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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For a friend depressed by the election
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which Escape is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.
--J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories", 1947
It is in games that many men discover their paradise.
--Robert Lynd (1879-1949)
Entered 13:19 [/culture/commonplace_book] permalink
As announced at Dragonflight XXV, I am running a glass bead game design contest until 15 February 2005, with $100 of prizes from Powell's Books and Funagain Games. Full rules for the contest are on the Glass Bead Game Wiki.
This is a little different from a typical game design competition, so please email me at rwhe@ludism.org if you have any questions.
Entered 22:34 [/games/gbg] permalink
Letterboxing: my first hitchhiker and first first-find
Now sit right back and you'll hear a tale, the tale of my recent letterboxing activities.
On 23 September (a Thursday night), I found my second virtual letterbox, Chippy. It didn't have quite the same feel of an actual walk as the Emerald City virtual letterbox did, but I did learn a lot about wildlife. Recommended for a rainy afternoon.
I'm keeping the "stamps" from virtual letterboxes in the pocket of the Moleskine I'm using for my logbook.
On Sunday, 26 September, Marty and I and Kisa Griffin made a quick stop on the way to Tacoma for the Glenn Hanson Park [sic] letterbox in Kent, Washington, the town where Marty and I live. Kisa and I figured out the landmarks and found the box without too much trouble. The stamp was cute, but the logbook and most of the rest of the box were severely waterlogged. I did all my stamping stuff, dried the box out as best I could, and replaced it. Interestingly, the last group to visit the box didn't stamp the log, but signed themselves "The Dog Pound", with trail names such as Snoopy, Big Dog, and Hoochie Poochie. Another dog synchronicity -- or do letterboxers just tend to be dog people?
The round trip from the starting place to the box and back to the car only took about half an hour. I asked Marty cheerfully when we returned, "You don't mind that we picked up a hitchhiker, do you?" I had found my first hitchhiker letterbox (what they call a "parasite" in Dartmoor letterboxing). It was called the Mini Bob's Wife Hitchhiker, and had made its way up to Kent from Gresham, Oregon, about 170 miles south. I would have liked to hide it in the next letterbox I found, as is customary, but there was just room in the logbook for me to stamp and sign it. I'll be mailing it back to Twinkletoes in Gresham shortly.
Personal letterboxing peeve: Big families with little kids who letterbox together and then give each of the kiddies their own page in the logbook to stamp. With a nice fat logbook it probably doesn't matter, but with a tiny logbook in a hitchhiker, it wastes a lot of space. Mini Bob's Wife might have made it up to Canada or somewhere out east if so many of the pages hadn't been wasted with this kind of thoughtlessness. Plus, the kiddies' stamps are usually store-bought, so there's less room for original stamp art.
Yesterday, 3 October, Karl Erickson and I found the letterbox "Great Moments in History: June 8, 1959", placed by Green Tortuga on 16 September 2004 in Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park. The letterbox had been there about three weeks, but we were the first finders. Woot! Too bad there wasn't a first-finder certificate!
As you can see if you follow the link, this is a box with a puzzle clue. I didn't find the puzzle difficult, but I had the right tool for the job. (No, I shan't tell you what that tool was.) However, if Green Tortuga is who I think he is, his letterboxes are reputed to be fiendishly difficult, so I guess it's no surprise it took so long to be found.
Karl picked me up around 10, but we didn't get to the park until 12 pm. Truly, we had a harder time finding the trail itself than finding the box once we were on the trail. The hike was lovely. This small field of flowers at the starting point was lovely in the noon sun:
The starting point: nothing but flowers
Not too far up the trail, we came across this gnarled, mutant, hollow tree, surrounded by huge mushrooms, where I would have hidden a letterbox if I had one to hide. But it wasn't our destination.
Where the letterbox should have been hidden
Eventually, I located the landmark and Karl found the letterbox when we got there. (I was poking around with my walking stick, wary of snakes. I might have found it if I had rooted around with my hands, but Karl was braver.) Karl snapped this photo of me:
A great moment in history: Ron, flushed with triumph
The stamp was really nice! You might say it was a commemorative stamp. Thanks, Green Tortuga! It really would have benefited from my using multiple colours instead of my standard black. I may start carrying around markers now.
On the way back to the car, I discovered that I had lost my compass. Since my camera had dropped out of my pocket when I sat down to stamp the letterbox, I figured my compass might have too. Light-footed Karl offered to zip back to the landmark to see if he could find it. He couldn't. So much for "take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints".
Hi, I'm Karl, and I don't have your compass.
The whole hike took about an hour, and when we returned, Karl and I made a slight detour to a scenic vista. The day was foggy and everything looked soft and perfect.
After we got back to my house, Karl and I hung out with Marty for a while, looking over a new game system I am reviewing called Trillõn and its rulebook. Karl eventually went home, and Marty and I went out in search of Sid Sackson's posthumously-published game BuyWord. No luck with that, but I did pick up another compass like the one I lost. This time I bought a lanyard for it.
Entered 14:18 [/games/letterboxing] permalink
THE ETERNAL TWINS
Taking fun
as simply fun
and earnestness
in earnest
shows how thoroughly
thou none
of the two
discernest.
--Piet Hein
Entered 02:10 [/games/ludism] permalink
Just as Kendo can be a meditative discipline, so can, uh, Zendo. Or almost any game. We have the Inner Game of Tennis; why not the Inner Game of Hearts?
Of course, people have known this about Go for a long time. In principle, it applies to Chess as well, although in practice it seems to have the opposite effect.
Entered 12:22 [/games/ludism] permalink
The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser
See also Permutation City.
Entered 12:20 [/culture/commonplace_book] permalink
Gandhi and Bertie agree to disagree
My effort should never be to undermine another's faith but to make him a better follower of his own faith.
--Gandhi
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
--Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1944-1969, pp. 71-2
Entered 13:33 [/culture/commonplace_book] permalink
Before I set out to find the REI Flagship letterbox (see below), I went in search of the Emerald City virtual letterbox by Mischief.
A virtual letterbox is one in which not only the clues but also the goal or treasure are all online. Emerald City has a nice treasure at the end of the trail, and the clue is clever and cute. An interesting experience -- you feel as though you are looking for a "real" letterbox. A quick, fun diversion. Recommended.
Entered 13:37 [/games/letterboxing] permalink
My first letterbox: REI Flagship
I've recently taken up a sport called letterboxing. It's a treasure hunt in which you decipher clues (in the U.S., usually from the Web), then hike to a hidden weatherproof box (the "letterbox") containing a unique, handmade rubber stamp. You stamp your logbook with the letterbox's stamp, and stamp the letterbox's logbook with your stamp.
For my personal stamp, I had wanted to do a graphic with a dog on it, because I love dogs and regard them as my totem animal. (Yes, I know that having a domesticated animal as a totem is... unorthodox. But you know, you don't pick your totem; it picks you.) My "letterboxing name" is related to dogs, and in fact, I am planning to take my dogs on letterbox hikes whenever it's permissible (many letterboxes are in city parks, where regulations about dogs vary).
Two nights ago, I spent a lot of time trying to draw a recognisable dog that somehow expressed my personality, but when I awoke yesterday morning, it had come to me that my stamp should show Anubis, so after buying the materials, last night I carved a rubber stamp bearing the image of Anubis (and my monogram -- see above).
Unfortunately, neither my skills nor my tools were up to the task of carving this computer graphic onto the stamp material. I'm told that the result is pretty good for a beginner, but eventually I decided to use a large version of my monogram (the sigil in the lower left of the stamp image). Too bad. I'll try my hand at another Anubis stamp (without my monogram) later.
Now, letterboxing is sort of like geocaching, but you don't need a GPS unit; the highest tech a letterboxer needs on the trail is a compass. But he does need a compass. Stewart Brand (who doesn't letterbox, as far as I know) recommends the Brunton Classic 9020G as a good, cheap, general-purpose model. It turned out that REI, an outdoor-goods co-op based in Seattle, carried this item, so I decided to go buy it and make my first letterbox the REI Flagship Letterbox. My friend Kisa and I went into the store, bought my compass and a few other things such as Nalgene bottle splash guards, gawked at the local sights (an indoor climbing pinnacle among them), and then followed the directions to the letterbox in the vicinity.
We got a little lost, because we didn't avail ourselves of the compass I had just bought, thinking we had spotted a short cut. We ended up poking around the whole area for the landmark where the letterbox was hidden. Kisa finally spotted the landmark, and I retrieved the letterbox and took it to his car, out of public view, where I did all the stamping and paging through the letterbox logbook. Then I hid the box again. Great fun, and I already have some ideas for my own letterboxes, which will be connected to my other gaming interests.
