abada abada

Bla bla bla the journey really is the destination. This was a photo I took at the Loussac Library in Anchorage Alaska. Often when I go places, I’m fidgety and sort of keeping an eye on the clock and my agenda and where else I have to be when. I’m good at getting places when I need to be, but sometimes less good at the Be Here Now aspect of the whole thing.

I finished up my Alaska trip and checked out of the hotel I was staying at around 1 pm and then had almost twelve hours to kill before my red-eye flight. I was pleasantly surprised that the library was open on a Sunday and got a ride over there and just hung out before taking the bus back to the hotel to use the free wifi for a few hours before eating and going to the airport for the long bumbada bumbada trip home. The library wasn’t too full, the heaters made a pleasant sound, the view was amazing, the wifi worked. It was one of the most peaceful parts of a long and interesting but rarely restful set of weeks.

I head to SXSW tomorrow. If you see me, please say hello.

There was a small amount of “Are you doing something special with Jim today?” questioning on Sunday, which seems normal. The short answer was “no, we decided not to” and the longer answer has more to do with the nature of long-distance relationships and the fact that we’d been together both the weekend previously and will see each other this coming weekend. We did more of a five-day virtual thing. I sent him some bamboo to his office on Friday [who knew you could use frequent flyer miles on bamboo?], we played Scrabble on Saturday, sent some schmoopy photos back and forth on Sunday and talked yesterday. Today I’m heading to the post office to pick up my valentine [received: 1210 songs with love in the title, wowie!]. And tomorrow I’m leaving town for three weeks.

The three weeks thing was sort of a gaffe. I made plans to go give a talk on a day I wasn’t actually free. I’ve never done this in six years of speaking, so I apologized like crazy and said “Pick a new date and I’ll go down there!” The date they picked — this is the NorthEast Florida Library Information Network — was wedged firmly between two existing trips, one to house- and pet-sit for my Dad while he goes to Mexico and one trip to Alaska. So as much as 2010 is going to be the Year of Sensible Travel, March is going to be a little insensible.

So I did the be-your-own-valentine thing and assembled some bookshelves that I’ve been sort of slow-motion working on for a few months. I made a valentine for my facebook friends and added a different photo to Flickr. I sent some email and had some fried cheese for dinner [on sale at the supermarket!] and had a bangup hilarious phone call with my favorite [and only] sister and called it a day. Moderate expectations, amply exceeded, and a five day Valentine’s Day. Hope you had, have, or are having a happy whatever-you-have.

So hey, I was over at BoingBoing this week. This was also the week my friend Dawn came to visit and I was in Florida for three days. I also worked at the school like normal. It was sort of a hectic week. I don’t read BoingBoing usually. I like it but can’t keep up with it. This past week, I enjoyed getting to see the other side of it. I’m more used to the world of MetaFilter where posts are for other people, not about yourself, don’t have photos, etc. I had a hard time adjusting.

So, in case anyone’s curious, here’s an annotated list of what I blogged about there, with some extra “where do you get your ideas?” notes tossed in for good measure. I’m typing this on a plane [with wifi! expensive! too expensive for me!] on leg three of my six leg [car-plane-plane-subway-bus-car] trip home from Florida. Update: I am now home. My last post appeared on BoingBoing flanked by McDonald’s ads.

