Categories
input devices

Multi-touch keyboard

Atari 400The year (if you’ll cast your mind back) is 1982.  Atari Computer has just released the Atari 400, with its flat, membrane keyboard.  It is a nice idea: just type on the surface (with raised edges around each key as key guides), no moving parts.  Unfortunately, the implementation is terrible.  It’s very extremely hard to get a consistent response from the keys, touch typing is nearly impossible, and it’s terrible for playing games.  Atari wasn’t the first to try the membrane keyboard, of course . . . the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 kit computers had an even worse implementation.

Fast-forward twelve years: the Apple Powerbook 500 has an interesting innovation, a touchpad that can be used as a mousing device.  Again, touchpads weren’t new, but they quickly moved to become nearly ubiquitous on laptops over the next decade  Some people find touchpads very natural, others despise them.  Certainly, after you’ve brushed one with your thumb while trying to type  for the fiftieth time, you’re likely to become a bit exasperated.

The common touchpad cannot detect multiple simultaneous touches.  Or rather, it selects the centroid of all the contact points as the touch location.  If you’re reading this on a laptop, try playing with the touchpad.  Place two fingers, or three, lift one, then place it back down again.  Amusing (if you’re easily amused) but limited.

FingerWorks TouchStream LP KeyboardFor the past four years or so I’ve been using a FingerWorks TouchStream keyboard on-and-off.  This is a return to the completely flat keyboard, but it bears little resemblance to either an Atari 400 or a conventional touchpad.  It is two pads, each around five inches by seven inches, connected by a very short ribbon cable.  The entire assembly can rest on a metal stand or lie flat on a table.

The device serves as both keyboard and mouse.  Without a doubt, it is the most natural mousing device that I’ve ever used. When using the TouchStream, you no longer have to reach over to the side; simply drop two fingers (your right index and middle fingers) anywere on  the right pad, and move them.  The mouse pointer naturally follows your gesture.  Clicking is as simple: tapping those same two fingers is a mouse click, while tapping three fingers is a double click.

Typing is as simple, though it does require more precision.    It is not the same as using a normal keyboard, as no force at all is required.  You simply type, touching your fingers lightly to the images of the keys.  Unfortunately, it is difficult to keep oriented when in full-on high-speed touch-typing mode.  Additional modes (including an embedded programmer’s symbol pad) allow you to reduce the range your hands have to travel while typing.

The array of gestures supported is huge, and completely configurable.  The configuration software is written in Java and works under Linux, Mac, and Windows. Certain common gestures (such as pinching the thumb and middle finger together for ‘cut’ and flicking them apart for ‘paste’) quickly become part of your repetoire, and you miss them greatly when returning to more conventional input devices.

This is one of my favorite gadgets, without a doubt.  It’s never managed to become my primary input device due to the difficulty of keeping fingers aligned with the keys while typing, but as a mousing and gesture device it is unsurpassed.  Sadly, FingerWorks has ceased operations, so this very cool technology is lying fallow.  Apple touts the multi-touch interface screen of the iPhone as  revolutionary, but it’s hardly an original development.

There are a number of TouchStream keyboards floating around on eBay, so it is still possible to obtain one.  I’m tempted to pick up a second, against the eventual failure.  (For this same reason, I have a closet full of IBM clicky-keyboards, the best and most satisfying traditional keyboard design.)

Categories
games

Nomic: Rules Are What You Make of Them

The Lady of Justice on the gates of DublinAfter graduating from college I lived for a time at my parents’ house, working in a local bookstore until I could find a job at least nominally related to computers. On a trip down to Ann Arbor to haunt the excellent used bookstores, I found a copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas at Dawn Treader.

MT is a collection of Hofstadter’s Scientific American columns from 1981 to 1983, and it is a cornucopia of fascinating tangles. Chapter 4 describes the game of Nomic, invented by Peter Suber. If you’re not familiar with it, the concept behind the game is deceptively simple: the rules are changable, and the players take turns suggesting new rules.

A game of Nomic begins with an initial rule set designed to facilitate this self-modifying gameplay and to deal with common situations. For example:

107. No rule change may take effect earlier than the moment of the completion of the vote that adopted it, even if its wording explicitly states otherwise. No rule change may have retroactive application.

