Ron's Info-Closet Annex

Sat, 31 Jan 2004

Slightly Belated Friday 5

Contest: There's a new piecepack contest called Group Projects. The contest theme is collaborative game design. All games entered must be designed (not just playtested) by a minimum of two people. Since some successful piecepack designers already design in teams, the Hale-Evans Gang (Marty and I) issued an ultimatum to the Schoessow Brothers: be out of Piecepackville afore sundown. I'm afraid (afeared) that the only real effect of the ultimatum was to trigger a cascade of Wild West roleplaying on the piecepack mailing list.
The deadline for the Group Projects competition is 22 May, which gives me nearly four months to obsess.
Craftiness: I've also been experimenting with making my own JCD piecepack. Marty is encouraging me because she likes to see me do things with my hands; she says I spend too much time in my head.
One of the attractive things about the JCD design is that it's easy to make a SixPack with it: just remove two suits. It's also completely colourblind-friendly: everywhere that suit is indicated by colour in the standard piecepack, the JCD piecepack uses monochrome icons.
The approach that's working for me right now is laser-printing the JCD graphics onto paper or cardstock (still experimenting), making stickers out of the paper bits with my Xyron laminator (printing directly onto full-sheet labels would work almost as well), sticking the graphics onto wooden bits, and sealing the stickers with Mod Podge. Looks nice.
Enough with the piecepack already...
Author: Thanks to my last boss, Todd Kopriva, I have discovered a good SF writer: John Barnes (not to be confused with the hack Steven Barnes). Todd told me John Barnes is similar to Greg Egan, which was like waving candy in front of a bull, or something. He recommended Mother of Storms (1995) in strong terms, but I was unable to find a copy locally. I did however find a more recent book, Candle (2000), which is part of the Meme Wars series. Since I'm a sucker for SF about memetics, I enjoyed this a great deal. I won't say more for fear of spoilers, but the day I finished Candle, I picked up a copy of its sequel, The Sky So Big and Black (2002), which I am also enjoying but finding a bit harder to penetrate.
Schedule: Now that Marty is working, we're on the same clock. I don't stay up until the teensy-weensy hours watching TiVo any more just because Marty's bedtime is 4:00 in the morning. Going to bed early + getting up early = getting to work on time. It's especially nice to share at least part of my commute with Marty.
Spree: I received a token of appreciation from my company, Open Interface North America late in the day Friday (30 Jan). I appreciated being appreciated by my company even more than I appreciated the gift as such. It's also nice to know I have a modicum of job security in the present economy, as much as anyone can.
Marty and I went out and celebrated in what we call "booze and whores mode". No booze (well, one beer for me), and definitely no whores, but a few electronics purchases followed by dinner. Marty had been wanting an MP3 player for a while, and she finally agreed that an MP3 CD player is a lot cheaper than an iPod and almost as flexible (more flexible in some ways, since it can play ordinary CDs as well as MP3 CDs). She bought a RioVolt SP-150, which is similar to the player I have (SP-50), with a few extra features. She also bought a pair of portable speakers, since she prefers not to listen with headphones. I bought a pair of noise-cancelling headphones that were on sale (the Audiobahn ABN-103NC). The treble sounds a little muddy to me, but I have been hearing little flourishes on my favourite songs that I hadn't heard before, and they certainly do block exterior sound -- I may have to try to learn lip-reading again. We rounded out our purchases with some AA and AAA batteries, and went out to an Italian restaurant for dinner (swordfish for me, ravioli for Marty). Today we're hitting the University of Washington bookstore, where I've had my eye on some remainders, and that will end most of the boozing and whoring for a while, I think.

Be good and be happy this week.

Entered 11:18 [/personal/friday5] permalink

Mon, 26 Jan 2004

I realised a few weeks ago that balding men who want long hair have the choice of a mullet or a combover, or some infernal alternation between the two. Nothing else. Until recently, I chose the mullet, but lately my hair has been literally inching toward a combover up top.

I had to stop the cruelty. Today I went and got a buzzcut all over: a #3 on the clipper for my beard and the sides and back of my head and a #5 for the top. Much better.

If and when I go completely bald on top, I can go for the John Malkovich look and become a great puppeteer. Until this happens for you, my long-haired baldy friends, remember: mullet or combover. Is this a choice you want to make?

Now if I can just get this broken front tooth fixed, people won't look so askance at me when I say I spent two years of my life in Kentucky.

