entirely safe and fun

This is a machine for tragedy. Be sure to wear ear and eye protection at all times while operating it.

On Wednesday night, Sarah, John, Chris and I playtested Jason Morningstar’s beta game Fiasco, which he describes as being about “big ambition and poor impulse control.” It’s a state-of-the-art, GM-less game where the players build situations where crisis is just around the corner: think Fargo, Burn After Reading, Blood Simple, Double Indemnity. Then they wind up this tragedy engine and let it go, playing characters in an improv drama whose situation they’ve just specified. There’s usually going a simple plan, and then some complications, some backstabbing and betrayal, probably some murder. Characters often will ruefully remember that at one time, whatever they did seemed like a good idea, often as a guy with a sniffle and an extravagant collection of facial tattoos force-feeds them Ex-Lax after chaining their ankles to either side of a well-used concrete trough. Happy endings are rare.

Our game never quite got that dire — just a little pâté of murder in a tart betrayal aspic. I started up a discussion at Story Games, where there’s a summary. But I also wrote a detailed, scene-by-scene report and figured that this would be a better place for that. So, check after the jump for a story of armed foolishness on the Gulf Coast, a story of unknown paternity, unexpected tenderness, greed, revenge, and running over a guy in a wheelchair who had already been gut-shot and had his fingers broken. Fun times!

“Ox 1, you’re on the clock,” he said, promiscuously mixing ‘draft’ puns. PD photo from wp.

“Yoker” because it’s… wait for it… draft poker. Yeah, I know, you see what I did there.

You’ll need 4-7 players and a standard poker deck, probably with the jokers removed (subject to playtesting, see below). Dealer deals seven cards, face down, to each player, and sets aside the rest of the deck face-down; it does not figure into further play of the hand. Each player picks up his hand, selects one card from that hand, and puts it face down in front of himself. He then passes the remaining six cards to his left face-down, taking a hand of six from his right-hand opponent, also face-down. He picks up his new hand, selects one of the six cards in it, puts it face-down in front of him along with the first card he chose, and then passes his hand to the left.

Before players pick up their hands of five cards, there is a round of betting (not for real money, of course) that starts with the dealer, using whatever ante and limit rules make sense to your table. Any player that folds leaves the game until the next hand; they shuffle whatever cards were in their hand, plus any that were in the face-down pile in front of them, back into the deck, without revealing them. Once the betting is resolved, players pick up their hands of five, draft a card into their face-down piles, pass the four remaining cards left face-down, and continue in this way until all cards are drafted. There is a round of betting before drafting the third, sixth, and seventh card; also, a final round of betting occurs after the seventh card is selected. All players still in the game after this last round then reveal their seven face-down cards, and then score the best five-card hand they can make from their seven face-down cards, using the standard poker hand order. The winner takes the pot (tied co-winners splitting it evenly).

Why this may be more fun than other poker games: Both the “public cards” information and the variance are spread out very differently among the players. In Hold ‘Em, everyone knows about the same cards that are in their opponents’ hands; in yoker, each player knows what he passed, can guess which downstream opponents took those cards, and may be able to infer things about his upstream opponents’ hands based on what they’ve passed him. Variance is spread out too, in that I can know that I passed A♠ to my left-hand opponent (probably improving his hand) so I could take the 9♥ that gave me a three-of-a-kind.

Possible changes:

• Some rule about when you can look at your face-down cards is necessary. I’m leaning toward “any time” but maybe the right answer is “only during betting rounds” or maybe even “only at the showdown” to keep the game moving along.
• It’s possible that the game works better if the dealer button gets passed to the right after each round of betting concludes, rather than just between rounds.
• Perhaps there should be more round(s) of betting? Not sure how that would be handled yet without clashing with people’s poker intuitions too much.
• Adding one or both jokers as wild cards might or might not be fun — I am leaning toward “not”.
• The game could be expanded to eight players either by shuffling two decks together (more variance, not recommended) or drafting six cards (not as much scope for skill, æsthetickally displeasing as poker usually has five- or seven-card hands).
• Seating order matters more than usual in other poker games. Maybe there should be a rule for re-seating the players from time to time? Or switching the pass direction?
• For two- or three-player games, replace the drafting mechanism with something like Winston Draft, q.v. I think that having just two players left in the game after the third pick, when two or more have folded out, still leaves enough hidden information to have a fun game, even though those two players are just passing packs back and forth.
• Oh yeah, one other thing that would potentially be awesome: hi-lo hand scoring.

