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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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
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