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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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.
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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.)
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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.
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