Science Fair - The Mathematics of Cunnilingus

A comic strip with math and language jokes – new we're talking! I of course have to pick the most sexually explicit one I've read. If you'd prefer some nice friendly generation gap humor, there's always Join Myspace (which is not actually a promotion of that crap hole, but a joke about it).

A couple more must reads: Penny Arcade Parody and Substitute. In fact, there's a whole velociraptor theme running through these, including a delightful dig at stupid AOL users Search History being released.

Set opening paragraphs flush left | The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

I'm puzzled by the short technical discussion here, maybe he's not done? The reason I'm puzzled is because he hasn't mentioned how he addresses this very issue on webtypography.net. The code he's using now is:

p + p {
    margin-top: 0pt;
    text-indent: 1.5em;
}

Which, in modern browsers pulls the 2nd and subsequent paragraphs up to touch the prevous, and indents it. That first bit is actually pretty ingenious. His default paragraph top margin is 1.5em, which is what obsolete browsers will see, and newer browsers get the better typography.

What he used to do, at least when the site first launched, is put a class="first" on opening paragraphs, which is what I do on my blog. Yes, I know this because I observed that he was following this typographic rule and looked at the source. His new technique, especially with IE7 on deck, is more clever and less of a maintenance headache.

Weird Al's White & Nerdy

absolutely spot on. scary thing is i think i've seen the original music video. not the whole thing mind you, just a little in passing while looking for tennis in a hotel.

Dan Osman Extreme Climbing - Google Video

ok, so I used to be a little reckless in my outdoors activities, but dude…

I imagine it's somewhat less reckless than it looks, when you've climbed something many times it becomes familiar enough that what might have been impossible the first time is simple. Then again, he died in 1999 doing some crazy jump.

Custom Dice

might just have to get some proper dice cut for dragon duel.

Tanga - One Big Huge Fetchin' Mystery

My poor recall of James Bond trivia forced me to pull up IMDB to solve this one. Still no idea what the site is about, except that they're giving away one boardgame every day for 30 days until they launch, and 2 of the 30 prizes will be Roads & Boats (new edition), and Settlers of Catan 10th Anniversary 3-D Special Edition Chest Set (via BoardGameGeek of course).

Travel Settlers Mod

Finally got around to building a Macro Photo Studio. Built out of a 16" box, which may be a little small for a full sized game, but should be just right for Cybil's product shots. I've still got shadow and light source brightness issues to work out (cheated using curves in Photoshop, but the green felt pieces in the plastic bag ended up darker than they should be). It'll get better with practice.

Anyway, the purpose of the photo setup was to take a picture of my minor adjustment to the travel vesion of Settlers of Catan. In the travel version the numbers are fixed, which makes the game far less variable. I decided to print out numbers and figure out how to attach them temporarily to the board. I was going to use velcro, but Cybil pointed out the sticky-backed velcro sticks harder to itself than the glue back does to plastic. She suggested sandpaper and felt, but I eventually settled on heavy leather backings that didn't wouldn't blow away as somebody walked by.

For the lettering I chose Adobe Caslon, bold, medium, and normal weights. It has nice energetic varience in the stroke width and reads well at small and large sizes. I made the most common numbers (6. and 8) the largest and heaviest, and the least common (2 and 12) small and light, using both size and weight to exagerate the indication of their probability. The only numbers that required re-working after my initial draft were the sixes and nines. I had originally used periods to indicate which was right-side up, but that was insufficient. The most space efficient solution ended up being to leave the periods on the sixes (6.) and underline the nines (9)

BoargGameGeek.com Thread: Podcasting

Ok, so I'm a little slow just finding The Spiel last night. From the discussion though it sounds like they require a little screening.

The Spiel: A Podcast About Games & the People Who Love Them

"Spiel" is german for "Game", but this is a podcast by a couple of guys in Indiana. It's going to take me a little while to catch up on this one, each episode is around an hour long, but it's got so many great segments it needs to be that long in order to go into any depth about individual games.

News and Notes

Discussion of upcoming games.

Backshelf Spotlight

Classic games (first episode was Cribbage and RoboRally – that's when I decided that I was hooked).

The List

They keep a list of all the games that they own but haven't played (70+ games). Before each show they play a game or two off "The List", these are recent games, no more than 3-5 years old. While not the well rounded review of someone who's played a game many times, they're great first impressions.

Truckloads of Goober

"Goober" is evidently southern slang for peanut and in this case refers to The Bits, this is a segment for those of us nerds who are fans of game components.

Game Sommelier

One of them comes up with a theoretical group of people, and the other has to name 5 games that those people would like to play.

Add and delete vertical space in measured intervals

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web has a new entry that is exceptionally good. It's basically talking about the fundimentals of how to set up a baseline grid in CSS, without actually saying "baseline grid".