116. Whatever is not explicitly prohibited or regulated by a rule is permitted and unregulated, with the sole exception of changing the rules, which is permitted only when a rule or set of rules explicitly or implicitly permits it.

The initial rules for winning are simple: the first player to reach 100 (positive!) points wins. If a player proposes a rule that is accepted, they gain ten points. If their proposal is defeated, they lose ten points. Rule changes are adopted only with unanimous agreement, but some rules handle possible situations in the face of changed rules:

204. If and when rule changes can be adopted without unanimity, the players who vote against winning proposals shall receive 10 points apiece.

To keep things moving, in addition to proposing a rule each player also rolls a die and gains that many points. Of course, that rule is often the first one to go!

Upon returning home, I immediately drafted my younger brothers into a game. I had already written out the rules on individual 3″x5″ cards, and we went out to the back yard to start the game. The garage contained any number of game materials suitable for livening things up: bocce balls, a croquet set, Frisbees, an astonishing number of hula hoops, and so on. I figured that in addition to playing with the rules, we could add some interesting physical challenges. Both of my brothers were amenable, so play began.

We began by abolishing rules. I don’t recall exactly, but I’m pretty sure the first to go was rule 201:

201. Players shall alternate in clockwise order, taking one whole turn apiece. Turns may not be skipped or passed, and parts of turns may not be omitted. All players begin with zero points.

The ideas was that we would strip out the rules that didn’t match the kind of game we were working towards, and then build up a new set. We then went on to remove seveal other rules.

Suddenly, a problem became clear: Rule 201 was a very, very bad rule to remove. We no longer had any legal way to determine who would go next! We began discussing the problem. Disagreements arose.

An hour later, we were still arguing. The nub of the conflict was this: were any of the rule changes we had made after revoking rule 201 actually legal?

The game moved inside, and we were all getting hungry and tempers were getting short. As the argument continued, we split into two camps: M~ and I held that the game was always in some particular state, and by examining the rules closely enough we could determine exactly what that state was. K~ held that the historical aspect was irrelevant, and only the current ruleset was relevant for determining the state of the game.

We went on in this vein for quite some time, and K~ threatened to resign. I forstalled this by pointing out that he may actually have won. The last rule deals with paradoxes:

213. If the rules are changed so that further play is impossible, or if the legality of a move is impossible to determine with finality, or if by the Judge’s best reasoning, not overruled, a move appears equally legal and illegal, then the first player who is unable to complete a turn is the winner. This rule takes precedence over every other rule determining the winner.

As K~’s turn was right after mine, and I had proposed the abolition of 201, we all agreed that I had completed my turn, but K~ had been unable to complete his. Resolution!

My first game of Nomic was not a rousing success. For some reason, I was unable to get anyone interested in a second game.

Thank Eris for the Internet! A few years later I discovered online Nomics. These saw a real surge in popularity in the mid- to late-nineties. Sadly, most of these have now closed down. I particularly liked Acknomic, which had a highly-complex chess variant (Ackanomic Party Chess) as a sub-game. There are still a few running these days. As a starting point, see the database of active Nomics at nomic.net, which lists 13 as of this writing.

(Image of Dublin’s Lady of Justice courtesy of MacBuckley.)

Categories
origami papercraft polyhedra

Five Interlocking Tetrahedra

Five Interlocking Tetrahedra - Angle 1Five Interlocking Tetrahedra - Angle 3Here are a few (unfortunately low-quality shots) of a modular origami implementation of five interlocking tetrahedra. This model uses Thomas Hull’s design. The joins are a bit sloppy, but it holds together nicely.

Modular origami is quite relaxing, very much like knitting. Once you have mastered a basic pattern, you can just disengange your brain and let your hands do the work. For larger constructions, in fact, it is extremely important to have something else distracting you from what might otherwise become intolerable tedium. Then, after you’ve constructed all your modules, comes the fun part: stitching everything together into the finished shape. This design, in particular, is a bit of a brainteaser; you have to carefully puzzle out where each strut goes, under or over. The final result is satisfyingly impressive.

Categories
books miscellanea religion

A High Weirdness Update

J. R. “Bob” Dobbs It’s been eighteen years since the publication of that auxiliary tome of Subgenius sacred aesthetics, High Weirdness by Mail. It was a perfect core sample of the peculiar, and still makes for bemusing, slackful reading.

