Ron's Info-Closet Annex

Gone to Croatoan

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:20:00 PST

I'm migrating my blog to a new location: RWHE Having Fun Yet? on LiveJournal. Hey, LiveJournal is free and open source. I make no apologies.

Cool Things

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 01:07:00 PST

"I can't help it that some cool things eat other cool things." -- Marty, in a conversation about snakes versus bats and pikas.

A Life Goal

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:26:00 PST

One life goal I have recently formulated is to translate the Land of the Lost theme song into Pakuni.

Will the three of you who are left...

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 16:27:00 PST

...please tell your friends and relations that the feed for this blog is finally fixed, including both RSS and Atom versions?

I thought switching to an Atom feed would help with repeated feed entries, and it seemed to for a while, but after a few days duplicates started showing up in the Atom feed too.

Anyway, I tracked down the real problem, and posted about it to the Blosxom and Markdown lists. Michel Fortin, one of the devs on the Markdown list stepped up and offered to help fix the bug. Meanwhile, I have a workaround.

Thanks for your patience. Now I no longer feel... dirty... when posting to my own blog, I have a few things to say.

RSS feed replaced with Atom

Tue, 08 May 2007 11:57:00 PST

I have replaced the broken RSS feed for this blog with an Atom feed. Please do not use the RSS feed any more.

I noticed that since the RSS problem started, I've lost nearly all of my subscribers. I'm sorry I took so long to fix the feed; I'm a bad, bad blogfarmer. Please come back now.

And we're back!

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 22:59:00 PST

This blog was off the ether(net) for a week or so because of an upgrade to Debian Etch that got stuck halfway, while I was stuck halfway across the country at Penguicon 5.0 and unable to do much about it. Fortunately, the wikis at Ludism.org were not affected.

Anyway, we're back. Next up I promise to fix the RSS problems that readers of this blog have noticed. Thanks for your patience.

Constructive Gaming

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 23:11:00 PST

Lately I've gotten interested in something called Constructive Living (CL). Although CL is based mainly on two schools of Japanese psychotherapeutic practice, Morita and Naikan, Constructive Living is not psychotherapy; it's more of a philosophy of life with a therapeutic aspect, such as Stoicism.

I first came into contact with CL through the bestseller Book Lust by Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl, who reviewed two books by David K. Reynolds, the founder of Constructive Living: Even in Summer the Ice Doesn't Melt (1986) and Playing Ball on Running Water (1984). When I saw a copy of the latter in a used bookstore, I snatched it up, brought it home, and misplaced it immediately. Then, a few weeks ago, Amazon recommended Handbook for Constructive Living (2002) to me. I bought it, read it, and was glad it's the first book by Reynolds that I read, because it presents a much later, fuller, and better integrated version of his philosophy.

Nevertheless, I'm enjoying my refound copy of Playing Ball on Running Water, not least because, for me, the title combines a Ludist view of life as game (playing ball) with the familiar Heraclitean saying that you can't step into the same river twice. There is yet more ludic goodness in the chapter entitled "Exercises in Living--The Ball Game", particularly exercise 8, "Play a game". Reynolds really understands the Ludist idea of game as microcosm. He writes,

Any game that requires some attention and effort to play well will do. Avoid games of pure mindless chance. Appropriate table games include chess, checkers, Scrabble, bridge, and the like... As you would expect, the quality of your play is more important than the particular game you select...

Work hard at keeping your mind on the game. Play purposefully with an overall plan and specific tactics. Notice the sorts of things that distract you from attending to the game in each moment. Do you think too far ahead and miss the immediate opportunity? Do you get disgusted with yourself for missing the last play and so lose the next few plays? Do minor physical discomforts intrude on your attention? Do you get annoyed and distracted by your opponent's habits? Are you intimidated into self-consciousness and a self-defeating attitude by your opponent's style? Notice these mental slips, then bring your mind immediately back to the play at hand...

Attend to winning well or losing well with full attention. Continue playing ball even when the ball game is over. [pp.112-113]

Many of these faults are mine both in games and in life, and they're one reason I've never mastered any game, whether Chess, Go, or Focus. And to them I'll add one more, my most grievous fault: failure to see the whole board.

