Ron's Info-Closet Annex
The online extension of Ron's Info-Closet.
Book links are usually to my Powell's affiliate program; game links are usually to Funagain Games, and benefit the Games to the Rescue Project.
Share and Enjoy!
Ron Hale-Evans
rwhe@ludism.org
Topics:
Archives:
Blogroll:
Iain Cheyne, my URL (Unknown in Real Life) buddy, has a new blog, Inconsequential ruminations. I am sure you will actually be able to find matters of consequence there, particularly on board games. He's using blosxom too -- good idea.
Welcome to the blogosphere, Iain! You're on my blogroll now.
Entered 11:45 [/personal/friendly] permalink
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So, a lot to be pleased as Christmas punch about this week, for obvious reasons.
Happy St. Stephen's Day to all! Careful with that ax, Eugene. |
Entered 12:13 [/personal/friday5] permalink
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Followup to the original piecepack playset story:
Delivery-date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 06:26:57 -0800
Subject: Sakura Piece-Pack Playset
From: Lion Kimbro <lion@speakeasy.org>
Ron: Good news and bad news.
Bad news first: My piecepack set is, well, rendered unplayable.
One tile is now very, very, silver colored.
Another one is makeup-red all over.
Others have various other uniquely identifying patterns of
God-knows-what feminine makeup-like substances on them.
The good news.
Sakura's FAVORITE TOY is now the Piecepack. She plays with
it all the time, and always wants it.
I keep coming to interesting game-like configurations on
the ground, different every time I get home.
Take care,
Lion {:)}=
--
http://speakeasy.org/~lion/ LionKimbro@jabber.org Seattle, WA
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Entered 19:22 [/games/game_systems] permalink
ShorDurPerSav: Paul "Sakar" Roberts
Paul Roberts: not only does he use and promote free software, not only does he use the free software Blosxom for his blog (the same software I do), not only is his blog, Endless Words (formerly Egg Blog) half in Esperanto, but he has written a free plugin for Blosxom that enables use of superscripted Esperanto characters in blog text.
Unto us (well, me) a Short Duration Personal Saviour is born. Thanks for the software, Paul.
Watch for Esperanto entries to appear in the Annex soon.
Entered 02:17 [/personal/shordurpersavs] permalink
Five things that made my week: book, movie, egosurfing, aggregator, socialising.
Book: Everyone In Silico, an sf novel by Jim Munroe that addresses issues raised not only by The Matrix (and let's face it, there weren't too many damn issues raised by that movie), but more importantly by Greg Egan's sf novel Permutation City. Review forthcoming.
Movie: The Return of the King, which was beautiful and made me cry, but also infuriated me in places. The best spots were where they stuck closest to the book, of course. Review forthcoming.
Egosurfing: I decided to Google for "low-tech game systems", the subject of my most recent article for The Games Journal. The search results were gratifying. More later.
Aggregator. In my search for a good RSS aggregator, I have moved from rss2email to Pears, back to rss2email, and most recently to Bloglines. This is a free (as in beer) web-based RSS aggregator service with an excellent user interface. Think of it as Hotmail for your blogs.
Socialising. What a social tornado the end/beginning of year holiday season is. This week I saw not only most of the Seattle Cosmic Game Night regulars, but also participated in an office party, hung out all day with one of my best friends, Karl Erickson, and saw my cousin Nancy Olson for the first time in years, meeting her SO Jeffrey Snider as well. I missed my cousin, and what a great guy she has added to the set of family members I actually like. (Collect 'em, trade 'em!) The gifts have been flying back and forth, in some cases literally, since my immediate family lives in Connecticut.
The solstice is tomorrow, folks; that's how all this nonsense got started, remember? Best word I have heard recently to describe the generic secular winter solstice festival we celebrate in this part of the world: Santanalia.
Ho ho ho! Hrum, hroom.
--StormHair RainbowBeard
(my secret Pagan name, generated programmatically)
Entered 23:16 [/personal/friday5] permalink
New piecepack game: Piecepack Playset
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Rules
I visited my friend Lion Kimbro yesterday and gave him a new Mesomorph piecepack as a holiday present. His 2-3/4-year-old daughter Sakura was present, and since her mother was away, she stuck close to Lion. As soon as Lion opened the piecepack, she dug her hands into the components and strewed them about. She messed around with the components for a while, then built an 8x3 board of tiles. (Are there any piecepack games that use an 8x3 board?) On top of each tile, right in the middle, she placed either a coin or a pawn. (She may have used dice too.) I did not notice any ordering, except that she placed the pawns close together. The result was pretty. Later, she took a coin from each suit and placed it suit-side-up on the corresponding suit icon on top of the piecepack box. (The diagram on the box is roughly the same as the logo shown to the left.) Pretty sharp for someone who's only 2.75! After she took off the coins, I placed a pawn of the appropriate colour on top of one of the box icons. Sakura picked the remaining pawns up and distributed them to the other icons. She didn't match the colours and I couldn't discern any other pattern in the way she placed them, but for all I know, the kid is a piecepack Mozart and invented a new system of colour correspondences. Overall, it was a lot of fun watching Sakura play with the piecepack. She treated them as construction materials, like building blocks, rather than as a game or game system. Lion showed me some varnished wooden building blocks she likes to play with of approximately the same size and colour as the piecepack tiles. He also suggested that "unit blocks" (that is, various blocks made of unit cubes) would make in interesting game system. If you do let a little kid play with your piecepack, watch them to make sure they don't eat the smaller components. This episode of the Piecepack Ethologist has been brought to you by Ron Hale-Evans. |
Entered 23:01 [/games/game_systems] permalink
Would you like Friday 5 with that?
So here's my Friday 5 for 12 December 2003. Yes, this is late (but I got it Friday to the social list where I always post it first). Yes, I missed posting the week before. yes I said yes I will Yes.
Connecting. Marty and I have been especially close the last few days. Marty has been really depressed recently. I encouraged her to write a Friday 5 to cheer herself up, but she said she hasn't had five good things happen to her recently. Poor Marty. I have had periods of black depression myself in the past but am fortunately feeling pretty solid lately, so I was able to be there for her and help her pull out of the depression somewhat. I've also taken up the practice of reading to her again, something we had let drop for a couple of months. Our current book is The Art of Happiness, which is a series of conversations with the Dalai Lama.
Completion. Marty and I finished our solitaire game entry to the latest anonymous piecepack game design competition. I was pleased when Meredith Hale's boyfriend Kisa, who is not only an extremely experienced gamer but has seen so much of gaming that he's more or less sworn it off for a while, wrote me to say, "I watched Meredith playing this last night and I wanted to let you know that while I didn't play myself I thought that [your game] had... great... playability along with having solid mechanics. Way to go!" Thanks, Kisa! Meredith seems to like it a lot too. More than this I cannot say; I may already have said too much.
Book. Devoured and greatly enjoyed Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland, which I read about on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools blog. It turned out Marty already had a copy, so I snapped it up. It imparted some solid artistic advice, gave me reason to feel better about some conflicts I have experienced as a game designer, and also reason to finish writing the "seed pages" for my Glass Bead Game Wiki and throw open the doors.
