I love Cracked.com. I can get lost for hours, surfing from one hilarious, insightful, and informative article to the next. There are so many great essays up there, but the one that’s really stuck in my mind right now is called the 4 Biggest Missed Opportunities in Fiction, by Daniel O’Brien.

Many have written about the flaws of the Star Wars prequels, but no one has ever described so well what they should have done instead. Daniel’s ideas are brilliant. I really wish I could see the movies he describes.

One of my favorite recordings ever is the eponymous Young American Primitive album. It’s prime electronica with occasional samples of quotes from old Outer Limits episodes, Hitchcock movies, and, in one case, Apocalypse Now. For years, we’ve wondered about the source of this quote or that, and figuring one out was always an exciting moment. Anyway, I was thinking of making a webpage, listing all the quotes we’ve figured out so far, when Rash pointed me to this page at s107.net. Yes, someone else has already built exactly what I wanted! And moreover, wow! What a concept for a site as a whole: Sources of Voice Samples in Music. What a great resource!

Chrononaut Spotted in Steampunk Bible

Here’s something fun I randomly found while flipping through my copy of The Steampunk Bible by Jeff Vandermeer. On page 155, in a section called “Eight Ways to Raise Your Steampunk Fashion Game,” I discovered this photo of a chrono-displaced chap sporting one of our out-of-print Time Repair Agency T-shirts! The point of the photo is actually the golden gizmo this dude is brandishing. “Whether carrying them or wearing them on belts, Steampunks need their tools,” Jeff reports in a bullet point called “Tools/Weapons.” What I especially love is that this guy’s costume seems to consist entirely of the all-important Tool/Weapon and a Chrononauts t-shirt. And sunglasses.

The Eponymous Victory Call

I always get a thrill out of finding a reference to one of my games in another form of popular media, so I was tickled to see Chrononauts being played in a recent webcomic called Deep and Meaningless.

In this case, what I liked best was the middle panel, shown here, in which the woman yells out the name of the game they are playing as she wins. Her kid complains about how often she apparently does this, but I think that’s great — Surprise ‘em with a Victory Cry!

You can do this with any game, of course, but there’s at least one game (besides Bingo) that actually tells you to do this in the rules: It’s a lesser known game for Looney Pyramids called Zagami, by Kory Heath. (When you win, you are also supposed to stand up, throw your hands in the air, and spin around as you shout out the name of game you are playing… but perhaps that’s overkill. Fortunately, it’s optional.)

I’ve just had a startling moment of self-enlightenment, combined with a vocabulary lesson. Why? Because, as I’ve just discovered, I’m an ambivert.

An ambivert is someone who’s both an introvert and an extrovert.

Some years ago, I made the startling self-enlightenment discovery that I was an introvert. This amazed me at the time because I’d always thought of myself as being rather extroverted. But after reading some stuff about introverts that really spoke to me, I totally embraced my introverted side.

I thought of myself as an introvert who’d developed a good set of skills for life in an extrovert’s world.

I convinced myself I was an introvert in extrovert’s clothing because I thought that, like sheep and wolves, a person had to be one or the other. (This despite remembering that my personality rating had actually come up as XNTP when I took those tests long ago.)

But my third eye has just been pried opened by Susan Cain, author of a book called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. In the introduction, she provides a list of 20 questions that introverts mostly answer with a yes… but which, for me, were only true 11 times.

Then she says, “If you found yourself with a roughly equal number of true and false answers, then you may be an ambivert. Yes, there really is such a word.”

So now I see myself as even more of a non-conformist, having moved from the oppressed minority of the introvert to the solitary world of the exception to the rule.

I truly am unlike most people. I’m an ambivert.

Found: My Earliest Game Design Artifact!

In my essay about Risk: Legacy, I went off on a tangent about the very first game design thing I ever did, which was a small board version of a sixties-era game called Battle Cry.

After writing about it, I decided to re-create (and improve upon) the idea I had hatched as a kid, and even gave copies of this re-imagined prototype to my brothers as Christmas gifts.

Then, in an amazing turn of events, I was digging around in the old game closet at my parent’s house on Christmas day, and I found the next best thing to my long-lost first-ever prototype.

Tucked inside the old Mouse Trap board (who knows why) was a small piece of cardboard which I instantly recognized as an abandoned first draft of my original gameboard!

It’s a fascinating artifact: It’s clear from studying it that I was having issues (the railroad network was too complex) and I clearly stopped working on it after drawing the first 2 grid lines and realizing I had the scale wrong. (It even seems as though I’d started re-using this piece of cardboard for some other unknown purpose, since I’d cut 2 circles from its edges.)

Anyway, it’s amazing to compare this first draft version with the one I recently re-invented — they’re practically the same size!