It's a good thing most of my gamer friends never read my blog; they already think I take gaming too seriously. The few who do read it probably agree with everything I've said here.

By the way, a while back I questioned why if there was a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, there wasn't an Inner Game of Hearts. It turns out there's an Inner Game of Chess, at least. It's not philosophical, though.

The New Game

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 10:18:00 PST

My friend Mark Schnitzius, who by the way is a contributor to Mind Performance Hacks, plays a game I will call The New Game. The first rule is:

Try something new every day.

He continues,

I've gradually evolved rules to the game, as to what counts and what doesn't, and since these rules are my own, they only really have to make sense to me. Seeing a new movie counts, but not a new TV show. Finishing a book I've never read counts, but not starting one, or finishing one I've already read. New restaurants always count, and even new dishes at familiar restaurants. What's best is things I've always been a little leery about trying (such as the Turkish delight I tried for the first time a few weeks back). Checking out new neighborhoods or new routes to get from point A to point B also count. Newness created is as good as newness discovered, so doing any sort of creative work counts.

The New Game is a good example of the Ludist idea of a positive life game. I'll be trying it myself starting today (Halloween/Samhain) and continuing through November. If I find it fun and useful, I'll keep playing.

Of course, I'll have my own rules about what counts as novelty, and I probably won't report every day on my blog the way Mark plans to, but you may hear from me once in a while.

Yours in neophilia,

Ron

The First Law of Game Systems

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:01:00 PST

Here is the First Law of Game Systems:

Given enough time, every set of objects becomes a game system.

Let's say you're someone living 10,000 years ago. You have a stick, some stones, and the dirt on the ground. They mean nothing to you. They're just a set of objects.

One day, you idly start using the stick to dig holes in the ground, you roll the rocks around with the stick, you drop them in the holes, and so on. You are playing with them. Your set of objects is now a toy, but there are no rules associated with it, so it's just a toy.

Someone else sees you playing with the sticks, stones, and holes in the dirt, and joins you in play. Over time, the two of you make certain rules about the way you play with your toy, and possibly over generations, Mancala evolves (or simpler games, such as Morris, or what have you). Now that your set of objects has one ruleset associated with it, it is not only a toy but also a game.

The game Mancala spreads, and people develop variants. Eventually, variants evolve that are different enough from Mancala to be called different games. Now that there is more than one ruleset, your set of objects (stick, rocks, and dirt) is not only a toy and a game, but also a game system.

Thus, a game system is always a game, a game is always a toy, and a toy is always a set of objects (possibly a set with only one member). Furthermore, each stage usually evolves from the one before it.

game system: 2+ rulesets
game: 1+ rulesets
toy: 0+ rulesets

It's basically a simple Venn diagram: four concentric circles, with (sets of) objects the outermost and game systems the innermost (see above).

I suppose negative numbers of rulesets could indicate further and further departure from use as a toy, so tools (such as rotary sanders) would have small negative numbers and weapons (such as neutron bombs) would have large ones. However, not every object is a tool, and not every tool is a weapon, which breaks the diagrammatic convention. Possibly usefulness and lethality need their own axes...

My dozen favourite games

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:14:00 PST

I was recently asked by my friend Mark Haggerty to name my 10 favourite games for his game design research. It was tough!

I've added two more games to the blog version of my list. Here it is in alphabetical order. I'm not going to comment on them now; perhaps I will later. All links except Ultima's point to BoardGameGeek.

Alien City, by Michael Schoessow
Can't Stop, by Sid Sackson
Cosmic Encounter
Decathlon, by Reiner Knizia
Entropy, by Eric Solomon
Focus, by Sid Sackson
Give Me the Brain!, by James Ernest
Go
Hearts
Nomic, by Peter Suber
Ultima, by Robert Abbott
Zendo, by Kory Heath

Coincidentally, I am no longer living a lie

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 02:14:00 PST

So: in my bio at the front of Mind Performance Hacks, I wrote,

You can find [Ron's] multinefarious [sic] other projects at his home page (http://ron.ludism.org), including his award-winning board games, a list of his Short-Duration Personal Saviors, and his blog.

