Rich and Strange Aeons

Chinatown, Pax Unplugged, masks, and games

2025-11-23T23:45:57Z

I'm back into Airbnb life, and just moved to Philly Chinatown. A modest number of surgical masks in older Chinese people at the grocery stores, plus one young woman in a K-mask I saw around. A couple old white people, homeless or semi-so, in surgicals. Very little masking in Trader Joe's, mostly one cashier, despite TJ having the highest CO2 levels I've seen in a grocery store -- 1300 when I checked. TJ packs in customers and does not have great ventilation.

It also turns out that Pax Unplugged, a large table/board game convention, was happening this weekend, two blocks away. Perhaps this explains why getting an Airbnb was annoying and expensive, compared to what I saw in DC. A friend of mine was flying out Sunday morning, so swapped me his 3-day pass so I could check it out. Free in money and almost free in time, why not?

( Read more... )

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gomoku tactics

2020-06-26T02:14:40Z

A while back I installed a gomoku app for my phone. It's a simple "connect five" game, no frills or variations. I'd been playing it mostly on instinct, but last night/this morning decided to think more about it.

What was obvious before:

Open four (row of four without opposing cap on either end) is a win; if the opponent caps one end, you extend the other and win.

Open three has to be responded to, lest it become an open four.

Closed (semi-closed, capped on one end) four has to be responded to, lest it become a five and win.

Two open threes are a win, since they can't both be interrupted.

(Assuming of course there isn't some side effect, where the enemy capping your three gives them a four.)

What I realized:

Open threes start life as an open two. So a strong move, keeping momentum, is to make an open three that also makes an open two; the opponent will respond to the three, and you can threaten again from the two

Making two open twos at once loses momentum, but at least makes options.

Alternatively, making a three or two (or more) that caps an enemy two reduces their options. Or when capping an open three, choose the end that lets you make an open two or three of your own. (Maybe! You want to also look at what they might do on the other end, since they'll probably push to a closed four that you have to respond to.) Or, cap the end such that the other end would benefit you if they *did* push to a four.

Results:

That's not really deep analysis, but it seems to have helped a lot, to beat the AI less randomly than before.

Unrelatedly, this program seems to "give up" when you're set to win. Like if you make an open four, instead of trying to cap one end, it'll usually just go play somewhere else. At the higher AI levels, it seems to "give up" in some positions where I didn't notice a forced win. This could just be a bug, or could be deeper insight. I suppose then the ultimate AI would play randomly from the beginning, since I go first and Gomoku is known to be winnable by the first player, like tic-tac-toe. (I think it's known that it is winnable, but not readily how.)

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Fate/Unlimited Verbiage

2015-11-15T23:45:53Z

So, I finally finished the Lets Play of the Fate/stay night visual novel. That sentence probably made no sense to most of my readers, so let me expand:

Visual novel (VN): a Japanese thing I'm not that knowledgeable about. It could be as simple as a novel with graphics, simple animations, and sound (music and dialog). In practice, they usually have you make choices, so it's like a multimedia Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) novel. They're also thought of as a game -- and usually H (for hentai) or ero games, with some sexual content -- albeit ones with far more reading than playing. They also make use of running on a computer: as they're usually about relationships (as it were), you can accumulate relationship points with different characters, which affects branches later on, so it's a bit more complex than a CYOA book.

Fate/stay night: one particular VN by Kinoko Nasu. No one knows what the title means, if anything. The English translation has been described as 800,000 to a million words, twice as long as the Lord of the Rings. It has spawned an anime of the same name, which I'm told is not that good (though popular); a manga, about which I've heard nothing; a prequel light novel series called Fate/zero by Gen Urobuchi (basically canonized fanfic) which spawned an anime of its own; and most recently an anime Fate/Unlimited Blade Works based on the second 'route' of the VN, which I'll explain later. I've seen Fate/UBW (strong start, pacing lags later) and Fate/zero (just plain strong, though dark.)

I imagine that there might be some way to run the VN/game in a Windows environment on my Linux box, with the fan-made English translation files. But, that's a lot of work, and after playing the American-made Black Closet, I'm not sure "playing" this sort of game is really my thing. Happily, some heroic servant of the people made a walkthrough, aka a Lets Play, of the (fan-English) game, including all the bad endings and extras, but excluding the (allegedly bad) sex scenes. I started reading it over a month ago, on October 11th. Last night, I finished.

