Larry Hosken: New: 2011

Non-San Franciscans: You Too Can Play the 2-Tone Game If you're not in SF and still want to play the 2-Tone Game: go ahead. If you're trying to solve a puzzle and you think "this is gonna be impossible because I'm not physically there", then use the an...
Salvaged from Facebook: More on Observing Playtesters A while back, I posted a plea for Game Control folks to offer up insights on how they Observe Playtesters. That got some interesting replies scattered around the internets. It also got some replies...
Site Update: Better Blog "Tag" Page You might remember a while back I made a "tag cloud" for this blog; now it's bigger. Before, it didn't show the tags labels tags thingies from the posts I imported from blogger.com. Now, it does. I...
Zine Report: Giant Robot #68 My favorte thing in this issue: Angie Wang's list of top 10 text adventure gam interactive fictions! Also an interview with Takayuki Higashino, who single-mindedly pursues motorcycle trick riding exc...
Book Report: Zero History It's another William Gibson novel. This one seemed merely good, not transcendentally wonderful like Spook Country. But good is still pretty darned good. It explores the relationship between the mi...
>> Braid is a fun game—and ported to Linux. If that's good news to you, don't get too excited right away. It was part of a bundle that's not available right now. But you can sign up to get notifie...
>> For old time's sake, looked at the Rapture Index. It's showing Google Ads now. If he figures he'll be around long enough to spend the money, that's a good sign, right? ...
>> The voice of Wikipedia. Each article written by people writing about what they care about most. The precise language of controversies tiptoed around. The earnestness. You might think you could rob...
>> If you recently guessed SCOUT VAILLANCOURT FOUNTAIN in the 2-Tone Game, try entering SCOUT again. I tried to clarify the wording a bit. If you didn't guess SCOUT VAILLANCOURT FOUNTAIN, then carry on...
>> So basically this poem says that codes lack the passion of poetry... well, the passion of good poetry. Maybe still better than, say "Pangolin Bowling" ...
Two Hours of Industry lead to Two Days of Sloth I tossed things out. I moved furniture. It made room in my apartment. This activity is kind of like combining Tetris along with hippo juggling along with deciding which hippo you can get along wit...
Technical Writing Student Internships Google is taking technical writing interns this summer. Yeah, everyone at Google's a genius and should never ever need anything explained to them. OMG especially not by some wet-behind-the-ears compu...
Book Report: The Hacienda I'm back on my feet after being down sick a couple of days. The internet is a wonderful thing. It delivers a substantial fraction of all human knowledge when you want it. It also delivers intellectua...
Book Report: Seaworthy What does "seaworthy" mean? It means something that can survive being out on the sea. But "worthy" is a word with interesting connotation. It doesn't just hint at toughness, but also at a sort of rig...
HTML Logo Someone at the W3C made a logo for HTML5. HTML is the format of web pages. It changes. For years, most folks used version 4.01, but lately people have been proposing, coding, and using some new fe...
I Dare you to Travel to DASH DASH is a puzzle hunt that's held in several cities. Last year, Deb, one of the bay area organizers, flew to NYC where GC was short-handed. She had fun, got to know some puzzle freaks, and she knew ...
>> Michael Agger wants a word for someone who speechifies about the future. He coined "Keynotist" but I prefer TEDifice. ...
2-Tone Game: What do you want to know? Suppose I gave a short talk on the 2-Tone Game at the upcoming GC Summit. What would you want to hear about? Yeah, I wrote designer's notes, but those are hard to slog through. Yeah, the Snoutcast fo...
>> If I was a SF bay area parent of a kid old enough to hold a glue gun, I'd want to know about the "young makers" and Open MAKE at the Exploratorium http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIX5a9HouKM . Lo...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhen: That Article that mentions Sondheim's 1968 Hallowe'en Hunt A while back, the Puzzalot blog had an interesting article on Sondheim's 1968 Hallowe'en puzzle hunt. There was a lot of information there, most of which didn't come from this article by Allan Brien...
Book Report: The Design of Design It's Groundhog Day, which the movies tell us is a day in which we have to worry about the same thing repeating over again. So maybe today's a good day to report on a book whose title repeats, The De...
Shopping is Hard; Let's Coin Phrases It turns out that REI's selection of headlamps is not as good as Hallmark's, depending on your criteria. In related news, the Triclops Headlamp is still missing; all hail the Quadruped Headlamp. ...
>> Seattle was awesome! It's good to be back in San Francisco, though. ...
>> I know, I'll use another regular expression. ...
>> Dude didn't seem like a master criminal when I slept on his couch is all I'm sayin'. ...
>> In the Haight, trading words with a tattooed dope fiend is old news; but shopping in a supermarket is novel. ...
Book Report: Three Cups of Tea Yeah, it's that book that everybody else already read, the one about the do-gooder who builds schools in Pakistan (and, later, Afghanistan). This book started out hard to read—the writer think...
