asgaard

TF2 Halloween 2012/How to kill Merasmus

Sat, 27 Oct 12 22:29:42 +0000

The 2012 TF2 halloween event is here and it's better than last year! The map, Ghost Fort, is a converted version of koth_lakeside and the boss is Merasmus whom you might know from the lore. He's the wizard responsible for the demoman's missing eye and he's also the soldier's roommate. He spawns and runs around killing everyone (like the Horseless Headless Horsemann of 2010).

After killing him, a portal opens to Skull Island and if you make it out of there, you get a hat. Huzzah.

So he's kind of a mix of the Horseless Headless Horseman and Monoculous.

There are also a few other nice additions like the random mutator that gets applied when the control point gets switched. Big heads, small heads, low gravity, super jump, etc. It's very Unreal Tournament, but seeing everyone running around with humongous heads is hilarious.

Gifts return too. The gift mechanics have been reworked - a gift will now spawn for a single random player. Nobody else will be able to see or pick it up. This is a huge improvement over previous years, where people would camp/farm them and sell them. The gifts are various items that can be crafted together to make zombie suits, or spells that apply effects to weapons or equipment. For example the exorcist effect makes little ghosts appear when you kill someone.

Merasmus

As for Merasmus, he's a lot tougher than either the Headless Horsemann or Monoculous and against a disorganised server, he'll win 9 times out of, well, 9. He's only around for 1 minute 30 seconds at a time, and he hides for some of that.

To kill him you'll need two things:

The enemy team to stop shooting you. This can be hard, but some servers will co-operate. There's nothing more beautiful than seeing RED and BLU put their differences aside and focus on a common goal. Unfortunately there are frequently trolls around, but do your best. If you're going to use sentries against him, make sure they're wrangled. Servers tend to organise themselves a bit. If you're in Europe, I can recommend GrimGG's servers, there's currently a dedicated Ghost Fort server (and it has vote-kick enabled!).
Huntsman snipers.

The latter is not negotiable. Merasmus has two states: shielded and unshielded. When he's shielded, your huntsman does about 300 damage against him. When unshielded, you can headshot him for 1080. The brass beast by comparison does about 2 damage per hit when shielded. You don't need a server full of huntsmen, but on a 24 player server, you'll want about 5-6. We had a demoman on our team who claimed he could do a good 10k damage with sticky traps, but I haven't tested that (but I can tell you that my loch and load does a paltry amount of damage). Valve seems to have designed it so that the huntsman is the only weapon (or at least, one of a small subset) that does enough damage to reliably hurt him.

During Merasmus's visit, every once in a while, the bombinomicon will replace your head with a bomb. When this happens, run towards Merasmus. When you get to him, the bomb explodes, you gain an ubercharge, and Merasmus is stunned (and unshielded) for a few seconds.

When you get him down to 50% hit points, he'll hide. Being a magician, that means he turns into an inanimate object. Like a chair or a piano. Or a rock. These spawn across the map. Hit them a few times. When you find the one he's disguised as, he'll spawn back as himself and you can continue.

Merasmus will fight back by hitting you with his staff or throwing bombs at you. Both of these are bad news. He's not quite as terrifying as the Horseless Headless Horsemann because he doesn't seem to move as quickly or roam so unpredictably, but if you get close he will kill you very quickly.

Obviously, as the hat reward is only given if you get to Skull Island, make sure you're going to be alive to get through the portal. The portal opens wherever Merasmus is when he dies, and it only lasts for a few seconds.

Update!

Valve apparently yielded to pressure and re-worked a few things. To try to encourage people to actually kill Merasmus, they made the hat (Skull Island Topper) 'level up' when you defeat Merasmus at a certain level. Merasmus spawns at level 1 and every time he is killed, gains a level. Unfortunately, he goes back to level 1 when he escapes, so levelling your hat past level 2 appears to be pretty much impossible. Killing Merasmus is rare enough, killing him twice in a row? Good luck with that.

If you want to try your luck while the event lasts, Wireplay has a Ghost Fort server which disables player damage while Merasmus is in the game. IP: 94.136.46.57:27025.

