Ron's Projects Page
Ron's Projects Page See my homepage at Seattle Cosmic, which has a more current listing of my projects, particularly about games. Right now I'm probably best known for my articles on game systems for The Games Journal. These have been used as part of a syllabus for an honours course on the history of board games at Ball State University, which means I missed by only one year my goal of having my writing taught in schools by age 35.
My current big project is a book called Kennexions about a game called Kennexions, a GBG.
GBGs are a form of complex collaborative artwork that has gained a lot of momentum in the last few years. They are inspired by author Hermann Hesse's concept of the Glass Bead Game. You can see my own GBG efforts at the Center for Ludic Synergy and the Kennexions GBG Home Page.
These are some projects that are still very important to me, but which I have shelved temporarily in the interest of finishing other projects:
is a suite of "brain amplifier" software for the Macintosh designed to give you a high-energy Boot to the Head. It will be commercial software or shareware and will include interconnected programs for divination, creativity and brainstorming, decision support, "metalearning" training (ASCII shorthand, speed reading, mental math ("Mentat math"), supermemory, and so on), and other stuff. Early versions were written in HyperCard and FutureBASIC, but I ran into limitations of the medium, and the current versions are being written as Java applets. You can find selected components of Cloudbusters in various stages of completion here: Cloudbusters Beta Archive (as of 23 Sep 1999, this link works again).
This is very ambitious, and I've barely begun it. It's a book about synchronicity, dealing with how synchronicities come about, particular symbolisms that frequently pop up, and answers to common objections to the concept of synchronicity. This project will require that I learn German so that I can refer to a classic work on the subject never translated into English, Kammerer's Das Gesetz der Serie. (I'm also looking for a translator in the meantime. I can't pay much, but I will pay something.)
This is a piece of "interactive autobiography" written in TADS, the Text Adventure Development System. It details my experiences with madness and the Mental Health Industrial Complex. My current tasks (11/94) is converting MV to the WorldClass library developed by David Baggett. I am making Mad Venture available only to betatesters at the moment.
Appeared in FringeWare Review #5. My views on radio synchronicities, and why so many psychotics think God is talking to them via said magick box.
Appeared in FringeWare Review #5. A critique of Kyle Griffith's book War in Heaven, in which skull farmer Griffith claims that there's a worldwide conspiracy to conceal the fact that bloated monsters exist on the Astral Plane who eat our souls after death, and that this knowledge, "the Breakthrough," is the vaunted gnosis/enlightenment/satori of every magickal org worth mentioning. I figure I can make fun of Griffith all I want, 'cause he says he doesn't care whether anyone believes him or not.
Appeared in FringeWare Review #6(66) (December 1994). This is the (incomplete) transcript of an interview I did of Mace in September 1994. Mace is a seminal figure in Chaos Magick and Thelema, and quite an interesting magickal innovator, as well as an excellent expositor of Austin Osman Spare. He's the author of Stealing the Fire From Heaven, Squeezing Being, and Sorcery as Virtual Mechanics (the latter is out of print, but the article provides purchase info for the former two). The interview covered a wide area, but the excerpts printed mostly cover "darker" magickal topics. If you read this article and are interested in publishing more of the interview, feel free to contact me.
At one point, you could usually find FringeWare Review at your local Barnes & Noble bookstore. The magazine folded a while back. I bet there are archives online somewhere...
You can see a few of my articles, programs, etc. here.
Being young and psychotic (no joke) at Yale in the Eighties. A true story. Originally published in Singularity #1 as the first "Notes from the Mountains of Madness" column.
A Discordian calendar for the Palm OS. Displays today's date in the Discordian calendar. That's all. Although this app is at version 0.5, it is extremely stable (unlike its developer, His Pontification Saint Ron the Second Draft, Speaker to Greyface).
Confused? Type "discordianism" into your nearest friendly search engine. Or just grep your pineal gland.
Another piece of mine from Singularity #1. This one is about the future of self-modification. It's in "setext" format, a kind of human-readable ASCII markup language. (HTML version coming soon.)
This is an award-winning paper on the study of memes, or self-replicating ideas. It's in the draft stage, but I was urged to make it available online by the late Sasha Chislenko. Later drafts will be posted at the same URL.
Singularity was a "zine", or small-press magazine. At its largest, it had a print run of about 500. We published articles about a lot of the things I list below as my interests. The main threads running through the tapestry of Singularity were futurism and cultural relativism. Accordingly, we had articles on cryonics, virtual reality, memetics, and magick, among other fringey topics. We also published satire, but our most popular column was probably "Notes from the Mountains of Madness", which consisted of descriptions of what it's like to be crazy and what mental institutions are like, by People Who Know. Here's the first installment of the column, "Cynanthropy", see above.
I'm not selling the zine myself anymore, but I'm negotiating to have someone sell my back issues for me. Email for details.
What if legislators who passed unconstitutional laws were fined or imprisoned? Think about it.
I am a CREW Signatory.
Ron Hale-Evans rwhe@ludism.org