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July 22nd, 2008
04:26 pm - Long-shot Prediction Game: early probabilities
Thank you to the twenty players who made submissions for Phase 1 of the long-shot prediction game. It probably needs a slightly better name at some point.
( Of interest to players only. )
The panel have collectively concluded that first estimates of the probabilities of the twelve long-shot events occurring after July 31st, 2008 and before February 1st, 2009 (unless otherwise stated) are:
USA to win most gold medals in Beijing. 52%
Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher. 50%
BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750. 47%
HP 6 to gross at least $285 million at the US box office. 46%
Microsoft to takeover Yahoo. 36%
USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran. 33%
Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister, Labour leader or both. 31%
Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher. 28%
New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII. 25%
No more than 2 major hurricanes in 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season. 24%
Named British Prince or Princess to marry publicly. 23%
John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats. 10%
( Do any of these look too low? Do any of these look too high? This cut includes an optional poll in which to vote. )
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June 30th, 2008
10:02 pm - Long-shot Prediction Game
New Year is probably my favourite time of the year to read blogs. I love it when people do year-in-summary reviews and build up a string of sets of results from year to year so that you can compare things easily. I also enjoy Iain Weaver's annual predictions; Iain makes interesting predictions of relatively unlikely events, and then - with admirable integrity - goes and marks the success or failure of the previous year's predictions. He marks himself harshly; even though his raw score is not high, considering how long many of his shots are, I consider his record to be remarkably good. Even many of his misses are near, interesting and insightful. The only other similar prognosticator I can compare Iain to is Robert X. Cringely, who has predicted annually in a similar way.
I love reading interesting predictions. Anyone can make safe short-odds claims, but I'd take a handful of unusual and correct pot-shots over stating the bleeding obvious any day. (Or perhaps what is the bleeding obvious for some well-informed commentators may be an unusual pot-shot to myopic ol' me.) Accordingly, while we've played prediction games in the past - Iain's even run a couple, though rather intricate ones - there is often a tendency for the games to reward conservatism and selection of relatively likely options. There are things you can do with scoring systems, but they don't make the underlying prediction targets more interesting. I would be more entertained by a prediction game dealing with plausible long-shots - ideally ones where players make the plausible long-shot predictions, but a cunning mechanic would be required to ensure, er, length of shot.
This is not quite that game. This is an attempt to see whether my Friends list can produce a prediction market worth a damn by trying to form a consensus opinion of just how unlikely some moderately unlikely events are.
Below, please find twelve moderately unlikely events, all of which would be slightly surprising, hopefully none of which are completely implausible. Unless otherwise stated, I am interested in whether they might happen after July 31st, 2008 and before February 1st, 2009, excluding these boundary dates, considering local time zones as appropriate. Hopefully these are moderately international, or at least skewed towards the predicted audience.
Finance:
* Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher.
(Any of Brent crude, New York light sweet crude or West Texas Intermediate crude, which are trading at around $143.)
* BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750.
(It is currently valued at 5230 and was based at 5000 in September 2004.)
Politics:
* John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats in the 2008 US Presidential election.
(George Bush won 286 Electoral College seats in the 2004 US election.)
* Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister of the UK, Labour Party leader or both.
Sport:
* The USA to win at least one more gold medal than any other single country at the Beijing Olympics.
(At the 2004 Olympic Games, the USA won four more gold medals than second-placed China.)
* The New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII, expected to take place on or around February 1, 2009.
(They won their first 18 matches in the previous NFL campaign, only to lose Superbowl XLII. See also the so-called Super Bowl curse.)
Internet:
* Microsoft to make a takeover bid for (or merger bid with) Yahoo that Yahoo's board of directors accept or recommend acceptance.
* Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher.
(Source: any month or any quarter reported by W3 Counter global stats, TheCounter global stats or Net Applications stats. See recent stats for comparison.)
Entertainment:
* The Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie, i.e. Harry Potter 6, to gross at least $285,000,000 at the US box office by (and including) the weekend concluding Sunday February 1st, 2009.
(Counterpart figures for the previous five Harry Potter movies.)
* One or more of Prince William, Prince Harry, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie to marry publicly.
Other:
* USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran.
* There will be no more than two major hurricanes (category 3+) in the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season.
(Current predictions are for two to five.)
My questions: how many of these will occur? Which are most likely? Which are least likely?
( Read more, including the poll in which to vote. )
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June 10th, 2008
06:12 pm - So near, so SPAR
I've long been a fan of watching the track and field action at the European Cup in Athletics, the primary competition held between teams representing countries. This year's competition will be the last under the European Cup banner with the current regulations; from 2009, the competition will be replaced by the European Team Championships, which are slightly different. ( After a quick search, I do not believe I have actually ever specifically blogged about the European Cup, which I cannot quite believe. Sports organisation geekery within, but hopefully reasonably accessible. )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/geeky.gif) organised
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June 9th, 2008
09:54 pm - Exciting transport developments
Pledging to myself to provide content that pertains to real life, rather than just grumbling about LiveJournal on LiveJournal, here are ten of the developments in transport that I currently consider most exciting.
1. The ULTra Personal Rapid Transit system. The technology behind Personal Rapid Transit is decades-old and there has been one nearly sort-of implementation on the go for a while, but ULTra is a small example of the real thing. Imagine, if you will, a bus system where the buses are little automatically-driven cars that only hold four people; you go to a station, hail a bus, probably only have to wait seconds rather than minutes for it, get in, tell it where you want to go, pay for your ride and then you are driven there along the tracks. That's personal rapid transit; flexible routes, one vehicle per party of passengers, shorter waiting times, less waiting all around. It probably can't cope with as many people as a tram or light railway system, and it's probably best suited for short-ish distances, but it's much less fuss than a bus. The first full implementation of the technology will arrive at Heathrow Airport, hopefully next year.
