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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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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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.
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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.
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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
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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...
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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.
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In rough order of occurrence:
And by the way, happy freakin' birthday, Melinda Hale! |
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I'm giving up on Friday Fives. Although management at my office must think I spend every minute I'm there either surfing the web or reading/writing email, since out of pure Resistentialism or butter-side-downedness, they always pick just the wrong moment to look over my shoulder, I simply don't have time during the working day to do more than glance at my most important personal email. Writing Friday Fives at home on Friday evening is no good, because it seems as though 90% of the social list where I initially post them are members of the Eastern Standard Tribe or live in even more exotic locales like Singapore and Wales, so the list goes dead around 2:00-3:00 PM Pacific Time on Friday and remains slow throughout the weekend. If no one is going to read my Friday Fives until Monday anyway, then goddamnit, I'm going to start doing Sunday Sixes, and right leisurely too. Sunday is the real end of my week anyway.
My first Sunday Six:
GREs: The big news in the Hale-Evans household this week was that Marty, who wants to get an advanced degree in Electrical Engineering, took her GREs (standardised graduate school entrance exams) on Monday, and from what I can glean on the Web, her scores for the verbal and math portions of the test were both in the 99th percentile. Hoo-ray! There was an essay portion of the test, distinct from the verbal portion and intended to discern how well she can reason and formulate an argument. It has to be graded by a human, so we won't know that result for a few weeks, but as Marty says, "All we do around here is argue anyway", so I'm sure she'll do fine. If the grad school admissions committees have even a fraction of Marty's brains, she ought to get into any school she applies to.
Spring: I woke up and walked the dogs last Saturday, and it was Spring. Little green shoots were poking out of the ground. The air was warm, and although I am fairly anosmic (which is one reason I have the option to do the fast-but-disgusting household chores like taking out the garbage and cleaning drains, rather than the long-but-interesting ones like cooking), by Goddess, Spring shoved itself down my nostrils. A few days later I saw my first robin. Soon I'll be able to take my shoes off and wiggle my long, hairy toes in the grass. (I am secretly a six-foot-two, 400-pound hobbit.)
PATO: Broken into a separate entry for easier handwaving.
Oz: I've read all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books and the first of Ruth Plumly Thompson's, his successor's. Now I'm waiting on a big order of books, maps, etc. from the International Wizard of Oz Club. The last time that I had to wait to get the next books in the series, I read a "non-canonical" Oz book to tide me over, Paradox in Oz (2000) by Edward Einhorn. I'm doing much the same thing this time. Tuesday I read Visitors from Oz (1998) by Martin Gardner (yes, the former "Mathematical Games" columnist for Scientific American). It was fun and Ozzy. Then I took a few days to read A Barnstormer in Oz (1982) by Philip José Farmer: darker and more adult, but still a fun ride. Unfortunately, about two-thirds of the way through, the book turns into a cross between Riverworld and Doc Savage for a few chapters. I guess that's always a risk when you read Farmer.
I had some communications problems with the club (for some reason, PayPal never sent them my initial order), but the problems seem to be solved, so in a few days I should be spreading out my maps of Oz and the Nonestic Ocean as I pore over books 16 through 23 of the Famous Forty -- an ironic name for the series, as few people today are even aware that the movie starring Judy Garland was based on a book, let alone that the book had 39 official sequels.
If you wonder why I read these "little bonbons of literature", as my friend Dave Howell calls the Oz books, ask yourself why you read Harry Potter, because I know that you do.
Window: My boss Todd, whom I liked very much (I suppose I should use the present tense, because he's not dead, although he is working for Microsoft now), resigned from my company a while back. His cubicle had a window view. My original cubicle was right behind his, so I could see out of the window a little, but not much. When Todd left, his cubicle was vacant for a few weeks. I finally asked to move into it, and my request was approved.