Moleskine. On the same blog (Kevin Kelly is an ex-editor of the Whole Earth Review, which is why he likes pushing "cool tools" on people; my excuse is forthcoming), I found a description of the Moleskine notebook. Sure, I bought one partly because of the hype (Bruce Chatwin and André Breton used them!), but once bought, this is a tactilely gorgeous and ergonomically superb little "paper PDA". Waterproof oilcloth cover, built-in bookmark, built-in elastic band to hold the book closed, and an accordion pocket in the back. I bought mine with squared paper so it would be easy to play pen and paper games on the go as well as take notes. Powell's carries lots of different Moleskines, by the way.
Pleasants. That's what we call gifts in our family. Remote family members we've shipped pleasants to have started to receive them. We got my father and stepmother a DVD player, the same model we have (Apex AD-1200), which will play DVDs, CDs, VCDs, Kodak Photo CDs, and that Christmas MP3 CD we made him last year that he couldn't figure out. It also has an Easter egg that makes it "region-free", so it will play DVDs from around the world as well as from the US and Canada. Dad had never used a DVD player and is now considering joining Netflix! Also, Friday evening we went to a solstice party thrown by a friend and his wife. Marty and I gave the hosts a subscription to Abstract Games Magazine.
It's fun to estimate just the right gift for a friend. However, I would like to observe the spirit of Buy Nothing Day as well as Christmas, so in future I may be giving more used books and games instead of cranking the consumer machine up another $X00.00. It is rumoured that FLOSS (free/libre/open-source software) and abandonware CDs may be making an appearance this year in the Hale-Evans extended family Christmas as well.
Entered 22:47 [/personal/friday5] permalink
I recently received the following email. (My correspondent's name has been changed to prevent googling by the gift recipient.)
On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 08:45:17PM -0800, Patricia wrote: > Dear Ron, > > I am a mother of a 16 year old who has learned Esperanto, speaks it > well (I guess), and spends quite a bit of time online in Esperanto > chat rooms. In any case, he has asked for books in Esperanto for > Christmas and I am having a heck of a time finding any. Then I > stumbled upon your website which looks quite promising. I see you > use Powell's Books (good for you - a great store) for purchasing but > I still can't seem to find any books in Esperanto. Too much to wade > through and I don't know what I'm looking for. Can you help me? > Offer suggestions? > > I'd sure appreciate it if you had time to suggest a few things.
Here is my response, lightly edited. All the books I mention are good gifts for not only Christmas but also Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Yule, or for birthdays if you're reading this at a different time of year.
Hi, Patricia--
I've got my Christmas MP3 mix playing as I write this. At first I thought that since I didn't know your son, I couldn't recommend any books for him. Then I realised that there are a few books I would recommend for practically any Esperantist, and that I could guess at a few more.
First of all, as much as I love Powell's, forget about them. Powell's has only a small selection of books in Esperanto. The ELNA Libroservo (Esperanto League for North America Book Service) is where you want to go. (ELNA has a broad array of books, but not as broad as that of the UEA (Universala Esperanto-Asocio, the global organisation).) Unfortunately, the UEA is in Rotterdam, therefore unlikely to get books to you by Christmas, but you might consider it if there's a birthday coming up...
To continue, many English-speaking Esperantists can still improve their Esperanto. The best book in English I know of for becoming a better Esperanto speaker is Being Colloquial in Esperanto: A Reference Guide, by David K. Jordan. Unless your son has already read this book, I guarantee there are fine points of Esperanto usage in it that he doesn't know yet.
Also by David K. Jordan (under the pseudonym Doko) is the side-splitting (to an Esperantist, admittedly) Rakontoj prapatraj pri nia lando antaux multaj jarcentoj kiam okazemis mirindaj aferoj ("Stories of our forefathers about our country, many centuries ago, when there tended to occur wonderful things"). This is a book of satirical fairy tales about Esperanto culture along the lines of Kipling's Just-So Stories, but much funnier. Since your son is spending time in Esperanto chat rooms, he has undoubtedly experienced some of the global Esperanto culture, so this book will probably tickle him.
Another good book on Esperanto language is La Bona Lingvo by Claude Piron. It is a book about simplifying Esperanto usage; I like it a lot, but it might or might not appeal to your son. There's a review available in English, so you can decide for yourself.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro ("Unabridged Illustrated Dictionary"). This is the definitive Esperanto dictionary, which contains just about every word you'll ever find in an Esperanto text. It's about three inches thick. It also costs about $75.00. I have one already, or else I'd certainly be glad if someone gave me one for Christmas.
I'm going to hazard a couple of guesses about your son. Since he's an Esperantist, it's quite likely that he is interested in world peace. In that case, I recommend a fine novel about a man in his early twenties who travels to Germany in the 1960s as a social worker to care for former concentration camp inmates who are in trouble with the law: Apenaux papilioj en Bergen-Belsen ("Hardly Butterflies in Bergen-Belsen"), by Trevor Steele.
Since your son is obviously intelligent (anyone who can teach himself a language to a conversational level from a book at age 16 has got to be smart, even if the language is Esperanto), I'll lay 50/50 odds that he reads some science fiction. In that case I have two recommendations. Naskigxo de la Rustimuna Sxtalrato ("A Stainless Steel Rat is Born") by Harry Harrison is a cracking SF coming-of-age story by a "real" science fiction author (it's a translation from English). It also happens to be set in a future in which everyone speaks Esperanto. For something further from home, I recommend the Sferoj series. This is a more-or-less annual collection of science fiction stories from all over the world translated into Esperanto. The title is a pun; it means both "Spheres" and "pieces of SF". There are many volumes available.
I hear that William Auld's translation of The Lord of the Rings is quite good, but it does not seem to be available at ELNA. Auld's translation of Jurgen by James Branch Cabell is, though. Jurgen was the subject of obscenity proceedings in the 1920s, but hey, The Catcher in the Rye has been banned at times too. I read Jurgen in English when I was 16 or 17 and it didn't hurt me. Jurgen is available online in the original English, so you can judge for yourself whether it is appropriate.
A non-SF novel about growing up is Fajron sentas mi interne ("I Feel a Fire Within Me") by Ulrich Matthias. I enjoyed it, and it has been praised within the Esperanto community. This book is also available online. Thus, your son might have read it already. If not, you might save a few bucks by printing it yourself and making a stocking stuffer of it.
I have also enjoyed Esperanto sen mitoj ("Esperanto Without Myths") by Ziko Marcus Sikosek. This is a nonfiction examination of the sometimes exaggerated claims made for Esperanto. Interesting for the devoted Esperantist, if a bit disillusioning.
No matter what language the person I spoke to read it in, I have heard only good things about Nudpieda Gen ("Barefoot Gen"), a Japanese "manga" (graphic novel) about surviving Hiroshima.
Finally, ELNA sells all kinds of doodads (buttons, pens, stickers, tote bags, T-shirts, etc.) with Esperanto logos and slogans that might be useful as stocking stuffers.
One word of warning: some of the titles above are transliterations; the Esperanto alphabet has more letters than the English one. If you have trouble searching for some of the titles at the ELNA site, try entering the author's name, or enter only the words without Xs in them.