( Read more... )
2. It's always delightful to hear of the Space Adventures company taking passengers up to the International Space Station, but that feels much closer to what NASA does than to what I would think of as relatively accessible space tourism, of the sort that you or I might participate in if we won a suitably sized lottery. It's particularly thrilling that one of the next two scheduled travellers will be Richard Garriott, "Lord British" of Ultima fame. However, as that has now been and happens adequately frequently - possibly twice this year - I'm looking to Virgin Galactic as being likely to be at the forefront of "real" space tourism, having made SpaceShipOne work. Unfortunately the trail went slightly cold when an explosion at a spaceport - yay, I get to use the word spaceport! - killed three, but it has been speculated that the required fifty test flights may start in June. Hopefully confirmation that things are on track will follow before long, and perhaps it may only be years, not decades, before we have sport in space.
3. OK, so with the global oil price being as it is, everyone knows that fuel-efficient cars are wonderful things. The Automotive X Prize (I refuse to write "prize" in all-caps or to name the sponsor) will make fuel-efficient cars very, very cool. The mission is simple: "design viable, clean and super-efficient (i.e., 100+ miles per US gallon) cars that people want to buy". The that people want to buy part is the really clever bit. There are 100+ mpg cars already - indeed, solar-powered cars are already known technology. The Automotive X Prize represents a far clearer path towards being able to being able to buy a 100+ mpg car for, say, a good year's salary within the next five or so years than any other initiative I know. (I may be able to afford one, second-hand, within fifteen years.) I'm confident that the technology will be there to produce 100+ mpg cars by the time the race starts; it's seeing how teams will meet the "Teams are required to submit a business plan which clearly demonstrates an ability to produce 10,000 vehicles per year" criterion that will be the major technical challenge. Hopefully someone will turn a winning business plan into fruition.
( 4. Transport in London. )
( 5. The Airbus A380. )
( 6. The Transport Innovation Fund. )
( 7. Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit. )
( 8. Airport expansion. )
( 9. Tees Valley Metro. )
( 10. Google Lunar X Prize. )
( Outside the top ten but still interesting: Edinburgh, Nottingham, Houston, long-distance buses, high-speed rail in the UK, Virgin airlines, small airlines, cycle paths and the car that parallel parks itself. )
( Going a bit cold: maglev, fast moving walkways, dual-mode transport and the Segway. )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/rushed.gif) mobile
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June 6th, 2008
08:41 pm - Big Games
1) The third incarnation of the annual Come Out and Play urban games festival starts today in New York City, mostly within Manhattan's Lower East Side. The Come Out & Play Festival seeks to provide a forum for new types of public games and play. We want to bring together a public eager to rediscover the world around them through play with designers interested in producing innovative new games and experiences. Oh yeah, and we want to have city-size fun. In short: benevolent malarky, thumbs very firmly up and only the faintest gnashing of teeth that I might not be there. The event runs from today until Sunday.
Three years in, there do seem to be some recurring patterns among some of the game submissions. One well-represented family is that along the lines of scavenger hunts, photo scavenger hunts, puzzle hunts and the like - you can never have too many of those, even if the fanciest and wildest clue ideas tend to be saved for exclusive events held for elite teams. Another family of games concerns the mixed reality genre, which largely involves playing with GPSes, mobile phones and video game paradigms; these are tremendously impressive, but there are huge technical barriers to content creation. Another family still involves story-based games and "urban play performances", some of which scale up well and some of which don't. Another family still are huge-scale versions of familiar small-scale games, which are possibly the easiest to get to grips with conceptually.
My favourite game based on the descriptions I've read is Metrophile, a live-action version of an area majority board game (Acquire, El Grande and so on, but simpler...) that is only played on a frickin' New York Metro train. That's ridiculously fun! Competitive Picknicking also tickles my fancy for featuring both solid card-game-like design and thematically appropriate giant fuzzy ants. Anyway, New York City folk, and people with NYC associates, please do enjoy and report back to those of use who can't make it about how good it all was.
1') I'm probably falling down on the job by not pointing out the counterpart event in London at the end of this month, taking place in and around the Southbank Centre from 27th to 29th June, the Hide and Seek festival. It starts off with a Werewolf (Mafia) evening and continues with many other games, some similar to the ones in their New York counterpart. In fact, at least a couple of the games will be played in both cities with some elements of competition between the two cities' collective outputs - for instance, the Snap Shot City photographic treasure hunt. There are plenty of games to be organised on a drop-in basis, as well, and lots of general Blank White Cardistry and the like going on when nothing else is.
You have to sign up for many of the games in advance, in both cities; several of the London games do not have all that many spaces left. I am this far from saying "Oh, bucket; even though I cannot really afford to go financially, especially as I am going on holiday in July already and have many other pressing reasons not to spend frivolously, my soul cannot really afford to miss out on this". While I am delighted that the interesting games movement is continuing apace and thus I can be more confident than ever before that there just might be a Next Year if I don't in fact go this time, I am really, really tempted not to miss out this time, especially as next year I might be on shift that weekend. Are there any enablers out there? While meeting exciting new people is a large part of the point of this, will I meet physically (as well as virtually) familiar people if I do go?
2) Greg Costikyan, illustrious in both the theory and practice of game design, as well as something of a glutton for punishment, is compiling a list (as a possible prelude to a collection of biographies) of Eminent Game Designers in, deliberately, many media on his independent-game-a-day Play This Thing blog. Needless to say, I have suggested many interesting people who just fall outside the criteria for his project but are not without merit, and might some day flesh out my claims as to why these interesting people have influenced the state of the gaming art. Who does the list continue to miss? Is there anything to support my wildly-plucked-out-of-thin-air theory that the inventors of Cosmic Encounter might have played more than a little Nomic in their time?
3) The World Series of Poker is now underway and this year it's even more of a flustercluck (presumably the cry of a perturbed hen?) than ever. The event now sprawls over, more or less, two whole months and consists of at least 55 different tournaments. The general public at large will care about, at most, one of these, the $10,000 No Limit Texas Hold 'Em Main Event; it takes something of a scholarly appreciation to care about what is arguably the other prestige event, the $50,000-buy-in mixture-of-five-games ("H.O.R.S.E.") tournament. (I note that this year there are more mixed-game tournaments than ever before, with a $10,000 octathlon mixed game event testing all-round poker skills, though the mix of times allocated to the various games has proved to be not quite right.)
