PARANOIA

After a long drought, Mongoose Publishing is now bringing out FOUR new PARANOIA books in November 2008! All these books were written by Mongoose staff designer and Chief Paranoid Gareth Hanrahan, author of The Traitor's Manual, the first Alpha Complex Nights collection, and many more. Check the catalog pages for more information and great covers by the One True PARANOIA Artist, the incomparable Jim Holloway!

• Alpha Complex Nights 2
  
• Big Book of Bots (and download the free .PDF Big Book of Bots preview)
  
• Mandatory Mission Pack
  
• The Thin Green Line

I have happily reunited with some of the PARANOIA writers from the Traitor Recycling Studio to start Ninjalistics, a humor website with a darkly satirical tone familiar to fans of Alpha Complex.

Ninjalistics, "your top-quality provider of corporate assassination and espionage services," is a company of corporate ninjas. They're like Dilbert with nunchuks, filling out requisitions for each throwing star and ensuring their assassinations are ISO-9000 compliant. Greg Ingber (who contributed to Extreme PARANOIA and other books) created the idea, and he's recruited help from stalwart traitors like Gareth Hanrahan (The Traitor's Manual), WJ MacGuffin (Criminal Histories), and Andy "Jazzer" Fitzpatrick of Paranoia-Live.net.

The Ninjalistics.com site features funny corporate ninja news (for instance, recounting the company's charitable work installing free deathtraps in a local Ronald McDonald House); Greg's weekly "Etiquette Ninjas" webcomic; and free forms and award certficates (Ninja Training Request, Cloud Weak Minds Award) that will ring familiar to every PARANOIA fan. (You can view the forms at the free document-sharing site Scribd.com.) Download the free New Ninja Orientation Handbook (.PDF link) and you'll instantly spot the PARANOIA ancestry of the Ninjalistics "authorization badge" scheme. Always steal from the best....

We'll be posting new content every business day, Monday through Friday. To avoid missing anything, subscribe to our RSS feed, and follow us on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and delicious.

I feel we've tapped a strong vein of humor with Ninjalistics, one that proudly acknowledges our roots yet heads in a new and original direction. If you've enjoyed the Mongoose PARANOIA line, look in at Ninjalistics.com and let us know what you think.

Via Dan Curtis Johnson of the Traitor Recycling Studio, this October 27, 2008 Wall Street Journal article by the delightfully named Julie Jargon, titled "Neatness Counts at Kyocera and at Others in the 5S Club":

SAN DIEGO -- Jay Scovie thought he knew how to deal with the latest mandate from corporate: He swept the clutter from his messy desk into boxes and tossed them in a closet.

But the 5S cop was on to him.

5S is a key concept of the lean manufacturing techniques that have made makers of everything from cars to candy bars more efficient. The S's stand for sort, straighten, shine, standardize and sustain. Lately, 5S has been moving from the plant floor to the cubicle at hundreds of offices around the country, adding desk cleaning to the growing list of demands on employees.

That means companies like Kyocera Corp., Mr. Scovie's employer, are patrolling to make sure that workers don't, for example, put knickknacks on file cabinets. To impress visitors, the company wants everything to be clean and neat. [...]

The North American headquarters of Kyocera, a manufacturer of solar panels, copy machines and ceramic knives, adopted 5S in April at the behest of its Japanese parent.

It wasn't long before Dan Brown, Kyocera's newly appointed 5S inspector, started asking Mr. Scovie, the office's communications manager, about his boxes. "It became a repeated topic of conversation," says Mr. Scovie, who eventually broke down and went through his stuff. He says he found things he had forgotten he had, including instructional videos on how to install solar panels. [...]

Kyocera's version of 5S, which it calls "Perfect 5S," not only calls for organization in the workplace, but aesthetic uniformity. Sweaters can't hang on the backs of chairs, personal items can't be stowed beneath desks and the only decorations allowed on cabinets are official company plaques or certificates.

While that may sound authoritarian, it's not the initiative that's important, it's how managers communicate it, says Gary Hayes, managing partner at Hayes Brunswick & Partners LLC, a leadership advisory firm in Bronxville, N.Y. "If managers clearly explain why they're doing something, I think most people will understand the rationale. But if you say, 'We're doing this because 14 efficiency experts say it increases productivity,' then it becomes kind of Dilbert," he says....

As Dan remarks, "If it seems authoritarian, it's because it was not explained to you correctly. Please turn in your boss so he can be taught how to better explain things to you."