1. At the edges of libraries - a few links I liked and a small “thanks for having me”
2. Phil Agre located, search not quite over - I had been paying attention to this story since I heard about it. Phil is brilliant, haunted, and vanished in 2008 sometime. I saw this update on rc3.org and made a quick note.
3. What’s really on bittorrent anyway? - found when reading the Freedom to Tinker blog which I read regularly.
4. “The only perfect reference work” Nelson’s Perpetual Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia - a friend emailed me about a friend of his who was coming out with a fascinating book about… something. He also mentioned this encyclopedia which I think I may have a few volumes of. I did some digging.
5. Airplane bird strikes are now public information - my friend Mike twittered about public FAA databases and I lost myself clicking around this one.
6. Slime as Engineer - brainless mold mimics Tokyo subway - I found this by accident [or serendipity] as I was looking up something else but it had a “bb would like this” vibe to it.
7. The peculiar challenges of Chinese Braille - judith twittered about someone reading Braille on the bus and I went off reading about Braille.
8. Read Houdini’s books via Google Books and Library of Congress - a pal emailed me a link to the original blog post about it. I’ve always been a fan of Houdini and full-text books available online.
9. Catch a cold for the holidays: a history of The Common Cold Unit - I answered a question for Ask MetaFilter about how communicable the common cold was and what we knew about it and everything I looked up pointed to the work done at the CCU. May be one of those things fascinating to me and only sort of interesting to other people.
10. Skin contact between performers creates a positive social environment - Melissa and Hiram posted a link to this on facebook. I enjoyed the video and the goofy musician’s take on things.
11. “If we’re there, where aren’t we?” — PBS looks at life online - Doug Rushkoff emailed me about this and it seemed like something the BB crowd would enjoy. I was hoping to use the tawdry photo of the girl in her underwear that graces the Frontline page [stay classy!] but opted instead of Patrick Stewart.
12. Copyright disputes in the 1840s - my friend Hugh thought I might like his Mom’s blog where she wrote about Dickens and some other terrific stuff.
13. Lessig on Copyright and Culture: “Things could have been different” - found this somewhere on Twitter. I suspect there’s some sort of Lessig history on BB because I was surprised that this got zero comments.
14. Funny kayak.com easter egg - David Weinberger’s twitter pointed me to this one. Surprised it was so popular.
15. A concise history of the [Judas] Priest logo - Modcult is one of my favorite blogs and it was all I could do to not just point to every single post they made.
16. Book Sharing Bankrupting Publishing Industry! - not sure where I originally found this, but anyone who is making amusing satire about ALA deserves more exposure.
17. Build privacy into national broadband policy says CDT - I read the CDT’s blog in my RSS reader and this sort of thing is 1) important 2) woefully under-reported
18. Pietenpol’s DIY airplane:”a common man’s airplane” - an email correspondent/library buddy of mine posted about this documentary on his blog. It had a DIY aesthetic that I enjoyed.
19. Valentine: serialized multilingual device-independent comics - a friend of mine is working with the artist/writer of this comic and pointed it out. I’m impressed with multi-lingual efforts and though tthey did a great job with this one. Plus hey, comix!
20. Puppets are fun - the last puppet theater in LA. I like the idea, was sorry I couldn’t find more catchy media for this post.
21. The longest-running open source project: US Federal Depository libraries - I have very good friends who are the authors of FreeGovInfo and they suggested this post.
22. Make your own mossarium! - the post I was born to make.
23. Librarians for Fair Access resists exclusive content contracts - interesting issue in the library world this week, maybe a little inside baseball for BB, but I thought people would understand it and appreciate it.
24. The unbearable awfulness of pine mouth - my friend Dawn mentioned this to me and I looked up some stuff about it.
25. Robots + Monsters reopens today, donations to aid Haitan relief - I have loved these illustrations since R&M first opened and it was timely that they had something to announce this week.
26. 310 class photos from 80 years of PS 99 in Queens NY - one of my favorite posts but maybe not as punchy as it could be. Watching this neighborhood change via the school photos was, I thought, fascinating.
27. Illuminated 15th c. Manuscript - full of hidden demons - a friend made a post about this on MetaFilter and I repurposed it a little for BB.
28. Superman - The 1948 Serial - not sure how I found this, I think randomly by looking at free stuff in the Internet Archive.
29. music for/by the birds - a favorite recent post on MeFi by a friend who just became a dad! Seemed like a safe starting post.