I've heard from a couple of places that there is something of a sentiment that poker's current popularity may now be on the wane, with some US events finding TV ratings now starting to drop. There are credible arguments both that the Main Event may rise in size or that it may fall in size this year; while last year saw the first Main Event contraction (compared to the previous one) in recent memory, a large part of that was due to players winning places to the Main Event on the Internet and not actually taking them. This year's first No Limit Texas Hold 'Em tournament (with a much smaller buy-in!) drew considerably more than the counterpart event last year - an increase from ~3,000 runners to ~4,000 - so there still is some degree of upward momentum, and some Internet sites are claiming that they will be sending more players to the Main Event this year than last year. It's possible that this year might see the biggest of big ones - or, perhaps, like oil prices, there might be further scope for expansion still in the future. Current thinking is that this year's Main Event might have about 7,000 players and a $10,000,000 first prize; I'd take the over on that.
4) And finally, the selection process for the city to hold the 2016 (!!) Olympics is well underway, with the seven cities making bids whittled down to four ahead of an eventual decision next October. ( It's a tricky one to call this time around. )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/creative.gif) playful
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May 28th, 2008
03:21 pm - Wednesday ten-spot
1) The Department of Corrections wishes to apologise: I have been a strong proponent of the concept that the Instant Runoff part of the vote in the ongoing LiveJournal Advisory Board election won't generate a candidate with 51% of the vote and so the result will be decided by just first preferences. I misunderstood the process, I was wrong, I was loud and publically wrong about it; I am sorry for not thinking about it harder before I spoke out in an attempt to make a first post - or, at least, the first expression of my viewpoint.
Barring a fluke, the Instant Runoff procedure will determine a winner as expected and so all three of your preferences could count. See Iain's analysis of how preferences might transfer based on a snapshot of the numbers and some reasonable-seeming assumptions; in conclusion, it may well still be very close.
The deadline for votes is 9pm PDT on Thursday 29th May, which is 5am BST on Friday 30th May and you can work out the time in other time zones yourself. Read information on the candidates, then cast (or change) your vote. To me, this has become an election that is about the polarising sense of humour of a leading candidate, which I consider to be so offensively mean-spirited that I am prepared to cast my vote in order to make sure that that candidate does not win. (Not what I had hoped or expected to base my voting rationale on, but sometimes you don't get a choice.)
I am happy to discuss my voting preferences privately; if you consider yourself fannish, you may wish to consider aligning with this bloc vote. I wouldn't necessarily expect conclusive voting results immediately after the announced election deadline, either, as there are may well be some accusations of malpractice from, and on, all sides that run on horribly for days, weeks or months. The whole election has caused me to re-examine some of my attitudes about apparently unrelated matters; possibly more of that some other day.
2) I'm really enjoying Fighting Talk, a weekly panel game on BBC Radio Five Live that can reasonably be considered the British counterpart to American "competitive" sports punditry shows like Around The Horn. It's one that rewards repeat listening simply because it is hosted so confidently as to be able to play with its format, build up in-jokes and so on, and frequently the humour is far closer to the knuckle than you'd expect for a show broadcast on a Saturday morning, when people might be eating a light brunch.
There are a few of you out there who I think would enjoy it, potentially enough for the hilarity and atmosphere to outweigh the downside of a degree of unfamiliarity with British sports. There's a "best of" programme coming up this Saturday which could be a good starting point for first-timers; read more and listen live or download the podcast from Saturday afternoon onwards. There may also be some old podcast .mp3s available if you decide you're a fan.
3) While we're talking about radio, a show I ought to listen to more than I do in practice is More Or Less - easy listening about numerical matters in real life. (As it's an Open University co-production, full archives are readily available. Thumbs up!) Weeks ago, Iain pointed to an episode with a feature on the passing of Dungeons & Dragons (co-)inventor Gary Gygax, which is very well-handled. The show is presented by Tim Harford, who some of us were fortunate enough to first bump into (twice!) at university; he is an entertaining writer with a style of explanation that is unsually easy to read, so there's no surprise at all he has grown up to be a high-calibre economic journalist and an up-and-coming presenter.
A lesser-known fact is that he has genuinely cool indie RPG credentials, and lesser known still is that he was (and quite possibly still is) pretty damn accomplished at laser games. In short, if you are an RPG fan who has long wondered "when will a genuine RPG fan become famous and talk passionately but perfectly naturally about RPGs in the mass media without it being part of a freak show?" then this is your opportunity. Enough name-dropping. (Boing!) Given that two out of my first three points here have come from Iain's hat-tips, you really should just read his very fine blog; here's his RSS feed; it's worth using non-LJ-Friends-list means to do so.
4) And while we're really clearing off the list of things I meant to blog about weeks ago, many congratulations to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) chocaholic7 for his imperious form on University Challenge: the Professionals weeks ago. He was backed up by a strong team, but they couldn't have been nearly as confident as they were if they had not known they had a Rob on board as a not-so-secret weapon.
5) For a long time, I opined that I really didn't particularly care about cheese. Recently, I have discovered a couple of cheeses that I quite like; good mozzarella has a certain something to it, and I can see why people pair it with tomatoes and olive oil so much, whether that's on a pizza base or not, and I'm enjoying Applewood Smoked Cheddar. I don't claim to be a cheese connoisseur making remarkable discoveries, but it's nice to know what you like.
6) It's annoying that I feel the need to have so many different media players on my system. RealPlayer and Apple's Quicktime are sufficiently annoying, principally with their update nagging but also in other ways, that I have installed Real Alternative and QT Lite, which come with "Media Player Classic" because they won't work with the otherwise wonderful VLC. (As usual, do your own research and checks for malware; I reckon they're OK, but I've been wrong before, as recently as point one of this post.) Don't get me started on requiring separate players for odd formats; theoretically this is the sort of job that the One True Player and half a dozen plug-ins ought to fix, but it just doesn't seem to work like that in practice. Grumble, grouch.