Vote Actual Lamprey — why settle for a metaphor! Image from wp marked PD.

The good news: loathsome pork-barrel parasite Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) was (finally) convicted of making false financial statements. He faces up to 35 years in prison, five years for each of seven counts.

The bad news: he will almost certainly not serve a day. He even gets to keep his pension! We may be quite certain that on the outside chance that he is sentenced to prison, he will not be treated as a member of the general population, searched intimately after each visit from his family, subject to the punishing depersonalization that prisons do and ought to impose on their inmates. Stevens was not completely wrong to believe that his seniority in the Senate — put plainly, his persistent, lamprey-like rasping and sucking grip on taxpayer wallets — would immunize him from the full force of the law. His status as a legislator, even as a convicted felon senator, may be counted on to overawe the human agents of the law.

Topping all previous displays of hubris, Senator Stevens did not make plans to suspend or redirect his re-election campaign in case he was convicted. In fact, he has announced that he will continue to run for the Senate despite the fact that, after his felony conviction, he can no longer vote for himself. Quoth the AP:

Despite being a convicted felon, he is not required to drop out of the race or resign from the Senate. If he wins re-election, he can continue to hold his seat because there is no rule barring felons from serving in Congress. The Senate could vote to expel him on a two-thirds vote.

“Put this down: That will never happen — ever, OK?” Stevens said in the weeks leading up to his trial. “I am not stepping down. I’m going to run through, and I’m going to win this election.”

He is depressingly likely to be right. So remember to do your part and Vote Freshman on 4 November. No matter how much you think you like your incumbents, the consequences of serial incumbency are so dire that you can’t afford to send them back to Washington. It’s best to blindly pull any lever that doesn’t have that fatal “(I)” next to it.

Oh, and when we get around to amending the Constitution to add term limits for Congressional representatives, can we please maybe add something that bars convicted felons from serving, especially if the felony in question is committed in office? It just seems like a good idea. Actually, I thought of an even better reason why convicted felons should be allowed to serve. Never mind.

Update again, 30 October: Turns out Senator Stevens will, by some tortuous legal reasoning, probably be allowed to vote.

“NO SOONER DO YOU DEFEAT THE TROLL THAN AN UMBER HULK APPEARS! ROLL INITIATIVE!” Photo courtesy Douglas S. Smith, found on wp

Surely it has happened to you: you’re out somewhere and need a random number, or a whole bunch of them. For me, this mostly happens at restaurants, when I would like to consult an Infallible Oracle as to which of N tasty possibilities is right for me on a given day. But maybe you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons in free-fall (this makes conventional dice less than useful). Perhaps you have found yourself diceless and kidnapped by a capricious yet mathematically sophisticated evil overlord, who will not free you until you have completed a Monte Carlo simulation by hand. I would like to help you, and if you’re that last guy I mentioned, buy you a drink.

Text “rolldice somestuff” to 41411, where somestuff is either a number or a D&D-style specification of how many dice to roll, and how many sides each die has. If you say just one number, you’ll get a reply with a random number between 1 and your number, inclusive, so sending “rolldice 6″ is like rolling a single, ordinary six-sided die; “rolldice 3″ will help you decide among the apple-glazed pork chop, the mahi-mahi on pan-fried noodles, and the five-spice steak. To use a D&D-style dice specification, put a “d” between the number of dice and the number of sides, so you would say “rolldice 3d10″ to get three random numbers between 1 and 10 (”three ten-sided dice”), or “rolldice 3d6″ to roll up your character’s stats old-school in that aforementioned free-fall role-playing scenario.

The way this was done is fairly cool, by the way: I used the free, ad-supported web service TextMarks to handle all the SMS-gateway logic, and then threw together a simple cgi script to handle the dice-rolling logic. Setting aside the time I spent figuring out that my newly-installed FTP client was set up wrong and mangling my script, the whole exercise took less than half an hour, which is nothing short of amazing – TextMarks 41411 is a marvel of simplicity.

giddy giddy.