Why I love... Death - The Sound Of Perseverance

Sun, 21 Oct 12 16:04:30 +0000

Over the course of their career, Death went from being a good but fairly ordinary death-metal band to being a technical thrashy-death band. Okay, so maybe not a huge change on paper, but they are one of the few bands who underwent an evolution and whose later albums far surpassed their earlier output. Partly this might be because the only stable member, Chuck Schuldiner, seemed to get a bit fed up of death metal and had other aspirations, and partly it might be because he kept altering the line-up to include fresh talent with new perspectives. People who are now well established metal players like Gene Hoglan (Strapping Young Lad), Steve DiGiorgio (Vintersorg, Quo Vadis, others), along with a vast array of lesser known musicians have played in Death at some point.

The Sound Of Perseverance was the final Death album and easily the most technical. It was an obvious progression from the previous Symbolic, which significantly moved Death away from straight-out death and into a slightly more progressive and technical area, while not falling into the trap of being overly self indulgent with it. It was generally slower and more thoughtfully arranged than previous excursions. TSOP retains that careful arrangement, but ramps up the tempo and the attack.

The production is crystal clear and unusually for death metal, the instruments quite sparse. The bass is clearly audible under the guitars. The vocals move away from standard death metal grunts into a sort of compromise towards the more melodic sort of singing that Chuck evidently preferred. It's a bit strange, but you get used to it. The guitars are heavily distorted but the tone is tight and cold (solid state amp). The guitars are also melodic, and they often stay above the standard death metal low-e string register.

TSOP opens with Scavenger of Human Sorrow, which kind of sets the stage for the rest of the album. It's fast, the intro isn't going to be constrained by details such as time signatures, and it has time changes almost every few seconds. It's kind of like going through a washing machine, but on the other hand, there's a sort of formulaic structure to the songs, spread out across some frighteningly good riffs and vaguely neoclassical leads. Everything's a very stop-start affair, but that's not a bad thing.

It's hard write about TSOP and not draw particular attention to Voice Of The Soul, an acoustic chord (and later arpeggio) pattern rounded off with Pantera style squealing solos over the top; it's a strangely introspective experience, especially in the middle of 7 incredibly aggressive tracks.

The album reaches a sort of climax with the straightforward thrashy aggression of a cover of Judas Priest's Painkiller. Painkiller is an awesome song in any conditions, but TSOP's version makes it sound like it's on steroids.

Tribes Ascend Brute Strategy/Purpose - HoF

Sun, 14 Oct 12 16:58:57 +0000

It's the eternal conundrum. Juggernauts blow things up, Doombringers stand on flags, but what on earth are Brutes meant to do? Fractal dispenser, obviously. But nobody gets caught in fractal fields any more and now people have cottoned on to the fact that indoor play isn't very important, they're even less effective.

Well, it turns out you can make Brute a pretty effective flag-defence/HoF class. Is it as effective as DMB? I'm not sure; it's more of a high-risk high-reward thing, but it's far more fun.

Loadout

Primary: Devastator Spinfusor
Secondary: Nova Colt
Grenades: Sticky grenades (yes, really)
Pack: Survival pack
Perk 1: Up to you. I use Safety Third, but none seems very relevant. Rage might be better.
Perk 2: Super Heavy (but you might prefer Survivalist)

Let's quickly summarise the reasons for the choices above. The devastator spinfusor does a huge amount of damage on direct hits and is good for one-shotting incoming lights or quickly finishing anyone trying to duel you. The Colt is accurate and effective at picking off (or at least damaging) flag cappers who get through.

Stickies are just fun. You could use fractals if you want, but they seem to be most effective at denying you access to your own flagstand, which is the opposite of what we're trying to achieve here. And getting a sticky on a capper as he shoots past with your flag is hilarious.

The survival pack makes you walk a bit faster, and gives you a bit more health and faster regen to make you a bit more survivable.

Super heavy is for squashing cappers as they fly into you (obviously), but you could argue that a capper with a brute in his way is not a capper likely to do anything useful anyway (in the chaos of pubs though, this doesn't really hold true), so you could swap this out for survivalist.

Tactics

Your basic tactic is this:

Stand on the flag.
Watch all around for incoming cappers
???
PROFIT!!!

Because of the nature of capping, if a capper wants to come in fast, they have to head in a roughly straight line in the half-second before they grab. If you're on the flag, you have the absolute perfect opportunity to put a disc in their face. Struggling with blue plate specials? Here's a great time to practise. And because your spinfusor does a ridiculous amout of damage, you'll probably kill them in one shot.