I confess that at the time I wrote this, I had only one award-winning board game, KidSprout Jumboree, co-authored with my wife, Marty.

I did have a game that took an honourable mention in another game design contest: Epic Funhouse, also co-authored with Marty and deemed "Cleverest overall concept" by the judge of the contest. So it was kind of an award. Technically. Miss Ingeniality, I guess.

But! In August 2006, I took first place in another game design contest with my solo project, Piecepack Letterbox, so now I can exhale and cease to fear being exposed as a dreadful fraud.

Except by myself.

Sorry.

Next up: I confess to hacking a gumball machine when I was 9.

No blogquake, eh?

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:46:00 PST

Well, I updated Blosxom and no one complained, so I guess it wasn't too awful. At ease.

My new Dragonchess board

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:38:00 PST

As I mentioned, I enjoy a good 3D chess variant now and again. I recently commissioned a board for Dragonchess from an artist named Orion who has a specialty in 3D chess boards.

Orion has some photos of the board he made for me at his blog. Beautiful. You should see the confusing board I used to use.

If you are looking to buy a 3D chess board of some unusual size or shape, or even of usual ones (for example, 8x8x3), I cannot recommend Orion enough. He listened to my requirements, made some suggestions, emailed me some sketches (first flat ones, then a 3D mockup in Sketchup), and was generally completely accommodating throughout the entire process, while maintaining his own vision and sense of his tools and materials. He built the board well within the amount of time I would expect a project of this scope to take, and I'm not going to tell you how much he charged me for it because "surprisingly affordable" doesn't begin to cover it; "embarrassingly affordable" is more like it. I almost think he was just looking for an excuse to make something cool.

I played four games with the board on Saturday night. It's not only beautiful, but highly functional. My friends and I at Seattle Cosmic had very few problems with it. Marty's camera battery died, or I'd have some photos of the board with pieces on it (I used the Exchess pieces from my EconoSplurge set). Soon...

Oh, I haven't paid the last part of the price of the board yet: Orion requires that everyone he makes a board for play him at a game of that chess variant. Considering Orion is at the equivalent of expert level in several different 3D variants, this may prove to be the most costly part of the bargain.

Blogquake

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 19:39:00 PST

I plan to update the Blosxom engine underlying this blog soon, as well as fix some of the HMTL headers and so on. This means that you may see all of my blog entries show up as new in your RSS aggregator, maybe even twice.

I hate it when that happens on other blogs, so I thought I'd at least give you a heads-up. Can't be helped; a couple of people have had trouble with the RSS feed and stuff.

Got me some art!

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 PST

Well, I was the first to respond to Matt Arnold's instantiation of the Artwork Meme, and because Matt knows I like 3D chess variants, he drew me this excellent 3D movement diagram for the Jester piece, as described in his "Beginner's Guide to Space Chess" essay. (The Jester is a kind of 3D equivalent of a Knight from regular two-dimensional Chess; it's a leaper, not a rider like a Rook or Bishop.)

There's still time to respond to my own offer of free artwork. Comments are disabled for this blog, so just email me at rwhe@ludism.org.

Garbage in, gold out

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 10:27:00 PST

Be tolerant in what you accept and conservative in what you emit.

--old Internet Engineering Task Force motto, meant to apply to Unix programming, but useful in learning how to behave on the bus and generally in life situations involving other people

Artwork Meme

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:47:00 PST

Ganked from Matt Arnold.

The first five people to respond to this post will get some form of art, by me, specifically for them. I make no guarantees about quality, but your piece will be unique.

The only catch, of course, is that as with most memes, if you sign up, you have to put this in your own journal as well.

The hard problem of objectivity

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 18:37:00 PST

There are different kinds of "best". Which is the best "best"?

WMM/MWW?

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 13:35:00 PST

Would you rather be a weremermaid or a merwerewolf?

What's the difference? A weremermaid is someone who turns into a mermaid at the full moon, whereas a merwerewolf is a werewolf with the tail of a fish.

(There's no punchline; sorry.)