7) The counterpart of the above is that one way around is to start converting media from one format to another - if everything's in one format, then, in theory, you only need one player. Meg very kindly got me a lovely wee music player for Christmas that has brought me a surprising amount of joy, and that's why I need to get things that aren't in .mp3 into .mp3. Much as I am not a cheese connoisseur with a demanding palate, I am not a music connoisseur with the finest of ears for lossless vs. lossy compression formats; Koyote Soft's Free Converter does a perfectly adequate job as far as I can tell.
8) Not so long ago, my wife and I went to some restaurant and enjoyed it. We submitted a happy feedback form and I even blogged about it here with a mostly positive review. The restaurant in question has since contacted me (from the data on the feedback card) and invited me to supply a review to a restaurant review site in return for a free meal. Somehow doing that seems unethical in a way that praising it, unprompted, in a manner of my choice does not. Anyone else draw the distinction? Such a practice even seems to come uncomfortably close (though I know it's not and can see the distinction) to sock puppetry, which is apparently now an illegal practice in the UK.
9) I like fig rolls. (These may or may not be the same UK biscuits as the US cookies known as Fig Newtons.) In general, I like fruity biscuits; it doesn't hurt that relatively few of the other people who I see most frequently seem to like them, so they are a safe bet for "sharing biscuits" if you're greedy like me. There was a shortage of them a couple of months ago, which has concluded. Branded fig rolls from a major manufacturer are available once more, but I fear the shortage has permitted them to be rebranded as a premium product among the snack range. Will we ever see own-brand fig rolls at own-brand prices again?
10) My wife made a wonderful (but Friends-locked) post about our holiday in her journal a couple of weeks ago. I'll not attempt to re-tread her ground, but ( here are some bullet points. )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/happy.gif) happy
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May 23rd, 2008
07:50 pm - If European association football were organised like NCAA college football...
There are many things I want to write about, but don't feel I have the confidence to do them proper justice - and yet the topic that gets me feeling that I have something to say and that I want to say it right now is the LiveJournal election, which is not important at all in the greater scheme of things. I keep following the voting counts, I keep observing that the lead is closing (600-ish, 585-ish, 565-ish, 550-ish, 490-ish, 470-ish, 450-ish...), I keep trying to read the entrails to discern changes in voting profile as different categories of people come online and vote, I keep hoping for miracles and I keep pondering idly where the transfers have to be going. (I think that there are some plausible patterns weakly indicated: cambler-jameth, jameth-cambler and squeaky19-rm at least.) However things turn out, there are bound to be accusations of sockpuppetry - though not nearly as many as there will be after next year's election. I shall sum up what I'm hoping for thus: "unity candidate". Hint, hint. (ETA: and, indeed, an attempt to create a unity candidate has been started, but it'll only work if the candidates themselves respect the results.)
Instead, I shall post upon an obscure topic of sports organisation at considerable length.
( If European association football were organised like NCAA college football... )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/hopeful.gif) hopeful
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12:19 am - Vote early -- and often
(Quote source.)
So the voting has begun for the LiveJournal Advisory Board election. Three quick observations:
1) The rules of the election have changed at the last minute with no notice. For the better, admittedly, and changing only the wording of the counting process, not the spirit of what was intended. (Have they been reading Iain? I hope so, but based on Iain's sequel post, I fear not.)
2) You can look at who's winning in real time, before and after you cast your vote.
3) Aaaaaand you can even change your vote should you want to. You can probably even change it after the poll closes, come to think of it. (ETA: apparently not. Thanks, imc. There are also rumours that they may remove the ability to change your vote mid-election, which - while it would make sense - would make this kooky election even more irregular still. Introducing new rule, and all that.)
What a strange way to run an election.
I have to say that property 3 above has an interesting side-effect which I consider beneficial, if possibly unintended; should no candidate reach 51% of votes after the Instant Runoff process - which is something I don't think we'll be able to tally from the real-time results - then it'll be down to whoever gets the most first preferences. It occurs to me that should a candidate conclude that they are unlikely to win, then by posting in their journal, they probably have a good chance of convincing those who voted for them as first preference to change their vote in favour of some other candidate of their choice.
One might expect that a candidate with, say, 4% of first preferences might be able to convince many of the people who voted for them to change their first preference in some other direction and thus add, say, another 3% of first preferences in favour of some other candidate, should it look like the "who has most first preferences" metric might be pointing in an undesirable direction.
If - if - you happened to be standing on a platform emphasising some sense of fun, it would appear a desirable property to me that your sense of fun were not abhorrent and malicious.
Non-Friends' comments screened. No, I'm making no pretence at impartiality.
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March 10th, 2008
12:29 pm - Monday links
1. Daylight Savings Time has now come into operation (i.e., the clocks have gone forward) for much of North America, but it doesn't do so in Europe for another three weeks. People with transatlantic family should therefore temporarily replace ingrained notions of "British = Eastern + 5 = Pacific + 8" with thoughts of "British = Eastern + 4 = Pacific + 7" until Sunday 30th. Traditionally there only used to be one week of this discrepancy, but this year there are three due to a combination of the USA's Energy Policy Act of 2005 and March having five Sundays. There'll be another week of this at the end of October and start of November, too.
2. I choose to believe that if any of you had known about the "Sandpit" monthly games meetings of London's Hide and Seek games festival, the London Games Fringe or Bristol's Interesting Games Lab then you would have told me about them. Yet another reason why I live in the wrong part of the country; Greater London has a similar population to the North East of England combined with Yorkshire and the Humber, and about the only other person I can think of within a hundred miles of here who might be interested is York's Thomas Scott, who is several times as creatively fecund as me. I shall merely have to admire rulesets from afar; I'm particularly taken with Texas Hold Me.
