10-31-07

Dave burned a pizza.

10-30-07

"As already said, however, de Selby provides some genuine mental sustenance if read objectively for what there is to read. In the Layman's Atlas he deals explicitly with bereavement, old age, love, sin, death and the other saliencies of existence. It is true that he allows them only some six lines but this is due to his devastating assertion that they are all 'unnecessary.'"

-- Flann O'Brien, The Last Policeman

10-29-07

"These cyclists are playing chess with each other. They are shuffling the cards even as we speak!"

-- Sportscaster for a bicycle race

10-28-07

Fluorescent bulbs contain mercury.

10-27-07

Washington.

10-26-07

Someone published a 600 page book of random numbers.

"To whom do I write to report typographical errors? I noticed that the first '7' on the third line page 48 should be a '3'. The '7' that's printed there now isn't random."

"Such a terrific reference work! But with so many terrific random digits, it's a shame they didn't sort them, to make it easier to find the one you're looking for."

Be sure to read the reviews.

10-25-07

Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, was only 5'2". His short stature was an advantage in getting picked, as space inside the shuttle was very limited.

10-24-07

"[In Street Fighter,] you will not see a classic scrub throw his opponent five times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimizes his chances of winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you—that’s cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too ... If you block for fifty seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap ...

Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is a tactic close to my heart that often elicits the call of the scrub. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by definition of playing to win. The game knows no rules of 'honor' or of 'cheapness.' The game only knows winning and losing."

-- David Sirlin, Playing to Win

10-23-07

"Black, who had been better all along, decided the game here with the nice double decoy 38...Nd2+ White resigned, because on 39.Nxd2, there follows Qg1 mate, and on 39.Bxd2, there follows Qf2 mate.

Only, in the last variation, Qf2 is an impossible move."

Colossal chess blunders.

10-22-07

"'Friend' and 'who hates games' ought to be mutually exclusive."

-- Sam, after I'd said "friend who hates games coming in" to explain why I might not make Mafia on Friday

10-21-07

I beat Puzzle Quest!

It's still an awesome game, guys.

10-20-07

Befuddled Wizards.

10-19-07

The founder of Johns Hopkins was a morphine addict.

10-18-07

Bioware got bought out by EA.

10-17-07

Citrus Soldier. The guy takes photos off of Flickr and puts captions to them. The writing is hit or miss -- most of it being "miss" -- but occasionally he scores a good one.

10-16-07

Puzzle Quest finally came out for Xbox Live last week and, yep. It's awesome.

10-15-07

See? I told you. Nationalized health care sucks.

10-14-07

California invented the right turn on red.

10-13-07

Obscure internet slang:

IANAL -- "I am not a lawyer."

10-12-07

Jokes > Sex.

10-11-07

Violent Acres.

10-10-07

A story that the great chess player José Raúl Capablanca used to tell his friends:

"I was playing in a tournament in Germany one year when a man approached me. Thinking he just wanted an autograph, I reached for my pen, when the man made a startling announcement. 'I've solved chess!' I sensibly started to back away, in case the man was dangerous as well as insane, but the man continued: 'I'll bet you 50 marks that if you come back to my hotel room I can prove it to you.' Well, 50 marks was 50 marks, so I humored the fellow and accompanied him to his room."

"Back at the room, we sat down at his chess board. 'I've worked it all out, white mates in 12 no matter what.' I played with black perhaps a bit incautiously, but I found to my horror that white's pieces coordinated very strangely, and that I was going to be mated on the 12th move!"

"I tried again, and I played a completely different opening that couldn't possibly result in such a position, but after a series of very queer-looking moves, once again I found my king surrounded, with mate to fall on the 12th move. I asked the man to wait while I ran downstairs and fetched Emmanuel Lasker, who was world champion before me. He was extremely skeptical, but agreed to at least come and play. Along the way we snagged Alekhine, who was then world champion, and the three of us ran back up to the room."

"Lasker took no chances, but played as cautiously as could be, yet after a bizarre, pointless-looking series of maneuvers, found himself hemmed in a mating net from which there was no escape. Alekhine tried his hand, too, but all to no avail."

"It was awful! Here we were, the finest players in the world, men who had devoted our very lives to the game, and it was all over! The tournaments, the matches, everything - chess had been solved, white wins."

About this time Capa's friends would break in, saying, "Wait a minute, I never heard anything about all this! What happened?"

"Why, we killed him, of course."

10-9-07

Occam's Razor has some competition.

10-8-07

From an article:

"There's a lot of girls around," adds pro gamer Tom "Tsquared" Taylor. "I honestly find them annoying."

===

Compared to ordinary gamers, pro gamers have somehow managed to be even bigger losers.

10-7-07

Facebook lets you see a person's status on AIM and read their away message, if they have one up.

10-6-07

Age of Empires III. The computer game sucked, but the board game is solid.

10-5-07

Mafia with an assassin rocks.

10-4-07

Hitting alt+prnt scrn takes a screenshot of just the active window.

10-3-07

"No, he used to be a mathematician."

10-2-07

Excel 07 can't do basic math. Try this: =PRODUCT(77.1,850)

10-1-07

Some days, you just don't learn anything.

9-30-07

"Well, you can't have everything -- where would you put it?"

-- Steven Wright