When I happened to mention Knightmare the other day at a gaming session there was a lot of squeeing and bouncing up and down. Then when I mentioned that something quite similar might be happening soon, lots of big eyes were made. Well, it's on!

It's being run by Tim Mannveille and Clare Huxley (who you may recall me mentioning in connection with Three). The working title is "You're In A Room" and if I understand correctly there will be opportunities to devise and run encounters for other players as well as to play yourself.

The game will be running at Sandpit on Friday 25th May alongside some other games (I haven't seen a list yet, but the theme is 'New Sports and Reimagined Gameshows').

(Note: I probably won't be able to make it myself.)

Google Image Search uses SCIENCE to find images matching the words you type in...



...apparently SCIENCE is hard to do right. :-/

(PS. Anyone know if there are any reasonably famous Muppets with pink hair?)

I propose a new test for evaluating artificial intelligences:

The candidate AI is presented with a sequence of internet forum threads. For each one, it must supply in response a link to the most appropriate XKCD strip (if any, otherwise a blank response).

This replaces the Turing test, effective immediately.

I have a new favourite way to use Spotify: I have a playlist called "Mix Du Jour". Each day, I clear it, then drag in all the tracks from three albums. I then select shuffle and hit play.

Sometimes the albums are things which go together, stylistically speaking. Other days (and more often so far) I pick things with deliberately contrasting styles.

For example, today's Mix Du Jour is:

Madness - Forever Young
Fiona Apple - Original Album Classics, Disc 2
Whitesnake - Saints and Sinners

...which works a lot better than you might expect. Well, unless you expect it to be awesome!

So - your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to nominate three albums for me to pick on one of the days next week! There probably is some way for you to check whether things are on Spotify or not, but that sounds too much like hard work. If in doubt, try to avoid picking albums which are both old and obscure and you'll probably do OK.

Before you get on with this important task, I will leave you with a Dave Grohl tweet^[1] from earlier this week:

If you play a Nickelback song backwards you’ll hear messages from the devil. Even worse, if you play it forwards you’ll hear Nickelback.

(Actually I don't mind them, but it still amused me.)

---

[1] Yes, it is him. Yes, I know he's also @FooFightersDave - this is his new secondary account. It seems to be mainly for insulting Nickelback.

I'm GMing another mini campaign for the local gaming group. First session was last Tuesday, so nothing much to report yet. I'm also having fun with the beginnings of another roleplaying project for later in the year. And I'm really looking forward to Cube drafts on Magic Online next week.

( King Machine Update )
( Fixing Google, One eBay At a Time )
( Public Social Data )
( Troll Articles )
( Bea is the Revolution )
( Department V )

Just watched Green Lantern with lathany. Here is my review:



Great character. Great dialogue. Brilliant, innovative use of the lantern's powers...

<record scratch noise>

...all in the movie they didn't make. The one they did go for was very pretty (and doesn't contain the above "screenshot"), but the cliches would have been old ten years ago and the central character was The Stupidest Guy Ever. If the lantern corps wanted a new power they should have invented the Pink Ring of Stupid to harness his stupidity. By the end we were literally calling their scenes in before they did them.

It's been a while since I wrote up any gaming events due to having organised and GM'ed the Alliance of Traitors trilogy across the last three years. Having stood down from organising the things for the present I wasn't sure exactly what - if anything - would happen this year. The answer turned out to be: a great week of gaming. Accordingly, I think some writeup may be in order...

( What I Did On My Holiday )

Originally posted by venta at Testing, testing...

A: No.

Lots of RPG material to write for April. I think it might be the largest number of different games I've run inside a week before. As such, slightly unfortunate that I'm having huge problems with the system for one of them. I have two versions so far. One is nightmarishly complex but otherwise quite fun and the other is exquisitely dull. Ho hum, more tinkering to go.

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( Music We Like? )
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I have temporarily disabled my public email address (dom@heffalumps) due to the insane volume of bounce messages it's getting. If you need to contact me urgently either use my private email address or, if you don't have that, dom2@heffalumps will work until I re-enable the usual one.

The traffic distribution is a bit odd, but I think it's gradually declining...