I don't think all of these items are available from ELNA right now, but a fair portion seem to be. Good luck, and Merry Christmas to you both.
--Ron
Entered 21:09 [/books] permalink
I mentioned in my last Friday Five that I'd had a particularly good day at work. I don't think I've written elsewhere yet about what I do for a living.
I was hired in May as a technical writer for Open Interface North America. I spend a lot of my time documenting the internals of our embedded Bluetooth protocol stack in Doxygen. I consider the iterative process of my documentation and interaction with the developers to be a distributed form of literate programming -- and often not so distributed, as sometimes my documentation efforts consist of editing detailed comments to the code that were written by the devs themselves.
After working on Bluetooth software for about six months now, I had a small-scale epiphany yesterday about the difference between Bluetooth technology and WiFi.
Bluetooth technology has received some bad press in comparison with WiFi in the ongoing "unwiring" revolution, but advocates of Bluetooth technology often point out that Bluetooth devices have a different niche from WiFi. Bluetooth devices were originally meant as a form of cable replacement -- that is, you can in theory replace the current tangle of cables under your desk by connecting your computers and peripherals with Bluetooth dongles. By contrast, WiFi is primarily a means of getting connected to the Internet.
In my opinion, this distinction is accurate as far as it goes, but does not go far enough. I would say instead that the main distinction between Bluetooth technology and WiFi is locality. When using a Bluetooth device, you're in a sort of neighbourhood -- but with WiFi your neighbours' PDAs are just more sites on the Internet. This insight came to me while reading a dispatch from a cow-orker who is presently in Japan, Kaz Morishita.
Kaz started his message by linking to an article from Wired News that has been circulating through the blogosphere lately: "Feel Free to Jack Into My IPod". From Kaz's perspective (and mine), one interesting thing about the article is the brief mention that sharing music while strolling or jogging would be facilitated by the use of Bluetooth connections. (Another article that has been making the rounds of the blogosphere, "Finally, a Useful Bluetooth Device", mentions an upcoming Bluetooth adapter for the iPod from XtremeMac and Infinite Range. What the article doesn't tell you is that my company, OINA, wrote the software used by the hardware mentioned.)
Kaz went on to describe the current Japanese phenomenon of rental-box stores, and concluded his missive with a miniature science fiction story about one possible future for Bluetooth technology, based on talks with Japanese business contacts:
I get on a train to commute to my work. I spend 40 minutes every morning on this train. There are probably about 150 people right around me in this car. I search for Bluetooth devices around me using my Zaurus. I find seven Bluetooth devices, of which three of them are running PAN profile and an http server. I connect to them, one at a time. The first guy is probably a young jazz piano player. He has a few mp3 files that I can download and listen to. I really like his version of Blue Funk. The next one had tons of photos. She likes water activities. There are many underwater pictures with interesting and colorful fish. She is cute. She is standing about 15 feet away, looking at flowing scenary outside. I wish I could talk to her. Oh great, she's got her email address on the page. I send her an email. I guess I don't get any replies, but it's worth trying anyway. The third guy is selling his car. It is a quite nice 1969 Toyota Land Cruiser. I might call him up this weekend and check it out. I find another Bluetooth device. It's not running an http server. It's an iPod broadcasting audio over Bluetooth. I listen to the music for a while. It's time I get off of the train. I check my http server's access log on Zaurus. It looks like five people downloaded some mp3 files off of my Zaurus today. I start walking towards my office.
It's not necessarily as sfnal as all that. Based on my understanding of the state of the Bluetooth art, this scenario might be only one or two years away, especially if people (a) start buying devices like the XtremeMac iPod adapter (quite likely), and (b) start using PAN (the Bluetooth Personal Area Network profile) more (somewhat less likely). Judging from current first-person accounts of bluejacking (against which, I feel compelled to add, there are some easy security measures one can take), the density of Bluetooth devices in this story is already common in large cities, such as Tokyo and London -- but of course the prevalence of Bluetooth streaming audio and web servers is not!
Kaz's little story nicely illustrates Howard Rheingold's concept of smart mobs, from his book of the same title (the first book I bought after being hired by OINA, incidentally). It also illustrates the concept of locality I was talking about. The service discovery done by the narrator and the ad hoc local network he forms with his virtual acquaintances on the subway would be hard to do with WiFi (to the best of my knowledge), but these capabilities are built into virtually all Bluetooth devices.
DISCLAIMER: As I mentioned several times, I am employed by a Bluetooth software development company. This article is not meant as FUD. If anything I have said is factually inaccurate, I apologise. My direct experience with WiFi technology is unfortunately somewhat limited at the moment.
If you have any comments, feel free to email me.
Entered 08:35 [/comp] permalink
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Email from a cow-orker in Japan, Kaz Morishita: "Rental-box" stores are popping up at various places in Japan. I found this recent trend in Japan interesting. "Rental-box" stores usually have large shelves divided into many square units that are about 1.5' by 1.5'. Any person can rent one square unit for ~$8/mo. to sell whatever s/he wants. Such stores are popping up partially because of empty store spaces due to the bad economy. Typical items sold include hand-made clothes, hand-made candles/soaps, original printed T-shirts, original paintings, photos, CDRs containing original videos, music, etc. Links (in Japanese): one, two, three. (My wife Marty points out that these stores have a partial USan counterpart in the craft mall.) |
Entered 08:02 [/culture] permalink
In mid-November I finished reading The Other Wind (2001), the fifth novel by Ursula Le Guin set in the world of Earthsea, and this morning (30 November) I finished reading her collection of Earthsea stories, Tales from Earthsea (2001).
Both were heartbreakingly beautiful. Earthsea is a reflection of our world in some ways, but not an allegory as Narnia is. There are few worlds in fantasy, let alone science fiction, in which I would like to live, but Earthsea is one of them.
These two Earthsea books, as well as Tehanu, the fourth novel, have been criticised for being revisionist, for being "bad Ursula". However, as Le Guin writes in the foreword to Tales, "The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime." Hell, all of Middle-earth changed between chapters 10 and 12 of The Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo, I don't think we're in The Hobbit anymore...
By the way, I have not yet seen anyone draw a comparison between The Other Wind and Philip Pullman's book The Amber Spyglass, which was published in 2000. I wonder if there was any influence.
I didn't like Tehanu when it came out, but now I am going to reread the whole series. So much "high fantasy" reads like a USan trying to speak with an English accent, but Le Guin has a true voice, and still can call the wind to bring our ships into Roke.
You can read a nice review of the two books in a 2001 issue of Salon.
Entered 01:20 [/books] permalink
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Hope all the USans had a happy Thanksgiving and that everyone worldwide is enjoying a happy Buy Nothing Day (tomorrow in the UK, but then it is tomorrow in the UK.)
Entered 22:40 [/personal/friday5] permalink
The folly of tactile psychoactive discrimination
It has come to my attention that by groping for a caffeine tablet (NoDoz, to be specific) without looking at it in the morning when I am half-asleep, I may in fact have been taking ibuprofen tablets (chemically close to aspirin) by mistake, since they both have about the same shape -- and that my feeling so sleepy lately may have as much to do with caffeine deprivation as with sleep deprivation.
