I'm in your Austin Java, blogging on my cell.

Eleven minutes, ten dimensions

My brain hurts a little after watching this promo animation for a book on the ten dimensions. Yes, Virginia, there are only ten of them.

Important: For a much cleaner video, click on the rotating spiral bit on the right, not the nav stuff on the left. My apologies for not being able to directly link into a flash movie.

Our lease is up at the end of July

People keep asking when I leave Austin, so here's a handy flash countdown clock.



And there you go.

Too Many Games

Yes, you read that right. I have too many board games (approx 345 as of this writing).

More accurately, I have too many games that I haven't played, or too many mediocre games that I snagged at thrift stores or in trades or simply purchased impulsively. Right now, I'm sorting them into a few different categories:

• Love and will keep forever
• Unplayed, but I'll probably keep
• Unplayed I honestly am not sure I will like it enough to keep it, so maybe I better trade or sell it while I can
• Played and ambivalent or generally positive
• Played and want to offload
• OH GOD IT BURNS

Once I finish sorting, ideally I would either sell or trade the unwanted games locally, and right now I suspect I've got anywhere from 30-50% of my collection to move on to other owners. My taste has changed over the last year; one might say that I have a more refined palate these days.

If you like, you can watch the progress on my games for trade list. This is a not-too-subtle suggestion to let me know if you want something. I should be able to post a final list to my local board game groups in the next few weeks.

Improv game design and procrastination hacks

Here's a twofer quickie.

I posted the latest improv game design experiment over on the Flywheel. I know that it doesn't get updated super frequently, so here's your excuse to go check it out for some freshness.

I came across this list of procrastination hacks by some fellow who posted the list as a means to hack procrastination. Since I'm about to have my machine off for a few hours while I calibrate my battery, I'm going to hit #8, #12, and at least #3 on a few things I want to do.

Steampunk rayguns

Words can not express just quite how much I want one of Dr Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators. Sadly, I do not have $700 USD to drop on a handmade, metal-and-glass creation, even if it is done by the geniuses at Weta. I could also live with more steampunk technology in day-to-day life- there's simply not enough aether or pneumatic tubes these days.

Thanks to Wired for the original article. Actual art an imagination by Greg Broadmore (webbernet coming from New Zealand, so patience is a virtue!).

In a similar vein, mechanical television fascinates me.

Disney and Fair Use

This article over on Wired has a link to a video mashup of Disney cartoons explaining fair use and copyright law. Oh, the irony alone. (YouTube, Quicktime stream, or download)

I haven't seen a response from Disney yet.

Thanks, Stanford!

James Ernest on design

I generally don't like to just quote-and-link, but I can't help it sometimes.

Cheapass' James Ernest has an article in Make magazine on game design. Some of it is pretty basic and introductory stuff, but this quote stands out as particularly insightful.

I like to say that there are two kinds of novice game designers: those who make houses out of doors, and those who make roads out of walls. The "house made of doors" game has no clear goal but offers many ways to get there. The "road made of walls" has a clear objective, the end of the road, with obstacles along the way. But a good game combines these two - a road made of doors, with a clear goal and multiple ways to achieve it.

Definitely a different way of thinking about design.

Spider robots

I totally want this for a daily driver. Might need to work on the suspension and top speed, though.

Spider Mobile - Voiture araignee
Uploaded by sebest

Reliving Katrina

I'm watching Spike Lee's documentary, When the Levees Broke, right now. It's almost like reliving the month after the storm all over again.

There's a scene in the documentary where a St. Bernard Parish man tells a story about a fellow walking into the refinery and asking what he can do to help. When asked who he was, the guy says, "We're the Canadian Mounted Police from Vancouver." It breaks my heart. (Bush plus Katrina make Mischa crazy. God damn Homeland Security and its mismanagement of FEMA.)

On the second disc, there's another scene of a man and his mom going through her house for the first time after the flood. It happened to me, taking my grandmother through her house, with furniture moved across rooms and the artifacts of a lifetime rotting and moldy- like a ghost of a memory overlaid on everything you see.

It's so good to hear familiar accents and see a few familiar faces in the documentary, including the hard-to-define quality of familiar kinds of faces.

A few new folks have moved to Austin and are now attending game nights. Consequently, they don't know I'm from New Orleans. After last night's gaming, we talked a little about how I wouldn't be still in Austin after a few months and why. One of the established guys didn't understand why I want to go back. "Austin has a future," he said. "New Orleans is a city with a past." I still don't know how to best respond- Every city has a future. My official position on Austin remains that my attitude would be different if we moved here on purpose and by choice.



[Edit: Allow comments. Not sure how my default Blogger settings got goofed up.]