I've started piling other men's treasure into Trodo - the
list is here if anyone wants to stake any
claims (although I'm only shipping within the UK). Friends without
Trodo credits (or with Trodo credits in the wrong medium) can just
take their pick and email a list of demands, if they like. It is
mostly rubbish, though.
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A Google images search for Sokoban is
wonderful - a colony of diverse and mutated single-celled lifeforms.
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"Crosswords tell stories. But who is telling the story? Is it the solver,
or is it the setter? A good clue will send the solver shooting off into
a variety of orbits, but he will always come back to the same point. In
the end, all that is required is that he think of a synonym for the
definition. How hard can that be?"
The mysterious world of cryptic crosswords, in
this extract from
this book,
somewhere in Saturday's Guardian. I'm still leaning my tired forehead
on the cold, glass periphery of these things - although I'd grasped the
anagram hints, I had no idea that the first or the last word of the
clue was generally a synonym for the answer.
This useful
guide has further pointers for the amateur.
You can take a stab at the Guardian crosswords online, with or without the
magic of Java applets.
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Has anyone ever ventured the theory that convergent evolution demonstrates
plagiarism between localised gods?
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Ah, the nasty aftertaste of plagiarism, whichever way it goes. Bartering-credit
site Trodo
seems to predate the previously-mentioned Swappingtons by over a month, and operates on a
similar but more bluntly quantised system of medium-for-a-medium - a
CD is worth a CD, a book is worth a book. Blank cardboard boxes labelled
"a thing I'm happy to give away" should be considered fairly interchangeable,
after all.
You can sign up here;
you have to enter three initial items as part of the sign-up, but you get
instant, spendable credit for entering those items. Swappingtons falters
because the enthused new user has to walk away and wait (perhaps forever) for someone to 'buy' their goods, before they can 'buy' anything themselves - although Trodo leaves
itself a bit more open to scammers by giving new sign-ups free 'money', the immediate user empowerment is good and important. [via Technovia]
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