Note: Mild possibly nsfw cartoon nudity in this post.

To finish closing off day 3 (Saturday), we check in on Fire Tetris:

And Fire Tetris is up! Note that each of the pixels are individually addressable flame effects. You can see the pilot lights from the back in this pic.

Also, we check in on the front of house, looking sharp:

Then, a new day dawns.

I check on my boots. Proper footwear is key for Burning Man. If you go barefoot or wear sandals, which you may be tempted to do because of the heat, if you’re not careful, you’ll end up with ‘playa foot‘. I have plastic plates put on the heels of my boots[1] because apparently I walk really heavily and wear down my heels. The plates help my heels last to prevent knee pain. You can also see in the picture the pernicious playa dust:

Heading to the portapotties, we see some of the most recent expressions of ethos:

Also on the same trip, we see a very nice, but pretty standard inspiring saying:

Followed by a zoomed-out picture showing a slightly different expression of the idea:

Last, but not least is a message about baby wipes. Baby wipes are one of the most important currencies at Burning Man, used for your daily cleanup, as most people don’t use showers. However, if they get into the portapotties, they will clog the equipment used to empty them, causing a very bad problem:

If you’re counting, we’re now in day 4 (Sunday), which also happens to be opening night for Burning Man. Thankfully, during day 3, we had completed the structure for Mirror Blaze, so all that remained was the cosmetic ‘big top’ bunting. Before we get to that, let’s check in on how the rest of Charnival was doing.

Here’s Riskee Ball looking mighty fine from the front:

With all of the intense construction activity happening in the back, tightening all the joins, attaching all the piping:

Fate was continuing Hellblazer[2] trenching (to attach propane lines to the fuel depot, I assume), with one of my most favourite hats ever:

Next time, we’ll check in on Mirror Blaze, and see how things are progressing!

[1]Nick’s Shoe Repair on Dupont. They are excellent and timely. Why not give them a call?

[2]Hellblazer was (and still is!) a highstriker.

Most recently, we covered a windstorm.

I spent most of the day looking like this:

And when I went out on expedition:

For those interested in the individual items:

Tilley hat, the hat that can be eaten by an elephant, multiple times, washed, and is good as new. Also UPF 50+, critical if you’re going to be in the sun all day.

Motorcycle Goggles, I liked these ones because they had really good visibility, and they weren’t curved glass, so I felt I could see better[1].

Respirator, an old standard. The same or similar model that my dad uses for wood working.

[1]They’ve also appeared on Downton Abbey!

A couple of days ago, we were talking about different ways of making computer games challenging, and the question came up:

How do you design a goal-less game[1]?

One step along the way is to remove all of the explicit goals. You could make a sandbox game like Minecraft, and only allow ‘Creative Mode‘, but people will just use that ‘sandbox‘ to build things, or to define their own goals, which they can then achieve.

Here, we are attempting to design a completely goal-less game.

You could start the game by removing all the in-game knowledge of the player character, a la System Shock, or Planescape: Torment. However, this merely focuses the player on the goal of ‘figuring out what is going on’.

So, you want a game with no explicit goals, where the player is enjoined from forming goals of their own.

S and I talked about a few ways to do this:

You could try something like ‘Papers, Please‘, where the goal is survival, but very difficult to navigate. S suggested something along the lines of a ‘Kafkaesque‘ game that we had been discussing, with constantly moving goalposts, where the goal always seems possible, but probably isn’t. (Pac-Man level 256 might fall in this category.)

You could go one step further and combine this with a sandbox game, where the game somehow detects what goal(s) you are trying to reach, and subtly moves that goal just out of your reach.

But these are examples of games with goals, just seemingly reachable but actually not reachable ones.

You could also go a completely different direction and make something like ‘Desert Bus‘, which has a goal, but reaching that goal is so boring that very few people will ever achieve it.

This brings us to the concept of the ‘Grey Game’. Not a reference to ‘Grey Aliens‘, or to ‘Grey Goo‘, but a game which is similar in concept to an isolation tank:

”
The player is suspended in a featureless grey landscape. They can move in every direction, but nothing changes. Nothing ever changes. You might think that parts of the background are different from other parts, but unlike COBE, all you are seeing is pixelation, and the universe is grey and featureless. Forever.
”

[1]As a thought exercise, it’s often useful to explore the limits of many or all of the assumptions you can perceive, to see what happens when you negate or change each of them (or multiple ones in tandem). We may discover a new goal-less game or goal-less genre of games, or we may discover this is actually impossible[2], and find some interesting ideas which are partway towards the negated or changed assumptions. I think I want to write about this some more. Watch this space!

[2]Some might say that the very definition of ‘game’ assumes the existence of a ‘goal’. I say ‘to-mah-to‘.

1: Most people know it by its colloquial name, ‘Hydrogen‘, but in more formal settings, it is known as ‘Hyllodrogen’. These more formal settings are usually at ISM[1] meetings, where Hyllodrogen wears its classier allotrope, H3+.

2: Similarly, most people are not aware that ‘Helium‘ actually has atoms of multiple genders. The two most common are called ‘Helium’ and ‘Shelium’.