3. whipartist points to an incredible piece of benign mischief - a two-minute musical apparently spontaneously breaking out in a food court, a bit like a low-budget Flashmob: the Opera. Not really very improv, but still extremely entertaining.
4. Excerpting from a longer article that I may or may not eventually get around to writing, I note that university sport has nowhere near the significance in the UK that it does in the US, even noting the traditional Oxford-Cambridge clashes. BUSA, the British Universities Sports Association, is the British counterpart to the USA's noted NCAA, and are holding as many of their national championships as they can this weekend in a single four-day Olymp multi-sport festival in Sheffield this weekend, the British University Championships. ( Read more... )
Current Mood: dry, fortunately
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February 29th, 2008
02:03 am - Fizz Buzz
All right, you lot are smart, but I reckon the over/under before someone screws this up must be about 29. (Some day I shall try it on a more public message board and will be delighted if it gets to 13.)
What I would like to see, if you would be so kind, is a single thread of comments. The first reply should be the number one, the second reply should be the number two and so forth. Any number exactly divisible by 3 is replaced by "Fizz", any number exactly divisible by 5 is replaced by "Buzz" and any number exactly divisible by both is replaced by "Fizz Buzz".
The count stops when:
someone posts incorrectly,
someone doesn't post as a response to the most recently-posted comment,
someone posts to the thread a second time,
someone gets geeky and decides that we aren't playing in decimal,
someone gets bored or drunk and instead of a number posts something else like a rude word, an advert for recreational medicine, a program to automatically generate the correct answers or an argument that my rules are wrong and 4725 should really be Fizz Fizz Fizz Buzz Buzz Grooby,
someone cocks up in some other more creative fashion that I haven't foreseen
or
someone tries to edit or delete their reply once they've spotted their mistake and realised they've stopped the count for everyone. (Don't forget, I get the replies e-mailed to me.)
I have faith in you. Go and set a world record that will never be broken.
Go team!
Current Mood: hopeful
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January 25th, 2008
05:17 pm - A bark for a mark, a holler for a dollar, a sound for a pound and a tune for...
OK, let's intersect the history of currency with the euphonic joy of silly-sounding words.
There are several instances where multiple currencies around the world use different currencies with the same name, or a very similar name. I might hazard a guess that some of these occur for colonial or imperial reasons, others due to other historical accidents of common linguistic background. For instance, not just Britain calls its currency the pound, but also countries including Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan and Syria. (*) Before the introduction of the Euro, France was proud of its franc, with currencies of similar names not just used in Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland but also in Madagacar, Mali and Rwanda. Finland and Germany both used the Mark, many South American countries have local versions of the Peso (where it's easy to hazard a guess at some sort of derivation from the Spanish Peseta), Dinars are spent from Tunisia to Croatia to Bahrain and I shall wildly speculate at historical similarities between the Albanian Lek, the Romanian Leu and the Bulgarian Lev. (Quite possibly some of these are alternate transliterations of a similar phoneme.) Let us not forget the many different Dollars out there, and respectfully smile at those countries that have changed their currency from their local Pound to their local Dollar.
(*) Digression: would it also be reasonable to compare the pound's derivation from a translation of "librae" in librae, solidae, denarii to the derivation of the old lira in other languages?
There is one other currency family I have not yet considered, though: you can spend Krona in Sweden, Krone in Denmark and Koruna in the Czech Republic. (As well as Slovakia.) I mention this because I was delighted to recently learn that the currency of Estonia is the Kroon. If the k-sound is considered amusing in the English language, and words ending in -oon have some jollity to them (cartoon! spoon! Walloon!) then you've got to go a long, long way to come up with a better currency name than kroon in my book. No, the Vietnamese Dong doesn't beat it. Much.
The other wonderful thing about the Estonian Kroon is its abbreviation. The Great British and Northern Irish Pound is referred to as the GBP, the United States Dollar the USD, the Japanese Yen the JPY and so forth. Want some Estonian Kroons? EEK!
Current Location: Not Estonia
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/amused.gif) amused
Current Music: Lord Rockinghams XI - Hoots Mon
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January 8th, 2008
10:35 pm - 2008: the new 1996
Which would be no bad thing.
1) Good news: Meg arrives home on Thursday morning!
Bad news: unless I get much better very soon, I shall be greeting her with a stinking cold. My nose is running, I am very sneezy and my mind cannot relax enough to let me go to sleep. Accordingly, I shall type at you instead until sleep overtakes me.
2) Not so much to do with 1996, but lambertman points to ABC reviving "The Mole" this summer in the US. Can this (and the apparently disappointing at-short-notice revival of American Gladiators) be attributed to the WGA writers' guilds' strike? Will this help the All American Football League, of which possibly more some other day, get a TV deal?
3) Here in the UK, Challenge have started repeating Shooting Stars, a parody panel game hosted by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. ( Read more... )
4) Pleasantly surprised to hear that college contemporary Mat Page - and how weird that feels to type without a "Colin" in the middle - beat eleven other contenders to win Durham FM's Dream Academy competition and thus win a year's contract with the station. ( Read more... )
ETA: 5) Tony Soprano informs us that "'Remember when?' is the lowest form of conversation", so I guess this post must be pretty low on the food chain. I have gone back and LJ-cut the more obscure parts, remembering that possibly only eight of you might have known Mat Page. (Though more of you should.)
6) I'm surprised not to have heard any scepticism about Jeremy Clarkson's claims with regards to his views to identity theft and bank account security. As a columnist with a, frankly, super soaraway fun-sational newspaper, he is frequently - putting it politely - less-than-literal in the views he expresses. Surely I cannot be the only one to suggest some degree of stunt here, just so that he could make his point.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/sick.gif) sick
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December 8th, 2007
05:52 pm - Ding ding ding ding ding ding Christmas
Roland's Countdown to Christmas continues apace:
* The last posting date for posting cards from the UK to destinations outside the EU by air-mail for delivery before the 25th is on Monday, and so far I have written ¾ of one card,
* The biggest ever edition of the Radio Times is out today,
* I have heard one (1) festive song on the radio so far, invoking the spirit of the new old-fashioned way,
* McDonalds have produced an absolutely fantastic-looking hot mincemeat-and-custard pie in the style of their hot apple pie and
* Tomorrow sees the annual BBC Sports Review of the Year, broadcast in a show renamed "Sports Personality of the Year 2007" after the titular award that forms the centrepiece of the show.
