Digging through old disk space, I found some photos of the glass clown that inspired
the first, rather slapdash Upsideclone.
The clown isn't there any more, it disappeared from the junk shop at some
point last year. I hope it has been shattered; it's chilling to imagine
it actually sitting on somebody's mantelpiece.
[ ]
The Silent Project;
a gallery of screenshots from people who've knocked unconscious every single person
on every single Thief level, lugged all the bodies to the same room, and piled
them up in an artistic manner. An astonishingly thorough waste of time. (Reading
the forum
links, it takes about an hour to push a static NPC along a short corridor.)
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Introducing Confab, a blank-card game for an integer number of players greater
than one, battered into existence during conversation with an ever-so-slightly
automated Ben:-
Get a load of blank cards; at least ten per person. Everyone then scribbles
arbitrary conversational sentences ("Hello." "How are you?" "Yes." "No." "You're
very tall.") onto the cards until bored. Shuffle them all together,
deal five to each person and leave a face-down draw pile. Taking turns,
players must either play a card that follows conversationally from the
previous card (or opens the conversation, if they're the first to play),
or - if they can't go - draw a new card from the draw pile. Resolve
disputed plays via a simple vote, or something. The first player to empty
their hand wins.
Sounds a bit of a throwaway game, but there's a good level of strategy
and humour to it; the 'offensiveness' and 'defensiveness' of particular
sentences, the vagueness of wildcards, the general effect of two cartoon
characters communicating via pre-written signboards.
Language is a game, after all.
[ ]
In the light of rules which are now actively encouraging the
publication of misinformation in player's weblogs, I hereby
announce my resignation from the game of BlogNomic.
[ ]
NetHack Monster High Scores;
"This program lists high scores for monsters, either by the number of
players that they have managed to kill, or by the total score of
their victims."
[ ]
"A group of prisoners are trapped in a forcefield. These
prisoners are perfectly brave, meaning that they would attempt an escape
on any positive probability of success. The prisoners are monitored by a
guard who has only one bullet in his gun, but who also has perfect
marksmanship skills (he never misses). A maintenance technician needs to
tune up the forcefield generator, and so for one second, the forcefield
is released. How can the guard still keep all the prisoners
detained?"
"Hardcore tech-interview style riddles,
not gaussian elimination logic puzzle fluff" - a hefty collection
of lateral and logical puzzles, given vividly concrete settings and well-dissected (for the most part)
in an intentionally-awkward-to-search forum section. Some very elegant and
mathematically beautiful solutions, and a lot of healthy brain exercise
along the way.
[ ]