Labels: hygiene

And you thought the Cold War was bad. Today "levels of paranoia and mistrust are much higher than previously thought and are increasing," according to Britain's arch-conservative newspaper The Daily Telegraph:

Dr Daniel Freeman, a clinical psychologist from King's College London, warned: "These days, we daren't let our children play outside. We're suspicious of strangers. Security cameras are everywhere."

Dr Freeman, a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellow, said: "We seem to have entered an age of paranoia. And the indications are that things may only get worse."

The psychologist has been researching paranoia for over a decade at the college's Institute of Psychiatry and found that one in four people have paranoid thoughts regularly.

Then why aren't all these people buying PARANOIA? Are they too suspicious? Maybe we should insert coded messages in the text: "This is the book the conspiracy doesn't want you to have." -- "Buy ten copies, one per day for ten days, and the Alliance will contact you." -- "Send messages to your allies via Actual Play threads on RPG.net."

(Via Reddit, where the comments are variously enlightening and otherwise.)

Loyal citizen Dan McMahon links to a BBC report that American scientists have taken steps towards a pill that selectively removes memories from the brain.

In experiments with mice, researchers from the Georgia College of Medicine were able to eliminate memories without any damage to the rodents' brains.

They suggested that the technique which works on a particular protein in the brain could, one day, be used to help humans overcome traumatic events.

However, the chief scientist said this was "years or even decades away."

"Good old soothing BBC," says Dan, "picking a scenario with the lowest possible level of bowel-loosening horror." Clearly the BBC isn't aware of (or has forgotten about) MemGo in the PARANOIA rulebook, and the implications of memory editing shown in the mission collection WMD. To say nothing of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or the collected works of MemGo's inspiration, Philip K. Dick.

Labels: memgo

Via Techdirt, a story from the Wired Threat Level blog about Computer Phreaks (Russian programmers, actually) who ran a three-year, $500K man-in-the-middle scam against American trucking companies:

For over three years the Russian immigrants repeatedly hacked a Department of Transportation website called Safersys.org, which maintains a list of licensed interstate trucking companies and brokers.... There, the pair would temporarily change the contact information for a legitimate trucking company to an address and phone number under their control.

The men then took to the web-based "load boards" where brokers advertise cargo in need of transportation. They'd negotiate a deal, for example, to transport cargo from American Canyon, California, to Jessup, Maryland, for $3,500.

But instead of transporting the load, Lakes and Berkovich would outsource the job to another trucking company, the feds say, posing as the legitimate company whose identity they'd hijacked. Once the cargo was delivered, the men allegedly invoiced their customer and pocketed the funds. But when the company that actually drove the truck tried to get paid, they'd eventually discover that the firm who'd supposedly hired them didn't know anything about it.

This must happen all the time in Alpha Complex. High Programmers wage entire wars of supply interdiction, completely invisible to the unwitting populace -- until suddenly, one morning, an entire sector abruptly collapses. Or a team of Troubleshooters in a Straight campaign might innocently carry out a long sequence of missions for The Computer, only to discover The Computer didn't dispatch those missions, never made those citizens Troubleshooters, and in fact has no idea who they -- crap! Even as I type those words, I see that's basically the mission premise PARANOIA has used for over two decades, since Vapors Don't Shoot Back if not even earlier....

Technically it's called the Soft Drink Can Generator, but naturally all right-thinking PARANOIA fans will use this online image generator to create nothing except the many authorized flavors of the universally acclaimed fizzy Alpha Complex concoction -- guaranteed to be now absolutely free of major postsynaptic neurotoxins -- Bouncy Bubble Beverage!

Update: Apparently the Soft Drink Can Generator site has been Slashdotted or BoingBoinged or conceivably even PARANOIAOfficialDevelopmentBlogged. Wait a few days and try again.

Matthias Megyeri of Stuttgart, Germany, runs an online business -- well, really more of an art project -- called Sweet Dreams Security.

Fences with bunny rabbits for posts, razor-wire woven with butterflies, padlocks shaped like teddy bears and cat-like CCTV camera covers are just part of the Sweet Dreams Security range. Vicious but cute, designer Matthias Megyeri has carved an exciting new market for security products that respond to the uncomfortable balance of the growing demand for safety, exaggerated by the media, and the over-saturation of ‘niceness.’

My favorite is the lace curtain that looks like a metal window shutter.