Seattle Photos Uploaded photos from my 2011 Seattle/Kirkland trip. I should get around to some kind of a writeup soon. Ideally before I forget everything that happened. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Meridian High School in Idaho Tonight I played in a puzzle event. The puzzles were pretty cool! They were designed by Mike Selinker, Thomas Snyder, Tyler Hinman... and maybe others? Eric Harshbarger designed the prizes; he's a ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the Art World There's this comic book artist, Jason Shiga. He makes these comic books that are puzzles; choose-your-own-adventure books that play with the flow of pages and frames within a comic book. You might ...
Cyber-F-22 Sometime the past few years, the prefix "cyber-" changed meaning. It used to mean "high-tech". But lately, it's meant "I am trying to sell some poorly-thought-out computer crap to the USA governmen...
Link: MobNotate The next time someone wants me to mark up their manuscript, I might suggest they use MobNotate to gather feedback. ...
>> Dueling theremins! Theremin on fire! If Man... or Astro-Man and Octopus Project are playing your town soon, I advise you to go. That means you, Portland and Seattle people. ...
Comic Report: Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards It's a story of paleontologists racing through the wild west to dig up bones and racing to scientific organizations to present dinosaur theories. This was a fun comic book, and some of the stuff in ...
>> I see tweets about Amazon's movie streaming disrupting Netflix. I've been watching movies on Amazon for a while; it's gone pretty well. Meanwhile, I still see obnoxious pop-under ads for Netflix. Net...
>> People kvetch about ineffective government nowadays, but I just read this report of the 1880 legal case UNITED STATES v. THIRTY-TWO BARRELS OF DISTILLED SPIRITS and the distilled spirits won. It's c...
>> Wonderella reminds us that following trails of puzzles is dumb. ...
Zine Report: Cometbus #54 On February 17, I read a tweet and a blog post. Just realized that now that Comic Relief is closed, I have no reason to go to Berkeley. -@SpectreCollie Cometbus 54, Green Day in China, and me......
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhen, even the so-called "Stupid Hours" A coupla weeks back, I gave a talk at the 2011 GC Summit. (Many thanks to Shinteki and Snout for organizing!) My talk was about time and the 2-Tone Game. E.g., at what time of day did teams mostly p...
PhotoCity Pervasive Capture-the-Flag Photo Game Part II PhotoCity is this game where you "capture" areas of a city by photographing them. But you can't play in just any neighborhood. The game only works if you start in a place that they've "seeded". I h...
Book Report: Independent Cycle Touring My bicycle's a coatrack; why did I read a book about planning and riding multi-day bicycle trips? Well, I wouldn't have heard of Independent Cycle Touring except that I know the author; but I'm glad...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the greater Seattle Area I'm reading about the World Henchmen Organization The Game coming up, and I realize part of the reason I'm excited is that I still have that lasso from the Justice Unlimited Game. You remember, the ...
Attn: Friends of Tom Lester Tom et fam. are well, and I have photographic proof (Annie's well, too, but I didn't have my camera out at the right time to prove it. Anyhow.). If you'd like to visit with the twins, now's your big...
>> I updated the 36 Views of Seattle's Grain Port Terminal page, swapping out one of the old photos for one that I took last month featuring that awesome covered conveyor as seen from a few blocks away ...
Coming Soon to Oakland Museum: More Michael McMillen I went back to the Oakland Museum, hoping to snap photos of Michael McMillen's Aristotle's Cage, which you'll recall that I liked. By the door to that piece of art was a little sign: there's a McMill...
Zine Report: EPS 99 If you're looking for something serious, go look at earthquakes. Today's zine report is pretty frivolous. It's a publication of the Elsewhere Philatelic Society. Their twitter feed said it was avai...
>> Escapist Comics: as threatened, the Dark Carnival folks opened up a comic book store in Berkeley, bootstrapping it with the comics "left over" from Comic Relief. It's on Claremont Ave, out next to Da...
>> Do you ever worry that you've been using your Javascript programming framework so long that you've forgotten how to write plain ol' Javascript? You probably never worry about that. Anyhow, I wrote a ...
Book Report: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web My job title is "Technical Writer" but I don't write much. I work with engineers, helping them to explain their work. Most engineers can write just fine. I bolt organization onto their stuff. Some e...
Book Report: Aramis, or the Love of Technology This book was pretty good but it was painful to read. It was painful because it was good... and it describes an engineering project that flopped and stopped: Aramis. It was going to be a railed pub...
>> Someone visited my website searching teh internets for [playdash oxford]. No pressure, folks. ...
Book Report: Waltzing with Bears This book's subtitle is "Managing Risk on Software Projects" and it's written by the Peopleware guys. OK, nobody's reading this blog post anymore; the non-computer folks have clicked away to find som...