What greeted me in my Amazon orbit today: New Neal Stephenson book, Anathem, dropping 9 Sept. The Ninth is a Tuesday, and the book is 2″ thick in hardcover, so there goes that Tuesday. If you see me in person or on the Internets, I do not want to know anything else about it, OK? I have seriously injured men for less.

For the uninitiated: Stephenson is a super-excellent science fiction writer who has written the best works in a handful of subgenres (techno-thriller: Cryptonomicon, cyberpunk: Snow Crash, retro-scifi/steampunk: The Diamond Age, alternate history: The Baroque Cycle). Whatever he’s doing, I enter into reading it with the very highest of expectations. It goes without saying that I recommend his earlier works (from Snow Crash onward and including the psuedonymous, collaborative techno-thrillers Cobweb and Interface) and that you could do a lot worse, come September, than having Anathem queued up.

“From such churches, owls… make their paradises.”
Photo by michelphoto53, cc-by license

Some unordered thoughts on the topic:

• More and more material keeps popping up on Google Books: Bladé’s Contes Populaires de la Gascogne republishes the chapter from the Quatorze Superstitions on the Mass of Saint Sécaire. A generous sampling of Gareth Medway’s Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism is available online — this is a breezy, skeptical look at the topic, despite the rather sensationalistic title.
• I called the Saint Sécaire contre-messe “peculiar” when compared to other accounts of black masses. Just to be clear, the chief peculiarity is the matter of the host; in other reports, the host at a black mass is a fully consecrated one, stolen from a “legitimate” church. This tradition calls for a purpose-made black host, which, as Bladé might have said, is «quelque chose de bien plus rare». Which is a more complete reversal of the sacrament?
• Boingboing had an article today pointing to a master’s thesis, by a certain Cecile Dubuis, on libraries and the occult, which I’ve begun reading. Synchronicity indeed.
• Everyone’s favorite occultist/creepy uncle, Aleister Crowley, wrote a short story inspired by the Mass (creatively entitled “The Mass of Saint Sécaire”). I’ve acquired a copy and am considering my options for making it available. For the record, Crowley cited Bladé’s Quatorze Superstitions — his scholarship was at least impeccable, even if his prose wasn’t. That said, the plot would be of interest to fans of (say) White Wolf’s Mage roleplaying game: a grasping woman conspires with a corrupt priest to have the mass said for a soldier who campaigns in Africa. Nothing appears to happen at first, but eventually the soldier sickens and dies — coincidentally? — of the then-new-to-science tropical disease trypanosomiasis, which (of course) the doctors can’t do anything about. Good times!

“…only in a ruined or deserted church…”
Photo by Steve Roe, cc-by-nc-sa license

I suspect that many reader’s of James Frazer’s omnibus The Golden Bough were, like me, arrested by his description of a peculiar black mass tradition:

Gascon peasants believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men will sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those who do know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch, can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his light o’ love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot. And many other things he does which no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly dying of the Mass of Saint Sécaire.

And now, every time I think of an owl, it is one of Frazer’s, moping and hooting among the blackened, bare rafters of a burnt church. They just don’t do scholarly works like that any more.

But where, precisely, did he find out about this Mass? The widely available single-volume abridgement of The Golden Bough lacks a scholarly apparatus, and the multi-volume Bough is six feet of shelf and a hundred pounds. An interested scholar is forced to simply search the Net for mentions of the spurious Saint Sécaire, and until very recently, the search was not rewarding.

Then, just in the past few weeks, Google Books came to the rescue by digitizing C. J. S. Thompson’s Mysteries and Secrets of Magic (1973). Thompson referred directly to Quatorze Superstitions Populaires de la Gascogne (1883), by the Gascon ethnographer Jean-François Bladé, and that was the break I needed. The book was published as a scholarly edition of 50 copies 125 years ago, so calling it a “break” is a bit of a misnomer. The inter-library loan search was undoubtedly the most difficult I’ve ever undertaken. But in the end, I chased down a copy in the Cleveland Public Library — Special Collections, in fact, completing the Lovecraftian superfecta of a rare antique book, written in a language other than English, detailing a forbidden ritual, held in an inconveniently-located library.

