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.
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Ron Hale-Evans
rwhe@ludism.org
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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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