Seven Dwarves: the Next Generation

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 22:08:00 PST

Belligerent (Grumpy's older brother; their sister is Bellicose)
Magnesium-Deficient
Proactive ("Hey, these axes are sharp!" "Yeah, I thought that needed done.")
Corny (speaks only in cliches)
Horny
Spacy
Pampers

Thanks to Marty for some of this, I don't remember which. Actually, thanks to her for remarking on my second favourite Pam too. Also, for her snarky comment about my taste. Come to think of it, she's been writing most of my blog lately. Go write your own blog, Marty!

A further imponderable

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 01:06:00 PST

Marty (on being compelled to watch an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series): Why is it you can't enjoy anything unless it sucks?

My two favourite Pams

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:23:00 PST

My sister Pamela Evans-Schink.
Clonazepam.

Sad trombones

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:10:00 PST

I had this conversation with my friend John Braley back on the Fourth of July:

Me: Why are highly-themed games more popular than abstract games and game systems?

John: Why is Spider-Man more popular than Wittgenstein?

By the way, congratulations to my friend Kevan Davis for being the first to kick me when I immediately failed to fulfill my oath to blog daily.

Mind Performance Hacks in Boing Boing

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:27:00 PST

As I write this, my book Mind Performance Hacks is ranked 104 at Amazon. That means it's very nearly in the top 100 books Amazon is selling right now. Its ranking for all of today will be a lot lower; the book started out the day around 5000. However, thanks to a positive review by David Pescovitz at Boing Boing, ("...Mind Performance Hacks is a thinking person's self-help book. Highly recommended"), it did wonderfully well this afternoon.

If you're not familiar with Boing Boing, it's probably the most widely read blog in the world. Are you trying to tell me you read my blog but not Boing Boing? Pull the other one; it's got bells on. Now pull my finger.

The review's just in time for the holiday season, too. Remember, much like Fudgie the Whale, Mind Performance Hacks makes a great gift.

Good Portsmanship

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 08:19:00 PST

To make a long story short, having won the previous piecepack game design contest with my game Piecepack Letterbox, I was entitled to design and judge the next contest. The rules have been announced, and the contest is called Good Portsmanship.

The rules state,

In the spirit of free and open source software and culture, every entry must be a translation, or "port", of an existing game to the piecepack. While this may seem like a mechanical exercise at first glance. there is plenty of room for the game designer's talents.

You can enter games until 3 December 2006, and I hope you will, unless you're Charles Manson, which seems rather unlikely.

By the way, there was some debate on the piecepack mailing list about the rules of the contest, which some people thought were rather strict. There have been several easements, and the rules are now at version 2.

"What's going on? I'm frightened."

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:00:00 PST

Whence all this activity in the Info-Closet Annex? In the spirit of nulla dies sine linea, I have vowed to make at least one blog post a day from now on. What good is my jaw-dropping brilliance if it remains locked forever in my moleskine, never to be seen by those who would benefit from it most?

You are hereby conscripted to kick my ass at rwhe@ludism.org if I fail to meet this goal. Would you please do that? Would you kick the ass of a man?

Jay's Tinfoil Hat

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 15:16:00 PST

My friend Jay O'Connell has a podcast called "Jay's Tinfoil Hat". He's done about a dozen 10-minute episodes so far, on topics ranging from his young son Milo's gender variance (Milo wants to be a girl), to watching the first gay marriages take place in Cambridge, to adolescent partying, his first apartment, transhumanism, immortality, and cryonics. He has an engaging narrative voice, which is unique yet reminds me of Spalding Gray or This American Life. He also illustrates each podcast with beautiful original photographs and illustrations.

This episode is my favourite, about a junkyard that Jay used to play in as a kid. It has a surprise ending that epitomises my friend -- and curiously enough is reminiscent of Narnia, but don't let that stop you from listening.

