Ron's Info-Closet Annex

1. Contest: There's a new piecepack contest called Group Projects. The contest theme is collaborative game design. All games entered must be designed (not just playtested) by a minimum of two people. Since some successful piecepack designers already design in teams, the Hale-Evans Gang (Marty and I) issued an ultimatum to the Schoessow Brothers: be out of Piecepackville afore sundown. I'm afraid (afeared) that the only real effect of the ultimatum was to trigger a cascade of Wild West roleplaying on the piecepack mailing list.

   The deadline for the Group Projects competition is 22 May, which gives me nearly four months to obsess.

2. Craftiness: I've also been experimenting with making my own JCD piecepack. Marty is encouraging me because she likes to see me do things with my hands; she says I spend too much time in my head.

   One of the attractive things about the JCD design is that it's easy to make a SixPack with it: just remove two suits. It's also completely colourblind-friendly: everywhere that suit is indicated by colour in the standard piecepack, the JCD piecepack uses monochrome icons.

   The approach that's working for me right now is laser-printing the JCD graphics onto paper or cardstock (still experimenting), making stickers out of the paper bits with my Xyron laminator (printing directly onto full-sheet labels would work almost as well), sticking the graphics onto wooden bits, and sealing the stickers with Mod Podge. Looks nice.

   Enough with the piecepack already...

3. Author: Thanks to my last boss, Todd Kopriva, I have discovered a good SF writer: John Barnes (not to be confused with the hack Steven Barnes). Todd told me John Barnes is similar to Greg Egan, which was like waving candy in front of a bull, or something. He recommended Mother of Storms (1995) in strong terms, but I was unable to find a copy locally. I did however find a more recent book, Candle (2000), which is part of the Meme Wars series. Since I'm a sucker for SF about memetics, I enjoyed this a great deal. I won't say more for fear of spoilers, but the day I finished Candle, I picked up a copy of its sequel, The Sky So Big and Black (2002), which I am also enjoying but finding a bit harder to penetrate.

4. Schedule: Now that Marty is working, we're on the same clock. I don't stay up until the teensy-weensy hours watching TiVo any more just because Marty's bedtime is 4:00 in the morning. Going to bed early + getting up early = getting to work on time. It's especially nice to share at least part of my commute with Marty.

5. Spree: I received a token of appreciation from my company, Open Interface North America late in the day Friday (30 Jan). I appreciated being appreciated by my company even more than I appreciated the gift as such. It's also nice to know I have a modicum of job security in the present economy, as much as anyone can.

   Marty and I went out and celebrated in what we call "booze and whores mode". No booze (well, one beer for me), and definitely no whores, but a few electronics purchases followed by dinner. Marty had been wanting an MP3 player for a while, and she finally agreed that an MP3 CD player is a lot cheaper than an iPod and almost as flexible (more flexible in some ways, since it can play ordinary CDs as well as MP3 CDs). She bought a RioVolt SP-150, which is similar to the player I have (SP-50), with a few extra features. She also bought a pair of portable speakers, since she prefers not to listen with headphones. I bought a pair of noise-cancelling headphones that were on sale (the Audiobahn ABN-103NC). The treble sounds a little muddy to me, but I have been hearing little flourishes on my favourite songs that I hadn't heard before, and they certainly do block exterior sound -- I may have to try to learn lip-reading again. We rounded out our purchases with some AA and AAA batteries, and went out to an Italian restaurant for dinner (swordfish for me, ravioli for Marty). Today we're hitting the University of Washington bookstore, where I've had my eye on some remainders, and that will end most of the boozing and whoring for a while, I think.

Be good and be happy this week.