Some cappers can swerve quite effectively, but ultimately they still have to go through the flag (or close to it) and you've still got a chance of body-blocking them if you miss. And don't forget you can move. Jetting at this point sacrifices a lot of control (but can make lining up a BPS easier), so generally you should stick to strafing.

But he's getting away!

You're not going to stop all cappers. When one gets through, whip out your Nova Colt and unload it in his direction. You're not a chasing class, so don't think about following him. Many games are lost because a flag is returned when the defence isn't at home, leaving the stand open for a few seconds. As a HoF you should always be in defensible range of the stand (except when you're dead. Try not to be dead very often).

But I'm getting blown up all the time...

HoFs attract spam. Which is why in many games, you simply won't be able to just casually reside on the flag. But you shouldn't leave the stand unless it's absolutely necessary (for example to avoid a wide-spread MIRV, or to resupply). You only need to be on the flag right as a capper is coming through.

As well as spam, you'll start attracting INFs, and even worse, they might work in tandem with cappers! Sandrakers can be smart like that. The good news is that if they do start operating like this, you've got a nice early-warning system on incoming cappers. The key is to stay alive and alert long enough to stop the capper without letting the INF distract you too much.

The hardest part is observation: cappers can sometimes come out of nowhere, and a capper with Reach doesn't have to go through you. Counter intuitively, these kinds of cappers are best countered by not being *on* the flag all the time. For example, Katabatic has a few back-to-front routes that are almost invisible to a HoF, and the visibility on Arx is clearly low if you don't move from the flag. On Kata, it makes more sense to wander around the stand from corner to corner. On Arx, it can help to get on top of a roof to look out for cappers then drop down when one approaches.

It's easy to get distracted by people trying to duel you or mortar spam or infiltrators. It's fine to engage in duels and general defence, but don't move far away from the flag. Definitely don't go after people heading into your base; it's not your problem. The beauty of a Brute HoF is that you're equally effective with or without the generator.

If you do get sucked into duels, make sure that between each spinfusor reload, you're looking around for potential incoming cappers. You'll still get caught out, but conversely, you're no use dead, which is how you'll end up if you don't defend yourself.

The Current Nightwish Singer Fiasco

Sun, 14 Oct 12 12:29:42 +0000

It's sad to see Anette Olzon leave Nightwish. I say this as someone who thinks Nightwish peaked at Oceanborn, wobbled at Once then floundered from there onwards. Although this coincides with Tarja's departure and Anette's arrival, I don't think Nightwish's problem is their singer, and a lot of unfair criticism has been levelled at Anette for no better reason than she's not Tarja. The real problem is the Jack Sparrow lookalike on the keyboards.

It's Tuomas's band and he can do what he wants. Fair enough. But as his composition and musical awareness soars, the quality musical output of the band plummets. He's fallen into the standard trap of not realising that making music more ambitious in terms of the number of instruments in the composition doesn't make it better, and his apparent obsession with film scores makes this worse. Film scores fulfil a very different role than standalone music, and even so, overblown composition is a modern trend in film scores; Ennio Morricone's "Fistful of dollars" is basically a guy whistling. Film scores are usually big, epic and colourful. But they must also be safe, cautious and conservatively inoffensive, and it is harder to create good art within those constraints. The constraints of commercialisation.

Besides, early Nightwish albums were ambitious, they created rich soundscapes with few instruments and a tasteful sparsity across the frequency range. Newer Nightwish albums are heavily orchestral and hit you over the head with vast arrays of sonic frequencies at every possible opportunity. There is no 'tasteful' here. And as a result, nothing really stands out any more. Bizarrely, although the music's trying to head in the opposite direction, some of the lyrics are regressing into teenage angst. "Bye bye beautiful", "I want my tears back", "For the heart I once had", what is this, post-emo? It's getting embarrassing.

In previous albums the main focus was usually Tarja's soprano voice. For those of you who argue that Nightwish's quality dip is due to Tarja's departure and their failure to replace her with another soprano, I contend that you should listen to Ghost Love Score from Once, which is one of the few tracks from that album where she actually showcases her vocal range, where she's clearly struggling to stay relevant against an increasingly overblown backdrop. Tuomas had already evolved the band away from the operatic style before Tarja left.