Book Report: Colossal Book of Wordplay It's a book by Martin Gardner (the Mathematical Games guy), edited by Ken Jennings (the Jeopardy! guy). So you might expect it to be pretty amazing. But it's a book of little word puzzles of the so...
Lowell vs Reality You may recall that in the most recent California gubernatorial primary, I voted for Lowell Darling. He had the best plan for fixing California's revenue situation: if elected governor, he'd do nothi...
Wooly Pig Cafe There's a Wooly Pig Cafe 3rd Ave and Hugo in San Francisco. I feel like I scored some kind of "scoop" by discovering this cafe by walking around instead of by reading Heath Putnam's Wooly Pig blog. ...
puzzlehuntcalendar.com makes a difference A few people have been playing the 2-Tone Game this past weekend—referred by puzzlehuntcalendar.com. I checked the IP addresses of three of the players; they were from the East Bay, Spain, and ...
Book Report: The Art of Game Design The Art of Game Design is pretty awesome. This book is about design. In theory, it's about game design. But if you're designing something for humans, this book contains plenty of wisdom. I think thi...
Comic Report: Spiral-Bound Speaking of "spiral bound," a while back I saw illustrator/comic book artist Aaron Ranier talk. A couple of weeks later, I was in the Giant Robot store, which didn't have the 'zine I was looking for,...
>> Some Dude named Danny asked on the BANG mailing list: has anyone played the 2-Tone Game lately? Anyone sure it's still working? After all, it's based on stuff in San Francisco, and is bound to corrod...
>> Thank you, individuals from Blood & Bones and Team Longshots. ...
>> I'm trying to figure out if I'm set up to shoot and edit simple home videos. This Linux distro comes with a video editor called "Pitivi". As near as I can tell, that name is short for "I piti the foo...
>> My Ubuntu box auto-updated a bunch of packages with names like "libavcodec" and "ffmpega". Hey those got mentioned on all those troubleshooting pages with which I totally failed to use Pitivi edit a ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Francisco I saw an interesting flyer on 9th Avenue today. I haven't done much with it, so it might not turn out to be as interesting as I hope it is. And I early on encountered an instruction which prevents me...
Book Report: The Collapse of Complex Societies This book looks at the collapse of the Roman empire, the Mayan civilization, and those Chaco folks you heard about from the X-Files. Why do civilizations collapse? There's a bunch of theories runni...
Gadget Update A few months ago, I snidely pointed out that Motorola Droid marketing was aimed at men who were trying to compensate for something. And yet, that's the kind of phone I bought last week. I figured tha...
Comic Report: Castle Waiting vol II Oh man, if you think Castle Waiting is a slow comic in which nothing ever happens, this book sure won't change your mind. But if you're OK with stuff not-happening as long as it not-happens in an int...
Book Report: The Silicon Eye You think that you understand something, but then you figure out that you don't understand it after all. You've built up this model in your head, then you see something that doesn't fit the model. To...
Comic Report: Scenes from an Impending Marriage I used to shop for comics at Comic Relief in Berkeley, CA. So did Adrian Tomine. Then he moved to—to Brooklyn, I think. I guess he buys comics somewhere else now. (Nowadays, I mostly shop at Is...
Book Report: Flashman It's the story of empire. It's the story of a conquering force in Afghanistan realizing that they weren't as conquering as they thought. It's the story of the Massacre of Elphinstone's army told from...
Comic Report: Hutch Owen: Unmarketable! A few stories in this collection... One good story, one story that kind of wandered around and didn't make much sense with ghosts, some sketchy bits, and some shorts. If you read just one Hutch Owen...
Book Report: The Planets Wow, DASH was a lot of fun. I'm so glad I volunteered; I met some cool people. I learned that I've been doing this geocaching thing all wrong (which I kinda suspected already). But I'm too tired to w...
Comic Report: The Fixer New York City was a lot of fun! It's great to be back home, though. I still need to re-adjust, though. Like, in New York, it's crowded, so the rules are different. People will just stop walking in th...
DASH3 NYC Photos Buddhists would say that I should live in the now, but jetlag says otherwise. I'm sleepy as if I were three hours in the future. But I guess I'm awake enough to cull and crop some photos and then sho...
>> Why is Corey Anderson so fast at puzzling? Constant practice. While most engineers scribble their designs on whiteboards, Corey draws his backwards on a transparent sheet of glass. Dude is badass. ...
Seattle 2011 Write-up I wrote up February's Seattle trip. Astute readers will notice that it starts out very detailed, then suddenly becomes very sketchy. I started out writing something detailed. Then I got busy and back...
Book Report: The Party If you're an American and you read this primer on China's Leadership Transition, you might be surprised that it says that party leadership and army leadership are more important than government leade...
Comic Report: Parker, the Hunted; Parker: The Outfit These Parker comics are retro noir crime fiction. The retro's all over the art. It looks like graphics from ads from the early 60s. The violence and the menace of violence is all over the place. ...
