Psychedelic Games of the 60s

[6_bleen_7]

The other day I was thinking of my distant youth, and overcome by a fit of nostalgia, I searched the Web for evidence of some of the bizarre games we used to play when I was a tyke. I got pictures and everything-isn't the Internet great? And it was brought home to me just how trippy these old games were. But living in the late 60s and early 70s

Comments

[6_bleen_7]

We had two such puzzles; ours bore the trade name "Schmuzzles." The pieces, inspired by an Escher woodcut, were identically shaped and could be tessellated (a delightful word that brings to mind a かわいい mutual friend) to cover an infinite plane. If you take a look at a fair number of assembled lizards (upper left of page), you may be able to see that they form a hexagonal lattice, just like the Psyche-Paths tiles, albeit with much more complicated borders between the hexagonal units. The individual units have three orientations, each conveniently drawn a different color.

Re: Tessellations

[kayigo]

Great book on designing tesselated figures: "Designing Tesselations: the secrets of interlocking shapes" by Jinny Beyer.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809228661/qid=1137775412/sr=8-8/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i8_xgl14/103-6148340-0197407?n=507846&s=books&v=glance
This is the book for you if you ever wanted to make your own Escher print. Written in a very practical and user friendly manner, she describes the different ways of making tesselations and steps you through simple shapes to complicated interlocking organic figures, like the Escher lizards. She discusses some of the mathematics involved, but is mostly hands-on. The really neat part: She is a quilt maker! who started exploring this field to make more interesting quilts. Multiple color illustrations of art quilts made using her ideas. She is also my favorite writer on practical color theory.

Re: Tessellations

[samwibatt]

Hey, thanks! This is very cool. At one point I'd wanted to build a coffee table with wooden Escher-lizards inlaid on the top. I've not given up on the idea, but might first attempt some simpler shapes. A book like that would be handy for the design.

[samwibatt]

Goodness! I'd forgotten all about Thing Ding, but the memories came a-stormin' back. I don't remember finding the robots especially threatening, though with my present-day sensibilities I do think they're kind of industrialist-brutal. Oddly, I did find Psyche-paths disturbing, even having a nightmare about it once.

[6_bleen_7]

Really? Was it perchance a four-dimensional nightmare? Now that I think of it, Psyche-Paths tiles are two-dimensional regular polygons with one-dimensional shapes of color affixed to their upper surface. The significance of that will be lost to every reader of this journal, save one.

[samwibatt]

Heh, no - the nightmare occurred when I was little, about 6 or so. It had to do with a big poster depicting a Scary Face drawn in a Psyche-paths sort of squiggly style. As was often the case in my early nightmares, everyone around me thought the poster was cool and enthused about it with an overly-bright-eyed intensity, and only I knew it was menacing. Your point about how the world was full of magic back then is well taken, but there was definitely a dark side to it.

The scariest dream I ever had as a kid was a similar one about a big machine at Lagoon (for the non-Utahns, Lagoon is the local amusement park). This machine turned children into stuffed animals, presumably to be given away as midway game prizes. Everyone kept insisting that I had to get in it, as they were planning to do, even though they had seen its effects.

[6_bleen_7]

Oh yes; I remember that fear was much purer back then; none of this gnawing worry about trivial things.

You know, your scary dream about Lagoon could be allegorical. I remember that when all our friends were getting baptized (which in the Mormon Church happens around age seven or eight), you were getting serious pressure from your friends to join in the eternal fun.

Certainly a few people we knew in high school got put through the stuffed-animal machine during their missions. I recall a couple of real hell-raisers, guys with great wit and few inhibitions, who came back from their missions completely zombified. They were now responsible Elders, with a sacred calling to complete their MBA, become a brainless business droid, and pump out as many children as their wives' physiologal limitations would permit.