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[firecat]

Tonight's writing was hard going, I wasn't inspired, but I did it anyway.

However, several of my characters are currently called name1, name2, name3, and name4 because coming up with good names for them did seem entirely beyond me in this state.

Comments

[firecat]

Tell me more?

[kshandra]

Straight from the penguin's mouth:

A few years back, James Lindsay and I wrote At Close Quarters, a variant (vastly improved) combat system for Marc Miller's Traveller (aka T4.) James loves somewhere in Canada. I was living in San Francisco. We sent sections back and forth over the net. I write in an express train style.. if I try to stop, things derail. I was writing the thrown weapons rules, and was stuck for a third example.. so I used penguins. James came back with rules for balanced and unbalanced weapons, with a comment about penguins resisting being thrown so being counted as unbalanced despite their aerodynamic bodies. We were off and running from there. The insanity spread to the TML.

Since then, the penguin has been the sort of totem or mascot of the list. And people keep sending me the bloody things. I have three dozen plush penguins, 10 of them various versions of Tux the Linux penguins. I have Scandinavian tissues, Australian breath mints.. all with penguins on them. The bloody things have taken over my life.

Why did I write penguins into ACQ? Because I like them. Wrote a report on them in 8th grade and have been fascinated by them ever since.

What's really funny is that after Ground Forces came out, i received several emails asking where the penguin reference was.. they were convinced I couldn't go 150-odd pages without mentioning a penguin at least once.. they were wrong.