I can't tell you how stupid I feel -- and how stupidly.
Entered 22:42 [/personal] permalink
OK, I've run a little over my allotted five here, but if the Top Five can do it, so can I. I guess I just had a good week.
Sick day: I called in sick and slept for something like 15 hours. I really caught up on my sleep deficit. My elementary school nurse told my class "You can never really catch up on your sleep -- that's just a myth", but that's exactly the opposite of what we now know to be true, as the cigarette-smoking doctor put it in Sleeper. Marty says my mood is very much improved...
Essay: However, my circadian clock seems to be bollocksed from getting up at 4 PM, so I leapt out of bed at 3:30 this morning, feeling somewhat manic, and wrote for about two hours. It's the outline of an essay on my personal philosophy that I hope to submit to The Games Journal, although it seems maybe more like the kind of thing the influential (but apparently defunct) The Life of Games would publish. You can see a few of the key concepts at the home page of the Center for Ludic Synergy; the idea is to remove the metaphysical baggage from the front page and let people know they don't have to subscribe to my ideas to join the umbrella organisation, while clarifying the core ideas for myself at least. (I've linked to an archived version of the page because it won't look that way much longer.)
EGG: A local game design group called EGG met at our apartment for the first time on Sunday. Although the emphasis is on playtesting rather than playing members' games, I had more fun than I usually do lately at our other game group, Seattle Cosmic. It was probably the smaller group size in part (Seattle Cosmic Game Night routinely runs to 20 people nowadays), but it was also fun to playtest the solitaire game Marty and I are submitting to the Solitary Confinement piecepack game design contest; it was fun to play our friend Steve Vallée's game, even though it was not quite ready for prime time; and it was especially fun to play our friend AlphaTim Schutz's game, which is quite definitely ready for prime time and could well (we all agreed) take first place in a major international game design competition such as Hippodice. (Also, it was fun to win the latter game by a wide margin.)
GIPF: Playing games in the GIPF Project with Marty. We played YINSH (the newest game) and DVONN on Wednesday night (Marty beat me at both). It was an especially geheimlich evening because we regard this series as "our" games; we selected them together to play together, and when a new one comes out, we buy it together. We also have fun making up new names for the games: FNORD, MINSK, PINSK, MENSCH... Ironically, I have now played every one of the published games in this series except GIPF, the game for which the project is named.
Gratis computers, libre software: I unexpectedly received two 450 MHz PCs as a gift on Saturday from my friend Karl Erickson, who was getting rid of them and didn't want to have to sell them. I offered one to Kisa Griffin (my friend, and my wife Marty's sister Meredith's boyfriend), who had been wanting to install Knoppix on his old PC for a while. He came over Sunday night and we had an impromptu installfest, swapping out hard drives and CD-ROM drives, diagnosing memory, and finally installing Knoppix on both machines. Gotta love commodity hardware and free software.
Limekiller: The book ¡Limekiller!, by Avram Davidson, arrived yesterday in the mail. I'll have more details later, but I'll just say this is a posthumous fantasy collection I have been awaiting for months, and I was able to get it a month before its putative publication date by ordering through Powell's.
First snow: We don't get much snow at lower elevations in the Pacific Northwest. I took the dogs out this morning and they reacted visibly. Tia was nonplussed; Gwenny, whom we suspect is part sled dog, started licking the ground happily.
Warm clothes: With winter coming on, sometimes it seems that I wake up cold and can't get warm the rest of the day. Well, Marty recently made a gift of some warm sweatclothes and slipper socks to wear around the house, so even if I have to be cold at work, I can come home and be warm. Thanks, sweetie!
Entered 22:06 [/personal/friday5] permalink
From the book Momo, by Michael Ende (1973):
'You're called Momo, aren't you?'
'Yes.'
'That's a pretty name, but I've never heard it before. Who gave it to you?'
'I did,' said Momo.
'You chose your own name?'
'Yes.'
'When were you born?'
Momo pondered this. 'As far as I can remember,' she said at length, 'I've always been around.'
(Chapter 1)
To paraphrase the Zen Master Bankei, "You were never born, so you will never die." Strangely, there does not seem to be much about Bankei on the English-speaking Web at the moment, but the best book about Bankei and his teachings I have ever read is Bankei Zen, translator Peter Haskel (1989).
Entered 12:44 [/sophia] permalink
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My latest Short Duration Personal Saviour is my friend Lion Kimbro. This blog owes its very existence to the excellent example set by Lion's own blog, Lion's Den. I've adopted many of the techniques in my current journalling/organisation scheme from his free online book How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think. I've also started reading some of Lion's favourite novels, Momo and The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, an author I disdained before because of the mess of a movie made of the latter book. I'm even coming around to his ideas on the way wikis should be linked and organised, something I never thought I'd do. Ave, Leo! ("Hail, Lion!" I believe I got that right. My Latin is rusty, but the vocative is pretty simple.) For previous ShorDurPerSavs and more on the ShorDurPerSav concept, see Ron's ShorDurPerSavs. From now on, however, I'll be blogging them. |
Entered 11:32 [/personal/shordurpersavs] permalink
After I mentioned that my wife Marty now has a blog and urged readers "Hie thee thence!", I wondered whether I was using "thence" correctly. After all, if "whence" means "from where", shouldn't "thence" mean "from there"? Was I not in fact urging, "Hurry away from there?"
A quick consultation of dict confirmed my suspicions. "Thence" means "from there". Fortunately, it also means "thereafter" and "therefore". Thus, my statement was ambiguous. Not only was I potentially saying "hurry away from there!", but also "hurry from now on!" and "therefore, hurry!".
I would prefer that readers take my statement in the word's tertiary sense: my wife Marty now has a blog. Therefore, hurry!.
Entered 10:44 [/personal/friendly] permalink
Another five things that made my week:
Caffeine. I've been reading a book called The Caffeine Advantage by Bennett Weinberg (2002). It makes a pretty strong case that if you already drink coffee or tea, you should drop them in favour of caffeine tablets. Since doing so, I have experienced the following positive effects:
EGG. J.T. Thomas, who is the founder of the Eastside Game Group, a Seattle-area game design group I belong to, has stepped down and handed administration of the group to me, including monthly hosting duties, administration of the mailing list, creation of a web site, and so on. The members have agreed that the group should affiliate itself with the Center for Ludic Synergy as soon as I make it publicly clear they don't necessarily subscribe to the mystical ideology presently on the site's front page. That kind of clarification is something I have meant to do for a while anyway.
Organisation. I've been on a (partly caffeine-inspired) binge to organise my life. I have created a formal to do list, calendar, and "pointers" file in a big three-ring binder. Last night Marty and I spent about an hour in our local Office De(s)pot shopping for organisational hardware. I now feel I have many of the tools I need to get my life in order. If I don't do so, it's my own damned fault. (I'll blog some of the software related to my organization scheme later.)
Lion. My friend Lion Kimbro visited on Sunday. We spent about seven hours in intensely pleasurable conversation. I'm finding so many of his ideas useful that Marty says I should list him as one of my Short-Duration Personal Saviours. I'll get to that later...