In addition to being long, the player had snarky comments about Nasu's "words word words", long (not that long) philosophical ramblings at times that didn't make tons of sense. So my ideas for snarky titles were Unlimited Verbiage (as above) or Unlimited Nasu Words, for a closer play on titles.

***

In addition to being longer than LotR, Fate/stay night could also be thought of as a trilogy, but in a different way. It's basically three different stories (also called 'routes') about the same characters and general events. Not three different perspectives on the same sequence of events (which could be interesting, and there is a bit of that in the prologue), but three different main sequences, branching based on early choices by the player. (I guess? I'm actually not sure if it branches solely on that; there seem to be aspects of three different related worlds, with differences that wouldn't depend on your choices. But, not sure, don't care enough to hunt it down.) Two of the routes also have two different good-ish endings each, and across all three routes there are 40 Dead Ends (you die) or Bad Ends (you otherwise fail). It's actually pretty channeled: you have to play the Fate route first, then the UBW route, then the Heaven's Feel route. Another reason I figured I might as well just read it.

So, was it good? It was engaging, at the very least: I didn't take a month to finish because I was slacking off in boredom. It does have flaws and confusing bits; never know what to attribute to the original author vs. the translator, I'd guess some of both. By the end of the UBW anime I was joking that the Holy Grail could punch holes in the plot, not just space.

It has more female roles than LotR, and strong ones. You play as Emiya Shirou (Japanese name order), a teenage boy, but interact heavily -- and not just sexually -- with various girls or women. Tohsaka Rin has been called the deuteragonist, as she plays a major role in all three routes, is the heroine (or love interest) of the second, and even gets to be the narrator in the prologue and one of the endings. (She's also an iconic character of tsundere, twintails, and zettai ryouki fashion... one of my early reactions to the UBW anime was "she's obviously tsundere, but I don't mind, because she's tsundere to *everything* and life in general, not just as a love interest.") And there's various other women, strong in combat, magic, and/or surviving a lot of crap. (And some of them do get a lot of crap to survive.)

It does pass the Bechdel test. I'm not sure it passes it often -- if two women are talking there's a good chance it'll be about Shirou, though "what an idiot" is more likely than "what a hunK" -- but it does.

Shirou's infamously sexist in some ways, like "girls shouldn't fight" despite the girls being able to fight on a completely different level than him, though someone on TV Tropes argues it's deeper than that: that he didn't want Saber fighting because she was *injured*, but (a) couldn't say that well (see: idiot) and (b) thought his life wasn't worth protecting. After barreling through the whole thing, I'm agnostic on the question, aka "I don't want to go back and re-read the first route to have an informed opinion."

The nature of the story allows it to plunder myth and legend at will. Sometimes brutally ("X was never like that!" people say, though I'm "eh, I can see it") but sometimes with research ("Y actually was described as a pretty boy").

It's inspirational: I imagine a lot of fanfic from it (though checking, not as much as I thought; it does rank higher in crossovers than on its own, which makes some sense), and have had some RPG inspirations of my own already. And I can see plundering some of the characters for future PCs. It definitely has memorable characters, of both sexes.

One cool thing for me is that at least three characters are basically Lawful Good (Saber is *officially* LG, she has a stat sheet in-universe!), with very different personalities, and none Lawful Stupid. (Shirou can be dumb but it's more your standard Shounen Stupid). I have an interest these days in how characters can be morally straight-and-narrow yet different people. (Nanoha is also good for that, and to a lesser degree Order of the Stick. Possibly superhero media in general, but that's less my thing.)

Basically, I had fun, and am glad I read it. Should you read it? I don't know if it's *that* good, objectively speaking. Would it be of interest if you hadn't seen related anime, as I had? I can't say.

I know I haven't described what it's *about*; there's a zillion other sources for that, though, so I was going for some underexploited angles, as well as "this was to my taste, if you like my taste you might too."

(Edit: one thing it's about is heroism and the sacrifices made for it. I'm not sure if it says anything deep or useful about it - -I've been more reading than thinking -- but that's definitely A Theme. Maybe even The Theme.)

