Blog : Cool Things on September 21, 2012

So I found some more cool things this week (and I even got some of my own work done). I'm please to share the cool things I found below.

Lectures

While I'm not able to find video from the talk (although it may materialize), this week I attended the seventh Richard and Louise Guy Lecture which this year was on the Mathematics of Doodling.

A view of the 7th Richard and Louise Guy Lecture.

The Department of Mathematics at University of Calgary has hosted this talk for several years now (arranged by Louise as a 90th birthday gift for Richard) and it is always informative and interesting without being bogged down. In pervious years the topic has ranged including areas such as knot theory and the mathematics of music and they have always left me more excited to explore than I was going in.

Sadly Louise passed away several years ago, but Richard continues to attend the lectures (and others, including some classes each year) and it is always encouraging to see his life long love of learning. (If one may be so hokey as to say it that way).

I hope the lectures serve as a model and that we can see more and more interesting talks that continue to inspire us to be better question askers and answer finders.

Blogs

One cool thing I found this week is Day[9]'s blog. Day[9] or Sean Plott (as the non-gaming world knows him), is a former pro Starcraft player and now pro Starcraft II shout caster (and host of the Day[9] Daily). Whether or not you're interested in e-sports and better ways to play Starcraft II, it's still worth taking the time to take a look at the blog. Day[9]'s interests go well beyond the realm of video games and he is a very astute and interesting speaker and writer. (Also you can watch him making a perfume with Felica Day on her Flog this week.)

Video

You might have seen this already given the names involved, but this week, for reasons only known to the deepest oldest minds of the universe the Nerdist manage to revive two things people haven't seen in a long time. Ben Folds Five and the Fraggles. Got something you don't want to do? "Do it anyway!" (Then watch the video.)

Former Five Awesome Girls Monday Kristina Horner and her housemates/co-star launched a new gaming channel called TeamHypercube. They're doing a mix of table-top gaming and video games and the first video game they've tackled Dokapon Kingdom is ... interesting to say the least.

Over the last few months the sports racers (are the viewers even still called that, duck fans maybe now) of a show have been working with Ze and Mr.Norman to put together a song and a video ... and this is it:

Wrap-up

Wanna know how Chris Hardwick managed to make muppetty goodness for us this year? Well now you will:

Project 5 : SNES Geek Coasters

One of the problems I face on a semi-regular basis (at least whenever I host a D & D session) is that I don't have enough coasters and that the coasters I do have are just not cool enough. Fortunately the Internet has reminded me that this doesn't need to be an on-going problem and that I can do something cool to fix it.

As such, my next big project is going to be SNES Geek Coasters made from pearler beads.

I was inspired to this idea from two sources, one is a mario coin I bought at the Calgary Comic Expo this year and the other is a set of fridge magnets I saw on Pinterest (which were mis-labeled as coasters).

The coin over my desk. From my photo-project with a friend Seven-Fifty-Two-by-Two.

Fridge Magnets with retro style - found on Pinterest sourced from gadgetsin.com

Pearler beads work well with retro-video game concept because it's easy to put beads in for each pixel. This means that all I have to do to find plans is to hunt down the sprite sheets for any game I'm looking for. Then all I have to do is match the beads to the pixels, load them onto a hedgehog tray and iron. Or not, this may prove to be harder than I've imagined, but I do have my childhood memories saying this is pretty easy and it may be harder to get the sprites that I want.

My first thought was to go with the question mark blocks from Super Mario World, but the more I've been thinking the more I'm interested in trying for some RPGs of the era (Secret of Mana especially) since they're likely to get hauled out during RPG session most often.

My goal is to have at least a prototype version of these up and running by November 1, 2012.

Project 2: The Ogre Manager : Update

You may have noticed that the second project I started, The Ogre Manager, has gone unmentioned for a very long time. There are three main reasons for this, the fact that I fell behind doing everything with the blog is the first, the second is that I didn't give myself a deadline to finish by and the third (and most interesting) is that I don't know that I really want the Ogre Manager in the way I outlined it in the first post.

As I mentioned in the first post is that the origin of the Ogre Manager was a sketch pad which I kept track of all my unit levels on and I did the math using my old high-school Casio calculator. I really enjoyed the "meditative" nature and the hand-made nature of doing it this way. I always felt like I was losing that when I used the spreadsheet and that the Ogre Manager was also going to be a little to "technical".

So, I'm re-organizing the project and introducing The Paper Ogre Manager. 

I decided to make this as nice as possible, so I started by getting a set of large moleskine cahier with ruled squares. I'm going to include 4 graphs which outline the average level for each unit, the average front-attack (or best-attack) power for each unit, the average alignment, and the accumulated experience (or possibly percentage of calculated experience). I will also track these in a table as well.

It's still probably a month or so before it really feels like Ogre Battle time to me (I think I may be a type of reverse plant I can only play Ogre Battle once I'm not getting enough light), but now that I have this set up I'll be ready. I may still tackle the software version at some point, mostly for the programming practice

Blog: Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 11)

Welcome to the eleventh volume of my favorite YouTube videos. This week our musical journey is interrupted by the arrival of a new species of video, the vlog. *Play ominous music now* At least we'll start with a vlogger rapping to make our transition.

• The first video of the volume is yet another song by the perennially appearing Brentalfloss. Rather than his usual video game fair, this one is an awesome moment of thanks for a teacher.
• The second video is another video song from Pomplamoose. As with "If you think you need some lovin" this is one of their earlier original pieces. Always fun to see the exuberance vs the cool chick.
• The next three videos are the arival of the vlogbrothers into my favorites list. For the uninitatied the vlogbrothers are brothers (surprise) Hank and John Green, who started out with a project many years ago called brotherhood2.0. In brotherhood2.0, they set out to spend a year without communicating with each other textually. This morphed over time into the vlogbrothers and the community surrounding them nerdfightaria. One of the nicest aspects of their videos (aside from the fact that they're awesome) is that most of them are under 4 minutes in length.
  These three come from three different time periods in vlogbrother history. I think the first one comes just after I started watching, although that seems far too recent (after I started watching the vlogbrothers I went back and watch all their videos through (at least twice) so my sense of time is a little mushed where when their videos actually happened). The first video is Hank's wootstock rap and pretty much explains itself (but it starts with a reason for me to use the wheaton fawning tag) The second is further back, but deals with the important concept of braincrack (and gigantic blue penises) and the third is from brotherhood 2.0 days and is one of the first book club videos (and a demonstration of how slow John used to talk). As I've said before the vloggers are coming and this is their vanguard.