I don't think it matters who Nightwish's new singer turns out to be, as it doesn't seem like the singer is an important part of the band any more. Same for any other individual member, save for Tuomas. Floor Jansen is currently filling in for them; it would be a shame if this turns out to be a permanent arrangement as Floor is very talented and doesn't deserve to have her voice assimilated.

Why I love... Devin Townsend - Ocean Machine: Biomech

Sat, 13 Oct 12 18:20:48 +0000

Ocean Machine: Biomech, by Devin Townsend. A review, of sorts, of one of my absolute favourite albums. Released in 1997, it was the first proper solo album Devin created (ignoring Punky Bruster, which sort of doesn't count), and came after he with Strapping Young Lad released the insanely heavy City album. City is angry, it's heavy, but like most extreme metal, it's very composed. Ocean Machine is a complete departure from that style, and as great as City is, Ocean Machine offers something far more interesting. I'm not going to say that OM:B is the best Devin Townsend album, because that's subjective and I'm not sure I even agree. But I will argue that it's the most open, expressive, and therefore remarkable.

There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form, and nothing stands;
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.' alt='O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form, and nothing stands;
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.'/>

Ocean Machine isn't just an album, it's a journey. If you listen to it as individual tracks, you're missing out on its brilliance, you're missing out on its expressiveness. That's really the key focus here, the album is expressive and stunningly emotionally open and honest in ways you very rarely hear in rock or metal.

Dev loves to put out long albums and this one flows particularly brilliantly. And as such, I'm going to explore it in order. It's very proggy, but it never goes into long-winded instrumental sections. It's progressive in the sense it moves.

Seventh Wave opens and sets the tone with a hard-rock style driving riff. It's going somewhere, it's relentless, but it's not overly heavy. We move through a number of similarly sounding songs until we get to Sister, where everything slows down into purely the echoes and ambience Dev's famous for.

And that marks the end of the straight-up hard rock section of the album. The next track is softly ambient and echoey, but leads perfectly into the next section.

This is where things get a bit weird. Up until now, we've heard mostly hard-rock (not even metal) songs with what we can now recognise as the trademark Devvy slant, and if the album continued like this, it would be solid but unremarkable. We're seven songs, or 25 minutes, into the album and we hit a very noticeable mood change. Things go strange. And coincidentally, or perhaps by design, this change fits well with your attention span.

Voices In The Fan is still rock, but it's much slower and much more pounding, despite the fact the vocals get softer and more distant; perhaps more unsure. There's a certain amount of incongruence as the album appears to lose its way and just tries to push forward in many directions at once. The music starts to feel much less stable, much less organised, much less focussed. It starts to feel unsettling, it hints at a haunting sense of desperation and hopelessness, while trying to hold it all together. It's rare you hear music that can convey emotion like this.

This continues throughout the rest of the album. As we're reaching the final run, 38 minutes in, we hit an 8 minute track then two 10+ minute tracks. These are long tracks, and their lengths provide a certain amount of stability. At this point it seems like the music has reconciled itself into a more united force, but it's dropped the uplifting, positive sounds from the start of the album. It's more content, it's more calm, it's also more determined and more unified, but it's definitely not happy. It's slow, it's relentless, it's crushing, but it's also soft enough to be relaxing and even slightly reassuring in places. The Death Of Music climaxes these three tracks with a huge, wailing vocal wall and fades out into the final track.

Things Beyond Things is a change of style which gradually and gently concludes the album on a soft and calm vibe, a satisfying, but not uplifting, way to dispel the emotional turbulance of the previous 83 minutes and 53 seconds of emotionally expressive musical brilliance. Or at least, you thought that, until the very final seconds when Dev lets out a massive, distorted, frustrated scream.

Overall, it's an epic. It's not a happy album, it's not an uplifting album. It's a satisfying album that takes you through a huge range of emotions, good and bad. Mostly bad. But in between the futility, the depression, and the hopelessness, it's sprinkled with hope and relief, and that, whether it is purely a musical technique or whether it's a consequence of Devin's manic depression, provides a powerful ongoing tension/release exchange throughout the second half of the album.

