The Lancia Stratos Is The Coolest Car Ever

lancia stratos ralley

I’m pretty sure I had a Matchbox Lancia Stratos as a kid. It’s an astonishingly cool car. Apparently, it was pretty dominant in the mid-70s as a ralley racer, which is really neat, given its street car looks. I guess it held on to the corners as tightly as the other top racers, then took off on the straights and pavement.

The only thing cooler than the Lancia Stratos Ralley, though is the Lancia Stratos prototype. Holy crap.

… and the only thing cooler than that is the Kraftwerk knockoff music followed by actual Kraftwerk.

Burning Rubber 0.2

explosion

(see also Burning Rubber 0.1)

Got together tonight with Rob Bohl, Emily Care-Boss, and Epidiah Ravichol for a first round playtest of Burning Rubber. We weren’t shooting at each other. I wanted to see if the driving game was fun, and when, if ever, you’d wish you could shoot. Each of them gave really solid feedback. Thanks, guys!

The big things we noticed:

  • Skidding and crashing work great. They’re reasonably intuitive and make a really solid, comical mess.
  • The ruler design is critical. Units were twice as long as they should have been and there were about half as many as there should have been, resulting in everyone achieving their top speed on turn 2 and having no problem keeping it, even around the tightest curve on the course.
  • Driving is too easy. If no one gets aggro on your ass, you just drive around.
  • I have to be clear that you can’t accelerate with Yellows.
  • You need two rulers to keep from losing track of stuff.

The following rules supercede the previous post on the matter. They are much simpler. My sacred cow of “facings” is by the side of the road, trying to hitch a ride to a different game.

Continue reading “Burning Rubber 0.2”

Burning Rubber

Car Wars

I really like racing games. I like Formula D, I like Burnout, and I played the shit out of Car Wars as a lad. What Formula D (née Formula Dé) and Burnout have in common is fast, sleek gameplay. What Formula D and Car Wars have in common are vehicle construction rules (otherwise excellent 5th ed. notwithstanding). What Car Wars and Burnout have are frenzied automobile combat. You will note that those don’t overlap.

I’ve been kinda trying to figure out how to adapt Vincent’s Mechaton rules to car combat for a couple of years now. I’ve got a couple of specs that make it non-trivial.

  • You’ve only got one car. Instead of having 3-5 guys to spread your resources around, you have one complex guy.
  • Facing has to matter. It’s a car, so it’s all about maneuvering, for both offensive and defensive gain.
  • You have to go forward. You accelerate and have a speed.
  • The game is about racing, not just blowing each other up. One of the great things about Mechaton is the objective system; it makes fighting a matter of tactics rather than one of bashing. In this game, I want the fighting to be about winning the race, or if you can’t do that, crashing your car really spectacularly.
  • Build a car in 30 minutes
  • Play in about 90-120 minutes
  • Have good crashing rules! Losing should be fun and funny!

So I started writing this up. What I got so far is under the break. Maybe you’ll get a chance to play before I will!

Continue reading “Burning Rubber”

All That’s Missing Is The Sun To Bake It On My Back

Matzah

Matzah is only slightly more fun than dreidl. As a lot of folks know, I’ve been trying to invent a dreidl game that’s any good at all for several years now, to no avail. But I’m all up ons with the matzah thing.

Here’s what you do.

  • 2c flour
  • 1/2ts salt
  • 1/2c olive oil. Use something good. I like Star, but we just went through a bottle of extraordinary yumminess that I can’t remember the name of.
  • 1/3c water
  1. Preheat oven to 350°F
  2. Start your timer. This has to be in the oven in under 18 minutes or it’s no good for Pesach. 18 is the gemmatria for “Chai”, which means “life”, so it’s “alive” in 18 minutes, and that means it’s leavened.
  3. Don’t sweat the time. This takes like 5 minutes.
  4. Combine the flour and salt.
  5. Sprinkle in the oil while tumbling around the flour. See if you can get all the flour stuck into oily, crumbly chunks.
  6. Sprinkle in the water while turning over the flour/oil mixture as little as possible. Don’t knead it. That’s the key. Just get it mixed so everything’s damp with oil or water.
  7. Oil up some baking sheets.
  8. Roll it out just as flat as you can get it, ideally 2mm thick or so. I rolled it out on my baking sheets so I knew it would fit, but it was a little awkward because of our rolling pin’s shape.
  9. Bake for 25 minutes.
  10. While it’s baking, clean up the flour so you don’t have chametz floating around the kitchen. Also, it’s a mess.

The result is much like a pie crust. It’s awesome with meats and I want to try it as sort of an eggs-and-biscuits thing, too. When I did it, it was just as good the next day. There wasn’t any to test on day 3.

I checked with our favorite rabbi to ask about it’s KFPness, and he said he couldn’t think of any reason it wouldn’t be OK, though seder matzah has to be just flour and water. Since I was baking this so we could eat dinner (all the grocery stores being totally sold out of matzah), rather than as a ritual object, he figures it’s fine, since people fry matzah all the time.