On the way home, I pulled out my logbook to admire the handsome new stamp, and Kisa said, "Look! A rainbow!" I glanced up and just then the CD player played a line from the Jethro Tull song, "Rover", from the album Heavy Horses: "The long road is a rainbow and the pot of gold lies there." Kisa shouted in surprise, and when I went home, I looked up the lyrics to "Rover". Here they are:
Rover
I chase your every footstep
and I follow every whim.
When you call the tune I'm ready
to strike up the battle hymn.
My lady of the meadows
My comber of the beach
You've thrown the stick for your dog's trick
but it's floating out of reach.
The long road is a rainbow and the pot of gold lies there.
So slip the chain and I'm off again
You'll find me everywhere. I'm a Rover.As the robin craves the summer
to hide his smock of red,
I need the pillow of your hair
in which to hide my head.
I'm simple in my sadness,
resourceful in remorse.
Then I'm down straining at the lead
holding on a windward course.Strip me from the bundle
of balloons at every fair:
colourful and carefree
Designed to make you stare.
But I'm lost and I'm losing
the thread that holds me down.
And I'm up hot and rising
in the lights of every town.
I find this a remarkably textured synchronicity: the dog connection, the treasure-hunting and wanderlust imagery, and of course the rainbow. An auspicious start?
Howdy, Anubis! See you on the trails.
Entered 00:09 [/games/letterboxing] permalink
Donald Norman, Le ShorDurPerSav du Mois
Donald Norman wrote a book called The Design of Everyday Things, a.k.a. The Psychology of Everyday Things, a.k.a. POET. I brought POET home tonight and showed it to Marty, announcing, "This will be your new god!" Marty is a technical editor by trade and user interface design critic by avocation, and recently described herself as a "professional stickler".
Of course, she's already started finding things wrong with the book.
Entered 23:11 [/personal/shordurpersavs] permalink
As I mentioned, I was a guest of honor at the Dragonflight XXV gaming convention at Seattle University, from Friday, 13 August 2004 through Sunday, 15 August.
I made a lot of friends at Dragonflight. I haven't been to many gaming cons before, and so making so many new friends was a serendipitous benefit, probably the most important one I experienced.
Lots of people gave me business cards. I have business cards too, but I want my gamer friends to call me at home. What I need is a "pleasure card" of the sort Richard Stallman gives out, to hook people up with my various projects through the Center for Ludic Synergy and elsewhere.
Here are a couple of other items that may be interesting:
I've already described the events I would be hosting at the convention, as I envisioned them. How they actually came out is described below.
Marty and I wake up, exhausted from packing the night before, and run around on last-minute errands such as photocopying seminar materials and buying microcassettes and dry-erase markers. It's crazy. Our nerves are worn thin at the synapses, but we still manage to make it to Dragonflight an hour before I am supposed to give my first seminar.
There is only time to register partially (pick up my "special guest" badge and so on) before the Ludism seminar starts. Marty parks the car and I bring in the necessities for the seminar and the Cosmic Pig session, which starts soon after.
Marty and I sit and wait in the fifth-floor lounge where the Ludism seminar is supposed to be. No one shows. It turns out there's been a schedule screwup: the scheduling guy allegedly got into a fight with the other Dragonflight staff and quit the week before the convention. The new program has outdated information: the times and places for this seminar and my Game Systems 1 session on Sunday are reversed. According to the schedule, I am now supposed to be in the ballroom, giving Game Systems 1. Marty suggests I go down to the ballroom and place a notice at my table informing people of the "schedule change". I quickly do so.
More problems become apparent: all of my other seminars and game sessions also have old information in the program, including promotional copy garnered by the organisers from the Glass Bead Game wiki and elsewhere, even having embedded WikiNames in the text, WhichLookLikeNonsense if you're NotOnAWiki. Also also, my bio doesn't appear in the program itself, but on an errata sheet. Also also also, the whiteboard I need for my seminars has been lost....
Ah, well. I try to be Stoic. I had told myself I would count the seminar as a success even if no one showed up, because (among other reasons) I had to prepare an outline for it, which I can turn into an article. Meanwhile, I use the time available to prepare for my Cosmic Pig session, which starts at 7:00.
I return to the ballroom, and prepare for CP by cutting out and sleeving the spiffy Cosmic Pig Edicts that Marty drew up, and mixing them with the regular Cosmic Encounter cards. Marty amuses herself by watching a game of Princes of Florence, the convention staff play The Waltons board game (long story), and Thread Impressions make her hat (see below).
I have brought four Hasbro/Avalon Hill edition sets of Cosmic Encounter, and enough Cosmic Pig Edicts for all four copies, so I am prepared for up to 16 people to play Cosmic Pig. This is my Cosmic Encounter variant based in the game in the juvenile SF novel Interstellar Pig by William Sleator, which I (and a number of other people) strongly suspect is influenced by Cosmic Encounter. In all, we have 8 players, including myself -- enough for two full H/AH games.
The players of Cosmic Pig Game 1 are an interesting guy named Eugene, another person I'll refer to as Rude Boy, and two other people. They start off cool toward Cosmic Pig and grow more enthusiastic as they play. Eugene is an experienced CE player, and expresses skepticism that Cosmic Encounter is a strategic game. I protest, and it gets me thinking. (But more on this later.) Rude Boy is an older man with a boyish demeanor who can't restrain his indignance when I don't remember the finer points of the Hasbro/Avalon Hill edition of CE. For example, I can't remember whether you lose your alien power when you're down to two home bases or only one. (When Seattle Cosmic plays with our "monster" set, we usually use two powers each. When you're down to two bases, you lose one power of your choice; when you're down to one base, you lose both powers.) Looking back, Rude Boy was atypical of the gamers I met at Dragonflight, who were almost to a person polite, friendly, and community-minded. But R.B. eventually settles down, and the players in Game 1 have a good time, with lots of laughter.
Game 2 starts off enthusiastic about Cosmic Pig (and Interstellar Pig) and cools off. It consists of myself, Brett Lentz (a Seattle Cosmic irregular), his SO Sara, and her brother Izzy. Sara and Izzy have visited SC once or twice as well. Izzy is an experienced CE player and helps with rule clarifications, for which I am grateful.
Eugene wins Game 1 when a Piggy Challenge happens near the end of the game and he manages to hold onto it until the "timer" goes off. In Game 2, we don't have any Piggy Challenges, but we know where The Piggy is. I grab The Piggy from its envelope with Four-Dimensional Waldoes near the end, lose it in a challenge, and get it back as consolation by playing a Negotiate (Compromise) card. Izzy, however, manages to obtain the Piggy-Befriending Device in the same way. The Piggy-Befriending Device alters the win condition to maximum number of bases. Izzy has 10 bases (edging out Brett by one base, I believe), so he wins. (I have something like 3 bases, including home bases.)
Cosmic Pig is much better playtested, and the new rules draft should be available when you read this. (Dragonflight was the first playtest with the new Edicts and rules.)
I finish registering and haul the rest of my stuff in from the car to my dorm room. I go back to the ballroom and hang out with some other Seattle Cosmic members. I select the design and colors for an SC logo hat, which will be done by the next morning.
Afterwards, a vendor (Bill from Wizards Toy Chest [sic] in Portland), lends me his demo copy of Trillõn (pronounced "Trillion", I assume), a new game system by the company Gamepeace in Utah (I have already been expecting a review copy of Trillõn in the mail). It looks even more interesting than I had hoped, and I plan to describe it soon in one of my upcoming game systems articles. Bill promises he will demo a few Trillõn games at my Game Systems 1 session Sunday, and puts up one of my posters in his booth.
I've had a long day, or what seems like one. I kiss Marty goodnight (she is driving home every night to take care of our dogs) and return to my room. I take a cold shower (no air conditioning, so the dorms are hot in mid-August), and listen to BBC World News. I think about Eugene's claim that Cosmic Encounter is not a strategic game. I was the second-best CE player in Seattle Cosmic the last time we bothered to keep track, so I have some strong opinions that Cosmic can be a very strategic game. I decide I'll write an article about it, and start enumerating some CE strategies before I finally go to bed.
I wake up and immediately begin thinking about my Cosmic Encounter strategy article. I call my friend John Braley, the number one Cosmic player at Seattle Cosmic, and ask him to collaborate on the article. He agrees.
I go downstairs to the ballroom (really more like a cafeteria) for brunch. I pick up my new Seattle Cosmic hat from Thread Impressions. It looks beautiful. I don't normally wear baseball caps, but half the heads seem to be sporting one here, so none will care it's considered déclassé by the mundanes. My cap and I are inseparable for the rest of the weekend. Its design is similar to the logo below, except that the pawn is green and the orbital ring is a solid yellow, with the words set off to the right in green and yellow. Marty bought a similar cap, but in pink and silver.
