Buddhist Hopscotch

According to the Brahmajala Sutta, a part of the Buddhist canonical writings that may go back as far as 500 BCE, the monasteries had some problems with the behavior of their monks.  Amidst the usual sort of prescriptions about proper monkish behavior is a list¹ of games that should not be played, including but not limited to chess (or the local equivalent), mental chess, dice, twenty questions, Pictionary (or the local equivalent), and hopscotch.  It's a very precise list¹, which rather makes you wonder what was going on that such a proscription was deemed necessary.  I'm including links to a fairly typical loose translation² (I've seen more or less the same text in a couple of places), as well as a more literal translation³ with minor exegesis that explains that "hopscotch" is actually "parihārapatha," wherein a diagram is drawn on the ground and one has to jump in the allowable spaces avoiding the lines.  Not that different, is it?

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha_games_list

²http://tipitaka.wikia.com/wiki/Brahmajala_Sutta

³http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html

Combat Juggling Rules

Yes it does, and here they are.

Combat juggling is a sport featuring one or more jugglers on a team (depending on the variant).  At the starting whistle, everyone will begin juggling, typically with three clubs each.  The goal is to be the last juggler who is still juggling a full set of clubs (not necessarily the same three that you started with).

In between these two points, the idea is to "interfere" with the opposing jugglers.  This can take several forms, although the most common involve visual distractions, interposing part of your body into their personal space (backing into them can work well), or tossing one of your clubs high enough to give you time to outright steal or knock away one of an opponent's clubs before catching your own again and continuing.

There are, as previously mentioned, a number of variants on this basic theme.  The Major League Combat YouTube channel describes, in addition to the basic three-on-three team event, the following:

360s, a one-on-one timed event where the players score points for successfully completing 360 spins while juggling.  Players have to balance between completing their own spins and interfering with their opponent's.

Sumo, a sort of tag-team one-on-one version where players have to stay within a small circle while juggling.  A point is scored for each opponent who loses their clubs or leaves the ring, and losers are replaced by a teammate as the winner continues to juggle.

Zombie, a three-on-three event where instead of leaving the arena when you are eliminated, you can stay around as a "zombie" as long as you still have at least one of your clubs.  A zombie with one club can't do much but get in the way, but if a teammate passes them a club, they become a slightly more mobile version and can actively interfere with opponents.  And if they can acquire a third club, they can come back to full life and move around again.

Pool film

Film is(was) made on Celluloid, as everyone knows.  But why?

When the film industry began, the very first films were recorded on a thin film made of paper.  This was clearly sub-optimal, because while the thin paper was appropriately transparent, it was also exceedingly fragile.  So they went looking for a synthetic alternative.

At that point, Celluloid (basically a mix of cellulose nitrate and camphor) was one of the primary commercially available plastics.

It had become commercially successful because the billiard industry at that time was running short of ivory for the making of billiard balls (conservation hadn't really taken a bite out of it yet, but they were honestly having trouble getting enough elephants to keep up with demand inspired by a billiard craze). The Brunswick Billiard company ^{1, 2} (probably?) ran a contest to find a synthetic replacement for billiard balls, and the Hyatt Celluloid Billiard Ball (or a variant thereof) was the winner in roughly 1868 ⁴.  I say probably, because apparently Hyatt never got the prize money ⁴, and the Brunswick company website ³ has does not mention the celluloid balls.  Possibly because although it was a much cheaper and easily acquired material than ivory, the balls themselves didn't perform as well.  Stories of the cellulose exploding are probably apocryphal, though.

Anyway, when the photography and then later the film industry went looking for their alternative, this material was no doubt an obvious choice, and the billiard ball factories were more than happy to supply it to a brand new market.

Sources:
¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard_ball#History
² http://youtu.be/7I0rX7t1J0Q (Adam Savage)
³ http://www.brunswickbilliards.com/our_rich_history/important_events/index.html
⁴ http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_2947

Importing files to a PS3

Here's how you import a Theme into your Playstation 3 from a flash drive-- first, you download the files for the theme (archived together as a big file with a .p3t extension).  That file has to be in a folder called "Themes" stored as a subdirectory of a folder called "PS3", and if so, the PS3 will be able to see it and import it correctly.

If you want to import a picture or music file, on the other hand, it just has to be somewhere on the flash drive, and you have to figure out how to tell the PS3 how to open the directories and look around (not at all obvious).  Easy, once you figure it out, but a conceptually completely different process, which has been messing me up all kinds of ways for ages since I was expecting it to be consistent.  Grr.

Snooker Rules

First Monday of the New Year, and we're back!  Let's see how long I can keep it up this time.


After watching the Snooker Guys on That Mitchell and Webb Look one more time, I finally got fed up and went and looked up exactly how snooker differs from what we in America simply call "pool."  The 2012 Welsh Snooker Championship on YouTube was helpful.

Snooker is played on the same basic table as pool-- a big felted rectangle with six pockets.  The main difference is the balls.  Instead of 15 sequentially numbered balls, snooker has 15 identical solid red balls and 6 "colored" balls (in yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and black).  The red balls are set up more or less like the 15 of pool, but the six colored balls are added to the table in a kind of loose T shape, basically spread out to get in the way of the red balls.