The new icon is, of course, Rin, apparently giving one of her "now listen up, idiot" lectures.

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The original GamerGate

2014-11-06T19:18:03Z

'During the 16th century the queen's move took its modern form as a combination of the move of the rook and the current move of the bishop.[12] Starting from Spain, this new version - called "queen's chess" (scacchi de la donna), or pejoratively "madwoman's chess" (scacchi alla rabiosa) - spread throughout Europe rapidly, partly due to the advent of the printing press and the popularity of new books on chess.[13] The new rules faced a backlash in some quarters, ranging from anxiety over a powerful female warrior figure to frank abuse against women in general.[14]'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_%28chess%29#History

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2048x4

2014-03-23T03:08:17Z

So there's this hot new game, 2048. First I said I wouldn't be part of the craze. But then I was.

Stage 1: I went on an intuition of combining numbers as opportunistically as possible. This got me to 512 and 5000ish points on my first attempt, 7 or 8k points on the 2nd, but getting past 512 seemed really hard; the board fills up with disjoint numbers.

Stage 2: In a comment thread I saw someone's simple algorithm for an AI:
go up if possible
if not, go left or right, depending on which consumes more numbers after an 'up' followup.
if all else fails, go down. Commentary was that you never want to go down if you can avoid it; logic wasn't given.

Spamming that got me to 13,000 points on the first use, and probably 1024. I know I've seen 1024, and I think the 10th Doctor on a Doctor Who clone (definitely the 9th, but that's like 512.) Further scores tended to be lower, around 7000, though having a dumb algorithm beat me was humbling. Couldn't get past 1024.

Then I thought about it again, inspired by a diagram I'd seen. And this works, so if you want to figure it out on your own, shoo.

( Read more... )

With that I quickly got 2048. I don't remember if it was on the first attempt, but soon. Then again, and again, and again. Not quite in a streak, but close enough that it's not a fluke nor a mining of many attempts. Scores ranging from 22516 to 32908. 4096 seems a long way off, though.

Feels a bit like my nethack ascension. Played for years, then Ascended, then Ascended again. Something had clicked.

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Pictionary and the evolution of writing

2012-11-04T05:16:05Z

At a party tonight, people playing a homegrown version of Pictionary, basically Difficult All Play with made up words. A neutral player picks a word and shows it to the drawer of each team, and they race ot make the guesser say the word; no limit on the abstraction of the word. We saw expertise, irrelevant, vulgar, and tact (which was going on when I left.) The winners of the earlier words used "sounds like" techniques, e.g. Vulcan + car = vulgar. This was banned for the 4th round on the grounds of being too powerful. Progress by non-sounds like teams was, uh, amusing.

It occurred to me that "sounds like" is recapitulating the evolution of writing. First, pictures of concrete objects or verbs, then ideograms for the more suitable abstract concepts like 'up'... and then instead of arbitrary graphical symbols for the hard stuff, phonemic techniques to elicit the sounds of the arbitrary spoken word people already know.

This suggests a compromise, based on the vast majority of Chinese characters: people can use a partial 'sounds like' technique, indicating part of the sound but combining it with a other symbols that suggest the meaning domain. E.g. 'vulcan' + pictures suggesting politeness or rudeness or the populace.

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NESFA game day

2012-03-04T06:22:13Z

Got there really late again, but chatted interestingly a bit about Somerville water supply, and Boston. Supposedly the Big Dig found *wooden* water mains still in use, not on any map, maybe dating to the early 1800s. Logs hollowed out, carved with male and female joints, and with iron banding around the join. Supposedly the hard water minerals precipitate out less, different surface chemistry, and as long as the pipe is below the water table and anoxic it doesn't rot fast. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Molasses_Disaster got mentioned too.

Played 3-player Settlers, one handily; played Zombie Dice, just lost; played my first Seven Wonders and tied for first. 49-48-44. Not that I had much clue of what I was doing. There were a bunch of anime-themed games around too: Anima, "Whack a Cat-Girl", another one based on a particular series. Also a Discworld board game, and Thud.

Met Ginnilee from the Bujold list, too.

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