Welcome to Oograh Boike's unofficial Thud!®-page.

Toms (DerToMs) profile

About Myself

I don't want to bore anyone with endless storys about my life my hobbys or other stuff. So I'll keep it short, stick to the theme of this site and maybe ad a thing or two ;-) .

So I'm a German, I live in Dresden and I'm an engineer in Mechatronics. (quite short eh ? :-) )

Aside from Discworld and Thud-stuff I'd say I'm interested in nearly everything (I mean that). I'll say something about a few things later where I put a bit more time in. But first...

My avatar:

This is my owl. I've bought it during a Holiday in Greece and since then it got some company by other owls. It's some kind of lucky charm to me so I use it often as backgroundpicture or, like here, as avatar.

My Nickname:

DerTom, to the ones of you who are able to speak German this may sound a bit awkward. To the ones who don't, You could say DerTom is similar to TheTom (not exact but close enough). It's a short form of Thomas (my name). And as it goes, I picked it up from friends who where speaking about me like „Der Tom did this, Der Tom said that.. „ and so on (very roughly translated ;-) ). And after all it's a lot better than Tom154 (or pick any number you like). 'coz as it seems even in the internet Thomas (and its short forms) is not a rare name. (I compensate that with my surname wich is quite rare in these parts, at least in the way it is written in my case)

Thud / Discworld

Now to Thud.

I started playing sometime during this summer (2006) and so far I like it. To be honest, I first thought this game lacks a bit in complexity due to the point it has only two kinds of figures in it and they do move all alike. But as I had to learn, it might look simple but it isn't.

So far I definitifely like to play the troll side. They might be slower but if you play them right they are far earlier in an attack position than the dwarfs (and can do a whole lot of dammage ;-) ). The dwarfes are an entirely different matter. First of all you have to understand that there's no way of getting all your dwarfs through a game. You will need to sacrifice some of them if you want to win (something I really don't like to do). The second point is you have to play much more calculating, you need to build traps over traps backed up by another trap in oder to catch some trolls.

At least this is my expierience with playing. If you want proof, wether try yourself or just look at the archived games in Oograh Boikes Thud archive. Maybe I'll add some kind of my own Thud archives as soon as I have played (and written down) some Games.

Discworld

So you might ask how did I came to playing Thud? The answer is quite simple: I read the right book. But let me start a bit earlier.

I've bought my first Terry Pratchet Discworld novel some years ago. If I remember right it was the German translation of „Jingo“ (Helle Barden). I liked it and bought some more Discworld books. All as german translation. Last year then I've borrowed some english originals from a colleague and from that point on I was infected. The german translations are just amusing books but they can't reproduce the lot of english wordplays which are a big part of the language quality and the fun in reading. (sorry if I'm unable to find the right words to describe how & what I like about the books) After those borrowed books I only bought the english originals, which can be found round here more often. Among the newly bought books where „Thud“. In this book the game with the same name plays an not too unimportand role. And after reading it I did a little investigation (don't ask me why) and found the game. So here I am.

Added Stuff

As I threatened Above I'll add some thing of my Interest here.

Science Fiction Literature

I do not only like Disword novels and sometimes Fantasy novels (LotR for Example) but also science fiction. So I'd like to give some musthaveread recommendations :

Dune from Frank Herbert – not just the first Volume but all six. The movies are not able to show the complexity and lenght of the story. Mostly there are important points missing.

Isaac Asimov, read anything. You won't be dissapointed.

Stanislav Lem, he has got a totally different aproach to sience fiction (if you want to call it that). Somewhat strange sometimes but not uninterresting.

Astrophysics

As Oograh Boike shows in his profile, he is interested in Astronomy. I am too, but more from the Astrophysics approach.

And for that I have just one point to think about:

I have seen shortly a BBC documentary about a special point in Astrophysics (Dark Matter) and the conclusion was (in short):

The universe consists of :

4% Matter that is know (everything thats built up out of atoms, stars, planets etc. ; I guess neutron stars and black holes count in here)

25 % „Dark Matter“ - where we don't know what and where it is – it's just something that has to be there to have enough gravity

71% „Dark Energy“ - some sort of energy – where we don't know what it is , what it does or where it comes from, it's just something to fill the gap.

So that means to me that the average Atrophysicist can tell me how the universe works as long as he can add a tremendous amount of totally unknown matter/energy to the obviously existing!? A bit strange don't you think? Especially if you look from the other side: guessing this was right what if the 4% of known matter are just some sort of byproduct of the other 96% ? And yes that would include you and me ;-).