Todd. My boss Todd invited me to lunch on Wednesday. We went to a pretty good nearby Japanese restaurant, and spoke about many things: Esperanto and the aesthetic of la bona lingvo, Japanese and Russian, low-tech game systems, and of course some shop talk. And it is certainly nice to have a boss who recognises the value of meditation in the workplace, even if it's not exactly corporate policy.
Entered 23:51 [/personal/friday5] permalink
I received the following mail from Lion Kimbro after I posted the first installment in this section:
Delivery-date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 13:24:27 -0800
Subject: Fan Mail Part 1
From: Lion Kimbro <lion@speakeasy.org>
To: Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@apocalypse.org>
Re: "Too bad you don't":
The quote goes something like this:
"Behind every successful man, there's a woman rolling her eyes."
-- http://speakeasy.org/~lion/ LionKimbro@jabber.org Seattle, WA
I hadn't heard the proverb quoted in full before. Possibly the truth is too great for mankind [sic] to bear.
Marty has taken to snickering and misquoting Iain Cheyne as saying my article is "over 7000 pages of quality". Here's another proverb: A prophet is without honour in his own apartment complex.
Entered 23:07 [/personal/fan_mail] permalink
Today's Friday 5, in the order I thought of them:
Good reviews. I've been getting good reviews and responses on rec.games.board to Game Systems Part 4, as I mentioned earlier.
Socialising. I am momentarily less eremitic. This past Sunday my friend Karl Erickson came over. The usual high-falutin' bullshittin' session took place, then he played me and Marty at Tamsk and Focus. Focus is one of my favourite abstract strategy games, and although Karl won, the game was close for once. This was encouraging because I have always wanted to get good at Focus, and Marty, Karl, and I have a non-transitive relationship with respect to the game: I can beat Marty, Marty can beat Karl, and Karl can beat me.
Thursday I had my usual lunch with my friend Chad Urso McDaniel (high-falutin' bulshittin' again), and this coming Sunday my friend Lion Kimbro is coming over for more of the same. (Lion wants me to split the four wikis I manage into multiple sub-wikis. This is unlikely to happen, but Lion is pretty vehement about it, so I'm keeping an open mind.)
Data management. I am reading Lion's book about his notebook system. It's a bit too involved for me right now, but I am adopting some of his suggestions, such as using a multi-coloured ballpoint pen in my current series of notebooks. (Lion writes, "Your pen has four colors: Red, Green, Blue, and Black... Those four color pens- I think they're made in France or something.") Lion, I think the pen you are think of is the Bic #14540 "4 Color", which sells for about $5.00 per three-pack at Office De(s)pot, and does indeed read "MADE IN FRANCE" on the barrel. (By the way, red, green, blue, and black are the colours used in most editions of the piecepack.
I am also trying out the Remembrance Agent. I am using it as I write and am already pretty happy with it. Right now it is reminding me of a Seattle Cosmic newsletter entitled "The Night of Intense Focus", at which we played multiple games of Focus and Karl was soundly defeated by a novel strategy developed by my friend John, who is literally a past master at Chess. Lots of people with wearable computers keep the Remembrance Agent running all the time, which makes me think I might one day want to swap my Linux PDA for a wearable. Mmm, borglicious!
Night on the town. Monday night Marty and I decided we'd go out on the town. What did we do? We had dinner at a fast food restaurant and went to a bookstore. Doesn't sound like much, but the restaurant was a Kidd Valley, part of a small local chain that I had long wanted to try. All the food was great; calling it "fast food" doesn't do it justice, and indeed we had to wait something like 20 minutes for it. The garlic fries will send judders up your spine. Then we went to Half-Price Books, another mostly local chain of used bookstores. The highlight of the evening for me was being able to surprise Marty by replacing one of her beloved books that had gone missing with a like-new copy. It was a book about Japanese inventions that ought to be adopted in the US. Some of them have been adopted since the book was written -- such as karaoke, alas. The book is called 283 Useful Ideas from Japan, by Leonard Koren.
Friend in progress? I discovered my cow-orker Phil loves Greg Egan and Permutation City as much as I do. Now I'm going to try to turn him on to Forever for All.
Happy weekend to all, and to all a good Friday night.
Truth in blogging: most book links lead to my Powell's affiliate program.
Entered 19:11 [/personal/friday5] permalink
My wife Marty Hale-Evans now has a blog, Sounds Like Slog. Hie ye thence.
Entered 22:54 [/personal/friendly] permalink
People are saying nice things about "Game Systems, Part 4" over on rec.games.board:
"The whole of [The Games Journal] is good, but this series of articles are the jewel in the crown for me. This article was thought provoking, well researched and well written. Over 7000 words of quality."
--Iain Cheyne"Yes, that certainly is a meaty article. The Games Journal is always really great, but this one is really REALLY great."
--Justin Green (shumyum@yahoo.com)
Thanks, guys! I wasn't even sure that people would like an article that focused on game systems made from everyday objects, so the response is especially gratifying. It seems the part that has gotten the most response is the game of Remainders, which was almost (not quite) an afterthought. Since it's not always easy to tell what people will respond to most in an article, my theory is that you should throw it all in. I believe Penn & Teller refer to this as "the scattershot technique" in one of their books. Note that "scattershot" is not always a word used in praise.
Entered 13:08 [/games/game_systems] permalink
Marty just read and commented on my earlier post, and now I would like to make two facts glassy-clear:
In other news, I have a new entry in memepool. Unlike other weblogs, memepool does not permit links to individual entries, so look for the "Robotics" entry of 31 October 2003.
Entered 16:27 [/news] permalink
I've been meaning to start a couple of features on the blog: "Fan Mail" and "The Mail I Get".
Generally, considering the kind of stuff I publish on the Web, I get two kinds of email from strangers:
I will be blogging email of type #1 under "Fan Mail" for my personal aggrandisement. I will be blogging email of type #2 under "The Mail I Get" for general instruction and/or amusement. (I also get a third kind of email that either requests information from me (e.g. "Where can I buy the Codex Seraphinianus?", which I get about once a month) or points me toward some bit of information I might have missed. While I appreciate the latter and try to answer the former promptly, this mail is not of general interest.)
Today's bit of my inbox comes from a guy I would classify as a "URL" (Unknown in Real Life) -- that is, a net acquaintance I have never met face-to-face, but who would probably be a friend if I had a better opportunity to get to know him better.
Note that most email snippets I quote will have identifying information blotted out Victorian-style, as in "In the early hours of the 25th of the month of D-------, Mr. S---- C---- bellowed a great 'Ho ho ho!', laid a finger aside of his nose, and slipped down the chimney as quick as a w---." 2f4890bdc202d884fb04c428aaef9ca5
To which Marty, looking over my shoulder, merely snorted and said, "Too bad you don't."
Sniff.
Entered 13:30 [/personal/fan_mail] permalink
"Game Systems, Part 4" now available
My article "Game Systems, Part 4: Low-Tech Game Systems" is now available online at The Games Journal, as the "cover story" for the November issue.