I run across a new game called ChessHeads. It looks as though someone has tried to turn Knightmare Chess into a collectible card game. I shudder and set it down.
I also meet a fellow named Jeff Wilcox of Curious Games. He designed the game Phantasy Realm, which I have played once and won. I enjoyed it even though it is not really my style of game. Jeff also designed the satirical TRPG: The Role-Playing Game, which we give out as prizes at game night. A nice guy, Jeff. He wants to attend EGGS, our game design group, time permitting. (More info below.)
After meeting Jeff, I buy a pair of Average Dice from a vendor. An Average Die is a six-sided die bearing the following numbers: 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5 -- no 1 or 6. Apart from my hat, they are the only game-related items I buy all weekend. Sadly, the vendor doesn't have any Extreme Dice (1, 1, 2, 5, 6, 6).
After my stroll around the vendors area, I sit down to eat brunch and go through my notes for the Glass Bead Game talk. A fellow named Aaron Nabil-Eastlund spots me and chats with me about the upcoming Monster Cosmic game. Aaron is an experienced Cosmic player, and it's his contention that the manifold expansions we'll be using tonight were produced by Eon solely to make money, and actually detract from the purity of the game, making a kind of "strategic soup" (my words, not Aaron's), so he probably won't be playing. I invite Aaron to collaborate on the CE strategy article (because he does think that in a stripped-down game, there is plenty of strategy). Maybe!
Besides sharing a taste in gaming, Aaron and I have a mutual friend: Dave Howell (who co-designed the Seattle Cosmic logo). We also both have hyphenated surnames. Hyphenees against the world!
I'm realising as I Google for Aaron's home page that Aaron probably joined the seattle-cosmic mailing list at one point -- Aaron, or someone else equally interested in robotics. Come to a game night, Aaron!
Fortunately, the convention staff have finally managed to locate the whiteboard, so I give my Glass Bead Game seminar, using the whiteboard for a kind of "chalk talk". I work from loose 3x5" cards with graphic images of the things I want to talk about, as recommended by Mark Twain, since I figure the iconic quality of a chalk talk will add to the glass-bead-gaminess of my presentation (iconicity being one of the pillars of the Glass Bead Game. Naturally, I am not as accomplished an impromptu speaker as Mark Twain, so I make a hash of the talk (according to Marty, later). Nevertheless, I seem to get something across, because, of the five people attending (five times as many as I expected), only one leaves early, and the rest stay late to toss ideas around. Most of the attendees indicate they will enter the Kenning Haiku competition I announce. I now reckon about a half-dozen people are planning to enter this Glass Bead Game competition, which is as many as actually entered the first piecepack competition, so we're off to a good start.
Of the people who stick around, one is Marty, one is Aaron Nabil-Eastlund, and there are two new people, Patric Rogers and Mac McKinlay.
Aaron is politely interested in my Glass Bead Game playable variant Kennexions, but is fairly critical of one aspect of it. Later, I realise we were miscommunicating. Fortunately, I have the chance to explain this to him (see below).
Patric Rogers [sic] comes to the seminar a bit late but catches up fairly fast. He is an interesting guy: politically active and sporting several GEEK buttons (Gamers to Enthusiastically Elect Kerry). He is very interested in Kennexions.
Mac MacKinlay is also very interested. Helpfully, he seems to have a background in poetry and mythology. For example, he recognised that kenning analogies are a kind of proportion, and suggested some improvements to mine (for example, he thinks that "flower" in the Norse Language Game should really be "seed"). Sharp!
All three stay and talk. They seem likely to collaborate on Kennexions, and I feel I could be good friends with any of them regardless. I plan to stay in touch.
Mac follows me down to the Monster Cosmic Encounter game, which is billed as being able to hold 10 or more players. There are seven people ticketed, which is more than a CE game can usually hold, but two of them, a father and a pre-teen son, ditch because the son is a CE newbie. We end up with five players, because I sit out to referee and explain rules in a nonpartisan way. The father and son might as well have stayed, because one of the remaining players is a 10-year-old girl who has only played twice, and I end up setting up the game and explaining the rules for something like an hour and a half. We're using tons of expansions, both commercial and off the Internet: not only Lucre, Moons, double powers, and Reverse Hexes, but also War cards, Internet Edicts, and so on.
The overall visual effect on onlookers, of whom there are plenty, is much like the photo below, taken of a slightly younger version of the same set from a Seattle Cosmic newsletter of 12 August 2000.
Everyone seems to have fun. One of the better players, Edward, tells me afterwards, "I had a blast". That's great! The only serious contender, however, is Mac McKinlay, who focuses hard, plans, and spreads (as the alien Disease) from toehold to toehold in the girl's reverse hex, which is a ringed planet and offers plenty of spaces to expand in the rings. I call Mac "Mac the Knife" because he's such a shark. I'm guessing he hears that a lot, because he kicks Marty's ass the next day in a game of Age of Renaissance.
After the game, a gamer named Jeffrey Field and his friend stop by to chat about Cosmic. He says he enjoyed watching our game, and seems impressed by the PostScript graphics for the reverse hexes and so on. I explain they are available as PDF files from the CE download area here on Ludism.org. Jeffrey says he is an old-timey Cosmic Encounter player who used to write CE expansions for The Space Gamer back in the 1980s. (I should have asked which ones!) He is interested in finding out about the growth of Cosmic after Eon stopped publishing it, and asks about the Mayfair counterpart to Eon's newsletter, Encounter. I tell him that Mike Arms, with whom I corresponded briefly, is the man to talk to. Before he goes, Jeffrey mentions something about Cosmic Settlers, which is some weird hybrid of Cosmic Encounter and The Settlers of Catan. Have to track that one down...
After Jeffrey leaves, I catch up with Aaron Nabil-Eastlund, who made some odd remarks during the Glass Bead Game talk that I suddenly realise were a serious miscommunication. I had been talking about every game object in the Kennexions archive having a UUID (universally-unique identifier number). Aaron thought I just meant spelling out the names of game objects in hexadecimal ASCII, and thought this was a rather pointless "encoding" as opposed to a completely different "representation", which might be more interesting. I explain to Aaron when I run into him that the UUID is algorithmically generated. It's a kind of index into the database and isn't just a "spelling-out" of the object's name. The whole thing is a misunderstanding due to my rather clumsily describing a bracelet Marty made for my birthday that spells out "glasperlenspiel" ("glass bead game" in German) using glass beads in a binary ASCII pattern, which doesn't really have much to do with Kennexions, but is a clever and fun attempt to translate language into object.
Aaron says somewhat enthusiastically that he has been thinking on and off about ways to improve gismu glyphs. However, he objects to making Lojban strings the "canonical" form of Kennexions games. "What about Hawaiian?" he says. "I know some things you can say in Hawaiian that you can hardly say in other languages. Why make everything Lojban?" I tell him about Lojban's "metalinguistic quoting" features, which enable a speaker to incorporate an arbitrary amount of text or speech in any other language into a Lojban string. It's as if Lojban has built-in HTML tags, thus:
Atom
<hawaiian> ... </hawaiian>
Aaron finds this amusing, and we promise to keep in touch.
By the way, you don't need to know all this technical stuff to enter the Kenning Haiku Competition. It's meant to be simple and easy to get started with, and you can email me if you have any questions at all.
I find Nat Dupree and Marty playing light games with Victoria Osborne, the former top-ranked female Magic: the Gathering player.
I beat her at Bucket King, despite her drawing five cards toward the end of the game because she kept forgetting. (Illegal, but she pleaded newbiehood.) I feel pretty good about this, even though Bucket King's only marginally more strategic than Loopin' Louie (and involves more chickens)....
After Bucket King, we sit and talk with Victoria about her views on the differences between the tournament mentality and social play, and between male and female gamers. I'm not sure I agree with all of her conclusions (Marty doesn't either), but it is an enlightening viewpoint from Someone Who's Been There.
I kiss Marty goodnight, and retire to my room to write up my observations for the day and listen to BBC World Service again.
I get up and prepare for Game Systems 1 and 2. I lug down the Big Box O' Game Systems (I portaged a ludicrous number of them with me to the con). The crowd in the ballroom has shrunk by almost an order of magnitude. Most people came for Saturday and then left. The cafeteria staff are packing up, so I quickly buy half a dozen Balance bars for my daily bread.
Game Systems 1 is lightly attended, but I do get a few people. One gamer, Danny Goodisman, is attracted by the new Abacus edition of Das Spiel. Danny has the 1980s edition, which he picked up on a trip through Germany. Danny and I play a game of Rasanto with the new set, then realise that the new edition doesn't have enough dice in just two colours to fill the pyramid.