Now I have a window looking onto the intersection of 2nd and Yesler from the fourth floor of the Smith Tower, Seattle's oldest skyscraper. My new cubicle is shielded from the noise of my cow orkers, but the noise from the street more than compensates. Yesler is the original Skid Row, or Skid Road, down which the loggers used to skid their logs to Puget Sound, and there are still plenty of homeless people surreptitiously drinking and trying to stay warm down there. About once a day the cops come around and make these foot soldiers in the Armies of the Road move along. I have even seen a few arrests, although I have not seen any police brutality. The Barking Man, who repeatedly barks like a dog -- it's very distracting -- seems to have gone south for the winter, but I have noise-reduction headphones for when he returns. Metaphorically, that's pretty ugly, I guess. I try to salvage a few laughs by telling people I "work with the unfortunates on Skid Row". Depends how you define "unfortunates".
Despite the depressing poverty blocked out by my headphones, and despite the nasty draft (did I mention the draft?), when the sun is shining, I get a full draught of it poured into my lap, and the seagulls are always wheeling at eye level. A week or two ago, a snow-white gull bigger than some dogs landed right outside my window. It was carrying a complete, full-sized donut in its mouth and it just sat and looked at me for about a minute. I said, "Holy crap, it's the Great Seagull of the Apocalypse!" and my cow orkers laughed. A week later, a smaller seagull landed outside and tried to peck at some papers on my desk through the glass.
It's all fun and games until the Great Seagull of the Apocalypse pecks your eye out. I'll keep the window seat anyway.
Barcharts (again): I mentioned last week how I had found some good study aids for Marty called Barcharts. After Marty did so well on her GREs, I said, "I want to be smart too!" and bought some Barcharts from Powell's, which has nearly the complete line. I bought the German Grammar and German Vocabulary charts, and Chess 1 and 2. I don't know if the latter will improve my Chess game, but I already feel I have an overview of German grammar as never before, despite the tonnage of German dictionaries, textbooks, and study tapes strewn around the house. The Note to Students on the back of the grammar chart reads,
This QuickStudy® chart is an outline of the grammar taught in German courses. Due to its condensed format, use it as a German guide, but not as a replacement for assigned classwork.
Fornicate those feces! (Yes, I know that to fornicate is intransitive.) This is how I aced Latin in high school: -o, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt, drill on vocabulary and dive the hell in. Get 80% of the language from simple rules, then pick up the finer 20% from context. All languages should be taught this way, with a healthy helping of mnemotechnics. (Example: Need to remember that die (pron. "dee") is the German feminine and plural definite article, while der is the masculine? Envision a squad of diminutive female cheerleaders giggling "die hee!" next to a hulking, apelike male football player drooling and saying "der...". It's an offensive image, and that's one reason it works.)
I can feel my brain crinkling as I write. Next up I plan to review Marty's math charts, and possibly obtain some charts to review Logic and Latin. And despite Marty's protests that she doesn't need it, I'm buying her the one for Linux.
If you've read this far, bless you and have a good week. If you haven't read this far, bless you and have a good week anyway.
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Five preferred indifferents for Friday, 27 Feb 2004
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If you grew up on the East Coast during the late 70s or early 80s, you may remember ice cream tycoon Tom Carvel's decision to do his own commercials for his ice cream chain, anticipating Dave Thomas's Wendy's commercials by 15 or 20 years. Unfortunately, unlike Dave Thomas's voice, Tom Carvel's was a guttural monotone that seemed to indicate the intelligence behind it was ravaged by age and perhaps didn't have too much to work with in the first place. One of the stellar business decisions made by Tom (or whoever made his mouth move) was to use a single mold for all Carvel ice cream cakes, so that Cookie Puss (an attempt to cash in on the movie E.T., whose TV voice sounded like a chipmunk in an echo chamber) looked suspiciously like Fudgie the Whale upside-down. Then there was the amnemonic advertising slogan "Wednesday is Sundae at Carvel's", which attempted to convey that you got two-for-one ice cream sundaes every Wednesday at Carvel's, but ended up conveying to viewers that Thursday was Sundae, or perhaps Tuesday was Sundae, or maybe Tuesday was Thursday... Why bother?
Tom Carvel is probably long dead, and I don't care whether Carvel's is still a going concern on the East Coast enough to Google for it, which is saying something, I think. In any case, since I'm doing my Friday Five on Sunday, I just wanted to announce that Sunday is now Friday.
