Book Report: She Come by it Natural
It's a biography of Dolly Parton braided together with a bit of the book author's family background. That family background might be summarized as "poor, hard-working woman," and helps the probably-p...
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I pre-ordered the book 50 Years of Text Games and you can, too. It's a book of 50+ essays about computer games; the author chose one game to write about per year from 1971 to 2020. If that has you th...
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Hallowe'en Haunt
♫ Oh I don't want no more of that carnie life / Gee Mom, I want to go home ♫ From now until 2100 tonight it's Hallowe'en Haunt on JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park. I saw people setting up som...
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On my morning walk, the stretch of Haight Street by Buena Vista Park was being taken over by movie-production people. The big signs said Dust Bunny but the smaller permission notices said PYM product...
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crunching IMDB data
IMDB, the Internet Movie DataBase, has a lot of information about movies, TV shows, actors, directors, gaffers, animators, etc. I just crunched some exported IMDB data to build a crossword dictionary...
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Genius ...
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Book Report: Catch and Kill
Content Warning: Rape, Abuse, Stalking, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Woody Allen, Donald Trump, etc. This is the autobiography of one reporter working on exposing Harvey Weinstein, serial rapist mo...
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Book Report: The Vapors
Once upon a time in the USA, gambling was illegal across the land. A few cities and towns went ahead and had illegal gambling. Those cities stopped one by one until just one was left: Hot Springs, Ar...
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Book Report: Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl
It's a memoir by one of the members of the music group Sleater-Kinney. I hazily remembered that she'd had a well-written web site back in the day, read this, and was not disappointed. E.g., she write...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even your local Cinematheque
Puzzle nerds and movie buffs, you might be interested in this email I got after a phone call today: Larry - good chatting with you. To recap our conversation: I'm Jack Kelley, producer of the fort...
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Book Report: How to Ruin a Record Label and Punk USA
It's two books about Lookout! Records, the East Bay record label. Before I read these books, I had the broad outline. Lookout! Records had the excellent luck to publish the first Green Day music. And...
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…and the blood loss makes me pale, sympathizing with Kimmy's time trapped in the underground bunker. ...
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I wanted to watch this sitcom, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It's a Netflix exclusive. Sometimes publishers do crazy stuff with their content. Instead of publishing it ina straightforward manner, they t...
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Book Report: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
It's Tom Wolfe articles about culture, celebrities, and New York city. He wrote these in the early 60s. The culture writing holds up. Even if demolition derbies are no longer so popular, it's fun to...
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Book Report: Bossypants
It's a biography by Tina Fey, writer/actress on the TV shows Saturday Night Live and 30Rock. I hadn't watched those (except for some SNL sketches where Fey played awful politician Sarah Palin), so I ...
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Link: Things & Movies
Fiji's TV and internet evolved, uhm, out of order. At least from an American point of view. The embrace of video takes on more significance when one considers that television was not available in F...
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Tonight's Adventure Design Group presentation was about The Go Game. They got their start around here. Thus, it wasn't 100% surprising when founder Finn mentioned early on talking with Alexandra Dix...
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To try a game prototype where the "map" depends on where you physically play, go to Amnesia Fortnight, pony up a few bucks, vote for "Buried Metropolis," and hope for good luck. That's the skinny. H...
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Link: The tale of this year's E3 Booth Bros from the perspective of @MylesNye the game designer ...
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Things Will Shortz doesn't want to do
…perhaps revealed via this New York Times job posting for a Director of Games, which I found out about thanks to the excellent Octothorpean playtest team WBYeats. Optimize games for discover...
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Book Report: The Restoration Game
It's a scifi thriller whose protagonist is a game designer. This book was fun. ...
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(#wartron) I paused just inside the arcade's front door to let my eyes adjust. Adjust to the low light; adjust to a new intensity of purpose. I was in an arcade. There was an arcade in Tron. GC had t...
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Book Report: Jay's Journal of Anomolies
The Breatharians were not the first fasting hoaxsters, nor will they be the last. Flea circuses have a history. This book is a collection of Jay's Journal of Anomolies, essays on bits of history of s...
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Link: Going Cardboard
I enjoyed this documentary about boardgames and boardgamers, Going Cardboard. If you don't already think boardgames are fun, this movie probably won't convince you otherwise. But I think they're fun ...
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Nice writeup of Shinteki Disneyland in Wired http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/02/shinteki-disneyland/ ...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere within and without the bounds of convention
A few months back, Ian Tullis talked about puzzles, specifically puzzle-hunt puzzles, and how they've evolved. The quest for novelty drives puzzlehunt designers away from the "plain" puzzles that mos...
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Zine Report: Giant Robot #67
In this issue: shopping for a Wurlitzer 106 keyboard in LA, a memoir of someone getting high-radiation cancer treatment across the street from me at UCSF, Daniel Wu writing about airsoft BB guns, and...
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Link: Jet Lamp video/talk about Text Adventure Games
Yesterday after work I went out to see a movie, sort of. And I recommend you go see it, depending on where you are. The movie is "Get Lamp", and I haven't actually seen the whole thing yet. It's a...
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Book Report: Museum Legs
I ran into Mahlen and he recommended this book. It turned out to be pretty good. It's about the place of museums in society. Yeah, I know it sounds awful, but hear me out. It's sufficiently interesti...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Hypothetical Magazine Articles
This afternoon, I talked with a couple of people about puzzly treasure-hunt game thingies. Now this conversation was kind of important, so I'd planned for it. I'd sketched out some talking points....
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, like Lindy Hop
Yesterday, Debbie Goldstein was at a playtest and so was I. And thus I got to hear a little about her trip to New York City. Debbie is, as near as I can tell, the force of cajolery behind the DASH ...