We fill the rest of the pyramid randomly with the third colour and are joined by a new player. Danny teaches us a quick game to take down the pyramid. He doesn't remember what it's called, but it involves rolling a die, then looking at the pyramid from one direction and taking only the free dice that have that number facing you. I quickly realise it's a game of pure chance, and Danny points out that elements of skill and dexterity could be added with a short timer. I still haven't found out what this game is called or even if it's in the Das Spiel rulebook, so I'm going to call it "One-Player Raffzahn".
After we destroy the pyramid, I teach my new buddies how to play Domino Rasanto. This is my favourite Das Spiel game. It's a kind of highly-strategic, three-dimensional dominoes -- a true bridge between dominoes and dice. The rules in the available English translation are unclear, so I wrote my own version of the rules, which I plan to post soon.
The third guy leaves, and Danny I hang out and talk. Danny has designed both abstract and Cheapass-style games. He is currently working on one of the latter. The theme is brilliant. It's historical and rife with dark comedy. I wish I could tell you more about it, but the theme has never been done before to my knowledge, and it's so perfect that I literally don't want to give the game away.
I invite Danny to join EGGS (Experimental Game Genesis of Seattle), and he says he wants to very much, especially after I explain that at EGGS we don't just give encouragement and back-patting, but gritty criticism and suggestions for improvement. I make a few suggestions about fine-tuning his new game's theme as an example of the kind of feedback we give in the group.
Danny is one of the people I connect with the most at the con, and I think we can be good friends.
Sadly, Bill from Wizards Toy Chest, who was going to demo Trillõn, never shows up to Game Systems 1. He goes out for lunch and gets lost. By the time he returns, people are packing up.
By this point, most people have left, and Danny is making arrangements for transportation, so the piecepack session never really happens. Knowing Danny's penchant for designing Cheapass-style games, I show him the rules to our game KidSprout Jumboree, which he enjoys.
Danny leaves. Marty is wrapping up her Age of Renaissance game, and I start getting ready to go myself. I pack up to go home much more systematically than I did to come to Dragonflight -- after all, I have a finite number of things to take home, but I had potentially the entire game-related contents of my house to bring.
I manage to get everything into four pieces of luggage. I also get to hear Ursula Le Guin talking about utopian fiction on Studio 360 while I am packing. What luck! The interviewer literally doesn't know a utopia from a dystopia, but Ursula sets him straight. You go, Ursula!
Marty is playing a pickup game of Lunch Money that she says will only take 10 or 15 minutes. I get the car ready and check out. It develops that Marty's Lunch Money game is being played with all kinds of expansions and takes more like 90 minutes. I have nothing else to do, so I hang out in the lobby and watch Big Trouble in Little China. Then I use the con's computers to check my wikis for activity. It turns out someone has been repetitively spamming them, but the wiki users have been mostly foiling the spam by reverting the changes minutes after the spammer makes them. I had planned to ask someone to be a wiki babysitter while I was away, but I didn't really need to. Ghod, I love the Internet. (Not the spammers, though.)
Home! Home! Home!
I drink deep of sleep.
I am surprised by how energising and positive an experience Dragonflight was for me, despite some initial problems, spotty attendance, and my usual dislike of crowds. I actually came home charged enough on Sunday that I felt I could go into work the next day, sleep deficit or no. I'll certainly be attending next year although the chances I'll be a guest of honor again are negligible, and I even surprised myself by contemplating going to GameStorm.
See you next year, or sooner!
Entered 22:24 [/games/events] permalink
The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
--"Happy Thought", A Child's Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
--Eden Phillpotts
Entered 07:15 [/culture/commonplace_book] permalink
This is the kind of thing you'll like...
if you like this kind of thing.
Entered 12:27 [/games/gbg] permalink
I have turned off comments, writebacks, and trackbacks. Nobody was using them but black-market pharmaceutical spammers anyway.
To the spammers: fuck you, and the whores you rode in on, and the whores your whores rode in on, yea, unto the seventh generation.
Incidentally, now that I no longer have to concern myself with blog spam, my enthusiasm for the blog has risen sharply. Today marked my first entry in two and a half months.
Entered 22:00 [/news] permalink
As I mentioned, I'll be a guest of honor at the Dragonflight XXV gaming convention from 13-15 August at Seattle University. Here's a list of events I'll be hosting. Consult the Dragonflight site for scheduling if you want to attend any of these.
Following the list of events is a short bio Marty wrote about me for the convention program.
Philosophy of Games - Not a seminar about game strategy, but about philosophy as it applies to games and gaming. Should we play games? If so, why? Why do people have an innate urge to play? What makes a game good? Can lessons learned in games be used in life, and vice versa? Is life in fact a game? Ron will describe a philosophy of gaming called Ludism, then open the floor to discussion. Remember: it's not the hand you're dealt, but how you play it.
The Glass Bead Game - Is it a game disguised as an artform, or an artform disguised as a game? Come learn about the many "playable variants" inspired by Hermann Hesse's Nobel-Prize-winning SF novel, The Glass Bead Game. Connecting everything to everything else, the GBG plays "with the total contents and values of our culture... as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette." Ron will give a talk with handouts, demonstrate his own gameform, and announce a contest.
Cosmic Pig - Ron will teach people how to play his Cosmic Encounter variant based on the cult SF novel Interstellar Pig by William Sleator. Multiple Cosmic Encounter sets will be available for play.
Monster Cosmic Encounter - One giant Cosmic Encounter game with 10 or more players and tons of non-standard expansions. (Ticketed.)
Game Systems - A game system is a set of components that function together in multiple games. The standard deck of playing cards is a well-known game system. Come play some of the oddball game systems mentioned in Ron's articles on this subject for The Games Journal, and some he hasn't written about yet.
Piecepack Games - The piecepack is a relatively new but increasingly popular game system. Come learn several piecepack games, including some of the award-winning games designed by Ron and his wife Marty.
Ron Hale-Evans has been an avid board gamer since 1978, when he received Cosmic Encounter as a Christmas present at the age of 13. Since then, his pursuit and development of a ludic philosophy has led him through many game-related adventures and areas of study.
In the late '80s, Ron and his college game group Y Nomic created a game of Nomic that lasted 2-1/2 years. Ron also encountered Hermann Hesse's book The Glass Bead Game in college, and began to study it seriously in 1995, leading to his work with the Bamboo Garden GBG workshop in Seattle and the development of his game form, Kennexions.
More recently, Ron has added his work with the piecepack game system; aside from writing about and promoting the piecepack, Ron has authored six games for it (most with his wife Marty) including the winner of the first piecepack game design competition. Ron also writes a respected ongoing series of articles on game systems for The Games Journal.
Ron and Marty started Seattle Cosmic Game Night in January 2000, which began as a way for Ron to play more Cosmic Encounter and has grown into a vigorous local gaming group that meets weekly to play and discuss a wide variety of new and old games.
For more information about Ron, see his webpage at http://ron.ludism.org and/or his blog at http://ron.ludism.org/annex.
Entered 21:48 [/games/events] permalink
Two Sunday Sixes (missed last week's). In blog order:
GOH!: The big news this week, at least for me, is that I will be Guest of Honor at the 25th anniversary of Dragonflight, a Seattle-area gaming convention at which, I am told, attendance tends to be around 700 people (maybe more this year because of the anniversary -- here's hoping). I've been asked to give some seminars, especially on the philosophy of gaming, but also on whatever suits my fancy, and to host some gaming sessions for Cosmic Encounter (the signature game of my game group, Seattle Cosmic), and the piecepack games Marty and I designed. So right now I'm planning three seminars: the philosophy of gaming; game systems; and the Glass Bead Game. I intend to run one monster Cosmic game with 10 people or more, and to run another session with multiple games of Cosmic Pig, the Cosmic Encounter variant I designed based on the SF novel Interstellar Pig by William Sleator. And finally I intend to run one long game session focusing on piecepack games: not only ones designed by me and Marty, although I will encourage people to play those, but also the piecepack game design competition winners, the games that have proved most popular, and my personal favourites.
Receiving this attention has been very pleasant, and attending the con will probably be even more so, but that does not mean they are good things. If I start believing my own press (something against which Marty often warns me), it might prove better I had stayed home.
Still, I was flabbergasted to receive the invitation to be Guest of Honour. I just hope it doesn't turn out to be some cruel joke, like when they sent Harvey Birdman to prison for five years as a 40th birthday gag.
Dangerous Curves: Marty hasn't been without her slice of fame, either. Friday night, she performed (as one of "The Willies") a new song about the Venus of Willendorf written by one of her friends. She appeared at Dangerous Curves, a benefit for several local size-positive organisations. She also appeared in a fashion show at the benefit, and looked mighty cute, receiving whoops from the audience.
