jennie at #354: The best party game I know is Cricket, Cricket, I'm on Fire. It has many other names, and the way it works is this:
Player 1 takes a piece of paper and writes a sentence or phrase across the top. Proverbs are good to start with. Player 1 hands the paper to player 2.
Player 2 takes the paper, reads the sentence, and illustrates it with a picture. Then the player folds over the top of the paper so that only the picture is visible and hands it to the next player.
Player 3 looks at the picture and writes a sentence explaining what the heck is going on there, then folds over the top and passes it on.
Repeat as necessary. Once everyone's had a shot at it, unfold the paper and see what bizarre mutations the poor innocent sentence has gone through. Anywhere from 5 to 10 players is good, but it starts getting unwieldy with more. Not that unwieldy is necessarily bad! Usually, we have everyone start a paper at the same time so that everyone's got something to do and you don't just have people dropping out of the conversation to write/draw in turns.
Necessary materials: Lots of paper, pencils or pens for everyone, clipboards or large books for drawing on.
Personally I'm also quite fond of charades, but that requires a little bit more organization (although fewer materials) and isn't quite so universally adored.
If you want game games, with cards and stuff, Apples to Apples is good for parties. I don't like it quite so much as, er, everyone I know seems to, but it's entertaining for a round or two.
It would be more helpful to have a survey whose questions have been validated. Those listed make me uneasy for reasons I can't put a finger on, as it's been too long since grad-level statistics.
One thing that makes me uneasy is the difference between "Would probably not buy" and "Would not affect decision to buy". If you wouldn't be affected by fanfiction and weren't likely to buy the book in the first place, which of those options would you select?
You can get into much better trouble now, because you can sneak up on it and no one will suspect -- Oh. I'll just keep quiet about that, shall I?
Happy birthday!
Stefan said: "A parent with a perverse sense of humor could have a lot of fun with that trope:
* Baby-sized space-pod (made of fiberglass) hidden under tarp in basement."
My parents told me I was found in a glowing green basket on the front step. This is clearly a lie, because I am just like them.
Including the perverse sense of humor.
So my dad, who works in a refinery, did in fact evacuate after shutting down the refinery.
This is the only time, ever, that that particular refinery has been shut down.
My parents live in Beaumont, TX, which is more-or-less on the TX/LA border, more-or-less on the coast.
My mom is on her way to Dallas with the neighbor's cat.
My dad is staying because he works for a refinery and they need people to stay and shut it down.
The neighbor is staying because he's got some high position in the Parks Department and they want people to stay and keep an eye on things.
I am very nervous.
We have a small flashlight that's powered by squeezing the handle to rotate a flywheel of some sort. It doesn't work very well for normal household flashlight uses, because it doesn't stay on when you're not squeezing the handle so it's hard to hold still.
It's okay for finding your way along a path or locating the candles and matches buried in the back of a drawer.
bryan: Whether or not it's publishable, I'd kinda like to read it. (Vampire Howard Hughes? How can one resist?)
I've had student editions of Shakespeare plays and various bits of poetry with explanatory footnotes. I found them either helpful, mildly interesting, or ignorable, depending on whether they were defining a word / explaining a reference I didn't know, giving further information about something I understood, or defining something I knew already. However, I am capable of ignoring unnecessary footnotes, which not everyone is.
Endnotes, unless they are exclusively the type in scientific papers that are just reference to another work, irritate me because I usually do like to read footnotes at the time I read that bit of the book and I don't like flipping back and forth looking for them.
I just finished The River King, by Alice Hoffman, and it's what I would call magic realism. Some unnatural things happen (spoilers to illustrate: the scent of roses appears without roses, roses bloom at strange times, a dead boy's coat manifests river water, stones, and small fish, etc.), but they don't actually affect the major events of the story at all. People notice them, and occasionally think it's odd that they're happening, but the actions the characters take aren't really affected by them.
So it hits a couple possible definitions/descriptions of magic realism:
* The plot does not focus on the strange events.
* The characters don't much care about the strange events, but don't expect them either.
* It's meant to be in the real world.
* The magic just happens and isn't done by anyone (unless you count the dead boy).
The copy from the library wasn't labeled with a genre of any sort.
Dave Luckett:
I find this inexplicable, on an intellectual level. I read Pratchett, and ignore that the world is a flat disc that sits on the shoulders of elephants. I read others and accept FTL or time travel. How come I get all upset at a physical impossibility in "Riddley Walker"?
The fundamental basis of Pratchett's Discworld is that it sits on the elephants on Great A'Tuin and has working magic. Within that framework, it's (mostly) self-consistent. The other story, which I haven't read, is probably supposed to be using real-world physics. When something like gunpowder doesn't behave the way it would in the real world, it doesn't fit the story.
I don't at all mind when a story varies from reality, but I mind when it's internally inconsistent. Also, if something is going to vary from reality I want that established right up front so I'm not wandering about assuming things work like they do in the real world and being blindsided at the end of the book by the Magic Trinket of Plot Device.
JVP, the only one of those links that works is http://dogfeathers.com/java/hyprcube.html
How long have you had them sitting around?
Metal Fatigue: I do not know Ken Hite, so if he had the same idea it must have been independent. Doesn't seem like a terribly original idea, once one has seen enough alternate-history-with-zeppelins-in-it. Correlation may not equal causation, but it's a good first guess!
Steve Eley said: Someone in my writing/reading group also noted the preponderance of zeppelins in fiction right now. They seem to be in every alternate or reimagined history: The Years of Rice and Salt, The Eyre Affair... His theory was that they're a convenient, very plausible, and strikingly visual way of showing an alternate economy. My theory is that they're just romantic.
In a roleplaying game, I once played the Power of History. Eventually, we decided that zeppelins were a side effect of changing history. Didn't matter what you did, it caused zeppelins.
One of the other characters kept getting trapped on burning zeppelins for various reasons. Eventually it took its toll:
"I haven't seen you in three or four zeppelins--I mean days!"
I'm glad you've found a new neurologist!
What's the asterisk towards the end? I'm on a new computer and it doesn't seem to want to do the little floaty-box thing that the old one did.
"Worse and weirder." That's not good at all. I hope everything gets straightened out, and you turn into a speedy quick loris.
I feel a little odd about asking this, in a possibly-leaning-over-to-look-at-the-train-wreck kind of way, but what does "weirder" mean in this context?
Anarch -- Could you give an example of something so simple it needs to be artificially complexified to be understood? I'm not sure what you're getting at there.
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