called the Bodies? When trawling through my archive disks recently, I found a copy of the Solar System data from many years ago, and that mobile was included. Here's what it looked like:

The bodies of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern lie here.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. They are laid out on a slab, ready for a post mortem. One of them is clutching a letter in his hand, which may have been the cause of their demise.

Anyone familiar with the play Hamlet will be aware of the significance of that letter.

In the same file I found an old description of Chez Diesel:

Chez Diesel
(Social Centre of the Solar System)
The seedy and disreputable bar has recently been refurbished in an effort raise the tone.
While the decor is undoubtedly in the best possible taste, the seedy and disreputable clientele lurking in every candle-lit alcove somewhat spoilt the effect.
The new furniture already looks battered due to the regular space-port brawls.

This is not the original decor: this dates from the GEnie Fed days, and was the first renovation of the bar. I don't think I have a description of the bar as it looked when it was first opened.

Finally, when I talked about the Urban Spaceman and mentioned the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, what I should have mentioned (but forgot) was that one of the Bonzos, Neil Innes, went on to work with the Monty Python team, writing and performing some of their songs. Among others, he plays the minstrel who sings about Brave Sir Robin in the excellent film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

You can buy the film from Amazon:
VHS
DVD

SOL EXPOSE: KLEINBOTTLE WAY

This week, a minor mention on an Earth road location gets the Sol Expose treatment: Kleinbottle Way:

Road
You have just entered Kleinbottle Way. It is questionable where the exits are!

A klein bottle is a fascinating idea which is actually quite hard to describe, so bear with me while I take one step back and talk about Mobius strips. Yes, it is relevant. Trust me.

A mobius strip is a one-sided surface. Sounds impossible? Try this. Take a strip of paper and place it on the desk in front of you. Note that the piece of paper has got two separate sides, the top side and the bottom side, as is normal for pieces of paper. Mark the top side at both ends - put an X, sign your name, anything. Now pick up the strip and put a twist in it so that at one end, the mark you made is on the bottom, while the other end still has the mark on the top. Curve the strip and join it into a loop so that the two marks face each other, and fasten the ends together.

You've now got a loop of paper with a twist in it. Strange as it may seem, this loop only has one side. You can prove it by drawing a line along the strip of paper; eventually, the line will come back and join the beginning, and you will find it's covered the whole surface of the strip... proving that it only has one side.

Ok, you ask, how is this relevant to Fed? Patience, I'll get to that in a moment.

Click here to look at some neat pictures of a mobius strip.

More fun can be had if you take a pair of scissors and cut the strip down the middle of its length - you don't end up with two separate bits of paper, as you would expect, but with one long thin strip.

Now what about klein bottles? Named after a German mathematician, Felix Klein, and nothing to do with Calvin and his underwear, a klein bottle is one step up from a mobius strip. The strip was a two-dimensional object with one surface; a klein bottle is a three-dimensional object with one surface.

It's impossible to make a klein bottle but you can imagine it. Take a hollow tube or cylinder. If you join the two ends you get a torus, or something shaped like a ring donut. But if you make an impossible twist through a fourth dimension (just like you twisted the mobius strip through the third dimension) before you join the ends, you end up with an object with just one surface. It's closed, but it has no inside. If you cut it (like you did the mobius strip) you end up with two mobius strips.

Or, imagine a bottle where the neck curves over and passes through the surface where it joins with the bottom of the bottle...

If you're having problems visualizing that, take a look at this web page:

http://www.kleinbottle.com/index.htm

This is a spoof page offering Acme klein bottles for sale, with some great pictures of what they look like (or would look like if they really existed).

So, back to Kleinbottle Way. Our Illustrious Leader obviously threw this in as a kind of mathematicians in-joke, but I have to say that I was always disappointed by the location myself. Why? Well the name would suggest something weird about the location; that the exits would send you off to unexpected places on the other side of the planet. At the very least, the directions should be somehow twisted so that if you enter by going E, you'd have to go S to get back again.

But no. All it means is that the two exits from the location are not listed in the description. What a wasted opportunity.

Sorry, Bella!

SOL EXPOSE: MING THE MERCILESS

I received a letter recently that rather surprised me:

Was just curious... I happened to catch a couple of animated Flash Gordon episodes and I couldn't help but notice that the evil arch-villain is none other than... Ming the Merciless! Coincidence?

No, of course it's not a coincidence. My surprise is that anybody didn't realize that Ming isn't just a Fed phenomenon. The Emperor Ming does indeed come from the universe of Flash Gordon.

Flash originally appeared in a comic strip, and then in an old black and white TV series from the thirties. Flash was a space hero, fighting on the side of right, against the evil Emperor Ming the Merciless from the planet Mongo. It's typical Saturday morning serial stuff, with cliff-hanger endings and amazing escapes. Much to my surprise, I found you can buy the series on video - Amazon sell a boxed set of 4 tapes.

Buy Flash Gordon TV Series from Amazon.

All this was long before my time; my first encounter with Flash was when his adventures were filmed in the 80s, in a wonderful movie that captures the spirit of the trashy comic-strip style and absurd adventures of the original TV series. It's so over-the-top it's out-of-sight. The colored backgrounds are quite spectacular. Max von Sydow makes a wonderfully evil Ming, and the soundtrack by Queen complements the action perfectly. If you haven't seen this film, then go rent it - or buy it from Amazon.

Buy Flash Gordon film from Amazon.

You can also buy the Queen soundtrack on CD.

So why did Ming show up in Fed as the supreme ruler of the Galaxy? To explain that, I have to go back, way back, into the mists of time, to the days when Fed was on the GEnie network. In those days, the plans for the top end of the game were very different. The idea was that after Duke, players would promote to the rank of Senator, and from those ranks, an Emperor would be elected. But there would be a limit on the number of Senators allowed at one time, so in order to promote you'd have to displace another player by assassination. The Senators would also be continually trying to displace the Emperor and take his place.

While we were working on the code for this, the rank structure was put into place, and we thought it would be fun to have someone role-play an Emperor who would be the first to be displaced by players. So we stole the name of the villain from Flash Gordon, and Ming the Merciless appeared in Fed DataSpace.

But it wasn't long before Bella realized that the plans for the top ranks would have to change, as a number of problems became apparent, all to do with the big change in the way that players interacted with each other with the new ranks.

If you look at all the other ranks, the players compete with each other but only in an indirect way. There is no limit on game resources so the success of one PO does not automatically mean the failure of another. Instead, the Galactic economy expands to cater for each new planet and duchy added to it. Fed just isn't a game about doing down the other guy. But suddenly we were proposing to put players in direct conflict for a small number of places in the Senate.

Even worse, the idea to have an election for the Emperor turned out to be a disaster. The players in line for that rank took it absolutely seriously, and campaigned just as they would have done in real life - with dirty politics, mud-slinging, and all that goes with it. It got very ugly, very quickly.

So, the election was called off, Ming remained Emperor, and Duke became the highest-attainable player rank.

And before you all email me saying that you think it would be a great idea to let players be Senators and vie for Emperor... sorry, it won't happen!

Finally, for proof that Ming's megalomania means he's not content to remain ruler of the Fed Galaxy, take a look at the Ming in 2000 page at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ejc/ming.html.


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