My two favourite acts at Dangerous Curves were Teri Ciacchi, who read a couple of prose pieces, one of them about the erotic life of dirty spoons (her book sold out, alas), and Zan Scommodau of http://www.raddykeplumber.com/, who read some, er, wrenching poetry. (She almost got a standing ovation.) In fact, I liked all the rest of the acts, except one dull one. It was a high-energy event, and I came away wired. My sleep cycle was screwed for the rest of the weekend.
Calliagnosia: Speaking of size-positivity, I recently turned my friend Karl Erickson on to the work of SF writer Ted Chiang. Chiang has only published eight short stories since he was first published in 1990, but he has won every major SF award. If I had to describe Chiang's work in one word, I would say "Eganesque" (which ought to be enough to make you salivate), but that doesn't do him justice: Chiang has experimented with "hard fantasy" stories in a way that Egan's overactive superego would never let him.
One of my favourite Chiang stories is "Liking What You See: A Documentary", written for his book Stories of Your Life and Others, which collects all of his published work. In this story, Chiang introduces the concept of calliagnosia, which is to looksism what colourblindness is to racism; in other words, calliagnosia is a deliberate choice not to distinguish between beautiful and ugly people. In the story, this beauty-blindness can be technologically induced, and the "documentary" follows the political debate on a college campus where some people want to make calliagnosia a requirement for attendance. Brilliant.
Look for a Calliagnosia page soon on the SeaFATtle wiki.
Anatomy of Melancholy: Project Gutenberg just posted an etext version of the Anatomy of Melancholy. It's beautifully done, and reading it on my PDA inspired me to break out my New York Review Books edition, which weighs about as much as the computer on which I'm writing this. Fun to annotate (I feel so marginalised), and a real blessing if one is depressed. I have been for a month or two now, for the first time in years, but I've slowly been getting control over the depression, and that gaining feeling of mastery is one of the things keeping me going, keeping going.
Dice Decks: I scored two copies of the Dice Deck game system on eBay this week. This is the penultimate item I needed for the fifth article in my game systems series, and therefore the antepenultimate requirement for me to dominate the world.
What's that, Marty? Oh, yeah. "Don't believe your own press."
Gismu Glyphs: Finally, thanks to a fortuitous confluence of Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics and my friend Dave Howell's explanation of how the Korean syllabary Hangul works, I have finally devised a way to create glyphs for Kennexions that will replace my intended use of Blissymbolics. Blissymbolics broke my heart when I found they are copyrighted and non-free (as in non-freedom). The new glyphs are basically a form of concrete poetry based on Lojban gismu and rafsi words. Marty drew the first one ever, which makes the Lojban word ger (short for gerku, dog) literally look like a dog. I immediately drew glyphs for na'i (wing) and xanto (elephant), so that I could draw the compound word for Winged Elephant using the new glyphs. She liked 'em.
I'm without access to a scanner or a graphics tablet at the moment, but I plan to post a page about the new concrete poetry logograms on the Glass Bead Game Wiki.
This is not the big Kennexions news, by the way. Keep tuning in.
Surgery? OK!: The best news this week was that Marty came through surgery without too many problems. It was fairly minor surgery, or should have been, but Marty has health problems that make general anesthesia risky, and she took a relatively long time to recover from it -- normally, she would have left the hospital around 4:00 or 5:00 PM, but she was there until around 9:00 while they kept an eye on her, and I had to take the next day off from work to take care of her. In any case, after she shook off the anesthesia, the operation worked, her health has improved overall, and we are glad.
Roaring mice: As our own big bully of a country's belligerent drunken binge careens into the international clink, I have developed a taste for Ruritanian fantasy. I would place the Oz books into this class; also, The Mouse That Roared. I have watched both the movie of this title -- an excellent vehicle for Peter Sellers -- and also the sequel, The Mouse on the Moon, which sucked (and lacked Sellers). Actually, the movies are based on a series of five books of the Grand Fenwick series by Leonard Wibberley:
I have only read the first, which I loved even more than the movie (and which distracted me during Marty's operation), but my friend Dave Howell (who explained Hangul to me, and maintains GrandFenwick.net) says they are "much of a muchness", and his favourite is Wall Street. I got books 3-5 from the library and will read them after I finish up with Oz.
Survival and Goodwill: I got a copy of the much-sought-after board game Survive! at the Kent Goodwill for $1.09 plus tax. Complete, including the extra pieces! I never thought I would see a copy of this one. I brought it to the Weird Games Table of Seattle Cosmic, and it was a hit. I was requested to bring it back, which I will, as soon as I figure out a System.
Liberry: I renewed my library card. It was costly, because I still had books out from before 9/11, but as Anne Herbert said, "Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries." Plus, I fear we may be heading for one of the latter, so I thought I'd better get those library books while the getting was good. And the getting is good, my friends. The borrowing, anyway.
Couple collaboration: Marty told me that she is open to collaborating on Kennexions, which makes me glad. We have reading-aloud time periodically, and I am thinking that the next book I should suggest is The Land of Laughs, with its lovely portrait of a couple collaborating (and its echoes of Oz for good measure). See my earlier post on this book.
Microvacation: Lastly, I had a lull in my work schedule, so I took Friday off and had a long weekend. Mmm, that cool, refreshing, minty taste of leisure.
Entered 07:03 [/personal/friday5] permalink
The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency.
Attributed to Albert Einstein. (Did he really say this? It's good, anyway.)
Entered 06:56 [/culture/commonplace_book] permalink
piecepack publicity: A few nights ago, the July 2004 issue of Games magazine arrived in the mail. I was astonished to discover that the lead article, by W. Eric Martin, is entirely about the piecepack. It's five full pages long and includes a full-colour spread showing a Mesomorph Games 3rd Edition piecepack set. There are interviews with several piecepack notables, the complete rules for a piecepack game, and a solitaire piecepack puzzle. I was initially disappointed that I had not been interviewed for the article, but Eric dropped me a nice note explaining that editors tend to prefer a variety of sources, and since he had interviewed me for his last Games article, he decided to talk to other people this time. Anyway, it's a great article, and very good publicity for the piecepack community. Go out and buy the July 2004 Games right now.
Hot Kennexions action: I've been making headway in my glass bead game Kennexions. I've created a couple of new game compositions and shown them to friends, who were interested enough that they said they wanted to experiment with the form also. Stay tuned to this channel for an important announcement...
Game night: Had a great game night last night; learned Attika, which reminded me of Hex with an extensible board, and got to play Vanished Planet, one of my favourite recent games -- and it's cooperative, too. Yes, we killed the all-devouring space octopus, and we weren't playing at the beginners' level either.
On Beyond Thompson: I finished the last canonical book by Royal Historian of Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson. Since I read them somewhat out of order, the last RPT book I read in the canon was Speedy in Oz, number 28 in the series, which was published in 1934. Hooray. That means I've read all of the Famous Forty through 33, as well as the Jack Snow books (numbers 37 and 38, which are in the public domain and available online). That leaves just five books: 34, 35, 36, 39, and 40. Some of these volumes are collectible; I managed to find copies of 34 and 36, and hope to find the rest soon, even if I have to (oh no) use the library.
Orgazmo: Speaking of the library, I had been wanting to see the movie Orgazmo, by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park, and it was available from the King County Library System (?!), so why not? One of my friends, Greg Dember, says it's his favourite comedy movie. It is actually my least favourite Matt & Trey movie; I enjoyed their other three (South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut; Cannibal: The Musical; and BASEketball) more than this one. Still, it was the fulfillment of a month-long dream.
Friendships: I've been thinking about how to deepen my existing friendships, and how to make some new friends with whom I can have deep relationships too. I spent some time talking about it with Marty, and made some concrete plans. So if you're one of my friends, you have been warned.
Entered 20:17 [/personal/friday5] permalink
New blog features: I've added pubDate tags, comments, trackbacks, and trackback autodiscovery to my blog, in that order. Wouldn't you like to add a comment? Gwan.
Glass Bead Games: The Glass Bead Game Wiki has finally started to take off. In particular, I'm happy to say that Charles Cameron, probably the most prominent GBGer, has started posting there, and is lending the site some of his support (and his considerable Oxbridgian gravitas).
Kennexions: I'm also happy that work on my own Glass Bead Game playable variant, Kennexions, is ramping up again after years of inactivity. I took a detour for several years into general game design; now I want to focus again on Glass Bead Game design, which I have long considered my vocation, however much I neglected it. I guess I'm back in vocational school. More details as I have them.
Air America Radio: Most mornings at work, I tune into the webcast for Air America Radio, the Left's answer to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly. I try to listen to Al Franken's show, the O'Franken Factor every day; since I live on the West Coast, I get it from 9 AM to noon. If I remember, I also listen to some of Janeane Garofalo's show, which starts at 5 PM Pacific, before I leave work. It's good to have a radio alternative that's further left than NPR.