I wrote loads about last year's award and wasn't intending to do so about this year's, but Iain (the writer formerly known as daweaver) has done a great deal of the work for me already. In fact, he has already written up at least as good a summary of this year's voting as I did last year, rather saving me the bother of most of this article. (His skewering of СУП, the company to whom LiveJournal has been sold, is a must-read.)
It's non-trivial to tell how this year's voting will play out. ( Read more... )
Current Mood: rushed
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December 3rd, 2007
09:46 pm - Sounds like Fighting Talk to me
( The If-I-have-to-explain-it,-it-ain't-funny dept. )
fx: theme from "Rocky" plays
jiggery_pokery, in this very special online edition of Fighting Talk, you have argued your way through to the Defending The Indefensible round at the end of the show. You have twenty seconds to defend each of the following three topics. Here they are:
If you don't love LiveJournal's new Journal Flagging feature, you're not thinking of the children.
It doesn't affect Friends-locked posts, you can't set up trolling accounts just for the purpose of shutting down other people's journals, you can't campaign to lock more than five posts away in a day and if you start abusing the flagging feature then they'll stop taking notice of your flags. Even if one of your posts does get found to be naughty, the worst that happens to it is that it gets hidden behind a LJ-cut, and even then it's only cut for users who haven't claimed that they're over 18 years old. If there must be abuse flagging, how could it possibly be any less obtrusive than that?
Who needs college football play-offs when we've got the Bowl Championship Series?
You can't fit play-offs into an already crowded season without making it longer still, changing dates or doing away with beloved Thanksgiving rivalries. Nobody wants any of these because college football is all about tradition. For every National Championship nerd, there are lots of Big Ten and Pac Ten fans who care about nothing more than winning the conference or the Rose Bowl. The BCS formula improves from year to year and learns from its mistakes - there's really very little computer influence, which is good because humans play football, not polls, and yet there's enough to counteract polls' tendencies to reward fashionable teams rather than good ones.
The best thing Six Apart ever did was to sell LiveJournal to СУП.
You can't see me, but imagine, if you will, that at this moment in time I am opening Winamp, I am loading up the .mp3 of the Soviet National Anthem that Comrade folk once sent me, I am enjoying its stirring orchestral charge, I am getting out of my chair, I am standing up and raising my right fist in a properly respectful salute to the way of the future. Don't know about you, but I, for one, welcome our new Russian overlords.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/quixotic.gif) exaggerating for effect, obv.
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October 2nd, 2007
10:20 pm - A tale of two chess leagues
If it's Autumn, it's time for the US Chess League season. I took a look at it back in 2005 and last year as well so am pleased to see it rolling along once more this year. When so many start-ups fade and die so quickly, continued existence earns major kudos by itself.
( The US Chess League and chess leagues in the UK. )( Special attraction: exclusive interview with USCL commissioner Greg Shahade. )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/impressed.gif) impressed
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September 17th, 2007
09:42 pm - You play poker like an 18-year-old girl
It's been quite a while since I posted last, so I'll ease myself back in to posting with a nice, easy one. Things are doing all right here, thank you, and I shall try to post some more soon.
A couple of months ago I quietly geeked out over the latest installment of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Most of the tournaments were slightly bigger still than they were last year; "10% bigger" seems like a reasonable guess. Two tournaments stand out, though; the tournament with the highest entry fee, the US$50,000 "H.O.R.S.E." tournament (which gets its name because players rotate between five different poker games, so abbreviated) went from 143 entrants last year to 148 entrants this year, though I note that the prize pool went down.
The biggest news is that the main event, the World Championship of Poker as far as most people are concerned, the US$10,000 No Limit Hold 'Em event only had 6,358 entries. While that is a hideously large event by any standards, the trend over recent years has been strongly positive - from 631 entries in 2002 to 839, then 2,576, then 5,619, then 8,773 last year, then down to 6,358 this year. (The winner's prize dropped too, from US$12,000,000 last year to a piffling US$8,250,000 this year.) Some analysis blames the UIGEA, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 in the United States, which has toughened times up for the online poker industry; at least one major player has pulled out of the US market altogether as a result, with many other major players waiting on the result of a test case, should one ever happen. The other consequence is that it also became rather harder for online poker rooms to offer satellite tournaments which offer entry into the US$10,000 main event as a prize. These satellite tournaments still took place, but in practice they offered prizes of US$10,000 of credit rather than of US$10,000 worth of tournament entry, and many - perhaps 75% of - people decided to take the US$10,000 cash and run rather than play another tournament with a very high chance of losing it all (or a small chance of turning it into millions).
Some might view this as evidence that poker has peaked, but I tend not to agree. Respected (and hilarious) blogger Dr. Pauly commented "Even with the UIGEA, PokerStars paid out more satellite winners than last year. Only a percentage of seat winners actually showed up at the Rio. And imagine how large the field would be without the UIGEA? Over 10,000. Easily." and this seems entirely plausible to me. Instead, I would tend to ascribe part of the downswing to frustration to the way that the tournament was organised over the year; since the World Series stopped being Benny Binion's event at Benny Binion's casino, the new owners haven't done nearly so well at making friends with their players, and the tournament (while prestigious) is just one tournament out of very many poker tournaments, both online and offline. Even the US$10,000 entry fee isn't as distinctive as it used to be.
