Blocks With Letters On. It's probably the only thing that kept me sane in a week of working til midnight every day. I must say, it's a surprisingly clever combination of word puzzles and spatial puzzles, both of which I really enjoy. Too bad there are only 64 levels.
So thanks, Jan, for pointing it out!
... to think "wow, Tina Fey is doing an *amazing* impression!" and then realize that you're watching the actual VP debates?
I think 10:28-10:40 of the following video explains what I wish I had been doing for the entire debate. That so many general and nonspecific comments from both sides could be considered a debate is sad. I don't think I learned anything about either ticket, except that I'm not particularly enthused about their VP picks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj0dqCB6pcI
... people sail across the pacific to dump their trash in the Ala Wai.
Raft Made Of Junk Crosses Pacific
A sailing raft made of recycled junk carrying two men on an estimated 2,300-mile trip across the Pacific Ocean has made it to Hawaii's Ala Wai Harbor.
I think we can fill the canal with shit on our own, thankyouverymuch.
Many of you (for some definition or "many", "of", and "you"), my dear loyal readers, have asked me repeatedly just how sharp an X-acto knife is. Since you have all made this blog so enormously popular (for some definition of "so", "enormously" and "popular"), I feel I am forced to do your bidding (for some definition of "do", "your", and "bidding"). It is for this reason that I decided to test (for some definition of "decided", "to", and "test") an X-acto knife upon my thumb. Unfortunately, I mean the common and universally understood definitions of "upon", "my" and "thumb".
On a scale of 1 (does not cut my thumb at all) to 10 (cuts the tip off my thumb), I would rate the X-acto knife's sharpness as 5 (cuts the tip of my thumb half way off). At the given depth, I'd estimate that if the cut had gone twice as far laterally, I'd be posting something philisophical asking whether it can still be called the tip if it's laying on the floor (see Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought).
Incidenatlly, when I say that coed astronomy pours it's blood, sweat, and tears into the Iron Puzzler BANG (and all the games we run), I don't mean that metaphorically. If your start clue has red stains on it, you'll know where they're from.
Well, ok, I threw out the piece of card stock I was currently working on, and the rest were protected in envelopes (unlike my carpet), so there was blood, sweat, and tears involved, but it's just the pouring that was metaphorical.
A coworker recently wrote an iGoogle gadget that uses News Archive data to display random historical events. Sort of a "This Day in History" thing with much more data and much less editing. So if like me, you happen to be in the intersection of the subset of people who use iGoogle and the subset of people who like random trivia, you might check it out:
Apparently, I'm an exotic foreigner. And by that, I don't mean tha I'm seeing Double Vision or that I'm Cold as Ice. I mean this:
"I know Hawai'i is a state, but..."? Seriously? Go to hell, Cokie Roberts.
With 47 applications for 20 slots, I feel quite privileged that coed astronomy made it in. We put a ton of effort into our app, and while I thought it turned out well, it's difficult to really judge one's own work. Our video is funny to us because we know what we were going for, but you never know if it'll fall flat with a real audience.
There's been much discussion on the_game mailing list about how to handle the popularity that games have been facing lately. The two main suggestions--encourage the running of more games by weighing GC work heavily in the app process, and run games over two weekends--really fall flat for me. The first seems somewhat infeasible to me, and the second really cheapens the parts of the game that I like.
BANG died because everyone who wanted to run one did. Despite a tremendous growth in popularity, the number of people who wanted to run BANGs simply did not scale linearly with the number of people interested in playing in them. I fear it is the same or worse with big games. Planning a game usually takes a year or more, and most of the people "hardcore" enough to do that have already been playing in games. Trying to force people to run games will only result in a bunch of crappy games. You have to be really dedicated and interested to stick it out.
Where I think we can pick up new teams who would run games is the fresh-out-of-college/grad student crowd. coed astronomy and XX-Rated both fell into this category when we started. Both teams were willing to run both BANGs and big games, and the likely reason we weren't on this bandwagon a lot earlier was that we were undergraduates/not in the bay area/too busy with school/etc. To give props to a friend, Jesse Young's team CRANEA is one of the teams I'd put into this category. It's unfortunate they didn't make it into Ghost Patrol because I think it just prolongs the time before Jesse inevitably runs some sort of game (be it BANG, a day game, a puzzle hunt, or whatever).
The problem with simply running more games is that every team wants to play in every game. And to do that, you need to accept more teams or run each game twice. Neither is particularly appealing to me. A lot of the charm and the magic of the game for me comes from the clues and clue sites that place the biggest restrictions on the number of people. The entirety of Hogwarts (my favorite game of all time, even though I only playtested it) would never have worked with 30+ teams. And frankly, I don't know many people who have the stamina to run an all-weekend game more than once.
So what do we do about this? I don't really know, and that's why I tried to kick off discussion on the mailing list. The real innovation in the game happens when people run one, however, so I hope to be pleasantly surprised sometime next summer when some team steps up with a game format which attempts to solve these problems. Even in the short few years that coed astronomy has been around, we've seen some pretty big changes in how games are run, so I'm quite hopeful for the future. =)