>> Non-spoilery Shinteki Aquarius report: Bliss. ...
Book Report: Wireless It's a book of short fiction by Charlie Stross. Oh man, if I wasn't bored by C'thulhu stories, then there's a story in here I would have liked and I might have liked the Laundry story... Or if I lik...
>> The Tenderloin National Forest is a cool little spot in San Francisco. It's been around for a few years, but I didn't know about it until I walked past today, checking up on 2-Tone Game sites. The Fo...
Book Report: Managing Humans It's kind of a book about people-management by "rands," a blogger who's also an engineering manager. I suspect that people-managers who aren't used to dealing with nerds might get creeped out by thi...
>> There's a van parked across the street from my apartment labeled Digital Concrete. That sounded about as useful as Online Haircuts. But when I visited the Digital Concrete website, it was pretty inte...
>> USPS-mailed some puzzle printouts to a hotel so that (I hope) some out-of-towners in town for Shinteki can use them to play 2-Tone on Friday without having to slow down to print stuff out at a Kinko...
Jotting Notes on Bill Jonesi GC Summit 2011 Presentation: Rallye School It's a talk by Bill Jonesi about Road Rallys, especially about the local varieties favored by The Rallye Club. This was a good talk. Going into it, I thought "road rally" just meant time+distance r...
>> My undisclosed location is very pretty in the rain. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, including water-related places in the SF Bay Area I was sooooo sure that the Shinteki Aquarius Remix water-themed puzzly treasure hunt game thingy would send us to the Pulgas Water Temple. I remember a few years ago, back when I started playing thes...
Comic Report: The Boys #53 The Boys is a brutal comic, and what could be more brutal than war? Issue 54 wraps up Mallory's WWII flashback. A group of superheroes shows up at a USA army base. In typical superhero manner, they r...
>> Swedish Rebusrally team name I would gladly steal: Baron Bosse Behöver Betänketid. I don't know what that means, but I'm sure I betänk like a bosse. On the other hand, not so much: The Sammanswet...
Jotting Notes on Curtis Chen GC Summit 2011 Presentation: Everything I know about Running the Game, I Learned Trom Running The Game Curtis Chen of Team Snout talked about stuff he's figured out from running the game. Specifically, he talked at the recent GC Summit and if you follow that link you can see the video. But here's the ...
Book Report: The Unexpected Mrs Pollifax This book is the first in a series of spy thrillers. And you're thinking, "But Larry, you never like thrillers. Why did you read this book?" One of my relatives mentioned these books at some family ...
Jotting Notes on Larry Hosken GC Summit 2011 Presentation: 2-Tone Game as an Overnight Game, Sorta It's Larry Hosken talking about time and the 2-Tone Game. My goodness, what a handsome and debonair speaker. They should have this guy back every year. And how cool is it that he was wearing a "Hec...
Comic Report: Stumptown It's a pretty good detective story, set in Portland OR. Kinda noir except it also has flannel and forest. ...
Jotting Notes on Sean Gugler GC Summit 2011 Presentation: Puzzle Design Case Study Sean Gugler talked at the 2011 GC summit about the Hogwarts Magic Mirror puzzle (which was awesome). (You should watch the video instead of just reading these notes. Much of the talk is about art, d...
Book Report: The 48 Laws of Power This book tries to tell you how to get ahead by lying to people. It keeps telling you how powerful you'll be if only you follow its advice; it tells you that people who try to be "nice" are doomed to...
>> I have reason to believe that a New York Times Op Ed columnist read my name while he was pooping. I think I deserve a Poo-litzer for that. ...
Comic Report: Planetary It's superheroes, so you think I wouldn't be interested. But the emphasis is on information-gathering, not just beating each other up. If there's some bad guy who seems invulnerable, most comic books...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the new Online Journalism Sweet article by Sara Faith Alterman in the Bold Italic with awesome illustrations by juan leguizamon about the local puzzle hunt scene. No wonder a bunch of people suddenly showed up at the 2-Tone G...
>> If you're in Google Plus and want to encircle me, I am lahosken [at] gmail [dot] com. Not much stuff of mine will show up there any time soon; I couldn't find a way to import my blog posts there yet...
Book Report: Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! It's a quick, light biograpy of Marshall McLuhan. Before I read this book, all I knew about Marshall McLuhan was "The Medium is the Message" and he was some pundit who cheerleaded ("cheerled"?) us in...
Book Report: Surface Detail (Yes, I'm publishing another blog post today. Sorry about the flurry. I'm testing stuff. This blog post should look pretty ordinary, but there's a rel="author" tag hiding in the source code.) It's a...
Comic Report: The Martian Confederacy (vols 1-2) It's a comic book. It's science fiction. But the characters are interesting. Why would the author of a science fiction comic book bother to come up with interesting characters? Doesn't he know his ta...
