(no subject)
This week has been quite fun and productive so far. Swung back into the groove at work fairly well, and got back into Frivolity code hacking. Got the test suite, running on my laptop, to work locally, and again when pointed at the new volity.net Jabber server that daerr set up. Hope to post a bugfix release by this weekend, and then start in on the new stuff that K will need for his client to work correctly.
Good game night yesterday, for me. dougo suggested we play Currents, which I haven't tried in years. Playing with three highly critical game geeks resulted in many rule-change suggestions being collected, some of which I can't wait to try. One in particular makes me especially excited because it might let me do away with those lame Goaltending rules. The last time I worked on the game, I was puzzling about how to fix Goaltending; it didn't occur to me to just throw out the rule entirely, making the game simpler, which now strikes me as something to strive for. I like to think this is a reflection of my growth as a writer/programmer since then!
Also got to talk about Volity with this group for the first time, which was neat. (It was a natural segue, as playing Currents reminded me that it was one of the reasons I started to invent Volity -- I wanted to be able to rapidly create computer versions of new board game ideas, allowing me to test them out with both humans and bots.) I also got to show off my pure-SVG/ECMAScript rock-paper-scissors game (sorry, not on the Web yet, though it probably should be), running in Squiggle. Oh, and I learned to pronounce "Batik" correctly, since it hadn't occurred to me Google for its real-wordedness. (It's [bə-TEEK].)
(And, link of the day: IPA alphabet table with Unicode keys and full names, the latter of which I've never seen before. All the letters are named, not after their sound, but after the position or activity of lip, tongue, tooth and lung necessary to produce the sound. Yes, you've known this for years, but it's new to me.)
And I won a hand of Lamarckian poker! And then Shmike won with a royal flush (of the strongest suit, too) and rightly declared victory over the entire concept of that game. (In Volity vocabulary he could have said, "I have beaten the ruleset", or colloquially "I have beaten this URI".)
Good game night yesterday, for me. dougo suggested we play Currents, which I haven't tried in years. Playing with three highly critical game geeks resulted in many rule-change suggestions being collected, some of which I can't wait to try. One in particular makes me especially excited because it might let me do away with those lame Goaltending rules. The last time I worked on the game, I was puzzling about how to fix Goaltending; it didn't occur to me to just throw out the rule entirely, making the game simpler, which now strikes me as something to strive for. I like to think this is a reflection of my growth as a writer/programmer since then!
Also got to talk about Volity with this group for the first time, which was neat. (It was a natural segue, as playing Currents reminded me that it was one of the reasons I started to invent Volity -- I wanted to be able to rapidly create computer versions of new board game ideas, allowing me to test them out with both humans and bots.) I also got to show off my pure-SVG/ECMAScript rock-paper-scissors game (sorry, not on the Web yet, though it probably should be), running in Squiggle. Oh, and I learned to pronounce "Batik" correctly, since it hadn't occurred to me Google for its real-wordedness. (It's [bə-TEEK].)
(And, link of the day: IPA alphabet table with Unicode keys and full names, the latter of which I've never seen before. All the letters are named, not after their sound, but after the position or activity of lip, tongue, tooth and lung necessary to produce the sound. Yes, you've known this for years, but it's new to me.)
And I won a hand of Lamarckian poker! And then Shmike won with a royal flush (of the strongest suit, too) and rightly declared victory over the entire concept of that game. (In Volity vocabulary he could have said, "I have beaten the ruleset", or colloquially "I have beaten this URI".)