On 12 February 2018 at 06:38, Caleuche <xxxxxx@sudnadja.com> wrote:

I wanted to get caught up on "The Traveller Adventure" that Timothy has been posting but the TML archive index is kind of clunky, and I couldn't tell where the whole thing started (I couldn't find The Traveller Adventure part I).

Delighted you're interested, thank you for that.

I should point out first off that the numbers refer to the *sessions* not to the posts, so don't bank on being able to find every number .... see below.

So, I grabbed all of the post data from TML and took a look, then got distracted thinking about human behavior a little.

Anyway, searching for "The Traveller Adventure" didn't seem to come up with the starting thread:

https://i.imgur.com/61Q80Nc.png

The first thread in the series seems to be TTA: VIII. So, as a request to Timothy, do you happen to have the prior episodes?

Hah! That's a good question!

OK, here's how it was/is. Given we started 18 months back it's getting hard to recall already.

If you missed an earlier discussion, we play every other month. On the 'inbetween' month we have a Library book group. My TTA group is made up of three ladies from book group and one guy from book group (he joined two sessions back), plus one other member of Library staff, plus one computing lecturer plus one non-University member of staff - a TravCon regular and the only one who'd ever role played before. One of the ladies had to drop out due to a shift change and next session (March) we hope to have another computing lecturer join us.

As the first session or two were *so* tentative and testing the waters of both Traveller and role playing I was very uncertain that we'd do more than the first session (in fact, pretty much every time I'm surprised that they want to meet again). So my initial thought to do write ups for Freelance Traveller rather got shelved for fear of starting something that would just fizzle out. Without an immediate goal/audience and assuming that I would just "remember" (fatal error) I didn't make good notes of the first couple of sessions. Then I started pre-posting queries/pleas for help from TML and feeling I had to report afterwards. Then I got myself in a pickle trying to do a write up for players *and* a write up (with more metacommentary and background commentary for TML. In short, believe it or not, my record keeping wasn't great. :-) So I'm not even certain I have everything. Then factor in that a bit before Christmas I toyed with the idea of novelizing the whole thing - but managed 15,000 words (in two weeks) before needing to take a break and having only covered the first couple of sessions. I'd be back on that except for stress about getting the bibliography done before Christmas and some other similar bits after Christmas. (The novelization isn't quite a game report as I get to fill in blanks I didn't remember to do, improve bits I thought were poor, or write bits that need more explanation or characterisation.) (He says, making it sound like it's any good which it isn't. Yet.) Now TravCon is beginning to keep me awake at nights as although I've said I probably won't run an adventure, I have offered to run a quiz which will actually probably be more work. <sigh>

So, give me a moment or three and I'll look through my files and see what I've got - but probably not tonight.

Is everyone happy for me to (re)post what I have here, or would you rather I do it off list?

I started to notice a regular pattern in some of the posting dates though and that got me wondering if there was any evidence of interest in Traveller dropping off as the years progressed:

https://i.imgur.com/ZnDGgmv.png

Fascinating (and the rest of your post) as a certain alien might say.

I won't post other people (though obviously the data is public), but looking at them it usually is very easy to determine someone's sleep/wake cycle and if I can infer their geographic location, if they're day people or night people. Also, several have no discernable sleep/wake pattern at all, which is interesting.

If you wish, you have my permission to post here on TML my cycle. Given my Chronic Fatigue and reasonably regular 'can't sleep for the pain/tiredness' nights when I might answer TML posts, I'd be quite interested to see my pattern.

Where this is going is that it was remarkably easy to pull that data and put together a simple analysis - not only are computers much more powerful than they were but programming languages are much easier to deal with. I do sometimes have perhaps unkind thoughts as to the lack of solid astronomy in the Traveller and the world that grew up around it, but I'm starting to think that even simple catalogue searches and sorting of stars in the timeframe of the original traveler universe's creation was probably quite difficult.

Not quite stellar data, but if helps as a reference point... when I did my library degree in 1986/7, I had to do a bibliometric study. I chose black hole literature for whatever reason. I spent the best part of a summer going through printed abstracts and the like counting papers and references and citations across time. I could replicate that work now in *minutes* not a month or two given the right database.

(Oh, and curiously, I found a 'black hole' in the literature when there was a significant dip in the number of articles published. Neither my lecturers or the astronomers I went to see with my findings could explain it, so it remained an unsolved mystery. I wonder if the research is still in my attic...)