Everybody loves the classic story, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. If you’re like me, you favor the original book (by James Bond creator Ian Fleming) which is radically different from the Dick Van Dyke musical. So what’s your favorite scene? Mine is the part where Caractacus Potts has locked himself away in his garage, tinkering away on his amazing new invention, and everyone else is waiting outside, wondering what he will soon unveil…

Alison recently taught me a great new word for the strange ways I sleep. Apparently, I’m cathemeral. It’s a term used to describe the sleeping habits of animals that don’t follow any particular pattern, being neither nocturnal, nor diurnal, nor even crepuscular, but instead simply random in the times at which they sleep and are active.

Furthermore, lemurs are noted for being cathemeral, which has caused me to think that my spirit guide is probably a lemur.

I’ve always been a big fan of the classic board game Risk. In high school it was our snow day tradition, and in college it became the basis of one of my earliest game design projects, which I called Nuclear Risk. This was basically a set of rules for adding elements of the card game Nuclear War to Risk. When territories were nuked, you marked the spaces with radiation tokens, and I even made a lookup table for the occasional randomly-targeted mis-fired missile.

[As long as I’m off on the tangent of my earliest game design efforts, I should point out that this was not my earliest. Neither were the primitive text adventure games that I was inspired by when I wrote my Parsely game, Muffins. From what I remember, the first time I tried to design a game was in around the fifth or sixth grade, when I created a mini version of the Civil War board game called Battle Cry. It’s a big, slow-playing game which I really enjoyed, but I wanted a faster and more portable version. (Like most game designers, I got my start by making changes, i.e. trying to “fix”, an existing game.) So I created my own little gameboard, using crayons or felt-tip markers, and cobbled together a set of tiny army men to use as game pieces. And while the original game is played out on a map of the whole country, mine was on a small, abstract playing field. I thought of my game as representing a single battle in the full war simulated by the original game. I wish I still had that home-made game set, but it’s long gone…]

Anyway, the reason I have Risk on my mind right now is that there’s a new kid on the Risk block and it’s awesome. It’s called Risk: Legacy and it takes the original game to a couple of levels beyond the next level.

Risk: Legacy starts with the same basic gameboard and combat systems, but then it changes. And when I say it changes, I mean it REALLY changes. It’s not just different every time — you literally change the game, by taking sharpie in hand and writing stuff on the board. When a game ends, you add special stickers to the spots of your choice, denoting major and minor cities, which you get to name. And those cities are still there when you play again! Events from one game become important moments in history for the games that are played after it.

The box contains various sealed envelopes that you open when certain conditions are met; these often contain more stickers, which you add to the board, or even the rulebook, creating further evolution of the game’s world. Sometimes you’re even supposed to tear up game cards, since the options they provide are one-time deals!

There are even ways in which your own personal achievements in the game become factors in future games. The winner of every game signs the board, and gets a special perk for each previous victory whenever they play again. At the same time, those who’ve never won get a benefit too. It’s really well balanced and thought out.

All of these bells and whistles add a lot to the fun, but the game itself has been re-designed to be faster and make more sense. For instance, instead of starting with a random scattering of territories, you start with a small army in a single location, which thereafter is your official HQ. From there, you spread out and conquer. But instead of needing to totally dominate the world, like you had to do in the original game, you win by gaining 4 Victory Stars, which can be obtained in a variety of ways,

But the best thing about Risk: Legacy might just be that one final envelope, hidden away in the very bottom of the box, which reads “DO NOT OPEN. EVER.” Wow. Gotta love that. I wonder what’s inside? I look forward to the day when our group decides to open it anyway. I expect to find something that really really changes things, such as the radioactivity markers I was adding in my own variations on the game way back when.

So, I’m very impressed. If you’re a fan of Risk, or games that change as you play them, you’ll dig Risk: Legacy.

The survey in the September edition of Notes From The Lab was about people’s favorite sci-fi subjects which are parodied in Star Fluxx. A glaring omission from that list was Forbidden Planet, which I somehow I forgot about when we were making that survey. So I recently decided to watch it again, and wow, it’s still holds up really well. Even the vintage special effects still look really good.

I was also struck by how much the movie feels like a random episode from a Star Trek series, in a Galaxy Quest kind of way. This in turn gave me an idea: Forbidden Planet — The Series! Take the movie as a pilot, and just pick up where that left off for Episode 2, with United Planets Cruiser C57-D arriving at the next planet on their itinerary, ready for the brave crew’s next adventure.

My favorite character in the movie is Cookie, the ship’s cook, and I kind of see him as being the main character. (I also see the show as having a humor-oriented angle, perhaps styled more as a half-hour sitcom than an hour-long sci-fi drama.)

Anyway, you can learn everything you need to know about the character of Cookie from one of his best lines: “Another one of them new worlds. No beer, no women, no pool parlors, nothing. Nothing to do but throw rocks at tin cans, and we gotta bring our own tin cans.”

Of course, Robby the Robot would also be in the crew, and don’t forget, this movie starred Leslie Nielsen as the Starship Captain (since this was back in the days when he was a serious actor, not a comedian). It’s a shame no one had this idea at around the time when The Naked Gun got canceled, since the greatest thing ever would have been for him to have reprised his role as Commander Adams, this time in that deadpan-for-laughs style he did so well…