Just trying to gauge interest here initially. Would any of you be keen to play in a murder mystery party game with a 1920s Chicago speakeasy/gangster theme, some weekend afternoon in September in central London? (Obviously I appreciate that the exact date will be significant, but I'm just trying here to see if it's potentially a goer or not.) ( Read more... )

Question for the techies. How useful is Levenshtein distance as an accuracy measure for eg. quiz answers? Or do you know of a more appropriate method for fuzzy search comparison? What I want is for it to give a good guess at rightness if the answer is spelt slightly wrong or has punctuation added, etc.

I make games for people to play and have fun with each other. Sometimes in the games people pretend to be other, more interesting, people. Sometimes they pretend to kill each other.

What do you do, using only the thousand commonest words? http://splasho.com/upgoer5/

(HT to vicarage, bibliogirl et al.)

'Tis the season and all that, so I thought it might be nice to share these with you. Courtesy of ar_boblad, about 15 years ago now I guess it must have been. Où sont les vampires d'antan?

• A crossbow bolt through the heart will stake a vampire.
• Cut off the feet of someone killed by undead, and they will not be able to walk if they become undead themselves.
• ( Read more... )

Has anyone used the web developer tools that come with Chrome? Are they any good, how do they compare with eg. the Firefox Web Developer extension? And what about any relevant Chrome extensions?

In all this recent kerfuffle about ZOMG sperm!, I haven't yet noticed any of the media coverage making reference to John Wyndham's 'Consider Her Ways'. Which you'd think would be obvious. A small kduo to the first mainstram commentator to do so, I think -- tell me if you spot one ( Read more... )

AdBlock Plus is a very useful Firefox extension. Except when you're laying out a page containing some ads, and spend ages wondering why the images are displaying properly in IE, but not in FF.

Any .NET programmers looking to relicate to Ipswich? Our friends at Alton8 are recruiting. Mail me for details.

One of the things we do as part of the sales follow-up thing is to ask people for suggestions for settings for new games, and one of the most popular -- from the American customers -- is "a murder mystery set at a luau ( Read more... )

OK, I think we've established that he is extremely obscure! -- the US-type folks on brits_americans didn't have any more clue than you guys did. I think I'll get back to our author and suggest she drops the reference. Thanks everyone for replying!

He was a notorious stock promoter / swindler, best known probably for his book My Adventures with Your Money -- ( Read more... )