The Marquis

YouTube – Plants vs Zombies Music Video  cute casual gaming fun.

Missile Command Circle Skirt – Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

I like the comment at the bottom “for the first time in my life I want to dress like a girl”

ThinkGeek :: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies  this looks awesome!

I’ve been on a Michener kick for light lunch-time reading for the past year or so.  I really enjoyed Alaska, and I’m currently in the middle of Poland, which I’m liking better than Carribbean, but not as much as Alaska.

I think it’s the time span difference.  Alaska starts out waaaaay back in geological time, Poland and Carribbean start back about a thousand years or so.  And Poland edges out Carribbean because it’s a single locale, more or less, rather than a disparate bunch of islands.  It seems what I like about his historical fiction is seeing the same locale over and over again as time passes and things develop.  There was some of that at the end of C., but because there were so many different islands with their own cultures, it didn’t have the same sense of continuity.

other michener I’ve read previously include the Source, Chesapeake (both of which were up there with Alaska), Hawaii and the Caravans (shorter book set in afganistan, in the late 40′s or so, interesting read).

Go.  I’ve always been fascinated by the black and white stones, played on the points of a grid.  In grad school I picked up a boxed set at Cerebral Hobbies, which came with a poorly written pamphlet that had the rules and a game record of some game you could replay along with cryptic comments.  It had pieces the size of m&m’s, which for some reason are really hard to deal with because they’re so damn small and light and get bumped all over the place.  Why would anyone want to play this?

So a decade passes.  And the internet grows up some more and becomes the fount of all knowledge.  And there are book reviews and recommendations, a manga that’s made into an anime series, and after an ebay purchase of a set of yunzi stones, a slightly warped board, and some wooden bowls that have flaws inside when you empty them out) it became much easier to play things out when reading some of the books, than when you’re fiddling around with little plastic m&m’s.  (Interestingly, I like the chinese style stones that are flat on one side.  you can try permutations by playing them upside down and get back to the original setup quickly.)   

 And the books are much better than that little pamphlet, but there’s still an enormous gap between the rules and knowing how to even begin to play.  Or even being able to understand the rest of the book written by the 9-dan pro.

I’ve just stumbled across the Learn to Play Go series by Janice Kim.  As a few of the reviews say, there are more in depth books (some of which I have) but this series seems to be the missing link I was looking for, to start to learn how to actually PLAY, or even understand what’s going on in a game.   Maybe once I work through those I’ll have some idea how to play, and will get more out of books like “graded go problems”.  The main complaint seems to be they’re not as dense as some other introductory books, and there’s 5 volumes in the set.  Look for them used to economize.

There’s some good software out there too, and you can play against it or online without needing anyone else to want to learn some inscrutable game that seems to make no sense when you try to teach yourself but is strangely compelling.  There’s an iso of a unix build called Hikarunix that isn’t under development anymore, but you can still download the live cd and boot it and play.  iGowin is a free small version of a commercial program “Many Faces of Go.”

For the TL/DR (Too Long/Didn’t Read) crowd:  If you’re trying to learn Go, it helps to have a full size board and stones.  Janice Kim’s “Learn to Play Go” series seems to be a good introduction to learning to play, even if it’s not the most indepth of all books out there..  And there’s some good computer resources to use or play against.

I’ve been doing some reading recently.

Since the last book in the Wheel of TIme series is being finished up by another author working from outlines, some recordings? and a partial draft done prior to the death of Robert Jordan, I thought I’d try reading some of the chosen collaborators books.  (the new guy’s name is Brandon Sanderson)

“Elantris” was his first published novel.  and mostly it was an enjoyable enough read.  I thought the magic system was reminiscent of the Deathgate cycle, what with certain folks drawing runes in the air and stuff, but the big plot twist, and it’s fix, struck me as disappointing.  It worked well enough in the story, and was reasonable given the plot, but man was it just kinda dumb seeming.  Oh, and the female lead was a mary-sue.

But “Mistborn” has a lot better.  new trilogy, different world, and it’s been interesting, even if the bad guy running the evil empire is named Lord Ruler.  So I have hope for the Wheel of Time series to get wrapped up nicely.  He thinks its going to come in around 700,000 words or so, and maybe have to be bound in two volumes.  The other 11 books put together runs about 3,000,000 words.  zoiks)

I’ve also read through the Gentleman Bastard sequence by Scott Lynch. (2 of 7 are written, book 3 coming sometime soon.  “The Lies of Locke Lamora” and “Red Seas under Red Skies”.  They’re engagingly written, reminds me somewhat of the Vlad Taltos books, although its not a first person narrative.  The jacket cover described it as Robin Hood meets Oceans Eleven.

Next up is KJ Parker’s Fencer Trilogy, starting with “Colours in the Steel”.

Shoot the Baddies – 05 / 01 / 09 on Flickr – Photo Sharing

profile targets with useful things, like zombies, godzilla, megatron, and freddie kruger!

But I played WarCraft 3+Frozen Throne. The datestamp says I installed in back in jan ’04, before the small daughter was born. I’m not sure if it’s more disturbing that it took me 5 years to get around to playing (well, I bogged down at the “kill 100 infected villagers” mission back then, a handful of missions in), or that my computer is more than 5 years old and is still doing ok. On the plus side the bonus campaign is entirely released now, rather than just the first chapter of it.

Since I was on an RTS roll I gave Starcraft and StarCraft:Broodwar a run through. Starcraft is no problem, but I’d been stuck on Broodwar Zerg mission 8 for, oh, 5 years or so. The answer to it seemed to be crank the game speed down to painfully slow for that mission, so that you have a prayer of reacting in time when the computer jumps you with spellcasters that do area effect death spells, etc… Of course that makes everything take much longer, say 2.5x as long as a normal long misison. But it worked, even if the final mission made me scream in frustration once at the massive coordinated multiprong attack by the computer.

It’s entitled I made this, you play this.we are enemies.

The eyeballing game.  LIttle browser game that you make geometry estimations.  Find the midpoint of the line, bisect and angle, etc…  I think woodworkers have an edge on that, but it’s pretty fun.