Download the Sweet Dreams product catalog (.PDF link).

(Caution: All the Sweet Dreams Security pages and the catalog are safe for work, but some other pages on the same site are NSFW.)

Via Jason Kottke (who nabbed the link from security consultant Bruce Schneier), a jaw-dropping Washington Post story (October 5, 2008) by Tom Ricks about the British government's successful efforts to track IRA terrorists using bomb-sniffing dry cleaners.

One of the most interesting operations was the laundry mat [sic]. Having lost many troops and civilians to bombings, the Brits decided they needed to determine who was making the bombs and where they were being manufactured. One bright fellow recommended they operate a laundry, and when asked "what the hell he was talking about," he explained the plan, and it was incorporated -- to much success.

The plan was simple: Build a laundry and staff it with locals and a few of their own. The laundry would then send out "color coded" special discount tickets, to the effect of "get two loads for the price of one," etc. The color coding was matched to specific streets and thus when someone brought in their laundry, it was easy to determine the general location from which a city map was coded.

While the laundry was indeed being washed, pressed and dry cleaned, it had one additional cycle -- every garment, sheet, glove, pair of pants, was first sent through an analyzer, located in the basement, that checked for bomb-making residue. The analyzer was disguised as just another piece of the laundry equipment; good OPSEC [operational security]. Within a few weeks, multiple positives had shown up, indicating the ingredients of bomb residue, and intelligence had determined which areas of the city were involved. To narrow their target list, [the laundry] simply sent out more specific coupons [numbered] to all houses in the area, and before long they had good addresses. After confirming addresses, authorities with the SAS teams swooped down on the multiple homes and arrested multiple personnel and confiscated numerous assembled bombs, weapons and ingredients. During the entire operation, no one was injured or killed. [...]

The Israelis have a term for this type of thinking, "Embracing the Meshugganah," which literally translated means, embrace the craziness, because the crazier the plan, the less likely the adversary will have thought about it, and thus, not have implemented a counter-measure.

Boy, no kidding. When Warren Spector and I wrote the early PARANOIA adventure Send in the Clones (reprinted in Flashbacks), we included a whimsical battle in a replica of an Old Reckoning laundromat. I guess we thought a laundromat was just inherently funny. If we'd Embraced the Meshugganah, maybe we'd have seen the brilliant intelligence-gathering possibilities in dry cleaning.

Labels: laundry, meshuggannah

Although it has nothing to do with PARANOIA, I flout that restriction -- fie, I say -- to pass along the news that my all-time favorite boardgame, Cosmic Encounter, is now returning in a new edition from Fantasy Flight Games! Hurrah, huzzah, yippee! Thanks for the tip to the excellent CE fansite, Blogmic Encounter.

What? You're new to Cosmic Encounter? Crikey, it's been out of print a long time. Learn more at Cosmic Encounter Online, a terrific web version created by original CE co-designer Peter Olotka. BoardgameGeek is of course authoritative, and the fansite The Warp will entertain experienced players for hours. Here is my 1992 review of the 1991 Mayfair Games Cosmic Encounter edition, my favorite of all the editions so far -- though I haven't seen this new one.

Duane O'Brien, the Gamemaster I praised in September for his brilliant electronic PARANOIA props, has now created real, material Alpha Complex plasticreds!

They are stencil-cut red plastic, so the white you see showing is just what shows through when I hold paper up behind it. The small, harder-to-read text on the first line says "For Best Results Use Before Expiration" (presumably that means before you die), and the second line says "This Card Is Legal Tender" followed by a unique number (#98482620).

I was going to use the phrases as stencils, but now I think I need to make EL [electroluminescent] backlights to go behind them. Will (friend of mine) suggested using the "Happiness Is Mandatory" one like an "Applause" sign. I think I have to do that, so that in a game I can make the players applaud on command.

As with his previous efforts, mere commendation points seem somehow unworthy. Duane, you have earned something far more precious than mere commendations: outright visceral envy.

Labels: awesome, duaneobrien

Paul Baldowski, contributor to the PARANOIA rulebook and many fine supplements, and designer of The Underplex, has now produced an engaging new .PDF adventure for the medieval RPG Maelstrom.