The World Series of Poker has spun off its own circuit of events, but this competes with tours of poker tournaments around the globe, from the grand and high-stakes World Poker Tour to a number of much smaller ones even within the UK. For instance, the European Poker Tour is a pretty big deal; on its most recent swing to London, Victoria Coren was victorious in a field of 398 entrants, each paying £3,500, winning £500,000 for her trouble. (Victoria is well-known and popular in the field as a journalist but also as a TV poker host, commentator and player. Her performances on TV were often not enough to win, but her off-screen results even before this bore high regard.) Last year's European Poker Tour Grand Final in Barcelona attracted 706 entrants, each with a €10,000 buy-in (technically €9,400 prize money + €600 fees) the winner taking home €1,825,010. This year's EPT is looking like being over 50% bigger than last year's, starting with an event in Barcelona where 543 entrants paid €8,000 (in the same vein as above, €7,700 + €300 - an admirably restrained rake) to play and first prize was €1,170,700. Accordingly, poker is doing at least as well as ever in Europe.
The World Series of Poker then struck back by inaugurating a clumsily-titled event, the World Series of Poker Europe (shouldn't there be at least a colon in there?) with a concerted attempt to emulate the tightly-focused, high-stakes nature of the original series in Las Vegas by having only three events, but all prestigious ones: £2,500(+£150) H.O.R.S.E., £5,000(+£250) Pot Limit Omaha - because PLO is the quintessential European game - and a £10,000(+£350) No Limit Texas Hold 'Em Main Event. This attracted an extremely strong field with many top professionals from the USA; truly this had the feel of a global event rather than being primarily European, as the EPT events might be accused of being. The £10,000 buy-in is a pretty chunky one; outdone by the US$25,000 of the World Poker Tour's Grand Final, but at effectively US$20,000 plus, one of the biggest tournaments anywhere in the world.
The organisers had announced an expected 750 participants in the main event for a £7,500,000 pool and a £2,500,000 jackpot and will probably be disappointed that the actual field was just 362. Perhaps the buy-in was just too high, perhaps the EPT events were too close in time, perhaps the plan to split the event between three London casinos was just considered a turn-off. (My gut feeling is that the WSOPE may well not be in London next year unless there can be a new poker venue with space for at least sixty tables in which to centralise the action. Whether this is a new casino, a new poker club or just a hotel managing to get the regulatory approval to host is open to question. Heck, the Dome O2 might even be a possibility.) Indeed, 362 was sufficiently small that tournament sponsors Betfair had to add some extra sponsorship to the pool in order to ensure that the first prize was a headline-grabbing million pounds. This is in part due to a rather more gradual prize distribution than yesteryear, which is considered a popular move; while the British Isles (specifically, the Isle Of Man, which is not part of the UK as such) had their first million-pound-first-prize tournament back in 2000, the prize distribution dropped off like a rock - ninth place then was a stake-back £6,000, ninth place now being over ten times as much.
If you've followed that link, you'll have spoiled yourself for this: the winner of the Main Event at the inaugural World Series of Poker Europe was one Annette Obrestad of Norway. The reputation of Scandinavian poker players is that they play prodigious quantities of online poker with phenomenal skill at a spectacularly early age, and Annette lives up to the billing perfectly, with a twist. Annette isn't a funkily deceptive Norwegian name, it's as much of a girl's name in Norway as it is anywhere else in the Western World. Oh, and she only turns nineteen tomorrow, as I type.
I'm sorry, I'll read that again. An eighteen-year-old young lady from Norway beat 361 of the best poker players in the world to win the first prize of one million pounds sterling, or just over two million US dollars, at the main event of the first World Series of Poker Europe. Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark.
In the Daily Telegraph, regular cricket journalist Martin Johnson was entered into the same event and has been writing up his experiences, emphasising his (presuambly faux) naivety and inexperience at the game. (He turns out to place in the money, but only barely above the bubble, taking home a still-rather-handsome £27k.) Seems to me that there's no need to make up a Plimpton-esque story about some wacky journalist trying his arm at big-stakes poker and coming out ahead when the real winner is, with all due respect to eighteen-year-olds, ladies and Norwegians, a priori far more unlikely. (Besides, Lennox Lewis playing in the Las Vegas main event in '06 was a much funnier reveted take on the central principle.) This would be considered too fantastic and unbelievable for Roy of the Rovers, should for unpredictable reasons a story about a poker kid be considered suitable material for a fantasy sports comic; in a reference that others among you might get, she is the Norwegian Hikaru no poker. Annette no poker, perhaps. She certainly does know poker - and, Bo, you don't know Diddley.
All that said, the story is far more believable than that and nobody is making wild accusations of real life poker being rrrrrriggggged, only with more "r"s and more "g"s. She has cashed in live poker tournaments in the past - four of 'em, count 'em! - and has very considerable previous form online. (I strongly suspect that her rather blue appearance in that photo is the result of questionable lighting; the alternative hypothesis that she is a blue-skinned poker-playing alien from the planet Neptune can be rejected.) While the claims that "she was long ranked the world's best online tournament player" are probably hyperbole, the stories of her online poker experience were already going around last October and this interview with her in August is also worth a look. She is the real deal and, by reputable account, happens to be perfectly lovely with it. If you look through the hand-by-hand, she certainly plays almost suicidally reckless poker - but, hey, evidently it works. (At least once.)
Everybody loves a good prodigy tale and this one is all the more wonderful both for being factual and for shattering stereotypes. My heart leaps just a little, in an I'm-a-married-man-and-don't-perv-over-eighteen-year-old-millionairesses fashion, to read the repeated descriptions of her as shy and soft-spoken. This is a very major tournament achievement; lest we forget, you have to be 21 to legally play live in Las Vegas, so all the slightly tedious repeated record-breaking of "youngest WSOP bracelet winner ever" as a 21-years-2-weeks-old champ beats a 21-years-3-weeks-old champ's previous record is over once and for all. (The MSO's Judith Miller has some catching-up to do.) We can expect an extremely high-profile Las Vegas debut for her in a couple of years' time, should she not have retired from poker by then.