Friday, 20 February 2004
Kickass new cellphone: Because I was stupid enough to lose my old cellphone but smart enough to have signed up for the replacement program with Sprint, for some reason when I ponied up my $35 deductible, they did not send me a reconditioned phone of the same model, but a brand new phone that is much, much better. It's a ruggedised Sanyo RL2000. It has a colour screen almost as big as your average PDA, and besides doing ordinary cellphone things with it, I can surf the web, read and send email, and if anyone I know ever gets a similar phone, I can use it as a sort of walkie-talkie. The customer service dudelet told me, "Man! I wish I could afford one of those! Your new phone can run circles around your old phone without even moving. Why did they send you one of those, anyway?"
Games magazine: On a day when I wasn't expecting any particularly good snailmail, the April 2004 Games magazine arrived. The cover story, "The New Oldest Game in the World", by R.H. Wei, tells the story of the discovery by Vincent Hughes, the "real-life Indiana Jones", of an ancient Egyptian board game called "The Game of Flying Obelisks". The game is extremely complex for one of that period; it more closely resembles a modern Chess variant than anything else known to exist at that time.
Yes, it's the April 2004 Games magazine. Geddit? I didn't buy the article as a whole for a minute, but I thought at least that Vincent Hughes might exist, since the article says he studied at Yale, and I recall reading about a "real-life Indiana Jones" etc. etc. in the Yale alumni magazine. However, relevant Google searches return nothing on the great man.
The Game of Flying Obelisks looks like fun, though, and receives a much more in-depth treatment than Games usually gives games it publishes, even if half of the coverage is fiction.
Nonestica: OK, a couple of weeks ago I talked about receiving a "current" or "spark" of inspiration from a friend, and said that I was collaborating on a project around this inspiration with him. Now I can tell you. My friend and I were working on a piecepack game based on the 14 Oz (as in Wizard) books by L. Frank Baum. The collaboration has fallen through; my friend had never collaborated on a game before and was uncomfortable doing so. Oh well; at least I can now blather about Oz (or Nonestica, as the continent of which Oz forms a part is commonly (?) known), without outing myself and spoiling my anonymity for the latest piecepack game design contest. More later; meanwhile, check out this collection of Ozzy/Nonestican links I've collected. I don't have many at the moment, but they are all key resources.
Game design: So it looks as if Marty and I will be entering at least one game in the new piecepack contest. I like it so far, and that's all I'm going to say.
Great EGG meeting: We had another great meeting of EGG, our local game design group. Kisa Griffin had a new piecepack game for us to playtest, and AlphaTim Schutz had a new Alpha Playing Cards game. I always come out of these meetings high off my friends' brilliance, and thankful (when I'm demonstrating a game) that I have a community to support me. As much as I love Seattle Cosmic, and as unfinished as the games brought to EGG tend to be, I have to say I usually have more fun at EGG meetings, because the games I'm playing were not designed by someone I don't know in Europe (say), but by someone I know and sometimes even love -- and if I don't like something about the game, I can suggest a fix and the fix may be incorporated into the rules on the spot. EGG meetings are so intense, though, that it's probably good they're only once a month rather than once a week.
Have a fine week, everyone, and remember: Fudgie the Whale makes a great gift!
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Two weeks of Friday Fives, but late. I've been two-timing you, dear blog reader; I post my Friday Fives as soon as I can on a social mailing list that originated the custom, then dawdle over posting them in HTML form on my blog. Live with it.
Friday, 13 Feb 2004: Friday the 13th Friday 5!
Rip, tie, cut toy man. While ripping, mixing, burning, etc. music for my MP3 CD player, I've discovered The Goon Show. Old time radio is really a form of abandonware. Although The Goon Show is still copyrighted, who will prosecute you for downloading episodes? How much less so for radio shows from the 1940s and 1930s! This is one reason I support the Public Domain Enhancement Act. To quote Lawrence Lessig, "That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don't, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would suggest 98% of works would pass into the pubilc domain after 50 years." Some things are worth more to the public than they are to the copyright holders.
Caucus. Marty and I attended our district's Democratic Party Caucus on Saturday. Five people from our tiny precinct voted (although there were something like a 1000% [sic] increase in attendees to the caucus overall). Three out of the five of us, including me and Marty, were for Kucinich, the other two for Kerry. (Two confused Deaniacs showed up after the voting took place, for a total of seven from our precinct.) In the end, two of our three delegates went to Kucinich. I like to think Marty and I did our bit for his substantial showing (by the standards of his campaign) in Washington State: 8%.