The Sward [sic] and the Stone is set in Wales, AD 1446. As Paul explains on his superior PARANOIA fan blog Omega Complex, Wales at that time was "perched on the precipice, faced with the prospect of a new rebellion by restless natives":

Complacent English nobles, entrusted with expansive domains, stretch themselves all too thin, leaving stewards to run much of their lands and properties. In many instances, these stewards come from the local population, swayed by misplaced loyalties and the corrupting influence of power.

In the midst of this, a simple merchant requests the assistance of travellers in Swansea to drive, and provide escort to, a cartload of goods bound for Pembroke. It seems a simple enough task, providing payment and transport for a couple of days on the road. However, how often do games present "simple" tasks that stay simple? Mixing legendary stones, agents of the Crown, bandits and stray sheep, The Sward and The Stone is a new adventure for the classic Maelstrom roleplaying system [...] A 27-page adventure plus two maps, the booklet provides background, NPCs and a gazetteer of the character’s route through the craggy, troubled landscape of south Wales in the mid-15th Century.

Now available for download from DriveThruRPG. Commendation point, Paul!

Labels: maelstrom, paulbaldowski

Could have sworn I blogged Subterranea Britannica here long ago, but I can't find the entry, so here it is now. (Via BoingBoing.)

Labels: underplex

Loyal citizen Ziv Wities reports there will be PARANOIA-related activity at ICon, the Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy convention in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 14-18, 2008. "Loyal citizens will pay no attention to the myriad non-fun games, movies, lectures, and social enhuddlements taking place in the convention complex," he writes, "and proceed immediately to the PARANOIA game round. The games will be run by both returning GMs from the oh-so-beloved Mandatory Convention 13A and new recruits.

"Full details and advance registration may be found at ICon's web site [site is in Hebrew] and the event page. ICon runs from the 14th of October 'till the 18th, and the PARANOIA round will be on Wednesday, October 15, from 9 PM till 1 AM. Please arrive punctually for mandatory briefing. Tardiness is treason. Treason is punishable by summary execution. Thank you for your cooperation, citizen, and have a wonderful Succot!"

Having no particular pressing worries about its balance sheet in these prosperous times, the British government is spending 12.4 billion pounds (US$20 billion) on an awe-inspiring "Interception Modernisation Programme," a central database of every single phone call, e-mail, and web session in the UK.

Science fiction writer Charles Stross -- who, by the way, got his start writing for AD&D (he created the githyanki in a 1979 White Dwarf "Fiend Factory" column) -- tracks the many proliferating UK surveillance initiatives and offers a "big picture of life on Airstrip One in 2013":

When you leave your home you remember to take your mobile phone (which the government is tapping, as they do, and logging the location of to within 50-100 metres at all times) and your ID card (because if you're stopped by a police officer without it you can be fined, heavily). As you walk to your car, you are being recorded by the CCTV network, and ID'd by your gait or facial features. Your emotional state may also be monitored at this time for crude signs of aggression or depression that affect your posture or movement. When you get in your car and drive somewhere, your vehicle is tracked. You arrive at your place of work, where you are under CCTV surveillance by your employers' security staff, and your internet usage is both filtered and monitored by the government. Any email you send is cc'd to the big government database and scanned for suspicious content that may indicate criminal or terrorist (or just plain weird) activity. And when you get home again in the evening and slump in front of your laptop to surf the net, remember that our lords and masters have decided that the 1950s vintage Obscene Publications Act applies to fanfic, the definition of illegal 'extreme' pornography is so vague that you can be jailed for looking at images of sex acts that are legal, and you can be banged up for years if you accidentally stumble across a web site containing network monitoring tools or information useful to terrorists (a term with no set boundary, as Gerry Adams and Nelson Mandela can attest).

Stross adds, "And don't look to me for help; I'm either in prison or I fled the country some time ago."

On Paranoia-Live.net, loyal citizen Aratos has kindly posted even-loyal-er citizen Greymist's extensive .RAR archive collection of PARANOIA magazine articles from eons past. Take a trip through history (and sometimes unhistory) with Dragon, Challenge, and especially White Dwarf -- the classic general-interest White Dwarf of long ago, children, not today's miniatures-catalog incarnation.

Most of these articles tend heavily toward the slapstick Zap play style. But after all those years you spent listening to old-timers reminisce with quavering voices about Ken Rolston's WD crossover between PARANOIA and Warhammer 40,000, now you can, at long last, read for yourself the hallowed "Vulture Warriors from Dimension X Meet Plenty of Cheerful Orks with Plasma Cannons."

Labels: challenge, dragon, whitedwarf