3: ‘Lithium‘ is more properly known as ‘Lilithium'[2], due to its properties of reacting with whichever molecules it wishes, ignoring the restrictions of others. It is postulated that this aggressiveness is what causes its therapeutic effects.

4: ‘Beryllium‘, or ‘Beeryllium’ was made up long ago on a drunken dare, but then was surprisingly discovered to actually exist.

5: ‘Boron‘ and ‘Boroff’ are two sides of the same non-interesting coin. Specifically, not interesting to stars in the main sequence, as they have to wait for cosmic rays to make it.

6: The name ‘Carbon‘ comes from the Latin ‘Carrusbon‘, meaning ‘what is left behind when you burn a vehicle’.

7: ‘Nitrogen‘ was originally dubbed ‘NitroGennifer’, after Daniel Rutherford’s stage name. It is said that his bonding flexibility is only exceeded by that of his namesake.

8: ‘Oxygen‘ was a favourite of the ‘Oxygentry‘, the name for the select group of chemists who did work on the Phlogiston and acids since ancient times.

9: ‘Fluorine‘ is the past participle of ‘Flyrine’, which explains its intense reactivity and corrosiveness.

10: As we reach the foot of the second row of the periodic table, it is only fitting that we mention ‘Neon‘, or ‘Kneeon’, so named because of the bend in early versions of the periodic table, before the discovery of noble gases.

[1]Interstellar Medium.

[2]Lilith(NSFW)

Back when I was in engineering, there was a story told about one of the profs:

He would say ‘Memorize! No time to derive!’, meaning that in order to do the questions on the exam quickly enough, you would have to memorize the formulae in their applicable form, instead of deriving them from first principles each time.

For me, there is a clear analogy to the regular brain remapping you do everyday through your choices of what to do and think about.

There’s also a clear analogy to performance, whether that is singing, dancing, or powerpoint. It’s important to know your ‘words and notes’ off by heart, backwards and forwards, so that you can focus on the task at hand, whether it’s entertaining people, conveying a message[1], or solving a problem.

[1]These are often one and the same.

It’s often said that ‘Fortune Favours the Bold’, a translation of a number of associated latin mottos[1], originally quoted from the Aeneid.

But what else does Fortune Favour? In different circumstances, Fortune could Favour many different things.

For example:

If you are a newspaper:
– Fortune Favours Above the Fold

If you are researching a new type of cheese:
– Fortune Favours the Mould

If you are a manufacturer of desserts containing cryptic messages:
– Fortune Favours the Mould[2]

If you are hoping your ice sculpture will last:
– Fortune Favours the Cold

For those colonizing a new world and hoping for horses:
– Fortune Favours the Foaled

For those hoping to move houses:
– Fortune Favours the Sold

For those hoping to not fall off their gondola:
– Fortune Favours the Poled

Nelson[3] is thought[4] to have said:
– ‘Fortune Favours the Coaled.’

Other associated sayings:

For those who enjoy canned pineapple:
– Fortune Flavours the Doled

For those who evade blame:
– Fortune Waivers the Scold

For those overheated who luckily find shelter:
– Fortune Savours the Cold

For those working with Filo[5] pastry:
– Fortune Flavours the Rolled

And finally, for those of a musical persuasion:
– Fourtune Favours the Multiphonic (my favourite)

[1]And a DS9 episode.

[2]From S!

[3]Somehow, Horatio Nelson does not appear in the first ten(!) pages when you search for ‘nelson’. Even Nelson Mandela doesn’t appear until page 7! What?!?

[4]No.

[5]Not to be confused with their enharmonic equivalent[6] ‘Lifo pastry‘.

[6]The enharmonic equivalent for ‘Filo’ would actually be ‘Lofi’, but that sounds silly, and I had already written the joke.

So, we had the privilege of going to hear Jane Goodall speak today. It was an intense experience. Apparently, she’s 80 and still going strong[1]. Hearing her speak, she talks about the very human things that are causing our worldwide problems, the intense poverty which is forcing people to make destructive choices, the intense greed which promotes the same, and the continued population growth which amplifies everything. I wonder how much of this perspective was from her growing up during the War, seeing firsthand much of the hardship and devastation, even in the UK, at the time.

She also credited her mother with giving her huge amounts of support and encouragement in her love and study of animals, that at many seminal points in her upbringing, if that support had gone the other way, with a parent who had disagreed or squelched, her life would have been very different, and nowhere near as successful or fulfilling.

I think most useful to me was her message of hope, of the successes people have had re-introducing species into the wild, of her institute’s ‘Roots and Shoots‘ program to help young people to identify and work on the challenges they see around them, from the ground up.

[1]Which makes sense with my memories of her being enough of an icon in the 80’s that I got the joke in The Far Side about her.

It was happening again. Every time he started strumming his guitar, his bass would start to walk, and his eyebrows would sneak away.

The bass walking made sense. It did that every day. Without it, he couldn’t Ska at all. But he never understood his eyebrows. They always came back a few hours later, seemingly contented and full of glitter.