And so it is, through the magic of scanning (thanks to Rhonda Green at CPL), that I was able to (finally) check the original source — Bladé had his account from “the late Cazaux,” one of his informants, apparently a man well-known to his family. One wonders whether the late Cazaux withered away, the doctors unable to diagnose or treat him… anyway, for your enjoyment, please find a scan of the (signed!) title pages, and of the relevant section of Quatorze Superstitions, in French. My translation of the section is also available, and I’ve been at work on the Wikipedia entry.

One down, 434 to go!

Primary season has been a real downer here in California’s 14^th. Not only did our serial incumbent Representative Anna Eshoo not draw a competitor within her own party, she doesn’t appear to have even drawn a Republican challenger! We don’t have a shot at either of our Senators, and all of the Presidential candidates are basically identical. Surely there must be some good news, right?

There is! Arizona Republican Representative Rick Renzi had already announced that he wouldn’t be running for re-election this year, and now we know why… and can be sure that he’ll actually keep his promise, a rare and beautiful treasure among Congressthings. He’s been indicted on charges of abusing his power as a member of the House Natural Resources Committee to secure sweetheart federal land deals for his co-conspirators, showing again how any power a government has, even something as simple as owning land, is bound to lead to corruption sooner or later.

The disgraced Congressman has appeared on the radar of many corruption NGOs over the past few years, and the group CREW has apparently featured him on their “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” list (fascinating read) for the last three years. Congressman Renzi, great job, and thank you for supporting term limits and the “Vote Freshman” campaign!

Adapted from this, and likewise made available under the GFDL

Toshiba, key player behind the HD-DVD format, announced this week that they’ve called in the priest for last rites. The conventional wisdom holds, then, that the competing Blu-Ray format “wins” the high-def format war. Honestly, I don’t buy it. It’s not clear to me that there’s anything to win. Downloaded or on-demand content is the next, and in some senses final, medium of choice for movie distribution; Blu-Ray gets to be King of Nothing for a day at best.

Consider: High-end computer monitors already offer resolutions of 1600 lines (2560×1600 glories in the entirely parody-proof name “WQXGA”) or more, compared to the 1080 lines addressed by today’s “high-def” content. Next year, there will be even more monitors with more than 1080 lines than there are this year, as an inevitable consequence of computer desktop creep. The year after that, there will be still more. At some point, it will become a selling point for high-end TVs that they are, as electronics salesthings are wont to say, “future-proof” in the same way as those computer monitors. Right around that time, some enterprising person, probably in the adult entertainment industry, will decide to sell content with 1600 or more lines of resolution, targeting the profligate. As a hard-coded standard, Blu-Ray is completely incapable of filling that many lines; it was written with VC-1 as its (arguably) highest-efficiency codec in terms of pixels/Mbit, and with Blu-Ray’s hard limit of 40Mbit/s video throughput, VC-1 can paint at most 1920×1080 at 24fps. On the other hand, a general-purpose computer, driving that same monitor, can add a new codec at any time. There is no pre-set limit on the throughput of its storage or network devices, and in fact we can expect that to remain a fast-moving target; thus, there is nearly no limit on the number of pixels per frame, or frames per second.

You will have your five-megapixel QSXGA smut, sure enough, but it is going to have to be delivered as “just data” rather than on a disc of the older, player-based kind. It may come on a BD-ROM, at least for a little while, but eventually will ship over the ever-accelerating Internet. Blu-Ray simply isn’t enough format, a problem compounded by the popularity and youth of the DVD format, and it seems likely that it’s destined for a northern winter’s day in the sun.

Documented here, the continuing saga of my attempt to master microfoam. Also, the awesomeness of ImageMagick. I was able to make that little montage with just a few keystrokes, by putting just the sixteen pictures I wanted in a directory by themselves, changing to that directory, and saying…
md small
for %i in (*.jpg) do convert %i -resize 100 -filter Lanczos small\%i
cd small
montage *.jpg -geometry +1+1 ..\montage.jpg
Note that “convert” and “montage” are two of the programs in the IM suite. I do have one small complaint about IM — why is it that I can’t take all the results of a batch transformation and “pipe” them into a multi-image operation like montage? The support for piping single images is incredibly handy, and it would be awesome if it could be generalized.