tablesaw | Just a Bunch of Stuff

I've been once again finding either the time or the impetus to post from work. And things have gotten a little crazy around the house.

ojouchan finished work with the film she was on much earlier than expected, and a lot of time was dedicated to keeping up her spirits. Another large block of time has been dedicated to getting her her driving permit and teaching her to drive. Hollywood streets are way too busy for us to practice, so we have to take a drive before we spend time driving and drive back. And between all of that, I've actually had some activities of my own (generally planned when I thought I'd have much more free time than I could handle). So it's been fun and exciting, but rough on internet me.

April first is already starting to bug me. I'd wanted to catch up on the Story Games forum, but they've apparently archived nearly all of their old threads in service to today's "prank."

I've been doing a lot of hiking, but haven't posted much about it. Ojou joined me for my last two Santa Monica Summits, San Vicente Mountain and Saddle Peak. Both involved short hikes which, perversely, could have been avoided by driving. But that's not the point, of course. In retrospect, the unusual number of bugs meant that we should ahve driven up San Vicente, but the hike up to Saddle Peak took us along a beautiful stretch of the Backbone Trail that were wonderful.

On Saturday, I headed east to Game Empire to play some RPGs at Nerd SoCal's March Game Day. It was a lot of fun. I played Shock in the morning, and In a Wicked Age in the evening. I'd heard a lot about both, and both were excellent. I have to say that IAWA was significantly more excellent, though. I'd like to go into details, but that would be a whole other post.

I enjoy these convention and miniconvention outings. It seems like I always have enough interested friends around to do some gaming, but it very rarely coalesces into playing games. But at these gatherings, the people I've played with have been pretty uniformly awesome, and it's great to try out a new game every four hours.

One of the reasons I can't really hang with fandoms is that I can't keep a text alive within my heart very long. Fans of a show or book—I mean Capital-F-Fandom fans—just seem to be able to keep that show alive regardless of what's happening. Writer's strike, delayed book, early cancelation, none of these can dim the spirits of fandom because they keep things alive through fanfic, speculation, spoilers, art, reruns, rereads, and any manner of thing. But for me, that fire only really exists while the show is going; when it stops, everything cools.

Battlestar Galactica restarts this week, and I'm having trouble remembering everything about it. I feel like this any time something I was a fan of goes away and comes back. I'll be into it soon enough, I know, but when I look at those giant ads plastered around my home, I feel disconnected.

I develop fandom muscles quickly, but I let them atrophy too easily.

radiotelescope wrote a fun little puzzle called Praser 12 a little while ago (last week?). It didn't take too long to solve (though it did take a while to find the time to actually do the solving); I think I was just on Zarf's brainwavelength when it came to laying to whole thing out.

TueNYTX: 5:45.

I've definitely let my crossword muscles atrophy. I agree with

thedan that Nikoli puzzles work out a different part of the brain, and it's hard to keep both of them going. I need to shape up both for Hunt construction this year.

Of course, I'm getting better at solving the Nikoli puzzles. I absolutely breezed through the mega-sized puzzles released today.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thanks for linking to the Nikoli puzzles - I'd been wanting to do some more of those. I'm still wanting to.

You did the puzzle! That's cool. That's the first report I've gotten of someone solving it since rikchik's party.

You'll be interested in this forum thread, then (contains spoilers, obviously). I found it when I was trying to figure out the significance of the title (which I have since learned).

So you didn't hear about the ifMUD group solving it a week or two ago?

Not until I read the linked forum thread.

That reminds me, with you away from the MUD I haven't had the chance to say nasty things to you about the fire puzzle on the literal plane of Praser 5. (It's the one with the five cities.) So consider them said!

(Of course, the fact that I cared enough to be that annoyed is evidence that it was a compelling game and was of generally high enough quality that I wanted to push through and solve it anyway despite that puzzle, but that's beside the point.)

Sorry about that. I wrote Praser 5 roughly half my lifetime ago, so any excuse I could offer for the design would be a triviality...

Enh, that's OK. The rest of the game was pretty good. And the final puzzle was fun enough to leave it on a high note.

So what's the graph of prasers-versus-time look like?

Now let me think. 1 through 3 were around ages 15-18. I think 1 was a maze with teleporters, and 2 and 3 were mazes with colored keys. I implemented those in Apple 2 assembly.

I don't remember what 4 was.

5 was designed when I was in college. 6 through 9 were also, running up through about 1993. They were mystery puzzles, like 12, but not very well balanced and not particularly solvable.

10 was another mystery puzzle, but I posted it on CMU's local newsgroups, so it had a short half-life. That must have been before 1995, when I disengaged from CMU.

There was no 11. I jumped to 12 for this one for reasons of symmetry.

So, the graph has a big gap in it.

Just a Bunch of Stuff

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