Turning It Up To 11
Two of our favorite games are getting new editions this year. There's Munchkin Second Edition, of course . . . And then, near and dear to my mini-painter heart, is Warhammer 40,000, with an 11th edition slated for June. Not only that, both games are previous-edition-compatible. Games Workshop is saying...
National Train Day
Today, May 9, is National Train Day. On this day, we celebrate . . . • Long dresses that trail behind you. • Teaching your dog to do tricks. • Great big loud things that run on tracks. • Wagons full of ammunition and supplies. • The luminous line behind...
New Evidence Suggests Life On Earth Originated From Meteors
Just not in the way you might think. An article published in Nature describes how meteor impact craters could have created "oxygen oases" that served as stable environments for early life to develop. Not quite as exciting as panspermia, but hey, they're not saying it's not that either. -- Ben Williams
The Guild Returns!
Remember The Guild? Felicia Day as a player trapped in a MMORPG, trying to deal with her game-addiction and with a guild of players as messed up, in different ways, as she is? Ran online from 2007 to 2013, and now almost impossible to find on the Web? Yeah, that...
Crazy Dice And The Boltzmann Distribution
Two economists recently wrote a paper proving the uniqueness of the Boltzmann Distribution - a specific formula used to describe probabilities in systems where things don't influence each other - using experiments featuring Crazy Dice. For 150 years, no one knew if this was the only distribution. Now we do. ...
Where Do Games Fall On The Revisitation Spectrum?
How long-lived are specific games, in the continuum of their own art form and in the larger picture? When I write entries for the Daily Illuminator, I usually have some kind of thesis I'm building toward . . . but today's a bit more freeform, because my conclusion (spoiler alert)...
A Special Holiday In A Galaxy Not So Far Away . . .
The Star Trek fans had their day on April 5th with First Contact Day. (The Vulcans were no-shows AGAIN. Then again, we haven't developed warp drive technology yet . . .) Today, however, is for Star Wars fans! Here in the U.S., May 4th has become Star Wars Day,...
Also, If You Make An "Organ Music" Joke I Will Kill You
Still with us? Good. If you are a fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus, you are simply out of luck, because it is those who are not (yet) fans of Monty Python who have the opportunity to discover Monty Python. So go discover it, but read the rest of this...