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Book Report: Oil!
This is the book that the movie "There Will Be Blood" was based on. But that's not how I heard of this book. I saw Word for Word perform the first chapter. This group acts out short stories and st...
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Book Report: Remix
It's a book by Lawrence Lessig from 2008, and therefore it's about copyright law. (Nowadays he does election finance reform. Back then he was all about the copyrights.) It's about mashups. It's ai...
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Book Report: Saturn's Children
This sci-fi book, dedicated to Heinlein, features an android female sexbot who-- Hey, wait, come back! You're thinking that the book is going to be some awful misogynistic piece of crap. But it's n...
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Glossing my Twits: 2HB
Seth Godin recently blogged "If you've got 140 characters to make your point, the odds are you are going to be misunderstood (a lot)." I'm not really surprised that I get questions about my twitter i...
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Book Report: Nothing Nice to Say
Work is busy. BANG 19 is less busy, but fills up the waking hours that are not devoted to work. Lately, most of my reading has taken place only because bus breakdowns have prevented me from working. ...
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Link: We Told Stories
Do you remember a few months back, there was a web-sensation around a novel told through the medium of Google Maps? I read that novel. What I didn't know is that this project was part of the effort...
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Book Report: Singularity Sky
My cousin goes to school in Washington D.C. He was talking with some Washington D.C. bloggers. Except that they don't call themselves bloggers. Why not? Because they're in Washington D.C. and "blog...
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Book Report: Noodling for Flatheads
I've been watching teams' Ghost Patrol application videos. They've been fun, with a lot of variety. What does this tell us? Fun: This demonstrates that Gamers are silly Variety: This demonstrates ...
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Book Report: Seabiscuit
This was a fun read about horseracing.Labels: book, entertainment industry, interspecies diplomacy...
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Link: Qwirkle
I don't feel so bad about all those times Susan Ross beat me at Petaluma Game Night now that she's an award-winning game designer for her game Qwirkle.Labels: awesome, entertainment industry, link...
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Link: my IMDb page
Darling of course I have a page in the Internet Movie Database. Some might say that it was strange that I worked on a console game for a year. But it was all worth it for that IMDb page. Darling, ...
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Book Report: Sand Cafe
I have now eaten ramen noodles that were prepared on one of those espresso machine milk-steamer attachment thingies. I am told that the espresso machine cost a few thousand dollars. However, the no...
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Book Report: Brainiac
It's a book about trivia by Ken Jennings, that guy who kept winning at Jeopardy!. Fortunately, this book is about a lot more than just Jeopardy!. The author explores the world of trivia--the histor...
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Book Report: Phonogram
I canceled out of the stuff I'd planned to do today. Instead, I am sitting, napping, eating. I wore myself out last week. First, getting over a cold. Then, having just gotten over the cold, stayi...
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Site: Santa Monica / Venice Photos
I posted some photos and notes from my meanderings in Santa Monica and Venice. The summary: there may be wonderfully exciting things going on in Santa Monica and/or Venice, but I didn't spot them. ...
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Book Report: One Hand Jerking
My friend 'Lene was bicycling along, minding her own business, when this set of streetcar tracks came out of nowhere and flipped her bike over. I was making fun of her for getting into a bike accide...
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Book Report: Houdini the Handcuff King
I was going to start this off with a cute paragraph about how I'm "handcuffed" to Debian Sarge (an old version of the OS) on my main home computer because I only have dialup access, my dialup provide...
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Book Report: Rain or Shine
You want to read this book. It's short, it's easy. It has rodeo announcing, stirring human drama, show business, the changing face of the American West, junk food wrappers. The writer, Cyra McFad...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even the Hearts of True Loves
Dave Blum of Dr. Clue writes: ...And every year, on the anniversary of our first date, we write treasure hunt clues for each other. ... It's a wonderful thing when two geeks--whose geekiness overl...
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Link: Travelers Storybook
I have mentioned this before: When I was growing, I spent a fair amount of time with Bob & Kelly Wilhelm, friends of the family. Bob was and is a storyteller. I don't just mean that he can rela...
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Link: Game Shoe
Depending on what you've been doing lately, you might be thinking "If I never look at another photo of an athletic shoe again for the rest of my life, that's just fine with me". But you might still l...
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Book Report: Giant Robot #46
In theory, I am tired of looking at photographs of athletic shoes. Nevertheless, when I picked up the latest issue of Giant Robot and saw the little list at the beginning in which Woody of SNKR FRKR...
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Book Report: Future Noir
Yes, I read a book about the making of the movie Blade Runner. I make fun of people who read the entertainment news, but I spent more than an hour reading this book. It's mostly the fluff that you e...
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Book Report: Re/Search Pranks 2
I had an interesting phone conversation a few weeks ago. I responded to some spam email offering to optimize my web site so that it would rank higher on web site searches. There are legitimate ways...
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"Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere" is Everywhere
JessicaLa researched an old puzzlehunt, and wrote some interesting things about it. I don't have anything to add to that, but in the tradition of boring bloggers blogging about other bloggers bloggi...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Seattle and/or annoying movie promo internet sites.
Peter Sarrett enjoyed the SNAP game in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. In tangentially related puzzling news, many people worked on the Google/Sony Da Vinci Code game. At least a couple of them were...
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Under-utilized Set
The next time I'm called upon to provide names for a set of [computers|meeting rooms|secret projects], I would like to use names of famous carnies and freaks. jojo chang eng petomane tomthumb Tag:...
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Book Report: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures
I enjoyed the Bill & Ted movies back when they came out. When Rob Pfile refers to my apartment's cross-street as "Wyld Stanyn", it cracks me up. It cracks me up every time. I enjoy Evan Dorkin...
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