I have a guest! My delightful friend Dawn is visiting and I’m showing her the town. For those of you who have yet to visit here, this means the post office, coffee shop, library, gym, pizza place, hospital cafeteria, cutiepoo downtown and The Wayside restaurant. So far so good. We also went snowshoeing. We talked about the world of libraries. Dawn is an old friend from Seattle times back when I lived in a city and … did things a lot. She was entranced by our adorable country life here and has been making noise about moving here. I assured her she could never find a decent paying job, and she would eventually be bored. Maybe she’ll surprise us.

Meanwhile, I answered a random email from someone asking about the Blank White Cards game and I went back looking through my old cards that have been on a “card server” on the internet since 2002-ish. I barely remember the cards at all, but more importantly, I don’t even remember being that funny, or that good of a drawer [you may disagree with my estimations]. Next week I’ll be guest blogging for boingboing [I KNOW!] and I’m lamenting the fact that I think I may have nothing to share with the adoring bb public that isn’t old news. I live in slow motion now! I’m sure this is late January talking, and I’m not sure I’m really that concerned, but for some reason leaving the cozy world of MetaFilter (well not leaving, but maybe branching out a little, for a week) seems like a big deal.

In any case, while I sit and think about that (send links you think might be of interest!), here’s the information I sent my correspondent about wtf exactly Blank White Cards is. She was concerned that she couldn’t figure out how to play it. I assured her that she would be okay. My copy/paste, for the curious.

The BWC thing is confusing because there’s really no real way to do it. That said, there’s a way I’ve mostly always played. I think for some people the “hey you just *play*…” explanation is preferred, but I find this sometimes irritating since it imples that there is some sort of secret knowledge being passed around. So here’s my quick summary….

Most of the “play” is really sort of messing about making cards. Cards have one or more of three parts

- illustration
- point value
- description/action

So most of the time I’ve played, you get together with a bunch of people and cards and markers and whatever and then make a bunch of cards…. the play itself is often some sort of discard sort of thing. Like hold a bunch of cards in your hand and put them down on top of each other in the middle, often finding juxtapositions that are amusing between what was laid down before. So for example you could put down a Magic Hedgehog card and someone could follow up with a “protection from spiny mammals” card if there was one. Basically there’s no real scorekeeping, despite the scores, and it’s mostly about having a good time and making up funny stories. Some games have a feature where you can make cards on the fly, some don’t. Some games are more rule-governed [i.e. they actually try to follow the rules set up on the cards and keep track of them] and some aren’t.

My favorite story involves a game where there was one friend of mine clearly “losing” like he just got a lot of “lose 10000 points” cards or whatever. And he got a card that said “draw a new card” and it was towards the end of the game [i.e. not many cards left] and he made a card that just said PLAY THIS CARD AND WIN… and he played it, and I guess he won.

I understand that it’s a Nomic-type game, but even Nomic has an initial ruleset and codified steps…Is 1KBWC ONLY about drawing interesting cards and being silly; i.e., there are no rules, no steps, no strategy or luck, no way to win or lose?

So yeah, nomic is similar but in nomic part of the game is keeping track of all the rules. In BWC the rules are sort of tangential and it’s basically an excuse for nerds to get together and have a good time. This can be problematic because for many nerds [and I count myself in this group] playing a game with no rules is the antithesis of a good time. And for other people the whole “hey there are NO RULES, just PLAY” thing, and hassling other people on that point is part of the good time.

So, it’s fair to say that it’s a pretty openly structured game. But it’s also fair to say that almost every time I’ve played it, it happens about the same way [i.e. make a lot of cards, discard them in the middle, keep only very loose track of scores and rules]. Strategy is mostly about helping people have a good time, making amusing cards, not getting too hung up in the whole competitive aspect of it [some people are clearly better at drawing but that shouldn't matter terribly] and enjoying being together. I guess everyone sees it as sort of a reflection on how they like to interact with other people, so you may get a lot of answers that are all conflicting.

Is 1KBWC ONLY about drawing interesting cards and being silly; i.e., there are no rules, no steps, no strategy or luck, no way to win or lose?

Pretty much yes. I don’t think anyone really wins or loses, unless they’re being a total pill about things. There are no real rules or steps, just making cards and not getting too hung up about things.