Jotting Notes on Allen Cohn GC Summit 2011 Presentation: Doctor When It's Allen Cohn in a video of his presentation at GC Summit 2011 about the upcoming Doctor When Game. Click that link to see the video and/or read these here notes. Wei-Hwa's advancing the slides t...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, including NYC, NYC, NYC, and NYC Happy 4th of July! It's USA Independence Day, a good day for us Americans to set aside our customary humility and exult in what makes our country great. So it's a good day to remember that not all th...
Book Report: Bird Cloud It's by Annie Proulx, so the writing's pretty good. It's about how she had a house build out in some windswept spot in Wyoming. Or at least, that's what it was about when I stopped reading it. The wr...
Comic Report: Gravel (vol 1) It's a comic about the UK class system and magic and maybe a couple of other things I don't care about. A lower-class magician kills a bunch of upper-class magicians. Good for him, but I'd probably f...
>> There was finally an entry puzzle on The Master Theorem simple enough such that even I could solve it. I kinda wish that had happened before DASH3, where I met one of the Master Theorem guys. Because...
Jotting Notes on GC Summit 2011 Panel: My First Game The 2011 GC Summit tried something new, albeit something that's worked out well at conventions you've heard of: a panel discussion. So I looked at the video and jotted notes on GC Summit 2011 Panel D...
List of Puzzlehunt Team Names I threw together a list of puzzlehunt team names, gathering names from a bunch of old game signup sheets and results pages. I didn't try to "combine" clusters like { Burninators, The Burninators...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Morgan Hill Hey Seattle puzzle people: don't click the link in this blog post. I'm talking about a BANG, but some SNAPpish folks are talking about re-running this event in Seattle. Actually, you know what? Don't...
>> SFMoMA wants game-ish installation proposals http://www.mesart.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1151&sid=b7daa4852154c4c7ffce75f2d1b2d2b3 via @avantgame ...
Book Report: The Lifecycle of Software Objects What if the tamagotchi were smarter? Not people-smart, but somewhere between people-smart and dog-smart? This sci-fi novella makes some guesses and tells a story. It's pretty plausible, and got me th...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Bainbridge Island MS Intern Game got written up in Inside Bainbridge ...
Comic Report: Three #1 Three #1 is a comic anthology featuring three LGBT comic artists telling LGBT stories, so you'd think it would be some boring thing that you'd read to one-up your sweater-wearing NPR-listening f...
>> As a professional technical writer, I am always on the look-out for documentation "success stories." Documentation, when done right, can improve lives. For example, this evening on the bus ride home...
Book Report: Knuth: Selected Papers on Fun and Games Don Knuth is, of course, one of our greatest scholars of Computer Science. If someone asks you, "What's an efficient way to to sort ______ for quick retrieval?" you are always safe bluffing the answe...
>> I went on a walk this morning. I took a few photos. ...
Book Report: Little Bets If you run a business that's supposed to be innovative, you must take risks. To succeed long-term, you must take many small risks; recognize which gambles work out and which don't; and then push furt...
Comic Report: Syncopated #3 It's an anthology of comics. Some are about New York City; some are about history; some are about New York City history. Special bonus: an interesting article about heading out to Staten Island to lo...
>> You don't understand. I coulda had class. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even in NYC audibly Remember how I went to New York and kinda figured out that some of the puzzle nerds there were into some kind of puzzly-geocaching combination thingy that I never really figured out? This week's Snou...
>> I enjoyed playing the computer game Forumwarz, but I need to attach a big disclaimer to that. This is a game about terrible parts of the internet, sort of in an alternate reality in which the line be...
>> You know what else is a fun game? Stacking is a fun game. Maybe you heard of it—an Xbox game in which you play a little Russian stacking doll. And you gain new abilities by combining with other...
>> Link: LOLMaybeCat ...
Book Report: Tabletop: Analog Game Design It's a collection of papers by a few authors about tabletop games: design, history, culture, place in society, all that. I got it for free here: Tabletop: Analog Game Design. Some of my co-workers a...
Comic Report: All Nighter Calm down, puzzle freaks. This isn't about The Great All-nighter from Midnight Madness. But comic book fans of a certain age might want to know: Remember that comic "Private Beach: Fun and Perils in ...
Puzzle Hunts were everywhere, even the Magic Mountain area at Coyote Point park I went for a walk partway down the peninsula this morning. At one point, I realized I was walking past the Coyote Point playground, the one with the big castle-themed play structure. This site was th...
Book Report: Underground I've read a few books about l33t hax0rz; so far, Underground is my favorite. It has short bios of young hackers in the 90s. There were a bunch of networks; there was an Ur-internet rising up above t...
Book Report: Kingpin This book was a tough read, but not for the usual reasons. It's a biography of l33t Hax0r Max Vision. It's good, it makes sense, the facts hold together (better than you can hope for in most technica...
