Bartender Geek

Yeah, I finally have gotten a chance to sit down and read the thing.

Some definitions first, for folks who would be otherwise totally lost. GURPS is a roleplaying game system. If that term means nothing to you, then the rest of this entry will be so completely meaningless to you that it's probably worthless to keep reading it. So ( this is where I'll put the cut tag. )

You know that whole speculation about whether every starting position of the game Freecell (the addictive Solitare version that comes with Windows) is solvable? Well, I got curious about it and did a quick Google search, and found this.

It's not. Position number 11982 has apparently been proven unsolvable.

And some versions of Freecell include an ability to choose game number -1 and -2, which are two setups which are clearly unsolvable.

Neat, hunh?

We did try to get a invite to the Mystery House folks and tendyl, who Mom wanted to see on her whirlwind tour through the New England Area, but it didn't happen. Ah well. My (first) cousin Mike, (Pescuma -- Mike Tresca is my second cousin), his sister Lindsay, and her boyfriend Darren (who I thought she broke up with, but nobody tells me anything) were there, along with Lis and me, my parents, and my sister Leila. Leila's friend Danielle also showed up later on.
( Read more... )

Several years ago, I ran a GURPS game set in a fantasy variant of Elizabethan times. The players were all members of Elizabeth I's secret service.

And ever since then, I've just constantly ran across things that make me wish I was still running the game. Because history just has too many cool things in it that would fit. Unfortunately, I just don't have a regular enough schedule to have any sort of regular gaming group.

Like . . . 1532. A Basque shipbuilder tries to get Charles I of the Holy Roman Empire, I think it was, interested in funding his new ship design. Instead of having sails, or oars, it had a big-ass paddlewheel off the back that would be turned by water vapor coming out of big boilers. Okay, historically, it would never have worked -- there are like a couple dozen technological advances you need to get usable steam engines. But, hell. . . in a FANTASY game, I think that the PCs had enough magical, scientific, technological, and blacksmithing skills that they could have made it work.

Or, this month's Scientific American. The Voynich Manuscript. 230 pages of beautifully-illustrated words in an odd handwriting, in no known human language. Modern cryptographers have not been able to decode it. Text analysis shows that it doesn't look, exactly, like a natural human lanaguage -- it's too regular -- but it also doesn't look exactly like random gibberish -- it's not regular ENOUGH. (I know, that sounds backwards.)

This article claims that the manuscript was written by Ned Kelly, Dr. Dee's assistant. The rogue and spy who Dr. Dee barely managed to save from being burned at the stake -- the one who eventually fled to Poland. The author if the SciAm article claims to have found a method, which knows Ned Kelly knew how to use, that would generate the text.

His theory is that it's just plain gibberish, created so that Ned could sell the manuscript for the equivalent of 50 G's, to the Holy Roman Empire.

Damn, but I could use that. I mean, either it's actually got power or it's a total fake. Having it be real is pretty good -- but, according to this guy's theory, the way that it's designed, it LOOKS like it's real, it LOOKS like, if you just put enough effort into decoding it, you could figure it out, but it's actually totally just gibberish.

Which I think is even cooler. What if this thing is a mage-trap? The point of it is that you sell it, for a hell of a lot of money, to someone you want to mess with. They are now out a chunk of money, and they have to use a certain number of their mages and savants in attempting to decode it. And it always LOOKS like you're making progress, or at least eliminating dead ends -- but, in fact, there's nothing there to make progress WITH, so it's really just something to suck mage-hours away from USEFUL work.

That would be so freakin' EVIL. I could never make something like that up. But it appears possible that Ned Kelly did. . . and, if I were still running that game, I could have used it.

Okay, so have you ever been reading a fantasy novel and you thought, "Wow. That's a really nifty magic system. I wonder how it really WORKS, mechanically," and then you thought, "If I worked out the machanics, I could write down rules for a roleplaying game for it, and that would be a good way of quantifying it," and then you realized, "hey, the person who wrote this fantasy novel also wrote one of my favorite GURPS suppliments," and then you realized, "wait -- we read each other's LiveJournals -- I could just ask HER if she's ever thought of writing up GURPS mechanics for the magic system in The King's Peace.".

Oh. Well, that's happened to me, anyway.

Denzel Washington is in a new movie called Man On Fire.

Every time I see the movie poster or an ad for it, I just crack up.

See, there's a Cheapass Game called Deadwood, in which everyone is portraying really bad hack actors. One of the best roles you can get in that game is "Man On Fire".

So, I played my first 7th Sea game ever last night: it was run on a MUSH, so a log exists.

It was fun, reading the log was fun . . . but all the bits which made me really lose it completely while playing are down at the bottom in the "Outtakes" section.

http://zapatopi.net/

I think I'm going to have to use some stuff from this for my Girl Genius Game. I think Kelvanism has to exist, as written. . .

It was featured on Slashdot late last year; I assume most of you got it then, or, if you didn't, it's because there's no Mac or Linux version yet. But, well, it's amazing just how addictive it can be to push a guy down a staircase. My best score yet is 79979, but that was a fluke. The rest of my high score list runs from 52448 to 66055.