Entered 02:11 [/personal] permalink

Sat, 24 Jan 2004

The Dominic System

Lion Kimbro wrote to ask why I thought that Dominic O'Brien's Dominic System of mnemotechnics is more flexible than the Major System advocated by most memory experts. There are three main reasons:

I think the 1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc. Dominic System is easier to remember than the Major System's more arbitrary 1=T/D/TH, 2=N, 3=M, etc. -- a lot easier, and therefore faster to use. There is circumstantial evidence the Dominic System is superior; Dominic O'Brien became World Memory Champion using his system, a title that includes competitions for speed in memorisation.
It is more flexible because the two-letter combinations don't have to be people's initials, just suggestive of the people they represent; for example, HO in my system is Santa Claus: ho ho ho! SC is Seattle Cosmic's mascot "Claus", no relation to Santa:
It is more flexible also because each two-letter combination represents both a person and an action, so that more information can be compacted into a single image. So if HO = Santa Claus laughing and holding his belly, while AE = Albert Einstein writing on a blackboard, then 8015 = HOAE = Santa Claus writing on a blackboard.

Lion also asked how the Dominic System's "journeys" differ from "memory palaces". Journeys are memory palaces, for all intents and purposes, as far as I know. My first journey is simply a tour of my apartment.

I guess that's another thing I like about the Dominic System: it is a combination of the innovative (easier mnemonic alphabet, using people's initials because people are easier to remember than inanimate objects, etc.), and the tried-and-true (memory palaces, which go back to classical times).

Entered 12:12 [/mentat] permalink

Friendly Friday 5

Marty got a job. It's a temp one, but will alleviate the screaming sound our wallets emit when we open them, so that we will no longer need to stuff our ears with anaesthetic cotton.
To celebrate Marty's new job, we had a night out. We ate at a good Seattle Indian/Middle Eastern restaurant called Cedars, browsed the University of Washington bookstore (which has the best science fiction and fantasy section for many miles in any direction), sat on a park bench and talked while I sipped hot coffee to stay awake after all that rice, and finally went to see a restored re-release of Francis Ford Coppola's "lost" movie, One From the Heart.
One From the Heart is a musical comedy that Coppola called his personal antidote to Apocalypse Now. All the songs were written by Tom Waits and performed by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle (don't laugh-- it works). The cast included Raul Julia, who was wonderful, an elfin Nastassia Kinski, and Teri Garr, near the apex of her delectability in several nude scenes. It was yanked from release after just a couple of days when critics snubbed it in 1982. Yes, it is, shall we say, a mixed success, but some of the things he did were amazing. He basically built a copy of a chunk of Las Vegas on a soundstage, and abutted a number of sets so that he could dim the lights on one and pan to what was going on in another apartment (for instance) in a very theatrical way. To me it seemed like an attempt to blend 1930s/40s musical comedy sensibilities with contemporary sexual mores (or at least those of 1982). Marty called it "the illegitimate child of a Jim Jarmusch movie and Grease."
One From the Heart is touring the country right now. It was only here in a university-district art house for a week. Catch it if you can. It may not be a great movie, but it is a curious one. (Google informs me it is available on DVD, but see it on the big screen if possible-- those soundstages are amazing.)
I'm working on a new game using the SixPack, which is my name for a new kind of piecepack. The game is called "Suits & Squares", or alternatively "Joe SixPack", or possibly both. I hope the next anonymous game design competition does not involve expanded piecepacks, because if it does, I just outed myself.
I'm almost done creating my first 100 personal mnemonics for the Dominic System, a mnemotechnic system that made the author, Dominic O'Brien, World Memory Champion (he can memorise the order of a full deck of playing cards in less than a minute). This is the first memory system I've felt able to stick with; the one most memory books use (the Major System) is too dry and restrictive. O'Brien's uses an easy-to-remember number-to-letter conversion and the initials of memorable people, as well as "journeys" that are like the "memory palaces" of the classical orators. Unfortunately, I had to special-order O'Brien's book from England. It's somewhat difficult to obtain his work in the US.
I'm in the process of reconciliation with a guy who has been a gigantic pain on one of my mailing lists. Without revealing any confidences, I'll say that there are things people don't know about him that go a long way toward explaining his behaviour. I am tempted to close with the title and refrain from one of the worst 1970s pop songs I have ever heard: "Things get a little easier once you understand." Instead, I'll finish with a slightly meatier quote from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the part sometimes called his "Ten Principles":

[If any have offended against thee, consider] what kind of men they are at table, in bed, and so forth; and particularly, under what compulsions in respect of opinions they are; and as to their acts, consider with what pride they do what they do.

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Sat, 17 Jan 2004

Friday Fifteen

Here's three weeks of Friday Fives at once. Yes, I've been keeping track of them. No, I haven't had time to post them until now. I'll do the weeks in "blog order":

Friday, 16 January 2004

OK, three piecepack-related pleasures, and then two non-.

Marty and I received an honorable mention in the Solitary Confinement piecepack game design contest. Specifically,
Cleverest overall concept: Epic Funhouse by Ron Hale-Evans & Marty Hale-Evans. This is a series of 6 mostly abstract games that are played in the 6 rooms of an amusement park in a not too-distant dystopian future. Also contains the only dexterity game of the contest.

