THE MONTH IN BRIEF
The test team continued to test the manufacturers code, and we suddenly saw the first shareholder revolts:
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The Spynet Review - Being an account of births, deaths, promotions and other interesting happenings during the current session.
Bread & Roses has suffered from a shareholders' rebellion
Diamond Wine has suffered from a shareholders' rebellion
Merrie Maids has suffered from a shareholders' rebellion
Then we got some real player manufacturers, with Catspaws, Darkangel, Desertwolf, Dunavant, Fancy, Ferreri, Fessonia, Fester, Filbert, Fraghappy, Gandolf, Garrick, Harley, Jazir, Jolia, Killer, Logical, Lorzec, Nomad, Pesoge, Pugwash, Stirling and Wally all being promoted on the same day.
The Galactic Administration decided to reduce the number of factories a company could own to ten, so they confiscated all factories which were numbered 11, 12, 13 or 14. Whoops! This took no account of CEOs who had sold lower-numbered factories leaving gaps in the run of numbers... some fast compensation had to be paid out by the bungling bureaucrats who made this mistake.
A change to the way the 'BLOCK' and 'UNBLOCK' commands work meant that those being ignored (or un-ignored) were not told about it - it just happened silently.
The Magellan space station took up orbit around Earth, and the Magellan Society Treasure Hunt was launched. Victor (another talking mobile) was given the job of handing out clues to puzzlers, and soon got himself into a real mess, much to the disgruntlement of the security forces.
The 'CLEAR MOOD' command was added so you can get rid of a mood without having to wait for it to be wiped at reset.
Bella went away for a conference for a week, and while she was out of touch, the game suffered a series of crashes, and our email developed problems. What excellent timing! She fixed everything on her return. Personally, I think the game was sulking about her absence.
FEDTERM'S F1 KEY
A few weeks ago, I was approached by a concerned Fedder who wanted to report a bug to me. "Hazed," he said, a worried look on his face. "I have found a bug in FedTerm: the commands on my F1 key are being sent to the game whenever I log on."
I had to explain that this wasn't a bug - it was supposed to happen. F1 is the start-up key, and whatever commands you put on it are carried out after you log on. So you can put on it all the things you usually do at logon, such as reading the noticeboard, turning on SpyNet Notices, sending a greeting to the comms, tuning to your favorite channel, performing a special act to anyone who is in the room when you log on, and so on.
Most important of all, you can set your mood. Moods are something that are not used nearly as much in Fed II as they were in classic Fed, and the main reason is that they don't get saved over sessions but have to be reset every day. That's a shame, because the mood is a great way to express yourself. But now, with the F1 start-up key in FedTerm, there's no excuse not to have a mood. Just include the command on the F1 key and your mood will be set automatically every day.
FINDING A SPECIFIC LOCATION ON FEDTERM'S MAPS
So you've diligently wandered the Solar System, watching FedTerm fill in the blank spaces on the maps of the planets, until you end up with a pretty comprehensive set. Then you need to find a specific place on one of the planets, so you turn to the maps... only to find you can't remember where, exactly, on the map the place you want to go is.
Unless you've gone to the trouble to print out your maps and annotate them. But not everyone has the time or the inclination to do that.
However, all is not lost, because there is one feature of FedTerm that people seem to have overlooked. Grab your mouse and move your cursor over the map - either the mini-map on the main screen or the full-sized map on the map page - and look at the bottom of the screen. As the cursor moves onto a location, the name of the location shows up in the status bar. So if you've actually visited the location you need to find, but you can't remember exactly where it is, this is how you find it!
THE MISSING PLANETS
Did you know that there are three missing planets in the Solar System? No, I'm not talking about the outer planets of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto - those planets were demolished centuries ago, their raw materials used in the construction of the Interstellar Link. I am talking about the three planets that you can get information on, but that you can't actually visit.
Those planets are called Snark, Hilbert and Horsell. Those who used to play classic Fed may recognize those names. Snark was the pirate asteroid that had to be explored and then destroyed as part of the GM puzzle. It was a dangerous place, with many opportunities to die. Hilbert space was the very strange area of space in which Snark could be found. The space was warped into an odd configuration, making navigation extremely tricky. And Horsell was the area to which those doing the Duke puzzle time-travelled, to defeat the Martians in one of their periodic attempts to invade the Earth.
Although centuries have passed since it was last necessary to visit any of these areas of Fed DataSpace, they are still there, and you can use the 'DI PLANET planetname' command to confirm this for yourself. It's just that there is no way to access them right now. The cataclysmic constant shift which stopped the Interstellar Link from working also prevented time travel, so there's no way to visit Horsell at the moment; it exists in its own little bubble of time, so close and yet so far away. And the access to Hilbert Space through the space mirror, and to the Snark asteroid through the portal in the Martian ruins, are no longer available either, although archeologists working in the ruins would love to get the power system working again.
So these three areas can be counted as missing, or inaccessible, at least for now.
REAL LIFE NEWS: THE MYSTERY INGREDIENT IN DUST CLOUDS
There are billions of tiny particles wafting around the globe, forming a vast cloud thick enough to block out sunlight. It affects the climate and reduces the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth. Scientists have known about the cloud for some time, and they have calculated that around 60% of this cloud was made up of soot, pollution, ash, dust and sand. But the remaining ingredients remained a mystery. What was the other 40% made of?
Now we have the answer. It's dandruff.
When you brush dandruff off your shoulders, the particles float up into the atmosphere and mingle with everyone else's dandruff. When you brush your hair or take off your clothes, you release a cloud of biological dust. Dr Uprecht Jaenicke of Mainz University has taken air samples from across the planet and discovered that about half the dust is organic debris - particles of dandruff, dead skin, animal hair, and decaying leaves.
If this disturbing news isn't an incentive to reach for the Head and Shoulders, I don't know what is!
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