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| Saturday |
the Twenty-Ninth of November, 2003 |
Game du jour; Siege,
a tiny-scale this-beats-that wargame where
units march towards each other from two towers, exploding one another
appropriately. But it's also a pattern-building falling-block puzzle game - to create
units, you have to arrange bricks into the required formations; from a couple of
adjacent "metal" blocks for a foot-soldier, up to a big, specifically-arranged
structure of wood and metal and fire for an airship. Nice progression of
complexity and memorability.
Although it's a shame that the veteran player gets an obvious advantage; it'd
be good to have a game where such patterns were randomised each game, and
players had to derive them experimentally. (You can simulate this effect by
not realising that the circle in the corner of the title page can be rotated
by the cursor keys to give a tutorial, and playing your first few games in
desperate but gradually-enlightening confusion.)
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Two nice emergent-monster anti-spam systems that uses the spammers'
entire method of attack against them, Judo-style:-
The denial-of-service
response; rigging spam-detection
software to idly spider all of a spam's URLs before throwing it away,
so that the spammer suffers all of the bandwidth costs and none of
the customer interest. (I'm not convinced that it's foolproof, though; even
if you blacklist to avoid killing innocent bystanders, couldn't the spammer
just get his site to ping an innocent victim with each hit?)
The spurious contact detail
response - if people were to respond
to even a small percentage of the spam they receive, giving
fake contact information, then filtering the signal from the noise suddenly
becomes the spammer's problem. This would drive spam towards
straightforward stand-and-deliver credit-card payments (if they're
not the majority already), but if we feed them
Luhn-valid
credit card numbers, they'll still have to pay to process them.
(This can be even be done en-masse with a shadowy
mass-fake-form-filling program.)
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| Thursday |
the Twenty-Seventh |
The Purloined Spam: "Subject: [Spam] is your s[e]x life dull ?"
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British Sea Power cancel a gig after Hamilton falls out of a tree
whilst sawing off branches to decorate the stage, and cutting through
the one he was holding on to. I'd assumed they just picked up fallen
ones, or snapped off the low-lying - I like a band that's willing to
risk its life for its set decoration. [from Holly]
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| Wednesday |
the Twenty-Sixth |
An SMS
dictionary lookup service, for bickering travel-Scrabble players with more
frustration than money. They also offer anagram and missing-letter services,
for crossword victims that don't consider grepping to be cheating.
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"Modernisers claim that shortened text phrases such as
ttfn (ta ta for now), cuthen (see you then) and fwiw (for what it's
worth) should be included in Official Scrabble Words, the reference book
of 160,000 permitted words."
A lunatic campaigns for
text-message
shorthand to become tournament-legal in Scrabble, and is
lobbying Mattel to include numbered tiles in the game so that the
kids can play "gr8" and "2mrw" and keep the game alive in the 21st
century. Presumably Zs and Xs will have to be reduced in value, while
vowels become rare and valuable. And blanks could be used as smileys.
But it's nonsense, for such a subjective, speech-like language where any
arguably-coherent abbreviation will do. I've never
understood the text
message dictionaries that litter bookshop counters, listing hundreds
and hundreds of abbreviated phrases - if they're obvious enough for a
recepient to parse them, then you could have just made them up
yourself. And if they aren't, then what use are they? Are
they secretly intended to be used as
one-time
pads?
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| Monday |
the Twenty-Fourth |
"The Queen is overly powerful, being able to move like a
Bishop or a Rook. This is redundant - why would anyone use a Bishop
instead of a Queen! [...] From now on, the Queen may only move 4 squares
in any direction, reducing her strength to an amount closer to that of a
Rook."
Blizzard Chess - keep an eye on the
metagame for the first
few hundred years. [via Leonard]
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