TurnitinBot and Why You Should Block It

Sat, 13 Oct 12 15:36:09 +0000

If you've been to university recently you'll be familiar with Turnitin. It's a service that supposedly detects plagiarism in students' submissions. Students submit their paper to Turnitin, and Turnitin generates a report telling you it's x% plagiarised and contains sentences, paragraphs, or even chapters that look suspiciously similar to other papers in its database. It's also woefully stupid; when I did my Master's thesis (on ragdoll physics), Turnitin decided I'd 2% plagiarised from some biochemistry papers, and completely failed to detect any similiarity with other papers on ragdoll physics.

It's now trawling the internet, similarly to Google, to build up its database.

The reason this is bad is as follows:

Turnitin is a for-profit organisation and generates money from indexing your stuff, with no permission given by yourself, and at no possible benefit to yourself. It doesn't reimburse you, it doesn't cite you, it just presents your work as being something it has an inalienable right to use for whatever it wishes. Whilst it is supposedly against plagiarism, it has no qualms violating your intellectual property and then making money off it.

Here's how you can block it:

robots.txt:

User-agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /

.htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} TurnitinBot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Why I love... Railroad Tycoon 3

Sat, 13 Oct 12 10:35:26 +0000

It's a surprising revelation if you ever delve into a certain era of PC Gaming that games back then actually were really complicated, far more so than now. It's striking. One such game is Railroad Tycoon 3. You'd be forgiven for thinking that Railroad Tycoon has all the ingredients of a boring game. Nuh-uh. It's not. It's not a Reverend Lovejoy model railway simulator - RT3 is a strategy/management game with a focus on economy and trade (trains are an incidental detail) and is every bit as engaging as games like Civilization (but with fewer tanks).

RT3 places you as a Railroad owner (Robber Baron) in the 1800s through to the present day and has you build up a railway network from scratch. Different scenarios have different aims, but generally, you're trying to make money, shift a certain amount of cargo or connect several cities together by a certain date. The game is hard; building infrastructure is expensive and if you don't get things right, your bank balance will plummet as your trains eat money for fuel and maintenance, and you've got no resources left to add more profitable train routes or build new track. And then your shareholders will start getting stroppy. Yes, shareholders, really. How can you keep them happy? Increase the dividends? Drive up the share price out of your own pocket? Some old games offer a staggering amount of rule-detail, and this is one of them.

But the real beauty is that the game's approach to letting you build your empire always has you thinking a few years ahead, "when I've got a bit more money I'll connect up that town..." ... "I'll buy another train to run between Town A and Town B soon...". Grizzled strategy gamers will instantly recognise this as "just one more turn" syndrome.

And I couldn't write about RT3 without mentioning the music; perfectly fitting country and bluesy guitars and harmonicas. It's completely engrossing as you connect up 1800s California to Arizona. Not that the game is limited to America, it also covers the UK and Germany/Prussia nicely.

Note for Steam users on Windows 7: the Steam version is kind of buggy. You'll get a lot of "Failed to find Steam" (restart Steam and try again), and it will often crash at the loading screen with "Railroad Tycoon 3 has stopped working".

You can workaround all of this by going into your Steam/RT3 directory and running "gcwRT3.exe", which seems a lot more stable. It's under C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Railroad Tycoon 3\. I think it bypasses Steam entirely.

Review: Devin Townsend - Epicloud

Fri, 12 Oct 12 20:52:37 +0000

The first thing to say about Epicloud is that according to a sticker on the case, it's pronounced epic-loud, not epi-cloud.

The second thing to say about Epicloud is that it won't change your opinion of Devin Townsend. The Dev is probably one of the most unique and prolific metal artists around at the moment (or ever), and it's a shame he's virtually unknown outside of metal, because most of his stuff overlaps with metal rather than sitting within in. The man's a genre unto himself.

Epicloud is the 5th album Dev's released under The Devin Townsend Project, but while the previous four were distinct enough to justify the new moniker, Epicloud's not a huge distance from some of his older stuff. In particular it reminds me a lot of Accelerated Evolution. It's hard to pin down exactly why, but possibly because it's fairly commercial and despite being hard hitting high tempo rock, it's pretty well cushioned.