I love what editor Greg Aleknevicus did with the graphics for my article. The pictures for the games Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard and Change Change are great. Greg adapted my US-centric description of the latter and replaced my ASCII diagram of US coins with photos of Canadian coins, including a loonie (dollar coin) instead of a quarter.
This issue was atypically a little late (Greg says Halloween is a big holiday for him), but from my perspective, it was worth the wait. I'm sure the rest of the articles will be a lot of fun too, as usual.
Entered 00:13 [/games/game_systems] permalink
Do you have to register Linux?
Answer: no, but I did anyway.
Entered 22:59 [/comp] permalink
Last night I was lazily refreshing the home page of The Games Journal in hopes of seeing when the new issue went up, so I could check how my new article looked. I got bored and wanted to go to bed, so I wrote a script that would download an arbitrary web page every minute or so and check for changes.
Usually editor Greg Aleknevicus posts the new edition around midnight of the first of the month. I started the script in the wee hours and went to bed, expecting to see a message in the morning that the new edition was posted around 3:00 AM or so. I got up at 8:00, however, and my script was still running! I apologise to Greg for artifically inflating his site statistics with hundreds of hits.
Apparently my friend Tycerium wrote a program like this for his master's thesis in computer science. I hope he did it in less than 13 lines of bash code.
Entered 08:32 [/comp] permalink
As I mentioned in my Friday 5, last night we watched the film Incubus on DVD to celebrate Halloween.
Incubus is the only film ever shot entirely in Esperanto, the "second language for all" invented over 100 years ago, which now has about two million speakers (on par with Icelandic and Hebrew). The film was made in 1965 by the director of The Outer Limits and stars William Shatner in his last role before Star Trek.
Verdict: suprisingly good. It may not be to your taste, but this is a cult classic. It was thought permanently lost, but a print resurfaced in the late 1990s in a French art-film theater, where it had been shown to packed houses for 30 years. It was only released for the first time a couple of years ago, digitally restored.
The film is very beautiful, both in its cinematography and in its story. There are a couple of goofy special effects, and one fairly awkward experimental shot, but overall this is a heck of a beautiful film, visually. The story is equally beautiful; it is a Bergmanesque allegory involving the triumph of love over evil in a sort of Everyvillage, set in Everytime. Indeed, everything about the movie is archetypal. Because of its powerful Christian imagery, it can be seen as a Christian allegory, but Christ and Satan are referred to only as "La Dio de Lumo" (The God of Light) and "La Dio de Mallumo" (The God of Darkness) respectively, so all the imagery of crucifixes and churches can be seen as mere "place-holders" for more universal spiritual truths, just as the film's Esperanto can be understood as a universal place-holder for whatever mysterious language the incubus and succubi speak.
Speaking of which, the script is written in flawless Esperanto, and quite poetic too. The actors get the syntax right 99% of the time, and usually get the pronunciation right too, but there are a few howlers. In particular, Shatner is stumbling about at one point in the belief that he is damned, shouting (in Esperanto), "Malsupreen! Malsupreen!" ("Downwards! Downwards!") Now, "malsupreen" is actually pronounced "mahl-suh-PREH-ehn", but Shatner, ignoring his language coach, pronounces it "mal-soo-PREEN" (with the last syllable rhyming with "bean"). I can't tell you how hilarious this is to an Esperantist. Shatner makes a few other goofs; he makes the typical American English mistakes in Esperanto pronunciation, but throws in a few from French too: he frequently accents the last syllable instead of the second-to-last, and pronounces Esperanto words with "en" in them as if they were French; e.g. he pronounces "sen" more like English "sun" instead of rhyming it with English "men". But since Shatner is Canadian (from Montreal, IIRC) and probably knows a fair bit of French, this is to be expected.
As a bonus (sort of), before they showed Incubus at the small art gallery where we first saw it in 2001, they showed a few arty shorts and a weird 1963 horror film called The Mask (banned in Finland!), which one might consider a Lovecraftian pseudo-prequel to the Jim Carrey vehicle of the same title, if not an actual influence on it. A psychiatrist gets hold of an ancient (and ugly) Aztec mask that brings out the evil in its owner. When the psychiatrist puts on the mask, he sees fabulous and genuinely scary dream sequences that drive him mad. These are rendered in 3D, for which the theater gave us glasses. (You always know when to put on the glasses, because the 3D sequences are cued by a hollow voice intoning, "PUT ON THE MASK! PUT ON THE MASK!")
The Mask was almost like two films spliced together: a corny early-Sixties horror film with bad dialogue and bad acting, and bone-chilling 3D montages featuring the mask, skeletons throwing fireballs, boats poling through lakes of bones, etc.. The writer and director for these montages was the same guy who did a lot of Frank Capra's montages, Slavko Vorkapich.
Entered 19:56 [/multimedia] permalink
One of the social mailing lists I'm on has a tradition of posting "Friday 5" lists, which are lists of five things that made you happy during the week. That's an approximate way of putting it. Since I don't believe that external things can make you happy (except perhaps drugs, but not until they've become internal things), I'll just say that my Friday 5s are things that "made my week", "pleased me", or "cheered me up", without committing to what these terms mean with respect to happiness.
Enough Neo-Stoic blathering. Since our list has just started the Friday 5 tradition again, here's more or less what I posted. I hope to make this a regular Annex feature.
In the order I think of them:
Truth in Blogging: The link for The Other Wind will ensnare you in my dastardly Powell's affiliate program, as described at Books Ron Read. You're safe with the others, though -- or as safe as you can be on Halloween...
Entered 13:37 [/personal/friday5] permalink
Gamers who run GNU/Linux systems should check out gtkboard, the free software world's answer to Zillions of Games. Conceived by a gifted programmer from India, Arvind Narayanan, gtkboard can currently play about 30 games. Thanks to its Logos (Lots Of Games, Open Source) library, however, gtkboard will soon be able to run the almost 1000 free games available for the Zillions platform. There are other good reasons to run it too.
The gtkboard project is understaffed at the moment, so if you're a developer and a gamer, gtkboard needs you!
Entered 12:29 [/games/game_systems] permalink
I just finished reading the final novel in a six-volume science fiction cycle by Brian Stableford sometimes called "Emortals". Privately, I call it the "Third Millennium series" because it is based loosely on a future history by Stableford and David Langford called The Third Millennium (1984) (not to be confused with the apocalyptic Christian fantasy novel of the same name).
The Emortals series spans approximately 13 centuries, from the late 20th century to the middle of the Fourth Millennium. Much of the action focuses on the characters' quest for "emortality" (true immortality is not seen as a plausible goal because a putative immortal would still be subject to death by misadventure).
This is not great speculative fiction. Stableford is neither Greg Egan nor Gene Wolfe. However, the Emortals series is thought-provoking; for example, Stableford's reasoning why periodic rejuvenation by nanotechnology would provide only "false emortality" is a bloody thread running throughout the series, and it is not at all clear that he is wrong. Also thought-provoking is the ideology of Hardinism, which posits that the Earth must be owned by someone (in this case, a small clique of emortal capitalists) in order to prevent a catastrophic global "tragedy of the commons". (Hardin's original paper can be found online.)
