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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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 (I've linked to an archived version of the page because it won't look that way much longer.)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!
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