Personally for me, The Dev occupies a disproportionate amount of my favourite music. Infinity, Ocean Machine, Terria, Synchestra, Addicted, Ghost, Deconstruction, City, Alien, and let's not forget Vai's Sex and Religion are all albums I rank up there as being some of the best music ever created. But for me, Epicloud doesn't quite hit the same spots. That's not to say it's not enjoyable, it is. It's just different and focusses on different things. It's a lot more uplifting, a lot more positive. And it's a lot bigger. Dev's always been about the echos and the ambience, but Epicloud takes it to a new level. And that's possibly a downside: when so many things are layered up, there's a risk of losing personality; there's a risk of blunting the attack. And that happens to a certain extent here.

On the flipside, it's not all blunted and the production is crystal clear. And for example, the re-recording of Kingdom is absolutely incredible. Dev's vocal technique is incredible. That vibrato! And Anneke filling up the sound is great too. It's well known that Dev didn't like the production on Physicist, and (personally I didn't think Physicist was bad, but) hearing his reimagining of Kingdom explains that perfectly!

In summary: if you didn't get Dev before, you still won't get him now. If you did, you still will.

Rating: 4.5/5

If you do get it, it's worth spending a bit more for the version that comes with the bonus CD. Although the songs on there are supposedly demos, they're no less enjoyable than the main CD.

Review: Ensiferum - Unsung Heroes

Fri, 12 Oct 12 18:49:18 +0000

Ensiferum's original vocalist/guitarist, Jari Mäenpää, is an absolute beast. His guitar chops are close to virtuoso and both his growls and clean vocals were unique and fitting to the music. Tracks like Token of Time and Windrider set the bar for folk metal.

After Jari left to work on Wintersun's album¹ Ensiferum wobbled a bit. They nabbed Petri Lindroos from fellow Finnish metal band Norther to replace Jari. Petri is good, but Norther were always hit and miss, and they were never exceptional when they hit. Ensiferum then released Dragonheads (not a full length album, more a "look we're still here"), which was alright but the stand-out tracks were Into Hiding (an Amorphis cover) and Finnish Medley, which featured a female singer. They were still there, but they weren't hitting with the same force in the same areas. This continued throughout their next release, Victory Songs, which again was reasonably good, but never exceptional.

At this point, you'd be forgiven for thinking they'd lost it. But you'd also be wrong. They hit back with From Afar, which was blisteringly good. Everything clicked perfectly. They weren't writing songs for Jari any more, they'd figured out how to get the best out of Petri.

So, high hopes for Unsung Heroes, then.

Unsung Heroes opens with a symphonic (rather than folk) instrumental, a bit different, but so far so good. Then we move into standard Ensiferum territory, but it never quite lifts off. There are a few surprises later on, the album is a lot more diverse than previous offerings, but overall there's little that stands out. As seems to be tradition amongst some metal bands, the final song is 17 minutes long, but it's meandering and unfocussed; it moves from hints of the spaghetti west through to operatic soprano passages (Finnish metal band identity crisis?) and then onto traditional folk via a few neoclassical licks and a spacey-synthesiser that wouldn't sound out of place in something by Jean Michel Jarre, and, while there are good bits in there, it just doesn't seem to unify itself. Like the rest of the album, really.

The production's mostly good but the vocals seem to have been intentionally dropped down the mix, probably to make them sound a bit darker, but in reality it makes them sound weaker.

Overall, it's not the logical progression from From Afar. It's more like back to the Dragonheads/Victory songs era.

Rating: 3/5

¹. Their yet-to-be-released second album, we all await eagerly and have done so since about 2006. It is aptly called Time, although supposedly it will be released later this month. I'll believe that when I see it.

What is Indy Library?

Fri, 12 Oct 12 16:43:21 +0000

Browsing my logs, I see a bot with the user agent "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; Indy Library)" doing some pretty interesting things.

It appears to be a distributed bot which dictionary attacks login forms. That is to say, it attempts to hack your site. It's (incorrectly) identified mine as Wordpress, but maybe it attacks other CMSs too.

I have a honeypot set up to make this site look like Wordpress which logs login attempts. You can see the results of this here, the Indy Library bot is the first to take the bait and is currently filling up the data quite quickly (although not excessively).

It's using a whole bunch of different IPs:

217.128.175.91
80.35.16.63
188.13.39.226
64.61.155.42
90.182.73.81
71.224.57.62
212.183.165.15
80.59.98.59
2.112.195.83

But instead of using the IPs, as it identifies itself via user agent, you can block it easily with an .htaccess rule

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Indy\ Library [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

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