Bush is fucking up. Big time. He can't show us the WMDs or proof that he wasn't AWOL. I thought he'd be cunning enough to fake "proof", but apparently not, so far. Even Fox's archconservative Bill O'Reilly is jumping ship; Yahoo! News recently reported "Conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly said on Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." Keep fucking up, asshole.
Juvenon. My mother has Alzheimer's, so anything I can do to stave off the ravages of aging in myself medicinally is welcome. I'm only 38, so it may be a bit early to start taking Juvenon, but I bought a three-month supply of the two component supplements online. If I don't experience any effect after three months, I'll know that either it doesn't work at all, or it doesn't work for me, at this time in my life.
Journal. I've finally decided what to make of the beautiful handmade journal that Meredith gave me for Christmas. I'm making it a book of aphorisms. Since I'm not an aphorism machine like Ludwig Wittgenstein or Friedrich Nietzsche, I think I can look forward to filling this book (in green ink, to match the cover) for years to come.
Friday, 6 Feb 2004: Doggie birthday
Tia. It was my dog Tia's 10th birthday (observed) today, 6 February. While it's sad to see her getting old, we look forward to years more with her, and we are glad our "Lab Chow" has been a part of our family for so long. (We got her when she was two and a half years old, from a shelter, and have never regretted it.)
Piecepack. Piecepack dice cards and piecepack paper dice. My friend John Braley invented piecepack dice cards, I elaborated on them and extended the concept to piecepack paper dice, Tim Schutz elaborated on the dice cards and drew up a beautiful printable set of them.
Magazine. Abstract Games Magazine issue 16 finally arrived. It's as good as usual, which is very, very.
Beating the Bushes. Kerry beat Bush in some polls. Democrats are out in mobs at the primaries and caucuses while the Republicans seem sluggish. The Republicans will have a harder time fixing the election again if the Democratic candidate wins by a landslide.
Inspiration wants to be free. As a bipolar person, I have thought for a long time that inspiration always came (if you'll excuse the metaphor) in an electric shock directly from the Muse. However, this week I found that a "current" can be passed down the years from one person to another. (I believe "current" is the correct occult term.) I started collaborating on a project with the person who passed a certain current on to me recently. Unfortunately, I can't say more right now. I don't mean to be secretive; we'll publicise it when we're done.
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Be good and be happy this week. |
Entered 11:18 [/personal/friday5] permalink
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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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-.
Friday, 9 January 2004
Friday, 2 January 2004
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Entered 15:52 [/personal/friday5] permalink
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So, a lot to be pleased as Christmas punch about this week, for obvious reasons.
Happy St. Stephen's Day to all! Careful with that ax, Eugene. |
Entered 12:13 [/personal/friday5] permalink
Five things that made my week: book, movie, egosurfing, aggregator, socialising.
Book: Everyone In Silico, an sf novel by Jim Munroe that addresses issues raised not only by The Matrix (and let's face it, there weren't too many damn issues raised by that movie), but more importantly by Greg Egan's sf novel Permutation City. Review forthcoming.
Movie: The Return of the King, which was beautiful and made me cry, but also infuriated me in places. The best spots were where they stuck closest to the book, of course. Review forthcoming.
Egosurfing: I decided to Google for "low-tech game systems", the subject of my most recent article for The Games Journal. The search results were gratifying. More later.
Aggregator. In my search for a good RSS aggregator, I have moved from rss2email to Pears, back to rss2email, and most recently to Bloglines. This is a free (as in beer) web-based RSS aggregator service with an excellent user interface. Think of it as Hotmail for your blogs.
Socialising. What a social tornado the end/beginning of year holiday season is. This week I saw not only most of the Seattle Cosmic Game Night regulars, but also participated in an office party, hung out all day with one of my best friends, Karl Erickson, and saw my cousin Nancy Olson for the first time in years, meeting her SO Jeffrey Snider as well. I missed my cousin, and what a great guy she has added to the set of family members I actually like. (Collect 'em, trade 'em!) The gifts have been flying back and forth, in some cases literally, since my immediate family lives in Connecticut.