Book Report: Fatal System Error It's a book about the era of botnets. It doesn't go into the technical stuff, but comes at the story from the point of view of law-enforcement folks investigating things the old-fashioned way: talkin...
Book Report: The Master Switch This book's title is a play on words: "The Master Switch" is a switch you can use to turn everything off. A telephone "switch" is a device at the center of a phone network that directs calls as in "s...
>> Nordic LARPers invade graffiti-art blog http://goo.gl/CQDgs ...
Book Report: Nerds 2.01 Back in 1998, some PBS folks made a TV documentary about the internet, "Nerds 2.01". TV isn't a great medium for this stuff—humming computers don't make great television. So there's footage of....
Comic Report: "Dark Horse Presents", "Noir" Dark Horse Presents, a periodic comic anthology, re-arose a few months back. It's good stuff. It was good before, and it's good now. There's a variety, so it's not all good. You and I probably wouldn...
>> If LASER stood for Liquid Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Ripples http://goo.gl/Mdb2p. ...
Comic Report: Empire State Not every Jason Shiga book is a choose-your-own-adventure nerdfest. "Empire State" is a book straight-up about human relationships (albeit with some nerd-ish characters). Special bonus cross-country ...
>> Star Trek price-slash fanfic: http://goo.gl/4eSf2 ...
Comic Report: Evolution: the Story of Life on Earth This is a comic about evolution: there's a framing story in which aliens talk about evolution on earth. I know some evolution. Some stuff I learned has since been shown wrong. I don't know all there ...
Ceiling Gopher For fans of the Go programming language who are also fans of the Ceiling Cat meme. (Estimated world population: seven people.) ...
Photos: Kim + Ryan's Wedding I watched my cousin Kim get married today. It was pretty awesome. Afterwards, I couldn't help but notice that my camera was full of photos. You can see them if you like. Also, my mom talked to my cou...
Comic Report: Spacetrash It's a mini-comic! It's like two-mini comics in one. There's a silly parallel-universe-traveling story. Then, if you flip the book over, there's "Tomahawk City", little stories from a fictional NYC n...
>> I walked south and took some photos http://goo.gl/nQMb5 ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, and can become your landmarks This week's Snoutcast is a conversation with Rich Bragg about traveling to play in puzzlehunts. Rich talks about the feeling he gets when playing a game in an unfamiliar city: it's as if the city was...
Comic Report: Gotham Central I'm not a big Batman fan, but this isn't exactly a Batman comic. It's a crime comic, a police procedural. It's set in Gotham City, and the cops brush up against superheroes, supervillains, ... T...
>> Supermarkets vs museums. Curated peaches are near the artisanal cereals in aisle six Since when does stocking a store - any kind of store - count as “curating?” –things consumed A lo...
Soon. Yes, I should be programming instead of re-contextualizing* Gordon the golang gopher in classic memes. Maybe tomorrow. *No, I don't know what this word means. ...
Books Report: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, The Potato Chip Puzzles The Potato Chip Puzzles is a puzzlehunt novel. You might want to read The Puzzling World of Winston Breen first, since The Potato Chip Puzzles is its sequel. Both of these books have some crime mixed...
>> Skunk smell is stronger by second floor window than on ground floor. What's the story behind that? "Polecat-apult"? ...
Y U GO Gopher Once again, I find myself placing Gordon the Go Gopher into a famous internet meme. Can't stop won't stop. More reasons that I confuse "select" and "switch" They both start with "s"; Our brains...
I makeD YOU A SLICE OF http.Cookies Once again I attempt to make Gordon the Golang Gopher the star of a well-established internet meme. Also, my kitchen linoleum is in pretty sorry shape. ...
Book Report: Puzzle-Based Learning I recently reported on the first couple of Winston Breen books. And then Joe Fendel asked me if I'd read the Gollywhomper Games book. Apparently, puzzle-based young adult fiction is a thing? Back in ...
Book Report: Adventures in Puzzling The cover promises multi-puzzle extravaganzas, and it delivers. There's a fun variety of puzzles here. And they're organized into extravaganzas—into groups of puzzles, with each group leading u...
Book Report: Being Geek It's a collection of essays—well, a collection of rewritten blog posts—by blogger "rands". In theory, it's a geek writing about being a geek. An awful lot of it is about being a geek in t...
Book Report: Startup Engineering Management This book Startup Engineering Management is aimed at engineering managers at startup companies—but is pretty good for engineering managers at big companies, too. It has some info about everythi...
Why I love Puzzalot Forum Post by Robotguy: I am working on a type of crossword that is played on the surface of regular polyhedra... [more explanation...] I would appreciate any feedback. And this yielded relevant, practic...
Book Report: Getting Sued and other Tales of the Engineering Life It's by a civil engineer from a few decades back, so you might think that a software developer wouldn't learn anything from this memoir. But there's wisdom in here—figuring out how to get along...