Play begins similarly, with one player shooting a cue ball into the mass of reds.  But from then out, on your turn, instead of hitting "your half" of the balls (as in billiards) or the lowest numerical ball on the table (as in 9-ball), you can hit any of the reds.  If you sink a red, you earn one point, but before you can aim for another, you have to hit and sink one of the "colored" balls.  These are assigned values between 2 and 7 depending mostly (as far as I can tell) on how much in the way of the reds they tend to be.  The ones right down in amongst the red end are the 6-7 pointers, and the three back on the other side of the table are 2, 3, and 4.  So anyway, in a perfect game, a player would alternate shooting reds and colors (with the colors being replaced on the table in their original places every time they're sunk) until all of the reds are gone, at which point they would run out the colors in ascending point value order.  Of course, if at any point you hit the wrong type of ball or fail to sink a shot, your opponent takes over and begins shooting at a red.

So instead of being a race to sink the 8- (or 9-)ball, snooker is a points game, with the frame going to whoever has the most points when the last ball is sunk.  Based on my limited viewing, it looks like 80 points is a commonly accepted end point, slightly more than half of the maximum of 147 points (it is possible in some rules sets to get a few more points off of fouls, so the "actual" maximum is slightly higher).

Ages 8 to 88

Apparently, the recommended age ranges on board games reflect more than just the designer's idea of how complicated the game is.  In order to qualify for an age rating of less than about 10 years, a publisher has to pay to have the game officially tested for safety, which is not a cheap process-- not only would it be tested for size of components (choking hazards), but I imagine there are chemical tests for toxicity and heavy metals and the like.  So some smaller publishers will just shrug and label the game "for ages 12 and up", even if the game is actually pretty simple and could easily be played by the average 10-year-old.

Source: a thread on boardgamegeek.com.  This does seem to be the conventional wisdom (I saw references to it in a couple of places), but I couldn't track down an authoritative statement, so take with the usual sodium chloride.

Absences

I'll continue to be gone sporadically for the next few days; I'm moving to a new computer and there have been a few stumbling blocks.

But that's provided for several learning experiences!  For example, I learned that my previous monitor is so freaking old that the new computer won't even recognize it without 45 minutes with tech support leading to alterations to the BIOS!

OTOH, in more pleasant discoveries, I learned that the Steam online game store (to which I am relatively new) acts not only as a store, but also as a cloud server-- once I downloaded the games again to the new machine, opening them put me exactly where I had left off in the old one!  A delightful revelation, to be sure.

Word for the Day - Curse of Scotland

There are a lot of interesting language tidbits surrounding games, and poker has some of the best.  There's the evocative language of the game itself-- terms for varieties of the game, like "stud," "High Chicago," or "Follow the Queen."   There are nicknames for parts of particular games, such as Texas Hold 'em's "turn" and "river" (the fourth and fifth community cards).  And most people have at least heard of "the Dead Man's Hand," (two pair, aces and eights), supposedly the hand that Wild Bill Hickock was holding when he was shot in 1876.  But I think the absolute best one I have ever heard is "the Curse of Scotland," otherwise known as... the nine of diamonds.


It seems like an odd card to have such an inauspicious nickname, but there are several explanations floating around.  The most lurid (and least convincing) involves a Scottish general writing the orders for an massacre on the back of a nine of diamonds (due apparently to lack of paper).  A slightly more convincing explanation, although still without much actual supporting evidence, draws from the resemblance between the nine of diamonds and the coat of arms of Sir John Dalrymple, 1st Earl of Stair, who was known for being a ruthless and brutal commander.  Either way, I can't wait until I find some way to work this into a friendly game of cards.

The Dalrymple/Stair crest.

Friendly Hockey Thugs

On a hockey team, there are several traditional roles and jobs.  Besides the usual obvious roles of goalie, wing, center, etc., I have been informed (by several usually reliable sources) that there is also the "unofficial" role of enforcer. This is the player (or players) whose job it is to look out for any egregious infractions on the part of the opposing team, and retaliate appropriately, or in some cases inappropriately.  Generally speaking, with fists.  This is technically illegal, but extremely common, and has become more or less just part of the game.

The bit that's completely new to me, however, is the fact that most of these guys (at least at the professional level) are not actually mean, violent types.  They look at this as their job, their responsibility, and they do it dispassionately, and in many cases genially.  A recent interview with one player on the How to do Everything podcast reveals that many of them will bust a guy in the head, or get busted themselves, and then go out for beers after the game, congratulating each other on a particularly good hit.  "Oh, man, I wish I'd known you were a lefty!"

You see an orc guarding a chest

It's a staple of old-school D&D-- your party is wandering through the dungeon, and you see a door.  What's behind it?  Why, it's a 10x10 room, with an orc guarding a chest.

I never really thought much about it.  For years, it was just sort of there.  But this weekend, whilst painting my bathroom ceiling (whose dimensions vaguely approximate the aforementioned room), the thought occurred to me, to wit:

Let's be generous, and have the orc stand over the chest.  Put them both in the corner.  Now, orcs are what, 5 feet tall?  Ish?  And humanoid in shape, so they'll have an arm span of about half that (see the Vitruvian Man).  Give them a short sword, and that's another 2 feet.  So the orc, by itself, with minimal room to swing a sword, already takes up about a third of the available space (roughly 14 foot diagonal).

A typical human fighter is closer to 6 feet tall, and uses a long sword.  So he will use up closer to half of the available space.

This means if the fighter obligingly wedges himself into the opposite corner (very gracious of him), the two of them will have just enough room to swing their swords at each other without overlapping.  If they're using fencing foils, that might work out, but can you imagine an old-school orc fencing?  Any sort of decent swinging/cutting hack-and-slash weapon and the visual starts to get a little silly.

And now that we've established that, here's the 64 gp question-- where, exactly, during all of this derring-do, are the wizard, the cleric, and the thief standing?!  Out in the hall, I guess.  Otherwise someone's going to be the recipient of an unfortunate elbow, if they're lucky.