Wicked: Other audio I have enjoyed lately includes the soundtrack to the Broadway hit musical Wicked by Stephen Schwartz. I do think it goes too far in reconstruction of the book Wicked by Gregory Maguire, which is a deconstruction of the Oz books. I haven't seen the show, but going by what I can tell from the soundtrack, the musical is a simple story of revenge, whereas the book has much more moral subtlety. That is, in fact, the point of the book: that there's more going on in Oz than is apparent to the reader of Baum. Still, while Schwartz is no Sondheim, the soundtrack is listenable; the song "Popular", sung by G(a)linda the Good, has become one of my earworms.
Dogs: My dogs are good girls. Enough said.
Entered 11:50 [/personal/friday5] permalink
In a massive effort to roll this blog uphill into the 21st century, I have added the ability to autodiscover TrackBack Ping URLs from links in my blog posts and ping them automatically. This functionality is brought to you courtesy of the autotrack Blosxom plugin. It still won't reping someone who pings me, but I'm not sure I want that functionality anyway. Thanks to Iain Cheyne, who helped me out with my first ping, and Sebastian Banker, whom I've been pestering. If I can only figure out how he got Markdown to work with writeback...
Entered 00:51 [/news] permalink
The Annex now has writebacks, which are a Blosxom combination of comments and trackbacks. In order to get them to work, I've had to move from a date-based permalink system to a category-based system. Unfortunately, this means I can no longer be so cavalier about moving blog entries from category to category; fortunately, all the old date-based permalinks still work.
Try commenting on this post if you want to see how things work.
Entered 07:13 [/news] permalink
In response to a suggestion by Chris Brooks, I have added the <pubDate> tag to the RSS feed for this blog. If your aggregator is at all sensible, it will no longer redisplay every story on the front page of my blog every time I change a stylesheet.
The way to truth was made manifest to me on Lychnis, although the times stated by my feed are PST rather than GMT. Sadly, this means that the times will be an hour off for six months out of every year, including right now (I have to specify either PST or PDT, statically, unless I hack Blosxom), but since roughly 23/24 of the world is in another timezone than Pacific anyway, and doesn't care what my local time is, I guess that doesn't make so much difference.
Thanks, Chris!
Entered 23:50 [/news] permalink
Never look for your work in one place and your progress in another.
--Epictetus, 55 - c. 135 CE, Discourses 1.4.17 [Oldfather Trans.]
Entered 15:12 [/culture/commonplace_book] permalink
Two weeks of Sunday Sixes, first this week's, then last week's.
Beating depression (again): Well, if I have to be depressed, like the Little Moron hitting himself on the head with the hammer, at least I can have the joy of stopping. This time my depression lasted about a week. Perhaps I'm deluding myself, but it seems to me I haven't been that depressed for a couple of years. I guess I can be thankful for that too.
Making the most of a bad economy: Marty and I have discovered two interesting organisations that may help us live well, within our means. The nationwide Freecycle Network enables members to get and give free stuff. It's not a barter list; when you post an offer of a dorm fridge (for example), there must be no strings attached. Similarly, if you want to take the TV or PC someone is offering, you don't need to trade them anything, just email them. Ernest Mann, your dream is coming true via the Internet.
TimeBucks are a national currency redeemable in hours of volunteer work. You get 15 free hours when you join, and after that you need to do some work yourself to pay people to plant your garden or photograph your kid. Just as Marty and I joined Freecycle a little too late to grab that evaporative cooler we were interested in, so the German tutor I contacted via TimeBucks has told me he's moving shortly and can't help me. Still, I'm optimistic that both these orgs will help me and Marty save money, clean out our closets, and meet interesting people to do interesting things.
Public-domain Oz: Speaking of free stuff, I've run out of printed Oz books to read and moved on to ones available on the Web. I found copies of the last five canonical Oz books of Royal Historian Ruth Plumly Thompson, which she let enter the public domain. These are books 29-33 of the 40-book canon; I have read up through 26 in paperback, which means I've only had to skip two books so far due to budgeting. The quality of the RPT etexts available was lower than I like in terms of data entry; nonetheless, I cleaned up the etexts with Emacs, and I hope to make them available soon in Markdown text format and HTML.
I had heard that Thompson's books started dragging toward the end of her run as Royal Historian, but picked up with her final book, Ozoplaning with the Wizard in Oz (33, 1939). This certainly wasn't true of the last book I read, Captain Salt in Oz (30, 1936). I would put it on a level with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, and parts of the book, such as bits of the chapter on the Sea Forest, actually rose to the level of Tolkien in my opinion.
Communicating better: If you're a fan of This American Life, you may have heard the episode a couple of weeks ago on marriage:
The Sanctity of Marriage 3/26 Episode 261 ...
Act One. What Really Happens in Marriage. Ira visits marital researcher John Gottman, who's part of a generation of researchers that have revolutionized the way we see marriage by observing successful and unsuccessful marriages and trying to figure out what the successful happy ones are doing that the ones who end up in divorce are not. Marriage research and links to marriage education programs for couples are online at www.smartmarriages.com. (23 minutes)
This was a great piece. John Gottman is doing research and conducting workshops here in Seattle, but the workshops cost hundreds of dollars. However, following the link given shows that there is an "evidence-based" program called PREP based on the same body of research, and that there's a book called 12 Hours to a Great Marriage that provides the material from the PREP workshops in written form for about $15. ("Evidence-based" is a polite term meaning "scientific, you clothhead, unlike the pap you've been fed by your minister or therapist".)
Marty and I have been doing the exercises. The book has been helping us communicate better and be better friends, and Marty even said she laughed to herself last night when she noticed my using the communication techniques when talking to people at Seattle Cosmic.
Seattle Cosmic: Last night on the way home from game night, I told Marty I was glad we get to hang out with such a great group of people as Seattle Cosmic, and what a privilege it is to have this game group in our life. It's not such a bad life after all, if it has such fellowship.
Living in the PNW: I won't say a group like Seattle Cosmic is only possible in the Pacific Northwest, but this is one of the "gamiest" areas in the country and perhaps the world, with not only many game groups but also many game manufacturers, such as Cheapass Games, Wizards of the Coast, WizKids, and Uberplay, not to mention game stores. And we game with people from some of these companies.
In addition to the PNW's gaminess, consider that
Seattle has one of the largest groups in the Freecycle Network, with over 900 members currently.
Seattle has the biggest TimeBucks group at present, with almost 250 members.
John Gottman, the great marriage researcher from This American Life I mentioned has his lab in Seattle.
A recent survey showed that the PNW is the "most wired" area in the country, beating even Silicon Valley. (When Marty and I heard this on The Screen Savers yesterday, we high-fived and yelled "Represent!")
We're building the Science Fiction Museum!
Maybe ten years from now Seattle will suck. But right now I wouldn't live anywhere else, at least in the US.
Mentat Wiki: As mentioned, I started a new wiki for mnemonics, mental math, etc., which is beginning to take off.
Oz books in the mail: I obtained and devoured three paperback Oz books by Ruth Plumly Thompson: The Yellow Knight of Oz (24, 1930); Pirates in Oz (25, 1931), and The Purple Prince of Oz (26, 1932). Oz, as it says many times in the books, is a fairy country. I guess that explains a few things about the Purple Prince...
Mmm, fresh Moleskine: I filled my first Moleskine notebook and started a fresh one. Yum! I have come to love my Moleskines, but probably not as much as the obsessives at the Moleskinerie. (Won't you please buy a Moleskine from me and keep me blathering for another week? I know someone out there has already bought a few.)
BASEketball: After watching Cannibal: The Musical, an early effort by the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Marty and I ordered BASEketball from Netflix. It was much better than I had hoped, and not as bad as I had feared. We laughed ourselves sick, we did spit takes, we didn't cry, it became a part of us. An inside part. (By the way, BASEketball is not just a movie but an actual sport, with rules, and if I'm lucky, I'll get to play it one day.)
Not cracked!: Some dumb Brazilian kid, or someone who likes to telnet to Brazil, has been nosing around my machine lately. The day after his latest script kiddying, I had trouble connecting to my machine remotely. Fortunately, the problem was just a halfway-installed automatic security upgrade. A Level 3 Diagnostic (as they say) revealed that nothing was cracked. (Of course, one cannot prove a negative.)
A little Paschal blasphemy: A couple of days before Easter, Marty made a pasta casserole that was good enough for Jehovah!. The next day I saw copies of the Jehovah's Witnesses' magazine, Awake, scattered around the bus terminal, and after I got on the bus, I noticed a woman was actually reading an article from one called "God Has a Name!" Marty remarked, "But we're not telling you what it is!"