Book Report: I'm Feeling Lucky It's anecdotes and interviews about Google's early history by Doug Edwards, an early employee. (Is this a good time to repeat that my opinions are mine? They're mine. I speak for myself. I don't spea...
Book Report: The Architecture of Open Source Applications If you're a computer programmer who thinks about software design, it helps if you've had a chance to learn about a variety of software designs. This is a great book for that! Maintainers of several p...
Book Report: Being Wrong I bought this book because the writer had a good TED talk Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong. That's a risky move. A lot of these TED talkers turn out to be better with the speechifying than with the wri...
>> I'mma let your floppy drive march finish, but Simple Text File is the best H/W music of all time http://goo.gl/edrMZ ...
The Go Gopher Meme is Too Damn High I've been messing around with writing an web app on App Engine using Go. A few months ago, there was a nice demo presentation of creating such an app that used as its example Mustach-io, a program fo...
Book Report: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms A fantasy novel about cruel people and deities. It was a fun, vicious read. Oh man, I'm not going to type any more. I had a flu shot today. I forget to tell them to use the right arm. Now my left pi...
Link: Why Did The Elite Extend The Suffrage? Maybe I should try a warped Churchill quote on my Libertarian friends: Big Government is the worst form of government in the world except all the others that have been tried. It's not 100% pure flipp...
Book Report: Bottlemania It's a book about bottled water and tap water in the USA. The summary, you already knew: bottled water isn't just bad for the environment, it's stupidly bad for the environment... if you live in San ...
>> I walked home a different way yesterday and bumped into #OccupySF . It's a real thing. You know how sometimes you read a news report of a protest, but eventually figure out it was just a half-dozen p...
Intercoastal Altercations: team login, UI, play flow You might recall that for the Two-Tone game I wanted a good way for teams to log in, but didn't get it right. (Moral of that story: Don't assume that only the captain will want to log in; therefore, ...
Book Report: Game Wars Battling a case of upper-respiratory-something infection, I find myself participating in a new activity: sinus irrigation. But nobody wants to read about that. You know what you want to read about, t...
Comic Report: Burger Force The premise doesn't sound promising, but oh man did I like Burger Force. Hapless youth joins an elite spy network with groovy 70s design that operates out of a secret base underneath a fast food rest...
Book Report: Deep State If you've been listening to the recent Snoutcast podcasts, you've heard interviews with some ARG (Alternate Reality Game) folks. If you listened to this week's podcast, you might have heard of a Walt...
Book Report: The Chinese Maze Murders A few decades ago, a diplomat who'd been to China "updated" some ancient Chinese detective stories and published them. In these stories, a magistrate solves many mysteries at once. In the ancient ori...
Book Report: Why Programs Fail Today we celebrate #DennisRitchieDay ahem excuse me, Dennis Ritchie Day, in memory of a computer programmer who... Oh, man his stuff is in your computer, in your phone, Dennis Ritchie's stuff is ever...
Book Report: Black Swan It's a short story (or perhaps a novella) about parallel worlds. (The publisher calls this book "a cyberpunk story", but I think they just meant they remember that Bruce Sterling did good things for ...
Book Report: Rule 34 Lisa Long (aka Cassandra Cross from The Hogwarts Game) is in town, showing off some music software that she works on in the UK. She was taunting us Yanks because USA licensing rules for streaming mus...
Back from WHO Back home from The World Henchmen Organization Game. It was awesome fun! And now: sleep. ...
a few WHO game photos Seeing as how it usually takes me approximately forever to write up a game, maybe I shouldn't wait to post these WHO game photos. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere and/or Everywhen, and I bet I prefer Everywhen Catching up on Snoutcasts, I just listened to the SNAP 8 Debrief. SNAP 8 was a "rerun" of BANG 28. (Surprisingly, it was run by the same folks who ran WHO. I think there's some kind of karmic balance...
Book Report: Lawrence and Aaronsohn It's Armistice Day today, so here's a book about World War I. Specifically, it's about Lawrence of Arabia and Aaron Aaronsohn who I guess you might call, uhm, Aaronsohn of Palestine. The subtitl...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, and worth documenting if you ship them to Seattle or something I'm catching up (caught up now) on Snoutcasts, and just listened to the BANG 28 Debrief. You might wonder: what information was in the BANG 28 puzzle playbook? Folks kept raving about it (and about t...
Book Report: Embassytown It's weird science fiction: humans interact with aliens. In the aliens' language, statements must refer to real things. If you wanted to compose a poem about a purple cow in this language, you would ...
Link: new Dead Milkmen album Fogeypunks and humorees of a certain age might remember The Dead Milkmen from back in the day. They have a new album out. I haven't listened to the whole thing, but "Caitlin Childs" and "Meaningless...