To coin a phrase, I think this victory makes Annette the Sofia Polgar of poker. Context: in 1989, at the age of 14, Sofia had a similarly remarkable 8½/9 result in an open chess tournament against vaguely comparably strong Soviet grandmaster opposition. One bio calls it "the highest performance rating of any chess player, male or female, in any open tournament in chess history"; there has been some quibbling over that claim (not least because tournament ratings when players score 100% are not necessarily well-defined) but Annette's result shatters the world of poker of today much as Sofia's shattered the 1989 world of chess. That said, Sofia Polgar is the least successful of the three prodigious Polgar sisters. That gives Annette something to work towards; another bracelet or two (cf GM norm, perhaps?) here and another million win or two before she's the full Judit Polgar!
Current Mood: impressed
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July 4th, 2007
11:47 am - Tchoukball
Yesterday afternoon, I was watching British Eurosport 2, as you do. (At least, as I do.) There's often some weird and interesting stuff on there. As someone who quite likes watching minority sports simply for variety and vague sporting education, it's my MTV. For instance, British Eurosport show Aussie Rules highlights. Incidentally, I was recently delighted to learn that Middlesbrough has its own Aussie Rules team and I could probably watch games played at their home ground from my old bedroom when I lived with Dad. Sadly I'm working the next day they're hosting otherwise I'd ask the team if they needed an uneducated but keen warm body to act as an emergency umpire, a scoreboard operator, a rubbish clearer, a goalpost or some other simple task.
Yesterday, I watched live coverage of the women's and men's finals in a big Beach Tchoukball tournament played on an artificial beach in the middle of rainy Geneva in Switzerland. (Trams occasionally ran past in the background, which made it feel rather Blackpool.) I'd seen the name Tchoukball before, presumably when looking at lists of sports for ones whose names I didn't recognise, but hadn't seen it being played. All told, it was perfectly diverting stuff. The most usual comparisons suggest that Tchoukball has similarities with volleyball and handball, though I can see just the tiniest bit of Fives in it as well.
To score a point in Tchoukball, players essentially have to bounce a ball off a small, angled trampoline so that no player from the opposite team can stop the rebounding ball hitting the ground. (I slightly over-simplify; there are rules about where the ball can and cannot bounce, where the ball must be thrown from and so on.) The most unusual feature of the game is that either team can score points from either goal. The pitch is reasonably small; accordingly, fast moves from one end of the pitch to the other are usual. This pleasingly subverts the familiar concept of end-of-the-pitch goals being associated with teams; on the downside, it takes some getting used to as a viewer and the fast moves can be disorienting. The ebb and flow of the game is slightly less intuitive than you might hope.
( Minority sports geekery. In short, Tchoukball is worthy and interesting. )
Current Mood: impressed
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June 26th, 2007
08:48 pm - Bye bye, Tony; bye bye, son
Tomorrow, current Prime Minister Tony Blair is set to take one more set of Prime Minister's Questions before travelling to Buckingham Palace and performing the formalities of resignation of the post of Prime Minister. The Queen will then invite Gordon Brown to form the next government. There are no surprises here; this has been expected for years, the date has roughly been expected for months and precisely expected for weeks. Prime Minister's Questions are the traditional "Punch and Judy show" of British politics, where loaded questions are asked and answered to the aural background of the political equivalent of a football match. Tomorrow's Prime Minister's Questions have the potential to be a tremendous piece of political theatre; even Margaret Thatcher let her hair down - at least, as much as she ever did - in her final set of PMQs.
It's interesting to note that Neil Kinnock asked for an immediate general election in Thatcher's last PMQs; lots of people have been calling for one with regard to the Blair-to-Brown handover in a very similar vein, though an obvious difference is that the successor here is known whereas then it was not. I cannot quickly find data to substantiate this, but I suspect that Labour were well ahead of the Conservative Party at the time in the polls; a major difference is that these days the two are now closely matched at handover time, with the polls tending to put the two parties within 2% of each other. That's why people are talking about a snap general election as being a real possibility.
We also hear that Tony Blair may even step down as an MP altogether, if his future lies as an envoy to the Middle East - and I can't help feeling that he's taking that job with the thought in the back of his mind that the worst-case scenario is that he gets to go out in a blaze of publicity like Princess Diana, which never did much bad for her legacy. With this in mind, a childish part of me is secretly hoping for some most unparliamentary language and perhaps even some highly unparliamentary conduct from Blair at his last PMQs tomorrow, with no practical fear of reprisals. Not statesmanlike so not probable - but this is the PM who turned out to be the single funniest performer, in context, on the most recent Comic Relief, lest we forget. ("Bovvered, Mr. Speaker?")
Here's a thought, though. Gordon Brown did a tremendous fake conclusion to his final budget as Chancellor, appearing to wrap up his speech before cutting the basic rate of Income Tax by 2% at the very last minute. Regardless of whether you thought it was a wise move or not, in the context of all the other budgetary changes that were required to enable it, everyone loved the theatre involved. How about if Tony Blair were to do the biggest One more thing... ever by calling a snap general election himself rather than leaving it up to Gordon Brown? Is there anything stopping him from doing that if he wanted to? Everybody thinks he's off to Buck Palace for one reason, but secretly he's off for another. Conventional logic would suggest giving Brown a few months before calling the snap election, but surely it's not really a snap election if people are talking about the possibility of it happening, and surely there have got to be far worse times to roll the dice...
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/calm.gif) calm
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February 20th, 2007
11:05 pm - Perplex City Season 2: a quick look
This is not likely to mean much to you unless you saw my last post on the topic, or my passing reference beforehand.
A couple of days later than planned, a beta version of the new Perplex City site has been launched, with a rather wider remit than the original. Essentially, it's a much more general-interest puzzle site than the old Perplex City game was, and ( probably stronger as a result. )
ETA: Stone the crows, the Perplex City Season 1 winner is only on LJ - about which I probably shouldn't be surprised, but nevertheless I am - and is even already a /friendsfriend via angiej. Given that he has three prominent HP fanfic authors beFriended, this explains why I was surprised to see a previous passing reference of his to (PXC in-game characters) Kurt and Violet's "great and t00bie love" and had wondered why argot was chasing me around from fandom to fandom. Right, that's that cleared up then.
Current Mood: happy
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