You may have looked sadly at your copy and said to yourself, “My, I sure do wish that someone would update this book for this modern era of email and those new-fangled hyperlinks.”

You, my friend, are in luck:

  • The Church of the Subgenius has made available the research of Friar Synapse as “The Return of High Weirdness by Mail.” It’s a “where are they now” of the organizations mentioned in the original book. Happily, the “where” seems to be largely Internet-accessible, so you’ll have plenty of oddness to enliven your weekend. (I just found out Factsheet 5 may publish again. Huzzah!)
  • Reverend Modemac’s High Weirdness Project wiki extends the mission of the original work into an “interactive directory of the differently-saned,” and includes a Bulldada Newsblog.  This latter often burbles up topical oddities that might be missed if you aren’t following alt.slack as closely as you should.

Remember: JHVH-1 is a space alien, and still threatens this planet!  Praise “Bob”!

Categories
books miscellanea

Casanova's Fiction: Color-Coded Hermaphroditic Dwarves from within the Hollow Earth

Giacomo Casanova in 1788, the year Icosameron was publishedOver my last few lunches I’ve been reading Hollow Earth, by David Standish. It’s a nice overview, tracing the the idea of habitable lands inside the Earth from Edmund Halley through modern fiction. I was particularly pleased by this passage on Giacomo Casanova’s Icosameron, a peculiar utopian tale published in 1788. I quote Standish’s description:

The novel recounts the experiences of a teenage brother and sister who fall into the earth’s interior through a watery abyss. There they find an inner world inhabited by many-colored hermaphroditic dwarves called Megamicres, who live in a color-coded social hierarchy with the red ones at the top of the heap. Their primary method of eating consists of sucking on each other’s breasts. They’re also nudists. Edward and Elizabeth promptly rip off their own clothes, declare themselves married, and set about propagating as fast as they can. Each year during their eighty-one year stay, Elizabeth gives birth to twins, who in turn marry at age twelve and begin having twins. Finally Ed and Liz make their way back to London, leaving behind millions of offspring. Not only do they cause a population glut down there, they screw up a previously balanced society in other ways as well, introducing gunpowder and war, among other things.

I’ve never read Casanova, but this certainly makes me want to look up a copy.

(Portrait of Casanova at age 63 by Johann Berka is courtesy of Wikipedia. The portrait is from 1788, and was used as the frontispiece of L’Icosameron.)

UPDATE: I’ve scared up a link to an online version of Icosameron (in French, I hope you don’t mind).  The interface is unconscionably dreadful; it’s a scan of the original text (all five volumes totalling more than 1,800 pages) with each page as its own PDF. Tome 1; Tome 2; Tome 3; Tome 4; Tome 5.

Categories
role-playing games

On Having a Life: Role-Playing and the Employed Adult

Cover Scan of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, 1st Edition You can only cram so many things into your life, and one that has been left out of my personal solution to the time-managment knapsack problem is traditional, pen-and-paper role-playing. I was a heavy gamer since first laying hands on a first-edition Monster Manual in third grade, continuing through high-school and college: lots of GURPS and D&D, but also Ars Magica, Call of Cthulhu, and plenty of others. After I graduated, the gaming group dispersed to the winds, and since then I haven’t played more than the occasional pick-up game.

A few years ago, just before I decided to go back to grad school, I decided that it had been too long since I had gamed. Against my naturally introverted tendencies, I posted a notice in a local game shop. Within two weeks, I had a response: a few people were trying to start up a game of third-edition Dungeons and Dragons. Several of us had not played this version before, so we spent most of the first meeting reading rulebooks and taking advice from the resident munchkin on character design.

No stranger to munchkinism myself, I rolled up a dwarven ranger (with terrible ranged weapons skills), and went heavily for animal training. I purchased several war dogs out of my initial gold; I had scoped out the Dungeon Master, and figured that he wouldn’t enforce the rules on how much control I’d have over the dogs’ actions.

