The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Steve Miller:

I'm wondering why Bruce Baugh assumes that NESFA is publishing work that's in the public domain? As I understand it they are reprinting and paying royalties on work that has been underpublished or long out of print, *not* work from the public domain.

Dover seems merely to reprint and takes all the profit -- NESFA supports those people who help create the stories.

Whoa...
the Statler-Hilton was years before we met, I'm afraid. In fact, I returned to Baltimore in a snow storm from the same Sheraton. That was the Boskone where I got to change rooms to a much nicer room late on Friday night because all the paint from the newly painted/sculpted ceiling fell in a shredded latex sheet.

We also have the People's Chronology (mentioned above), which is pretty good, as well as the New York Public Library Book of Chronologies. The latter isn't quite side by side -- making one wish for a good relational database file of the info... sigh.

Bughouse -- mentioned above -- was the favorite of the young players before and between rounds at a lot of my tournaments (for some years I was the professional chess tournament director mentioned in the annual Locus polls) and when I ran the Maine State tournaments we had a "skittles" room where players could go over their games -- but which rapidly filled with bughouse games.

I should mention -- as a variant from regulation tournament chess, at least -- the various blitz games(also called speed chess) favored by young and old extra-hormonal players. Time limits of 7,5,or 3 minutes aren't uncommon, and I've seen 1 minute played. That's not per move, but per game. One of my two triumphs over masters happened in an impromptu after-tournmant 5 minute speed tournament (the other was in a club-rated rather than USCF rated event, so neither was "official", sigh). I achieved real Old Fart status for pointing out to the young players prepping for a day's play that "speed kills"... for too often they'd play speed for an hour before the real event started and then have difficutly slowing down for the first money round.

I have a hard time with the variations (like starting the game with having the pawns in place and then the first 8 moves for each player consist of placing the pieces where you want them on the first rank) and I don't know if it's because I'm calcified or because I'm so competitive I don't want to give up any advantage to someone who already knows the variation.

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