Happy American Censorship Day If you use the internet, you probably want to visit http://americancensorship.org/. USA legislators want to set up China's Great Firewall in the USA, urged on by copyright holders screaming about pir...
Book Report: Hackerspaces: the Beginning It's a free book in which folks who participate in Hackerspaces write about their organizations and their spaces. Hackerspaces are tangled up with the Maker movement: folks who chip in to form a spac...
Book Report: Tactile Morse Code Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. I don't feel that I need to read the book Tactile Morse Code because its cover explains its system pretty well. Bonus irony points for being a book about...
Link: Nourot Studio glass pumpkins Behold a link to Glass pumpkinoid decorations, photos thereof. One stop during the bay area rerun of the WHO game was Nourot Glass Studio in Benicia. On display were glass pumpkins. Of course, The ...
>> I'm on my way to a new level of handiness or dorkiness... or maybe both at the same time. ...
Comic Report: The Tell This comic book might be called "The Tell" or it might be called "The Inventor's Story", part of something called "Sunless Circus Mysteries". It's kind of hard to tell what it's called, which might ...
>> Now with carpenter-pencils clipped on. I found carpenter pencil clips for sale online, and they arrived. It turned out they weren't small enough to be "snug" on the pencils so I had to help them ou...
Link: Chess Story Dave Hill writes about playing chess for money in Zucotti Park. Right, that Zucotti Park. ...
Book Report: Zero Day Happy USA Buy Nothing Day 2011, aka #OCCUPYXMAS. To celebrate, here's a report on a book I'm glad I checked out from the library: Zero Day. Maybe it's not quite accurate to say "I'm glad I checked o...
Book Report: The Parthenopean Scalpel It's another piece of short fiction by Bruce Sterling. Back before the age of total war when everything was worth blowing up, terrorists were assassins. This is the story of an assassin who spreads ...
Book Report: A Gentleman's Game I've been reading a bunch of Greg Rucka comics lately and wondering whatever happened to his Queen and Country comics. Those were great grim spy stories, with Steve Rolston art. But they'd turned int...
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Book Report: REAMDE What if Neal Stephenson wrote a thriller in which fate throws together a ragtag mop of gamers, hackers, and spies and pits them against an international terrorist? Yeah, you probably already made up ...
>> Two steps forward, one slide back I bought a couple of clip-on lights. Also, I bought a new counterweight. To keep this whole mess from sliding forward (until all the pencils are under my elbow), I'...
Book Report: The Buddha in the Attic It's a novel of the Issei experience, a story told in the first person plural. We arrived in the USA, we met our mail-order husbands, we picked crops, worked in houses and laundries. Peeking at folks...
Dr Who's Martians as Puzzle Designers #badpuzzles Cramming for the Doctor When game, I watch Doctor Who. The Pyramids of Mars arc aims at being puzzle-huntish... kind of... Towards the end, there's a Martian stronghold guarding a treasure chamber; ...
Book Report: Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? Try to stay awake through the short description, because it gets better after: autobiography of a bench chemist. Max Gergel learned practical chemistry: someone wants some quantity of some substance ...
>> Just got back from the Mystic Fish interview with the folks from the Trenchwood Institute. Glad we weren't following Team Lowkey. It looked like they had some kind of art/science thing going on that ...
Link: Clang MapReduce video If you're a computer programmer and don't have much computer code, then refactoring is easy. You start up your IDE, fill out a little dialog box, and there you go. But if you're part of an organizati...
Book Report: The Art of Computer Game Design It's an early book of essays on computer game design, from back when pixels were chunkier and networks were slower. Plus some notes from more modern times, pointing out places where those early essay...
Link: thelatitude The Nonchalance website (GC behind Jejune Institute) updated recently The Jejune Institute is now CLOSED. Our adventures concluded in 2011 with hidden episodes IV and V. For information on our ne...
Milestone: 20 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 20 millionth hit. Looking at the apache log line, I see: 207.46.12.178 - - [25/Dec/2011:22:21:57 -0400] "GET /new/atom.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 15073 "-" "msnbot-UDiscovery/2.0b (+http...
Comic Report: A Very Sammy Day This comic's protagonist is the world's unluckiest thief. This means a plot that's driven by coincidences. I guess that could be interesting... but here, it just seems like a series of coincidences. ...
Comic Report: Criminal: The Last of the Innocent It's another collection of the noir-ish comic Criminal. The premise of this one is kind of twisted. What happens when the kids from Archie grow up and get tangled in a web of deceit and murder? Since...
Book Report: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 Half the fun of the League of Extraordinary Gentlement comics is spotting the references. Just about everyone in these comics is a character from some other work of fiction. Apparently, I don't know ...
Comic Report: Incognito: Bad Influences Incognito was a great comic book story of a supervillain who becomes an undercover agent infiltrating a super-crime syndicate In this sequel, he infiltrates another crime syndicate. You think it mi...