At the second meeting, the game is finally underway. We start off outside a town . . . and no one wants to go in. The DM is peeved, as this means he can’t get his planned adventure hook into our characters. I’ll spare you the details, but two hours later we have a mission, and are off into the woods. At last, some action! The DM calls for an ability check; six dice rolls, and nobody manages to detect the goblins lurking in the trees. The ambush begins with a painful peppering of arrows. We then fight the goblins for the next four bloody hours of real time, including a break to go to the local market for munchies.

It’s now six hours since the gaming session started. One our our characters has died, the rest are badly wounded, one of my dogs is dead, and I’ve spent hours of my life contending with what is essentially a random encounter. What was it I missed about role-playing, exactly? Needless to say, that game was not compelling enough to bring me back for session after session.

Since leaving college, I no longer have endless swaths of “hang-out” time. I have a life, and a house, and a spouse, and work, and then grad school on top, along with a slew of interests that I’m trying to pursue. I could manage gaming if it were my only hobby . . . but eight hours of aimless sitting around rolling dice to kill a few tactically uninteresting goblins just doesn’t cut it anymore.

There’s a great article from Pyramid Online, published November 17, 2000, “How to Keep Gaming after Adulthood: or, Everything I Needed to Know about GMing I Learned from Watching Television.” (Pyramid subscription required to access the article. There are a few discussions about it various places about the net.) The author, David Dickerson, makes exactly this point: busy people need a different kind of game.

The article makes a number of suggestions for playing RPGs with adults:

Keep things contained. Don’t try to run a game with too many players. Don’t aim for grand epics; episodic or one-shot stories are easier to sustain. More than three or four hours for a gaming session is probably too much.
Stay flexible. When planning an adventure, make sure it the game can proceed if someone can’t make it. Avoid games with complex rulesets; keep things fast and loose. Focus on the action.

Use TV as a model. Genre TV shows have an ideal structure for this sort of game. Have an A-plot (usually violence) and a B-plot (perhaps sex). Make sure every character has a chance to experience some sort of conflict or challenge, tailored to their personal gaming style. Establish a pattern for the game for a few sessions, an then violate the players expectations. Make the fight scenes different and dramatic: go beyond the goblin-slaying dice-fest. Design a big, set-piece combat with a twist.

Keep players involved outside the game. Set up an email discussion list or web site to handle less-exciting stuff (such as dishing out experience) . Send out news and rumors of events in the game world.

Try this rough mixture for a session: One NPC encounter; one short combat; one major, set-piece combat. Allow time for discussion and making plans.

Have I tried this? Nope. I am likely to remained isolated from gaming for the forseeable future. Still, I enjoy reading RPG rulebooks, browsing in game stores, and reading about new game designs on The Forge. I’m keeping my hand in. Someday, this adult shall game again.

(Monster Manual cover scan is courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Categories
conspiracy freemasonry illuminati

The Sacred Architecture of Canada

Manitoba State Legislature Building Ah, Winnipeg, home of the Manitoba Legislature (and, apparently, a number of well-funded Masons).

While Wikipedia has a perfectly bland overview of the the Legislature building, it fails to capture the many occult correspondences that have been cataloged by more enterprising researchers. CTV, for example, interviews a Mr. Frank Albo. We can trust him. After all, he assures us that “My academic career hinges on this, so I’ve been careful to make sure I’m not inventing things.” Thus, the fact that the day that the building was first opened to the public (July 15, 1920) saw a conjunction of Venus and Mercury is a matter for comment. The governor’s reception room mirrors the dimensions of the Holy of Holies. And so on, though the full list remains less extensive than those compiled for the Great Pyramid.

More of Albo’s correspondences can be found at the site of the Societas Rosicruciana in Canada. In Canada, you ask? Remember, the true Rosicrucians are never where you expect to find them.

What shall we conclude? Henry Makow (who has a Ph.D and invented Scruples, so we can trust him, too) tells us quite sincerely:

When the Free Press series ran in November, there was a lot of interest from Manitobans but few no objections. No people seemed to mind that a public institution representing freedom and prosperity for Manitobans was taken over by an occult society for its own bizarre purpose, at taxpayers expense . . . We live in a world where a large segment of the leadership class has sold itself, if not to Satan, to people who worship Satan.