The volumes in the series are listed below, in Stableford's preferred reading order (= rough chronological order). Book links in this article are part of my Powell's affiliate program, as detailed on the Books Ron Read page. If you enjoy this series of novels, you might also enjoy the game 6 Billion. (In this case, the link benefits Games to the Rescue.)
Entered 00:25 [/books] permalink
I created a page on the Piecepack Wiki today called Playing Chess with a Piecepack and 88 Cents or Less. You probably have the eight dimes and eight pennies, or something equivalent, but do you have the piecepack?
In the spirit of WikiWiki, "AlphaTim" Schutz added the game setup illustration you see above, and Mark Biggar added an explanation of how to play Chess with just a piecepack. Thanks, guys!
Entered 19:19 [/games/game_systems] permalink
Just about six months ago I was interviewed in email by W. Eric Martin of TwoWriters.net for an article in Games magazine about "rule-changing games", which I call "transfinite games".
The article was called "Meta-Gaming 101" and appeared in the September 2003 issue of Games. Although the interview seems to have informed the article significantly, not much of it was explicitly quoted. (And if you're looking for the "Center for Ludic Strategy", I assure you that you're really looking for the Center for Ludic Synergy.) Thus, I am reproducing the interview below, with Eric's permission. I have changed nothing except for abbreviating the header, deleting my .signature, and making the hyperlinks "live".
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 18:07:38 -0800 To: "W. Eric Martin" <eric@cluestick.org> Subject: Re: Questions about rule-changing games From: Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@ludism.org> On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 04:51:27PM -0500, W. Eric Martin wrote: > Thanks for responding so quickly! As suggested, I've included my > questions below. My deadline for the article is the end of March, > so if you can answer the questions by Friday, March 28, that should > give me enough time to incorporate your answers. > > Please don't feel obligated to answer everything, but the wealth of > knowledge you display on your Web sites and in your articles > inspired me to keep adding questions. Thank you very much. I've answered everything I could. If any of my answers do not seem cogent, please let me know. > 1. How would you like your attribute to read? Founder of Seattle Cosmic Game Night and the Center for Ludic Synergy, Gamemaster of the Kennexions Glass Bead Game, and card-carrying Pope. > 2. You list Nomic as an interest on your home page; what about the > game appeals to you? Why single out Nomic when all other games are > grouped as "board games, card games, and role-playing games"? That's just my crufty home page, which has evolved over more than 15 years. My online bookmarks have quite a different breakdown. However, I do have a sentimental attachment to Nomic because for two and a half years, I played a face-to-face game as an undergraduate at Yale. Further, Peter Suber's Nomic Initial Set is the best thought-out, most balanced ruleset of its sort I have seen. More to the point, Nomic can encompass all the other types of games mentioned; during our college game, we frequently subsumed games of Illuminati, Nuclear War, Black Spy (Alan Moon's Hearts variant), and even Cosmic Encounter. We called these little pockets of other games "barlafumbles" in Nomicspeak, the artificial language of my college game. > 2a. What common elements, if any, do you find in the Nomic games > you've played? I've run across many games online that introduce > colors, money, and locations, for example; are these quirks of > particular players, or is this to be expected from our collective > gaming experience? Every Nomic group varies, but there are often similarities because Nomic players like to introduce features of the real world that interest them. Since Nomic is a political game, these include awards, titles, offices, and political parties, as well as the items you mentioned. These are all _imaginary objects_ or properties, and I think this partly stems from the fact that many Nomic players are computer geeks, and a computer programming technique called "object-oriented programming" has been very popular. In fact, in Nomic's first online heyday (the mid to late 1990s), there were a couple of experimental intergame computer protocols that would let Nomic players carry objects from game to game. > 3. What doesn't work about Nomic, if anything? Or does the game > fail only if the players let it fail? The main problem is that Nomic games sometimes buckle under their own complexity. However, if there's anyone left in the game who's still interested, they can have "constitutional conventions" or "revolutions" and "purge" all the old rules that don't work at once. (Yes, I know this sounds unsavoury; Nomic players tend to be fond of power grabs, even if the power is imaginary.) It really is up to the players. Our group really had the will to keep playing, so we jokingly introduced a kind of Orwellian doublethink. When we encountered a "boogle", or snag in the rules, we plastered it over with a "whabawwea" by chanting in unison, "We Have Always Been At War With East Asia!" (or Eurasia, as the case might be) -- an allusion to a brainwashing technique used in Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_. In our club, even _winning_ the game didn't end it; when someone won a game we would "pop" up to a "metagame" and "push" down to a fresh game with the same rules, minus the rule or rules that had caused the person to win. > 4. In your introductory essay to the Kenning Game (I spent a lot of > time looking around your site), you relate Nomic to James Carse's > idea of infinite games; what's the appeal to you of playing a game > merely to keep playing? The last sentence of _Finite and Infinite Games_ reads "There is but one infinite game". I'm sure Carse means life, or the world. Nihilists, ascetics, and lunatics aside, this is a game most people want to keep playing. "Transfinite" games like Nomic are like the world on a smaller scale. Tolkien delighted in the Elves of Middle-earth he created, and his Elves delighted in the magical jewels _they_ created. In just the same way, Nomic players, like role-playing gamers, love to explore the worlds they create. Creating leads to exploring, and exploring leads to creating. Sometimes the most fun in Nomic happens when you discover unintended consequences from the way two or more rules interact. It's like one of those dreams in which you discover a new room in your house. The difference between Nomic and role-playing, however, is that in Nomic, there is no gamemaster -- the creators and explorers are the same. (In the game we played at Yale, a player was called a "govotnik", which expressed the idea that she was both government _and_ voter.) > 4a. Following that thought, Kate Jones told me that one of her goals > with Lemma was to create a game in which the purpose was to keep > playing -- yet I know from one of your newsletters (mentioned in > your game system article) that your gaming group did not have a > great experience with Lemma. Any thoughts on the difference between > Lemma and Nomic, or is the difference all in the players? Nomic was written by a professor of constitutional law, and its design reflects that. It is much more detailed, formal, and rigorous than Lemma, which in its turn is much more free-spirited. With all its loopholes, Lemma seems to be designed for an afternoon's play, while Nomic games can go on for years. However, after talking with Kate Jones myself, I've concluded that your experience with either game will largely depend on the group with whom you play. I've certainly heard of enough Nomic games that only lasted an afternoon. > 5. Being a math person myself, I like your description of these > games as transfinite; do you feel there's a continuum of > "rule-changingness" that games like Nomic, Lemma, Fluxx, Democrazy, > Cosmic Encounter, Proteus, and Bartog can be placed along? That is, > from most changeable to least? Or are the games too different to > compare in this way? Yes, I do think there is a continuum. At one end of the continuum are games like Checkers whose rules do not change. Then come games like Cosmic Encounter, in which the rules change mostly at the start of the game. Then Fluxx and Democrazy, in which the rules change every turn, but