All a long the riverrun, Howth Castle kept the view

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:00:00 PST

Last night, around this time (dark and a half in the morning), I finished Finnegans Wake. Actually, you can't finish the book, so I lapped it. LAP = ALP = Anna Livia Plurabella = Great Mother Goddess = River Liffey (Livia), the riverrun in the famous circular sentence that begins on the last page of the Wake and ends on the first:

A way a lone a last a loved a long the

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

I've been reading Finnegans Wake on and off since about 1985, more on than off. I stopped years ago about 2/3 through, but this time dug up my old copy, and my trusty Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, and plowed to the end and back again. Bigod (Shem and Shaun), this is forking nectarnal stuff. Don't let anyone tell you it's nonsense; those are their own limitations speaking. There is more meaning packed into some sentences of the Wake than in whole pages of other books, and I intend to prove it. But more about that later.

So whence the impetus to lap the Wake, and whence the impetus to blog, since the last time I did so (it says here) was 25 April? Well, dear friends, I have been writing a book since then, and I'm just about done, so I have some spare time. The book is called Mind Performance Hacks: Tips and Tricks for Becoming a Better Thinker, and it's a more "practical" sequel to the popular Mind Hacks published by geek favourite O'Reilly. I got the gig when the Mentat Wiki suddenly started getting lots of hits due to a mention in 43 Folders. If you like the Mentat Wiki, you will heart Mind Performance Hacks.

One of the hacks in my books has to do with learning to communicate via portmanteaux and neologisms as Joyce did in Finnegans Wake, so that stimulated me to peruse it again, and then, as I said, this sudden free time sealed the meal.

I believe it was yesterday also that I accidentally learned my book already has an ISBN number and is listed in the catalogues of some online booksellers. The ISBN is 0596101538, and it's listed for publication in December 2005. (Unfortunately, it will really be published a little later than that.) Check out my placeholder pages below! If you're reading this after the book is published, you can go to Amazon and browse it online. O'Reilly will also have a page for the book containing PDFs of a few complete sample hacks, but it's not up yet.

Whoops, B&N has it as Mental Performance Hacks. That's the old title.

Anyway, hard to believe my book is coming together. At times it seemed incompletable, but now there are mutterings of a sequel if the book does well. Just gotta make a few last editorial changes, negotiate illustrations and layout with Production, and coax a few final efforts from the friends and strangers I shanghaied into contributing a non-Ron hack here and there. (You know who you are, and I have your phone numbers.)

And oh yeah, I'm starting a Finnegans Wake reading group in the Seattle area, tentatively called Allforabit Funferall, so if you're interested in that, or in getting your copy of Mind Performance Hacks signed or something, drop me a line at rwhe@ludism.org.

Golly, I'm almost a real writer now like my hero James Joyce, except he's... better. Two wriders were approaching, and thunder began to bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn- tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk...

Shooting the Moon

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 12:07:00 PST

While writing the latest article in my Game Systems series, I had occasion to research the origin of the phrase "shooting the moon" in the card game Hearts.

At the turn of the last century, "shooting the moon" was apparently used to mean something like "aiming high as a desperate gambit", and particularly to mean absconding in the middle of the night without paying the rent. Examples:

For a day and a half I had nothing to eat or smoke, and then, too hungry to put it off any longer, I packed my remaining clothes into my suitcase and took them to the pawnshop. This put an end to all pretence of being in funds, for I could not take my clothes out of the hotel without asking Madame F.'s leave. I remember, however, how surprised she was at my asking her instead of removing the clothes on the sly, shooting the moon being a common trick in our quarter.

--George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

What concentrated irony and imagination there is for instance, in the metaphor which describes a man doing a midnight flitting as "shooting the moon"? It expresses everything about the run away: his eccentric occupation, his improbable explanations, his furtive air as of a hunter, his constant glances at the blank clock in the sky.

--G.K. Chesterton, "The Red Town", Alarms and Discursions

How well the last passage describe the nervous attitude of someone trying to shoot the moon in Hearts.

In the Hearts variant I am designing, I considered replacing the phrase "shoot the moon" with "fly by night" as a contemporary phrase for a similar situation, but the old phrase stuck, so "shooting the moon" it remains.

Haeresis

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 21:32:00 PST

Q: "Do you belong to any religion?"

A: "I'm a Cafeterian."

("Heretic" means "one who exercises choice".)