Infowar.com identifies that guiding architectural hand as that of Our Illuminati Puppetmasters:

One doesn’t have to be a researcher to see the obvious repeated 13s: 13 steps, 13 lightbulbs and “a number of other instances where 13 were used in construction,” or to see other occult symbolism in this building or in any of the other public buildlings and places where the Illuminati have hidden their secret language in plain view.

I proffer my own conclusion (available to anyone who has read Foucault’s Pendulum): if you learn enough numerology, your life will never be boring.

(Photo of the interior of the Manitoba Legislature Building courtesy of shadesofgrey516.)

Categories
role-playing games

The New Role-Playing

Gold-Plated Dwarven Stones Dice. Woo! If you don’t know game designer and writer on things conspiratorial and alternately historical Ken Hite, you’re missing out. His exuberantly polysociative Suppressed Transmission column is what keeps me subscribed to Pyramid (the Steve Jackson Games online ‘zine). Sixty-eight of the ST columns have been anthologized into Suppressed Transmission and Suppressed Transmission 2, both of which are lovingly annotated and bibliographied with all varieties of high-quality weirdness. (There’s a sample column available, if you’re not willing to pony up without seeing the goods.)

Hite’s other, more conventional column, “Out of the Box“, is freely readable at GamingReport.com. In the most recent (January 25, 2007) edition, he announces the “Out of the Box Awards” (a.k.a, the “Outies”) for 2006. The list is a mouth-watering assortment of new gaming goodness, and it really makes me wish I had the time for role-playing. Over the past few years there has been an explosion of small and indie RPGs, some indifferent, some superb.

There’s good stuff going on at indie game design site the Forge . . . this isn’t the D&D you played in college. There’s experimentation with every aspect of play, concept, and mechanics. If you’re interested in some vicarious views into new indie (and some mainstream) RPGs, check out the Actual Play forums.

Anybody up for some Dogs in the Vineyard?

Categories
miscellanea

The Pack Goat

North American Pack Goat AssociationI haven’t been camping in years, but it’s great to get out in the woods. Once I finally have a bit more time, I hope to engage in a more active lifestyle. Unfortunately, I’ve been having back problems, so loading myself down with fifty pounds of gear would not be the brightest thing to do. The solution to this problem is clear: the pack goat.

Goats are good people: they’re intelligent and (typically) quite friendly, and I certainly wouldn’t mind having one along with me on a trip.

There are quite a few places where you can actually rent trained pack goats. Some (such as Escape Goats in Utah) provide the services of a goat wrangler. If you get really serious, you can even join the North American Pack Goat Association.

There’s a lot of information out there, both on training the goats and the mechanics of actually packing with them. I’ll have to check the zoning. I wonder how strongly the borough would object if I tried keeping a goat in my backyard?

Categories
books

Twenty-five Years of Little, Big

Cover of the first edition of Little, Big (Bantam, 1981)I recall an afternoon from the time when I was living in Ann Arbor, in that dank basement apartment with the teddy-bear-skin carpeting. Victoria and I were having a conversation about favorite books. I held that trying select a single, favorite book was a futile task. Her position was that her favorite book was Little, Big. When I expressed surprise that she was able to make a choice just like that, she told me that Little, Big was a very good book, and had as good a claim as any other for the title of ‘favorite’.

I certainly can’t disagree with that logic, for it is a very good book indeed. It pulls together a wonderful assortment of ideas and influences, from the Art of Memory and Sylvie and Bruno, to Thornton Burgess and Shakespeare, to theosophy, an alternate Tarot, and Frederick Barbarossa as President. I was a bit impatient with the book during my first reading, but I began to understand and appreciate it more with the second and third, and it entered my own circle of favorites It’s been a few years, and it’s probably about time to pull it down from the shelf and travel again to Edgewood and The City.

I dearly wish that I had $100 lying around that I could in good conscience put toward the purchase of the new twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Little, Big. It’s being published by Incunabula and printed by the Stinehour Press. The edition is to be illustrated using details from the prints of Peter Milton. I wasn’t familiar with his work previously, but it looks to be an excellent match to the mood of Crowley’s story.

If you haven’t read it before, I recommend it highly. Be warned, though: it’s not for everyone. The pace is slow, and the fantastic elements are usually hidden, winking from behind the curtains.

The farther in you go, the bigger it gets . . .