Categories
Economics Games

Noughts and Crosses

A reply to “What’s the best hack/edit to make the boring Tic-Tac-Toe game more interesting?” on Quora:

  1. Each player starts off with 100 chips.
  2. Each turn (including the first), the players submit a silent bid for how many chips they are willing to spend for the right to make a move.
  3. The bids are revealed and the player who made the highest bid pays that amount of chips to the other player and then makes his play.
  4. Repeat every turn until the conclusion of the game.

This is brilliant (and, I imagine, not a game for the AP prone). A high bid can buy you the coveted centre space but now your opponent has a bidding advantage over you, at any given point how much is a given space, or even the opportunity to play a turn actually worth?

Modern board game design is ace.

Edit: Another reply mentions another version I’ve seen before and liked. Each square on the grid contains its own gave of noughts and crosses, winning that game wins you the square on the parent board. The twist is the mini-board on which you must play is determined by the square last played by your opponent. e.g. They place a O in the top left square of whichever micro-grid they’re playing on so you must play on the micro-grid in the top left square of the parent board.

Categories
Books Film

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

I only read the first book (I think the second is on my shelf), this is a lot more Last Action Hero than I was expecting, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, Matt Colville sums up my feelings pretty well:

Categories
Animals Art Illustration

Birbs

Quentin Blake curates an exhibition of his own illustrations of birds at House of Illustration, running May to October 2017.

Categories
Comics People

Belief

Related to a recent post, “You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you,” from the Oatmeal is worth the few minutes of your time it will take.

You’ll learn about presidential teeth, Napoleonic height, poop, and flies, but also about something much more important.

Categories
Film

Guardians

I saw Vol 2 last night and was not disappointed. Once again, Drax steals the show (I think my favourite line of his is still from Vol 1, “Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.” But there are still many many actualols.)

It’s nice that Yondu gets a decent arc, and I wasn’t sure what Nebula would be up to but glad she was there too. The Stan Lee cameo might be my favourite one yet.

As with many comic book movies the finale becomes a bit of a CGI slugfest* but it’s still fun, funny, and dramatic enough to hold your attention.

A good measure of a comic book film is whether or not Sarah genuinely enjoys it or whether she’s humouring me. The first Guardians is the only one we saw together twice in the cinema, and I think we’d both see this again. Also the soundtrack is, predictably, great. I think the only thing I was disappointed by was the lack of a Ragnarok trailer before the movie.

Stray things that made me smile (spoilers I guess):

  • Uatu!
  • Howard the Duck!
  • Zardu Hasslefrau
  • Yondu’s face during the 700 bounces
  • Drax’s turd brag
  • “You look like Mary Poppins!” “Was he cool?” … “Yeah he was cool”
  • Adam Warlock (almost!)
  • “The skin is the same level of thickness from the inside as from the outside!”
  • Jeff Goldblum’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it credits Grandmaster cameo
  • Teen Groot!

* I actually thought the first film handled this pretty well, I don’t mind a big space battle and the actual final ‘fight’ with Ronan managed to largely avoid this

Categories
Books Geography Natural Science

Gilead

Like the Kingdom of God, the Republic of Gilead is both now and not yet. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale conjures a theocratic dystopia—a version of the United States taken over by fundamentalist Christians after a terrorist attack on Washington. Women are now divided into rigid classes determined by an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. Atwood’s protagonist, Offred, is a Handmaid—a fallen woman who is forced to bear children for righteous couples—and the book follows her sufferings under the Gilead regime.

I’m about halfway through The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s very good, and as this article notes it feels very current. I don’t watch a lot of TV these days but it seems that TV scheduling still has significant influence on my reading habits, not that I’ll be watching the Hulu adaptation any time soon.

The linked article is also a good read: women in positions of power exerting incredible influence in order to reduce the influence of power of women is such a contradiction, and yet like so much in modern politics the contradictions matter not to those that support such figures. I don’t know how you persuade someone to give up a fervent belief, religious or political.

I recently found out that some friends of mine are flat-Earthers. I tend to avoid Facebook, now that I’m greeted by ‘Proof the Earth is flat,’ ‘Overthrow the conspiracy of the globists,’ and, ’10 truths that disprove the prehistory of dinosaurs,’ I’m even less inclined to log on. I’m aware I can mute people and channels but there’s part of me that can’t help but try to explain how things work. On the bright side I’m getting good at explaining in simple terms why the sky is blue, how one can tell the earth is round, or how it’s possible to see the sun from so far away. On the downside I’m not yet ready to just leave them be and unfortunately and ‘Yeah, that confused me at school, it all just sounds too complicated, I’m just going to believe this’ infuriates the hell out of me.

As a chaser let’s have a look at our lovely Earth.