The solstice is tomorrow, folks; that's how all this nonsense got started, remember? Best word I have heard recently to describe the generic secular winter solstice festival we celebrate in this part of the world: Santanalia.
Ho ho ho! Hrum, hroom.
--StormHair RainbowBeard
(my secret Pagan name, generated programmatically)
Entered 23:16 [/personal/friday5] permalink
Would you like Friday 5 with that?
So here's my Friday 5 for 12 December 2003. Yes, this is late (but I got it Friday to the social list where I always post it first). Yes, I missed posting the week before. yes I said yes I will Yes.
Connecting. Marty and I have been especially close the last few days. Marty has been really depressed recently. I encouraged her to write a Friday 5 to cheer herself up, but she said she hasn't had five good things happen to her recently. Poor Marty. I have had periods of black depression myself in the past but am fortunately feeling pretty solid lately, so I was able to be there for her and help her pull out of the depression somewhat. I've also taken up the practice of reading to her again, something we had let drop for a couple of months. Our current book is The Art of Happiness, which is a series of conversations with the Dalai Lama.
Completion. Marty and I finished our solitaire game entry to the latest anonymous piecepack game design competition. I was pleased when Meredith Hale's boyfriend Kisa, who is not only an extremely experienced gamer but has seen so much of gaming that he's more or less sworn it off for a while, wrote me to say, "I watched Meredith playing this last night and I wanted to let you know that while I didn't play myself I thought that [your game] had... great... playability along with having solid mechanics. Way to go!" Thanks, Kisa! Meredith seems to like it a lot too. More than this I cannot say; I may already have said too much.
Book. Devoured and greatly enjoyed Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland, which I read about on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools blog. It turned out Marty already had a copy, so I snapped it up. It imparted some solid artistic advice, gave me reason to feel better about some conflicts I have experienced as a game designer, and also reason to finish writing the "seed pages" for my Glass Bead Game Wiki and throw open the doors.
Moleskine. On the same blog (Kevin Kelly is an ex-editor of the Whole Earth Review, which is why he likes pushing "cool tools" on people; my excuse is forthcoming), I found a description of the Moleskine notebook. Sure, I bought one partly because of the hype (Bruce Chatwin and André Breton used them!), but once bought, this is a tactilely gorgeous and ergonomically superb little "paper PDA". Waterproof oilcloth cover, built-in bookmark, built-in elastic band to hold the book closed, and an accordion pocket in the back. I bought mine with squared paper so it would be easy to play pen and paper games on the go as well as take notes. Powell's carries lots of different Moleskines, by the way.
Pleasants. That's what we call gifts in our family. Remote family members we've shipped pleasants to have started to receive them. We got my father and stepmother a DVD player, the same model we have (Apex AD-1200), which will play DVDs, CDs, VCDs, Kodak Photo CDs, and that Christmas MP3 CD we made him last year that he couldn't figure out. It also has an Easter egg that makes it "region-free", so it will play DVDs from around the world as well as from the US and Canada. Dad had never used a DVD player and is now considering joining Netflix! Also, Friday evening we went to a solstice party thrown by a friend and his wife. Marty and I gave the hosts a subscription to Abstract Games Magazine.
It's fun to estimate just the right gift for a friend. However, I would like to observe the spirit of Buy Nothing Day as well as Christmas, so in future I may be giving more used books and games instead of cranking the consumer machine up another $X00.00. It is rumoured that FLOSS (free/libre/open-source software) and abandonware CDs may be making an appearance this year in the Hale-Evans extended family Christmas as well.
Entered 22:47 [/personal/friday5] permalink
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Hope all the USans had a happy Thanksgiving and that everyone worldwide is enjoying a happy Buy Nothing Day (tomorrow in the UK, but then it is tomorrow in the UK.)
Entered 22:40 [/personal/friday5] permalink
OK, I've run a little over my allotted five here, but if the Top Five can do it, so can I. I guess I just had a good week.
Sick day: I called in sick and slept for something like 15 hours. I really caught up on my sleep deficit. My elementary school nurse told my class "You can never really catch up on your sleep -- that's just a myth", but that's exactly the opposite of what we now know to be true, as the cigarette-smoking doctor put it in Sleeper. Marty says my mood is very much improved...