Humans Are Pretty Good People

tweenbots

From The Viscous Platypus comes this link to a study in empathy. Robots (using the term very loosely) are built to these specifications:

  • Roll forward
  • Have the body proportions of a 1-year-old
  • Have a flag that says where they would like to go, asking for help

… and people help them. To date, no robots have been lost or damaged.

To me, this shows not only human empathy, but the incredible processing power available to the world by interfacing with that empathy. Think about the distributed processing we could perform but withhold because to use it puts us in jeopardy to use it. And we’re usually right. But somehow, by assuring us that we are not being endangered through our evolved social senses, that processing is tapped.

Perhaps the future is not the Modern ideal of total autonomy, but one of free giving through the robust and extremely high bandwidth interface we’ve slowly developed over the last four million years. It’s given us open-source software, it’s given us a method of donating meaningfully to political causes $20 at a time, and it’s given us the tremendous power of social networking on the Internet. Maybe that power can be tapped for future endeavors of humanity, as well.

Children of Men Is Very Sad

Children of Men

I just watched Children of Men with Carrie. I’ve been asked if I’ve seen this movie by approximately every single person who’s ever played Shock: and for good reason. But I’d been avoiding it. I was avoiding it because I knew it was going to be good, but the Grid of the movie was all stuff that I felt so strongly about, I was worried that it would come up short of what might have been impossibly high standards.

The Shock is that humans can no longer conceive. In the course of the movie, you discover that it happened across the world over the course of a couple of months. It has no apparent cause.

The Issues are Immigration Policy and Terrorism, synthesized nicely into several threads of xenophobia. It’s very much a post-9/11 movie, but it’s also a movie made by a Mexican director for an American audience.

If you know me, you know that this is a perfect brew of fears for me.

The movie didn’t disappoint me. It’s full of humans acting very, very badly toward each other from the institutional to the personal level in ways you can understand. The world is in despair. You hear the sentiments of the movie echoing your friends, your enemies, talking heads on Fox News, crazy people on your favorite internet fora. At one point, it makes you complicit in a racist statement and then shows you that it was you making that assumption, not the film, not the situation. This character’s humanity is in the balance exactly as much as any other character’s, and it’s defined by their actions and desires, not their obvious otherness.

It’s a sad movie that doesn’t blink. At one point, while watching it, my body physically hurt from the tension.

A Trip to Europa

The Artist And His Subject
From a photograph of the arist at work, studying a Europan Whale.

In 1998, as part of a drawing class, I made a book called A Trip to Europa in which I “edited” the works of a Dr. Kesling Frankh about his exploration of the oceans and life forms of the vast world-ocean of the Jovian moon Europa.

Europa is covered in ice and has a small rocky core. Tidal forces of Jupiter cause constant shifting of the ice, which releases heat and keeps liquid the vast world-ocean 2 kilometers beneath the surface liquid.

Click images to see closer.

Europan Life Cycle
The Europan life cycle. Clockwise from the bottom left: Spores, Plankton, Fox, Wolf, Whale.

There is only one “species” of life on Europa but its stages of life fill all available niches. Life “starts” as small, striated Spores that hatch into mineral-consuming Plankton. They become and are consumed by Foxes, small predators that, in turn become and are consumed by Wolves, the next phase. Wolves, when their local population becomes too great, are consumed by scavenger Foxes, Plankton, with the remainder becoming Whales, who consume minerals, Plankton, and any other organic detritus in the water. They lay Spores that eventually hatch into Plankton, restarting the process.

Europan Plankton
Given the very low gravity of Europa, the life forms tend to be large. “Plankton” in this case are several centimeters long.
Europan Fox
The Europan Fox, like all of the mobile stages, is jet-propelled, swallowing water through three sphincters in the front of its body and squirting it out behind.
Europan Wolf
Europan Wolves alternate between cooperation and cannibalism, depending on the situation at the moment. They will band together to attack Whales or to corral Foxes, but when resources are scarce, will turn on each other, consuming each other until some of them can become Whales.
Europan Whale
The Europan Whale, often as much as 100 meters long, consumes all it can, straining the water free of the waste of the carnage that led to its existence. It releases spores constantly, though they only hatch when in the presence of particular nutrients.
Size Comparison of Europan Life Forms
Size comparison. From the upper left, a Whale, a Wolf, Fox, Plankton, Jacques Cousteau.

A New Edition To The Family

Barfturtle

As Xenon: takes form, I’m discovering a small but elegantly creative “speculative evolution” and “worldbuilding” communities. They’re intensely creative and often collaborative environments, and there’s just as often a set of standards about authorship. You might even say that these communities have developed System for such endeavors.

One such really incredible world is called Snaiad. It’s remarkable not just because of its creativity, but also because of the extraordinary skill with which it’s been created. The paintings are rendered with amazing texture. Some textures, you recognize from animals you know. Some seem to be vegetable. Some body parts look like you’d expect. Others aren’t at all what they look like.

Enjoy your visit to Snaiad. When you get back, I’ll have some comments about other worldbuilding sites and projects, including my own Europa project from 1998, newly edited.