ShorDurPerSav: "Weird Al" Yankovic

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 22:54:00 PST

I'm having a bad week. It's not a bad work week per se, but I have all day to myself at work to stew. Fortunately, I've had the music of "Weird Al" Yankovic to succour me in my desolation. How can I listen to "One Of Those Days" from 1991's Polka Party! ("and a big steamroller ran over my mom, and I cut myself shaving, and they're dropping the bomb") without feeling better?

In fact, Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, wrote a paper (cache) on the use of self-satirical songs in psychotherapy. His songs have titles like "I Am Just A Fucking Baby!" and "Glory, Glory Hallelujah, People Love Ya Till They Screw Ya". They're not as funny as Weird Al's, but Ellis offers some good how-tos. I need to poke more fun at me; I'll be doing this soon.

And then there's Katie Lee with her Songs of Couch and Consultation, mentioned elsewhere on this blog. My favourite of hers is "The Will To Fail", which is also available in one of the Incredibly Strange Music collections.

But Weird Al's music right now is like finding a two-litre bottle of cold, sweet water in the middle of an asphalt parking lot that stretches for miles around. He is the W.A.Y., the truth, and the life at this farpotchket moment in my life.

Coming home

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 22:18:00 PST

They say meditation feels like coming home, but sometimes the place is a pigsty.

Become a superhero, cheap!

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 21:06:00 PST

Three ways to obtain sensory superpowers for almost no money down!

*Offer good only if your origin story includes being born with this mutation.

The magnetic-sense link is piercing-related, but worksafe.

I've been asked how the magnetic sense of "Cap'n Magneto", as I like to call him, is different from ordinary touch. Nu, since the magnet is embedded in his flesh, as opposed to glued to his skin, he probably feels his finger muscles pushed around internally when he is near a magnetic field, and this probably feels different from "touch".

The brain is a weird thing. When two senses are stimulated at the same time, one can bleed over to the other. (I noticed this myself long ago, but it's also one of the 100 "hacks" in the recent book Mind Hacks -- highly recommended.) Then there are "synaesthetes", people who can "see" music and "hear" colours. And so on. In short, sensory processing in the brain is wonderful, and I wouldn't be surprised if the brain learned to recognise the movement of this guy's embedded magnet as special, and treat it as a whole new sensory modality.

An expedition to the East and West Poles

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 23:39:00 PST

Bipolarity can be conducive to creative work: braindump when high, edit when low.

The editing phase is crucial. Unfortunately, when low, one may not even have the energy to publish (for example, post a blog entry), much less edit, one's manic ejaculations.

So how've you been lately? I've had my ups and downs.

Oh how del.icio.us...

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 06:03:00 PST

I'm fed up with deloxom clutter. I bet you are too, if you read this blog. I've deleted all the old del.icio.us entries. I now use the syndicated plugin for Blosxom to create a linkblog in my sidebar from an RSS feed of del.icio.us/rwhe. Much tidier.

Happy now?

LocalNames documentation for Blosxom coming RSN.

LocalNames, etc.

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 12:44:00 PST

This blog is one of the very first to use Lion Kimbro's [[LocalNames]], a quick and easy way to add automatic [[SC][WikiName]]-style linking to everywhere from everything -- wikis, web, blogs, email...

Since there is now an easy way to add [[LocalNames]] to [[Blosxom]], I'll soon be documenting how Lion and I set it up on this site, as well as on the [[CLS]] wikis, so you can do it too.

In other news, the Info-Closet Annex now has a multicolumn screen layout. I can't believe I put off learning how to do it so long, considering how simple it was.

For a friend depressed by the election

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 13:19:00 PST

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)

Kenning Haiku Competition

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 22:34:00 PST

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.

Letterboxing: my first hitchhiker and first first-find

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 14:18:00 PST

Now sit right back and you'll hear a tale, the tale of my recent letterboxing activities.

Chippy

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.

Glenn Hanson Park

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?

Mini Bob's Wife

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.

Great Moments in History: June 8, 1959

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.

Ludist grook

Sun, 03 Oct 2004 02:10:00 PST

THE ETERNAL TWINS

Taking fun
    as simply fun
and earnestness
    in earnest
shows how thoroughly
    thou none
of the two
    discernest.

--Piet Hein