Obviously, we entered to win, but this was as much as we were expecting (I for one fully expected a more elegant "unitary" game to come along and scoop us), so we were quite happy. The judge, Phillip "Benedict" Lerche, also sent us some very nice feedback in private email that he said he will post now that our game is available on the main piecepack site.
Hey, now that the contest is over, we have seventeen other new piecepack solitaires to play! I've started a three-ring binder just for such games.
Today (Friday) I received in the mail two review copies of the new piecepack expansions from Mesomorph (the Four Seasons Expansion and the Playing Cards Expansion). They are beautiful, as usual, and I am already thinking of games I can design with them. Read the review. (Depending on how soon you read this blog entry after I post it, the review may still be under revision, but that's WikiWiki for you.)
In other game-related (but not piecepack-related) news, my former URL (Unknown in Real Life) friend Ava Arachne Jarvis has moved to Seattle from Illinois. Since she is participating in two projects I am working on (Games to the Rescue and gtkboard), the added ability to coordinate with her is welcome, and perhaps the projects will GaTheR momentum again. Plus, I think she's an interesting person (although very different F2F from her online presence), and I'm glad she's started attending Seattle Cosmic Game Night.
Hell week is over at work. Getting a release out the door compounded with workplace politics, and brainless errors on my part, leads me to wonder whether Mercury is still retrograde. Man! It reminds me of the old riddle:

Q: Why did the person of unspecified ethnicity keep hitting themselves on the head with a hammer?
A: Because it was nirvana when they stopped.

Hell week is over. The weekend and nirvana have set in.

Friday, 9 January 2004

Happy thing: a visit from Melinda! Melinda Hautala, that is, Marty's sister. Not enough time, as usual, especially because I was often working when Fun Happened, but still pretty great.
Another happy thing: a surprise visit from my old friend Bill de la Vega, whom I have known since high school, but with whom I had been out of touch. It turned out he didn't hate me; he had just lost my email. It was great to see Bill. He was the same in all the important ways.
Had a couple of snow days in a row. On the first one, the biggest, I ended up talking to several old friends, including Peter Breton, Dana Nibby, and Jay O'Connell (with whom I had also been out of touch -- again, not hatred on Jay's part, just five years of email lost in a computer malfunction). Jay and I talked on the phone, while Peter and Dana and I talked via gaim (a GNU/Linux application that unifies several instant-message protocols such as AOL's and Yahoo's).
Marty has been urging me to start work on turning my Game Systems articles into a book. I have written four so far. I imported them into OpenOffice (a free/libre/open-source Microsoft Word clone) and started "chapterfying" them. I also thought hard about the rest of the series and now have outlines of the next seven or eight installments and the order I'll write them in: the rest of the series and the rest of the book.
I finally, after many, many coasters, figured out how to burn MP3 CDs under GNU/Linux that will work on my little RioVolt SP50 MP3 CD player. The trick is to use the Joliet option (-J in mkisofs) when burning, and keep banging the rocks together, guys! (Would have been nice if the RioVolt manual had told me the MP3 CDs it plays need a purely MS-Windows option, but MS-Windows is just assumed, usually.) Man, it's great to bring music everywhere again. This little gizmo (I'm listening to it now) is the poor boy's iPod -- I can fit 200 songs onto a CD and swap it out for other CDs (MP3 or not) whenever I want. Cost: $50ish (RioVolt) vs. $250 for a low-end 10GB iPod (and all the hidden costs of proprietary software).

Friday, 2 January 2004

Performed an upgrade to MoinMoin version 1.1 for my four wikis. Got everything working that I wanted to, except the RSS feed, which was really the thing driving the upgrade.
More computer maintenance: swapping out our two old Macs for another Mac that suited our needs and a Knoppix box. The new Mac, Popomatic, will go where the old one, Kublai, used to be, and my new Knoppix computer, Fullhouse, is already where the old iMac, Moneypenny, used to be. Fullhouse has a kickass CD burner.
Read The Land of Laughs, by Jonathan Carroll (1980), which details the fictional creations of a dead juvenile fantasy author that come to life. Billed as horror and reputedly creepy, but not more so (I found) than the average old Twilight Zone episode. What I did like was the beautiful portrait of a couple collaborating artistically (as Marty and I often do), and how their creations only came to life when they worked together. The Land of Laughs was also interesting to read (deliberately) immediately after The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (1984) with its arguably similar blending of fantasy and reality. Is there a critical essay on this in the Info-Closet Annex's future? Could be.
I have now listened to almost every episode of This American Life through their archive.
As I do every New Year's Day, I consulted the I Ching with a few questions about the upcoming year. You know, the I Ching is crammed with such good advice, I bet you could just pick a hexagram or two at random and it would still... uh, oh yeah, you do.

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