Bog bless us, every one.
Entered 13:31 [/personal/friday5] permalink
I created a Mentat Wiki last night, and it is already blossoming, thanks to illustrious contributors like Lion Kimbro and Ian Docherty. Here is some text from the front page:
This site is a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker. Topics to be explored on this wiki include MemoryTechniques, MentalMath, CriticalThinking, BrainStorming, ShorthandSystems, NotebookSystems, and possibly SmartDrugs. Other relevant topics are also welcome. How have you made yourself smarter?
The word mentat comes from Frank Herbert's Dune novels, and refers to a person who undergoes special training to become a "human computer" in a society where computers are taboo. Although computers are not a taboo subject on this wiki (you're soaking in them!), augmentation of the human brain by computer is not generally a topic of interest; that information should be delegated to a Transhumanist wiki, except where the computer is used for training (example: drilling on the pegs in a PegSystem).
Because this site is a WikiWikiWeb, every page on the site is editable by everyone. You can edit any page by clicking the EditText link at the bottom of the page or the word balloon in its upper right corner. Capitalized words joined together form a WikiName, which hyperlinks to another page. Pages that do not yet exist are linked with a question mark: just follow the link and you can add material to it.
Entered 21:09 [/mentat] permalink
Adde parvum parvo manus acervus erit. [Add little to little and there will be a big pile.]
--Ovid, 43 BCE - 17 CE
Entered 02:08 [/culture/commonplace_book] permalink
Marty's milestone: Marty had her 40th birthday this week. She took it calmly, unlike how I took my 30th... I rather improbably found for her a book that was not only a Jane Smiley novel she hadn't read, but also about Kentucky horse country: Horse Heaven (2000). I also bought her Sotheby's Concise Encyclopedia of Glass, and I made her a deck of 3x5" cards redeemable for 33 favours such as shutting up about my latest obsession for the rest of the day, or taking out all the garbage in the house right now. Each favour was worth $10^15 ("a million billion dollars" being the traditional offer for a favour in these parts), so altogether the coupons were worth $3.3 x 10^16 -- the most expensive present I've ever given.
The fam had a big party on Marty Gras Observed, which was Friday, 4 April (Marty's actual birthday is 30 March). Corn dogs and pineapple upside-down cake, yum. People shouldn't worry so much about getting old. Youth is valued in our culture so highly because death is always waiting. When we're emortal, it will be considered much cooler to be 200 years old than to be 20.
Tea brewer: Melinda sent me a belated Santanalia present: a teeli best medium tea-brewing basket. (See photo above.) This is a little stainless steel gizmo that brews loose tea leaves in hot water. We have lots of loose tea at work, and we even have a communal mesh basket, but mine is better, because it's big, it hooks onto a cup instead of dangling from a chain, and it's mine, so I can take it back to my desk and let my tea brew as long as I want.
Work week: Speaking of work, I had a great week. One of my friends there, whom I had thought was avoiding me, turned out just to have been preoccupied. Further, I'm kicking ass on the release notes for the latest release of our Bluetooth protocol stack and profiles. The release notes weren't bad before by any means, but I've come up with a couple of innovations to organise them, add more data to them, and make them more usable and useful. Plus, I've been working on them non-stop. My manager recently said that the release notes are the most important document in a given release, so he's happy with them too.
Revamp at last: I finally completed the revamp of the front page of the Center for Ludic Synergy. Whew.
Weirdly popular: "Weird games" are catching on at Seattle Cosmic. This week, I brought Ploy and Sly back, and other people spontaneously asked to borrow them. We had three "weird games" going at once at one point: the two just mentioned, and Ad Acta, which I brought at my friend Chad's request.
I'm not knocking all that German games have done for the hobby, but there are people who are just snobs about them. I'm working on a gamer filksong called "German Game" to the tune of "Boston Band" by Jim's Big Ego.
Small realisation: I realised that I don't need to constantly take my emotional temperature and "medicalise" my every state of consciousness. If I feel down for five minutes, it does not mean I've plunged into the black tarn of depression again. I might just be in a bad mood.
Maybe now I can be a little less self-absorbed. Stop smirking.
New software: OK, I guess this is a Sunday Seven. I installed Thokbook, which lets me catalog my library just by entering ISBNs. Cool! I'm hoping it will help Marty with her inchoate bookselling business too. I also installed the latest version of Gaim, which is finally working with Yahoo! again, and I got my first taste of BitTorrent. Oh, and Keith Hautala ripped Songs of Couch and Consultation by Katie Lee from my vinyl LP for me.
Anything else? Probably. Busy week.
Ron
Entered 21:46 [/personal/friday5] permalink
Moratics is the study of generalised lines of strategy and tactics in games. For example, the concept of a tactical fork is common to Chess, Checkers, and many other games. I run a mailing list on the subject. My friend Chad Urso McDaniel attempted to revive discussion lately by writing,
Here's an assigment to help people get into the moratics mindset:
Choose any two distinctly different games you play over the next week and post to this list describing a gameplay strategy that you can employ in each. Try to find how this element can be used in each of the games.
My exercise involved two games from Seattle Cosmic last night, Starbase Jeff and Ad Acta.
In Starbase Jeff, "space station contractors" simultaneously play tiles in order to build a space station in the center of the table. Rules summary:
The contractor with the most money at the end wins.
The station starts as a few connected corridors. Some tiles simply extend a corridor, some make it branch, and "end caps" terminate corridors.
Tiles cost a certain base amount to build. This goes into a pot. You must also pay other players $1 for every tile they have between the tile you just played and another one of your tiles (you choose the route, and if you have no other tiles on the board, you pay only the base cost).
If you finish the station by capping the last corridor, you win the pot.
Every tile has a priority. End caps are in the range 0-2, while other tiles have priorities as high as 6 (the more branches, the more costly). The highest tile is Sabotage (7), which destroys one other tile.
Players take turns in descending priority. If two players play cards with the same priority, the cards "bounce" and are saved for the next round. If you have more than one card to play, you may play them in any order.
Dave Howell is a Starbase Jeff shark and won twice in a row against three of us newbies. At the end of the first game, he predicted correctly that I would play a 0 priority end cap and bounced with me, so we each had to save them for the next turn. On the next turn, he was the only player to play a 7 (Sabotage) card, so he went first. Since he could play his cards in any order, he played his end cap from the previous turn and won the pot.
The other game I played last night was Ad Acta. Rules summary:
Players score victory points by filing cards, or "files", in a series of filing cabinets. Every time a cabinet fills up, the cards in it are scored. The game ends either when someone has reached 36 victory points (in which case, she wins), or all cabinets are full, in which case the winner is the player with the most points.
Each filing cabinet has a number from I to VII. Each file has a letter from A to G and a colour that designates who it belongs to. There is also a series of icons along the top of each file that designates which player, or "office", must process the file next. When all of these icons are paperclipped, the file is "finished".
Some filing cabinets are better than others for certain files. For example, Cabinet II might score 7 points (the maximum) for a C file, while Cabinet III might score only 1 point for it (the minimum). Thus, timing is crucial. If you are "aiming" your C file for Cabinet II, you don't want to overshoot and end up placing the file in Cabinet III instead, scoring only 1 point instead of 7.
Each player has an in box and an out box. Tiles are processed from the top of your in box and placed in the top of your out box.
Each player has three action points that let him do things like process the top document in his in box or tell someone else to process the top document in her in box.
The first-player position rotates, and the first player in a round is called the Messenger. After everyone has had a turn, the Messenger places the contents of the out boxes into a delivery cart on the central board, preserving both the order of the files in the out boxes and the order of the out boxes starting with his own.
The Messenger then takes the top document in the cart (the last document processed by the last player). If it is complete (it has been processed by all necessary offices), he places it in the first available filing cabinet. If it is not complete, he sends it to the next office listed on the card, where it is placed on the top of the in box. He does this for each file until the cart is empty.
So, what strategic elements do these games have in common? Superficially, not much. One is about building a nonlinear map of a space station, the other about filing documents in a rigid linear order.
On closer examination, in both games it is important that you insert objects (tiles in Starbase Jeff, cards in Ad Acta) into the right positions in a "data structure" (a first-in first-out (FIFO) queue in Starbase Jeff, a last-in first-out (LIFO) stack in Ad Acta). Both games involve preemption tactics:
In Starbase Jeff, you can preempt another player's tile either by playing a higher tile, in which case you go before they do, or by playing the same value of tile, in which case their attempt to play a tile this turn is completely foiled (if someone else had played a 7 at the same time Dave did, he would not finished the space station and won that turn).
