You may have to expand it, but it is SO worth seeing. ^^

Gaming night fun ^^

I got this idea from a post I read while stumbling. for those who want to view my inspiration, click here.

I know everybody and their mother is on them int0rnets now, and that includes me, but damn it I remember when the internets were enough of a pain in the ass that we’d occasionally throw up our hands in disgust and take a break.

You remember those nights? Grabbing as many friends as you freaking could, fighting for an hour (if you were lucky and it was quick) over what to play, how to play it, where to play it, and what food you were gonna god-damned order in while you were playing it?

If you do, then you also remember just how awesome those nights could be once everybody quit their collective whine-fest and got into the game (as long as the game was good). Cameraderie, festive jokes, playful backstabbing, laughter, good friends, good times. Screw ‘celebrating the moments’ with International Coffees, I want to do that again.

And here are the games I want to do it with, in no particular order (except that the last one is the most bitchin’) :

Flux

Flux is the most unpredictable card game ever invented. The goals, abilities, and most basic rules of the game (how many cards to take, play, turn order, even choice of play) are constantly in . . . well, there’s a reason it’s called that.

And it’s a blast. playable with two, but it’s most fun when you have three or four.

Settlers of Cataan

This game doesn’t look cool. it doesn’t sound cool. And it is the most fun you will ever have playing a board game based on economics. Scratch that. It may be the most fun you will ever have playing a board game. EVER. It is simply that awesome. especially if you get a bunch of geeks to play.

Munchkin

This one is just tooo much fun. Especially for those who actually rolled a character at one point in their lives. This is basically D&D on crack for the ADHD set, with a sense of humor that everyone is gonna lolcopter over (well… except your gramma)

Last, and (what did I tell you) MOST AWESOME –

ILLUMINATI

*thunder rolls, lightning cracks*

We are talking the mother of all games here. This game has strategy, intrigue, money, politics, LOLs, backstabbing, back-room deals, and an awesome set of graphics/visual jokes to go with it. The goal is simple – WORLD DOMINATION. . . . . BWAHAHAHAHAH. *lightning and thunder*

Made by the same people as Munchkin, and it’s just as high quality, only a lot more grown up and complex. I definitely wouldn’t recommend this game for somebody under fourteen or so. But man, I’m glad I’m old enough to play.

Fawkin' awesome.

Just because

Found this on t3h nets ^^ at this address

For Fun

Just for fun, …. check out the pic i found after the bump ^^

0.o NSFW

I suggest a new rule for t3h Int0rn3ts… rule number 71 – If it exists, there’s a graph of it.

So about that link…

Yup, this is the post I promised you guys (or guy, actually, since so far as I know, this is being read by me and one of my friends down in Phoenix, and maybe a depressed house cat in North Piddle, Grafton Flyford, Worcester, U.K.  . . .

But enough about low readership! Onwards and upwards! The link that I attached to my first post should have led you to an interesting little video showing an experiment that Bobby Mcferrin demonstrated as a speaking guest at a panel of the World Science Festival.

The subject of the panel was  Notes and Neurons, and the question asked was something along the lines of, ‘What, if anything, about music is universal to all humanity? and if there IS a universality to music, what does that have to do with our brains?’.

Bobby’s experiment had to do with what he thought of as the universality of the pentatonic scale. No matter where he went in the world, he said, he could repeat his little social experiment (follow the link to see what that experiment is) and people would respond in exactly the same way.

I was quite impressed upon first seeing the video. The audience (and I) were anticipating notes without being led to them, almost as if there was some sort of universal set of basic notes. Then I thought about it.

This is not to say I think Bobby is wrong. As a matter of fact, I believe him. And it’s not because I trust him more than any other person I don’t know.

The reason I believe him when he says that he can get any group of people anywhere in the world to respond in exactly the same way is because his experiment is fundamentally flawed.

He leads his audience: He creates a cognitive link between where he is standing and a note, demonstrating the note until people in the audience catch on. He then creates a cognitive link between another place and another note, again, demonstrating it until the audience catches on. Then he demonstrates the inter-play between the two notes and essentially creates a keyboard out of the floor, jumping from one note to another.

The reason this is flawed is that he essentially creates a mathematical construct, like the interval problems we all had to solve in childhood, i.e.- solve for the blank: 2, 4, _, 8 (the answer is 6). The fact that the audience fills notes in on its own once the construct is established isn’t surprising, it just feels that way.

A Doozy of a first step

Hiya! My name is Arthur. Welcome to my blog!

My purpose in this first post is to explain a little bit about myself, and to bring you up to date on my world, which is odd, and fundamentally different from the average person’s world.

Hmm. Obviously I need to define world a little, because I’m using it a little strangely. By ‘world’ I mean all of these: Frame of reference; culture; general point of view; a framework to judge and compare new experiences by; and the lenses through which one looks at the entirety of human experience.

My lenses are a little skewed. ^^

For example, I’m a member of political parties

which fall outside the norm, several fringe groups

Ahhh, rainfurrest, one heckuva con... which shows my interests in T3h furry, AND my interests in T3h fannish conventions ^^

(also outside the norm), have an unusual breadth and depth of interests in music, art, photography, psychology, cinematography, and civil rights, all from the standpoint of a layman, and all colored by my experiences in life, although not necessarily springing innate from those experiences. A side note here… as you can probably tell, I try to keep the behaviorist school of psychological thought as far away from my brain as possible – I wouldn’t trust those unimaginative engineers with a spanner wrench, much less my mind.

So with all of that said, I intend this blog to be pretty much all about my personal little slice of the macroverse, what I think is cool, nifty, appalling, or just plain interesting… such as this video taken from the world science festival of 2008, in NY, NY…

Which won’t for some reason embed here, so I’ll just link to it instead, because I’m lazy, and you can gosh darn click your mouse button one more time for the awesomeness.

I’ll be blogging about THAT a little more in my next post. For now, I leave you with warm well wishes (unless you’re one of those anti-everything conservatives who wishes I’d die, in which case, well, fuck you too then).