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| Friday |
the Twenty-Sixth of September, 2003 |
Panicking mice behave like humans, apparently;
scientists have been drowning them to prove that the best
way to let a stampeding mob out of an enclosed space is to only
provide a single, narrow door, which allows polite queuing to
self-organise. Wide doors lead to disorganised competition, and
multiple exits cause queue interference.
[ Comments? ]
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| Thursday |
the Twenty-Fifth |
This all seems terribly obvious in retrospect (I was considering a moderated,
complicated Taboo-card server, last year, but gave up) - Metaboo is a simple variant of Taboo where players
are just given a word, and have to describe it so that only a specific
person guesses it. Instead of avoiding five words chosen by Hasbro,
you have to avoid any words which might help opposing players.
Describing nouns in terms of their relation to NetHack is much
better than being careful not to say the word "red".
[ Comments? ]
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| Wednesday |
the Twenty-Fourth |
"Another black piece is visible one block east on Essex
Street. I bike over to chat. He turns out to be the Black King's Bishop.
He points out another piece one block to the east, and reports it is the
Black King's Knight. The bulk of the pieces seem to be focusing on our
side of the board -- we are the locus of the action! I feel a sudden
rush of adrenaline. No reports yet of any White pieces
encountered."
Human
chess; two armies being led into urban combat by text message -
actually quite a cheap way to run things, at the sacrifice of piece-level
decision making (which would have been interesting). I'm still percolating a
real-life version of Mornington Crescent - text messages being used to
declare blocks against other teams, and such. Would probably need a lot of running up escalators in search of a signal, though.
Related: Rogue Semiotics' low-strategy, high-strangeness
Urban Chess,
following on from my
yellow pawn. (Inevitably, I lost it somewhere whilst still considering
my move.)
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| Tuesday |
the Twenty-Third |
An intriguing Nomic variant that involves the players creating a piece of
collaborative music, imposing restrictions upon one another as they go -
Legacy.
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It looks like I wasn't the only person
who was bothered by the ecology of the grues
in Pitch
Black. Apparently the original
script backs up my suspicions of a vast underground food web, although there'd
have to be a lot of heavily dead-end evolution for the whole network to refuse all
that sunlight. Maybe the planet used to be completely dark - the grues' social
behaviour seemed to hint at mating rituals with the need for flying room, once they
were out in the open. Or maybe it was just a slapdash monstery reworking of Asimov's Nightfall, by a director who'd been considering making a film of the book anyway.
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