In Ad Acta, you can preempt someone's attempt to get a card into a given filing cabinet by making sure that there are enough completed files after his file in the turn order that they will end up higher in the delivery cart and will go into that cabinet first. For example, it is useful to preempt someone's file with your own if getting your file into that cabinet will score you lots of points, or if the cabinet in question would score your opponent lots of points.
A related concept is what I will call postemption. Sometimes you want other people to go ahead of you.
This might happen in a two-player game of Starbase Jeff when there are two branches left on the space station, and you are fairly sure your opponent will play an end cap. You could try to "sneak in" an end cap with lower priority so that your opponent caps a corridor first, leaving you to cap the remaining corridor and win the pot.
Postemption in Ad Acta might take the form of trying to get into a later file cabinet that is valuable to you by completing one of your files earlier in the turn order.
Or consider Hearts: in Hearts, the cards played in a trick have a notional order: the highest Heart card wins the trick, unless there are no Heart cards, in which case the highest card of the suit led wins. The player with the lead is the person who took the last trick. Sometimes you want to lead, because it gives you better control, so you might preempt the other cards with a higher one. However, if a trick has a lot of Hearts in it, winning it will cost you, so you should generally try to postempt it by "sneaking in" a low card.
Thus, preemption is a somewhat more general version of the concept of trumping, and postemption is its complement. I suggest the backformation of emption for the general concept of inserting a card, tile, or other game object into the right place in an ordered set, to your own advantage.
Note: You can follow this thread from its beginning in the moratics archives, which are open to the public.
Entered 19:52 [/games/moratics] permalink
Beating depression: Had a bout of black depression this week. I guess it wasn't so bad as depression goes; Marty pointed out that I could walk around, and I replied that I didn't want to kill or cut myself either. Still, I've had my depression fairly under control for a number of years now, and getting blindsided is no fun. I found myself sleeping a lot and fighting with Marty for hours with no reason. On the day it broke, the way a fever breaks, Marty left me to myself and I realised what an incredible asshole I had been to people around me. I apologised to her and did what I could to patch things up with everyone else. It looks as if my relationships are on the mend.
Working for the weekend: What's so great about spending your Sunday alone at work? Not much, unless you're doing it because you had very strong personal reasons for taking a day off during the week and it would be irresponsible to take it as a vacation day. Then you swallow hard and remember that being alone at work can be kind of fun. You can crank away at whatever you have to do without constant interruptions from your cow orkers, and if you have speakers (I should have brought Marty's), you can play Web radio as loud as you want. I got to hear the most recent two episodes of On the Media, myself.
Memory palace effects: I'm experimenting with memory palaces, and I found an odd effect, if it was indeed an effect. After putting my to-do list into a memory palace based on my apartment, and then sleeping on it, my dreams were full of it, and I awoke extremely motivated to do some things I had been putting off, such as...
A website revamp: As I mentioned before, the old home page of the Center for Ludic Synergy needs work. It's much too idiosyncratically philosophical and gives people the wrong idea of what I'm about. For example, I recently asked one gamer to contribute his information to the CLS. He read the front page, and asked, "Is it OK if I'm not religious?" Another person wrote me last month to ask me to be her guru. Really! So you see why I'm worried. I also wanted to get all the CLS projects on one page, finally. A revamp of the front page is nearly ready. Meanwhile, my game group Seattle Cosmic has got a new logo, thanks to SC stalwart Dave Howell (see above).
Weird Games Table: The first permanent floating weird games theme table at Seattle Cosmic was a small but definite success. I started it so that the choices of games available to me and others at game night were broadened. This first time, we played Ploy, "Gateway" from Sid Sackson's Sly system, and Hungarian Tarokk. Check the SC wiki if you care.
The Knight: Halfway through The Giant Horse of Oz, book 22 of my first run through the forty canonical Oz books, I lost the book! I had to start reading The Knight (2004) by Gene Wolfe sooner than I had planned to. I finished it tonight. Marty laughed out loud at the jacket blurbs, which essentially said that Wolfe bested Tolkien and entered the realm of Homer. I would like nothing better than to tell you it is true, but it isn't. Wolfe is a great SF writer, and I do think the Book of the New Sun approaches Tolkien, but The Knight doesn't, unless I'm missing something very important -- and one usually does with Wolfe, so take my comments cautiously. Like the Knight himself, The Knight is head and shoulders above its peers, but it's not the best thing Wolfe has ever written, and it's not the best fantasy I have ever read. And sad to say, while Wolfe is far from a one-trick pony, one of his tricks seems to be dazzling you into thinking that he has more tricks than he does. I'm starting to see the bottom of his saddlebag of tricks. He did teach me something about chivalry, though, and that's a very new trick, at least for me.
Now I'm going to reread Wicked by Gregory Maguire, to slake my slakeless thirst for Oziana. I guess we'll have to buy the Broadway cast album soon.
Yawn. Bedtime and I have a headache. I wonder which will win...
Entered 01:33 [/personal/friday5] permalink
I visited Piecepack.org yesterday and saw that at long last, James Kyle's seminal article on the piecepack from Grampa Barmo's Discount Games Magazine has been posted.
I also noticed that you can download beautiful, colourblind-friendly JCD printable piecepacks there now too.
Finally, the piecepack has just made an appearance on MonkeyFilter also.
Entered 14:05 [/games/game_systems] permalink
Markdown: Markdown is a human-readable markup language that can also be parsed by computers. It's really cool! This blog entry is written in Markdown and converted to HTML on the fly.
Productivity: I am making better use of my time lately, getting more writing and game design done. I have had slightly more energy and have been in a slightly better mood. It reminds me of the hypothesis that most people are already living at or above the level of their own cognitive resources, and that so-called "geniuses" have only a little more razzmatazz than the average human being. Therefore, the reasoning goes, if one can raise her own resources just a little bit, she'll cross a threshold and be able to do tremendous things.
Game design: Marty and I started working spontaneously on a second entry to the latest piecepack game design competition. We don't think it has much chance to win, but it's fun to design anyway.
Seattle Cosmic: Over the 4+ years it has been in existence, the focus of the game group I founded, Seattle Cosmic, has shifted significantly toward games that don't interest me. It has been disappointing and frustrating, but last night I announced an initiative to (a) reintroduce regular Cosmic Encounter games, and (b) have a regular "alternative games theme table" at which would be played the kind of oddball game I like. Response so far has been mostly positive, and I am glad.
Halfway through Oz: I am now reading canonical Oz book 21, The Gnome King of Oz (1927), so I am more than halfway through the Famous Forty. Unless Marty and I have a windfall, I am going to pause at book 23, Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz (1929), which is the latest one I currently own. Although I already have sources lined up for the next ten Oz books (through the end of Ruth Plumly Thompson's tenure as Royal Historian in 1939), at a book a day, my Oz habit is getting expensive. Instead, I am going to plunge into Gene Wolfe's latest novel, The Knight (2004), which will take me at least a week or two.
Mom: As I've mentioned before, my mother has a kind of senile dementia closely related to Alzheimer's, if not Alzheimer's itself. The disease is not yet in its advanced stages, and she is reasonably well medicated given the current state of the art, as far as I can tell. She has good periods and bad periods. For the last couple of weeks she's been in a good period. I try to call her every day, but usually my calls are a couple of days apart. Lately she's been bringing up things I talked to her about in our previous conversation, and mentioning things that have happened in her life since I last talked to her. Since Alzheimer's research is advancing incredibly rapidly, it gives me hope that if we can just keep her stabilised as long as possible, an actual cure for Alzheimer's will be found in time to help her.
Entered 12:14 [/personal/friday5] permalink
This blog is now running Markdown for Blosxom. Markdown is a human-readable markup language that can also be parsed by computers. I like it a lot! It seems to be the realisation of what the Setext project set out to do a decade ago, before its designers lost their gumption and disappeared. It certainly makes writing these blog entries a lot easier. (The first post here that explicitly invokes Markdown functionality is A little song about Grampa.)
One thing that isn't made clear at the Markdown site is that if you are already using HTML for your Blosxom blog posts, you can pretty much drop in the Markdown plugin and start using it right away without affecting your old posts.
Entered 14:17 [/news] permalink
I swore I would never write lyrics to the tune of "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer", but sadly, here some are. My wife Marty co-wrote them. She thinks my Ozzy obsession is silly but likes to hear about the characters secondhand.
Grampa got run over by Kabumpo,
Limpin' home from Ozma's chic soirée.
Elephants don't like iv'ry prosthetics,
So if you wear one, don't get in their way!
That's the chorus. You probably don't want to hear the verses.
Entered 13:56 [/books/oz] permalink
Grampa's got himself an Emergency Game Kit:
Grampa, too, had much to occupy him, oiling his gun, packing his knapsack and polishing his sword and game leg. Many old soldiers do a lot of talking about game legs, but Grampa had the real genuine article. It buckled on at the knee and was an