Essay: However, my circadian clock seems to be bollocksed from getting up at 4 PM, so I leapt out of bed at 3:30 this morning, feeling somewhat manic, and wrote for about two hours. It's the outline of an essay on my personal philosophy that I hope to submit to The Games Journal, although it seems maybe more like the kind of thing the influential (but apparently defunct) The Life of Games would publish. You can see a few of the key concepts at the home page of the Center for Ludic Synergy; the idea is to remove the metaphysical baggage from the front page and let people know they don't have to subscribe to my ideas to join the umbrella organisation, while clarifying the core ideas for myself at least. (I've linked to an archived version of the page because it won't look that way much longer.)
EGG: A local game design group called EGG met at our apartment for the first time on Sunday. Although the emphasis is on playtesting rather than playing members' games, I had more fun than I usually do lately at our other game group, Seattle Cosmic. It was probably the smaller group size in part (Seattle Cosmic Game Night routinely runs to 20 people nowadays), but it was also fun to playtest the solitaire game Marty and I are submitting to the Solitary Confinement piecepack game design contest; it was fun to play our friend Steve Vallée's game, even though it was not quite ready for prime time; and it was especially fun to play our friend AlphaTim Schutz's game, which is quite definitely ready for prime time and could well (we all agreed) take first place in a major international game design competition such as Hippodice. (Also, it was fun to win the latter game by a wide margin.)
GIPF: Playing games in the GIPF Project with Marty. We played YINSH (the newest game) and DVONN on Wednesday night (Marty beat me at both). It was an especially geheimlich evening because we regard this series as "our" games; we selected them together to play together, and when a new one comes out, we buy it together. We also have fun making up new names for the games: FNORD, MINSK, PINSK, MENSCH... Ironically, I have now played every one of the published games in this series except GIPF, the game for which the project is named.
Gratis computers, libre software: I unexpectedly received two 450 MHz PCs as a gift on Saturday from my friend Karl Erickson, who was getting rid of them and didn't want to have to sell them. I offered one to Kisa Griffin (my friend, and my wife Marty's sister Meredith's boyfriend), who had been wanting to install Knoppix on his old PC for a while. He came over Sunday night and we had an impromptu installfest, swapping out hard drives and CD-ROM drives, diagnosing memory, and finally installing Knoppix on both machines. Gotta love commodity hardware and free software.
Limekiller: The book ¡Limekiller!, by Avram Davidson, arrived yesterday in the mail. I'll have more details later, but I'll just say this is a posthumous fantasy collection I have been awaiting for months, and I was able to get it a month before its putative publication date by ordering through Powell's.
First snow: We don't get much snow at lower elevations in the Pacific Northwest. I took the dogs out this morning and they reacted visibly. Tia was nonplussed; Gwenny, whom we suspect is part sled dog, started licking the ground happily.
Warm clothes: With winter coming on, sometimes it seems that I wake up cold and can't get warm the rest of the day. Well, Marty recently made a gift of some warm sweatclothes and slipper socks to wear around the house, so even if I have to be cold at work, I can come home and be warm. Thanks, sweetie!
Entered 22:06 [/personal/friday5] permalink
Another five things that made my week:
Caffeine. I've been reading a book called The Caffeine Advantage by Bennett Weinberg (2002). It makes a pretty strong case that if you already drink coffee or tea, you should drop them in favour of caffeine tablets. Since doing so, I have experienced the following positive effects:
EGG. J.T. Thomas, who is the founder of the Eastside Game Group, a Seattle-area game design group I belong to, has stepped down and handed administration of the group to me, including monthly hosting duties, administration of the mailing list, creation of a web site, and so on. The members have agreed that the group should affiliate itself with the Center for Ludic Synergy as soon as I make it publicly clear they don't necessarily subscribe to the mystical ideology presently on the site's front page. That kind of clarification is something I have meant to do for a while anyway.
Organisation. I've been on a (partly caffeine-inspired) binge to organise my life. I have created a formal to do list, calendar, and "pointers" file in a big three-ring binder. Last night Marty and I spent about an hour in our local Office De(s)pot shopping for organisational hardware. I now feel I have many of the tools I need to get my life in order. If I
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