Dean Christakos« August 2007 | Main | July 2008 »
September 27, 2007
End of year one
It's hard to believe, but I moved to DC just over a year ago.
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September 22, 2007
Awful, Just Awful
Via humor site SomethingAwful, this week, we get treated to a treatise on The 8 Most Awful Minorities. Coming in at #6, hipsters:
Posted by Dean at 7:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 12, 2007
Blank is the new Blank!
Via Emily Thorson, I found a graph that depicts every occurrence of the phrase "is the new" (e.g., "Lexapro is the new Prozac!") and what it's connected to. The conclusions: lots of stuff "is the new black," but "white" is the only "new orange."
You can also see trends that died (this is back from 2005). XAML did not, in fact, turn out to be the "new XML" and bloglines did not turn out to be the new Technorati. However, gin has become the new vodka, if my reading of the young-professional-drinking scene is correct. More research may be required on that last one.
Posted by Dean at 12:06 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 7, 2007
It's a palindrome and the product of two primes!
Most amusing take on my birthday I've heard all day: "33 ain't so bad, unless you're Jesus Christ."
Posted by Dean at 5:28 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 5, 2007
Dean visits the National Cathedral Gift Shop
While driving through Washington, I decided, since I actually live here, to make an impromptu visit to the Washington National Cathedral, the Cathedral of the Episcopal Church of the United States. It's known for its Gargoyles, including Darth Vader (really, click the link!).
I also made a stop at the gift shop. And then I came across this:
Bibleopoly! Now, I couldn't see the rules in detail, but apparently you collect properties, just like in regular Monopoly, but the properties are Biblical cities and such:
Plus you get little Chance/Community Chest cards that test your Bible knowledge:
But check out that property card again. If it's "tended" by another player, you need to make an "offering" when you land on it. Instead of building houses and hotels, you build progressively-larger churches on the land, which increase the "offering" your opponents have to give when landing on it. Now, at first, I was kind of creeped out about a game whose goal seemed to be, like Monopoly, to get all the properties and take everyone's money, except this time it was by forcing everyone to give you offerings based on the size of your church, progressively bankrupting them.
My cynicism regarding the ill-thought-out gaming ideas of the designers turned out to be unfounded (hey, I had reason to be skeptical). The rules might not make for great gameplay, but they don't foster cynicism as much as I would have expected. As explained here, the victory condition is simply to finish the construction of a church on a property (I suppose the equivalent of constructing a hotel). Now, the problem is, the only way to construct the church is to help your opponents complete one of their own color groups, which in effect makes it easier for them to construct a church. Now, as far as I can tell, you still get to build your church out of the involuntary offerings of the other players, but it's not as though the goal is to bankrupt them, giving yourself your own empire of churches (that would, however, be amusing, and would make this blog post much more entertaining). They totally could have gone that way-- or if your churches were bigger than your opponents, it would force neighboring properties to revert to you. Because hey, everyone wants to join your church, since you have much nicer buildings.
It strikes me that one could make "Bible Risk" or "Bible Axis & Allies," but the problem there was that parents wouldn't want any of their children playing "the bad guys."
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