are limited to the rules on the deck of cards. Then Nomic, in which the rules change every turn and are limited only by your imagination. Finally there is life itself, in which the rules change from moment to moment, and we are never quite sure what they are. > Is rule-changing a strong enough quality (such as simultaneous play, > bidding, or hidden movement) that it can be considered on its own? Yes, and you can add rule-changing to any game as easily as saying, "On your turn, you make a new rule". As kids, long before they heard of Nomic, my wife and her sisters added rule changing to the game Sorry. They called their variant "Evil Sorry", and they still have the rules somewhere. > 6. Care to comment on the other games mentioned in question 5? > (Obviously CE is huge in your group, but the rule-changing aspect is > only a piece of the game, not the essence of it.) I haven't played Proteus (the game from Kadon), although I would love to. Bartog I understand to be similar to Mao, about which I am sworn to secrecy. > And you mentioned that your group has tired of Fluxx; care to > elaborate on why? Seattle Cosmic tended to find Fluxx games too similar to one another after a while. Also, we focus on strategy games, and there is very little strategy in Fluxx. Nevertheless, there are some people in the group who still like it. > 7. Are you familiar with "The Only Known Game," a creation by Mark > Bassett and Steve Knight that predates Nomic by two years and very > much resembles Lemma? Yes, I've seen it. It looks all right, but I prefer games with more initial structure. Changing the rules of a game as you go is not new. Peter Suber's real innovation was his detail and rigour. > 8. Are there other rule-changing games I haven't mentioned that you > feel should be covered in this article? Well, _Games_ did that great article on 1000 Blank White Cards last year. (I found that very similar to a nameless boardgame I played with some friends in New Haven one night.) Dvorak <http://www.dvorakgame.co.uk/> is a more structured version of the same idea. Bob Abbott's game Eleusis <http://www.logicmazes.com/> is a forerunner of these games, and Das Regeln Wir Schoen <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid=1003> is really the German original for Democrazy. Mutant versions of Suber's Nomic Initial Set have proliferated; one that interests me is Solitaire Nomic <http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/acka/hist/solitaire.html>, which I carry around on my PDA. You should also look at Matrix Games <http://www.io.com/~hamster/> and Shared Universes <http://members.tripod.com/~lkraz/SharedU.html>. Mornington Crescent <http://parslow.com/mornington/> is very silly, and the Fantasy Rules Committee <http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/frc/> have done some really amazing stuff. And then, of course, there is the Glass Bead Game. > I've enjoyed your sites greatly, and have found many new topics to > explore, especially the idea of being headless. I look forward ot > your responses! Thank you; I'm glad you've enjoyed my stuff. I've tried to answer your questions in a timely way, in case they raise any further ones. Best, Ron
Entered 05:14 [/games/transfinite] permalink
A Coping Strategy for Bad News
The news just keeps being bad, doesn't it? Does it cause you as much anxiety as it does me?
I came up with a list of things to remember about the media's presentation of the news that serves as a generalised coping strategy. I hope this short list helps you to cheer up.
Note: Some of these items apply mostly to news about the USA, where I live, such as ones that mention a bicameral legislature.
OK, let's take a semantic pause, everybody.
Entered 04:58 [/polyticks/media] permalink
Sirius Cybernetics = Microsoft?
The major difference between the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and Microsoft, as far as I can tell, is that Microsoft would never, ever use a slogan like "Share and Enjoy!"
Entered 20:45 [/polyticks/ip] permalink
Check out this superb new book on game design, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (MIT Press, 2003).
I won't say much about it, because I'm a few chapters in, having only skimmed the rest, but so far it's obvious that there has never been anything like this before. It's more than 650 pages long, meant to be a textbook for an academic course in game design (any kind of game, on computer or off). It's even of interest to non-designers, because it contains original games by James Ernest and Richard Garfield, among others, and an essay by Reiner Knizia on his Lord of the Rings game.
And, oh yeah, my Game Systems series was cited, and served as source material for a chunk of the "Games as Open Culture" chapter.
If you buy it here, I'll even make, like, $3.75...
Entered 20:32 [/games/design] permalink
Now that I've got a blog, I bet a lot of my friends will think I've become incorrigibly self-obsessed. However, I've been keeping a paper journal since 1982, when I was 16, so I've been self-obsessed a lot longer than that.
Entered 19:43 [/personal] permalink
These two new Cosmic Encounter powers come from a post I made to the seattle-cosmic mailing list on 17 March 2003. Our group still hasn't playtested them, probably because we haven't been playing a lot of Cosmic this year.
These powers are based on the Mesmer and the Vulch, respectively. The Mesmer can turn any Edict into any other Edict, and the Vulch can collect discarded Edicts. Naturally, like the Mesmer and Vulch, the following two powers are not meant to be used together (except perhaps at Cheezy Cosmic Nights).
FLESMER (optional)
You may treat any Flare in your hand as though it is any other Flare in the game (whether in the Challenge Deck, the Flare Deck, the discard pile, or someone else's hand). As usual, you may only use the Super version of a Flare if you possess the corresponding power. Once you declare that a given Flare "is" another Flare, you may not change your mind.
You may look through the Challenge Deck, the Flare Deck, and the discard pile to see what Flares do, but each time you significantly slow down the game while doing so (by unanimous vote of the other players), you must lose a base of your choice. You must shuffle the Flare Deck and Challenge Deck after you have looked through them.
This power may not be combined with Flulch in a game with multiple powers.
Wild: All other players must show you their Flares. You may select one to take into your hand. Discard after use.
Super: You may use any Flares in your hand as either Wilds or Supers, except this one. A given Flare cannot be declared both Wild and Super in the same challenge.
FLULCH (optional)
When another player discards a Flare, you may take it into your hand.
This power may not be combined with Flesmer in a game with multiple powers.
Wild: You may retain the Flares in your hand, including this one, even when discarding the rest of your hand.
Super: Once per challenge, you may take a Flare from the discard pile into your hand, even if you yourself discarded it.
Comments? Seattle Cosmic has also collaboratively come up with at least two more that need to be formalised: the Deafener and the Crippler. See this March 2000 newsletter.
Entered 13:59 [/games/design] permalink
The Tale the Fishers of Men Tell
Perhaps the life of Christ is The Greatest Story Ever Told, but didn't your mother teach you to stop telling stories?
Entered 21:21 [/sophia] permalink
Lion Kimbro wins big prizes in the year 2000 Cheezy Cosmic tournament.
Entered 21:14 [/personal/friendly] permalink
The Info-Closet Annex opens to visitors
I've been thinking about doing a blog for a while, but didn't want it to be one of those whiny "Sorry I haven't been making any entries lately, man. I've been real busy. Uh, not much happened today except I had pancakes for breakfast." affairs.
Fortunately, I had the radiant example of Lion's Den, my friend Lion Kimbro's excellent blog, before me. I asked him what blogging software he was using, and he said it was pyBlosxom, which eventually led me to blosxom. (I prefer Perl to Python.)
I vow that no matter how long between entries I go in this blog, you will never, ever see an entry like the "pancake" one above.
In other news, yesterday I added a GeoURL tag to the front page of the main Info-Closet, so click the GeoURL icon at the top of the page to see where the Info-Closet is in "real" space.
Entered 20:47 [/news] permalink
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