2004-12-22 RussCon Report

News

15 of us played 13 games! Welcome visitor Garrett, friend of Omar.

It was JimG's last RussCon! Oh no! His work in Austin finished finally, so he will be living permanently in Arizona with his family, which I guess is some compensation for having to miss future RussCons, but still...

There will be RussCon As Usual during next week (2004-12-29).

There was snow in Houston on Christmas. How weird is that!

Our Most Assiduous Reader will have noticed that non-ASCII text (ekzemple, ĉi tiuj ĉapelitaj literoj) at russcon.org was displaying incorrectly lately, despite the html being valid and nothing having changed in the pages which used to work... I hypothesize that the problem was due to a recent change in Apache configuration (wherein the webserver is now bogusly sending charset=iso-8859-1 regardless of what the html pages themselves say, thus overriding the charset=utf-8 in my pages). As I type now, it appears that PJ has sorted it out, yay. The same thing happened recently at my webcomics hosted at keenspace.com when they upgraded to a new version of Apache, and they also fixed it quickly.

Game Results

HoneyBears	5	Adam 4 Jeffles 2 Tim 0 Ben -2 RussW -4
RicochetRobot	4	Tim 3 Ben -1 MarkY -1 Adam -1
Tayu	2	KevinU 1 JimG -1
Carcassonne	4	RussW 3 Jeffles 1 Clayton -1 Whendy -3
MammaMia	4	JimG 3 William 1 Tim -1 KevinU -3
Blokus	4	Jeffles 3 RussW 1 Clayton -1 Whendy -3
RicochetRobot	3	Tim 2 Omar 0 Garrett -2
WhatsThatOnMyHead	5	SarahM 3 MarkY 3 Adam -1 Matt -1 Ben -4
Samurai	3	Matt 2 Ben 0 SarahM -2
CarcassonneHunters	4	William 3 Whendy 1 Jeffles -1 Clayton -3
Tichu	2	( KevinU Garrett ) 1 ( Omar Ben ) -1
Attika	4	RussW 3 Omar -1 Garrett -1 KevinU -1
Carcassonne	4	Clayton 3 Matt 1 William -1 RussW -3

Go red bear!

Several diverse games of Carcassonne were played for meta reasons. The first was the Ark of the Covenant variant, which I won. Then a game of Hunters and Gatherers (which apparently took a while, based on some anguished wailing about the agonization). Then a game of original Carcassonne with the extra tiles and a new expansion which Clayton just acquired, the Count of Carcassonne, which changes things radically. It is basically a mechanism to let you put meeples into a holding area where they may then be added to your meeples when something completes. Thus even a cloister could be stolen from you. Analogous to the special tiles in Hunters and Gatherers, you only get to put a meeple into cold storage (as a corpsicle, I will say, since I just read the Larry Niven story "Rammer", since William gave the book to Clayton, but I digress) when you generously complete something which gives another player points and you get no points. We weren't sure if we liked this variant, but it seems worth trying again - the strategy certainly feels different. In particular, there may be less incentive to start a tiny city which can be completed by another player, giving you only 2 points but letting them make a corpsicle.

Jeffles had, incredibly, never played Blokus before. Or so he claims. Suspiciously, he won. Hmm. Coincidence? I don't think so!

Another game of Attika with various thwarted attempts to connect shrines, so it turned into a long haul to get all the buildings out. A close finish between Garrett and me: he almost could have won on his turn, but not quite, so then on my turn I did win.

Ratings

Rank Ratings:    
 2.0794 Tim
 2.0794 Jeffles
 1.3863 William
 1.2164 Matt
 1.0341 Adam
 0.6931 JimG
 0.6286 MarkY
 0.1823 RussW
-0.1824 SarahM
-0.2877 KevinU
-0.6931 Garrett
-0.8110 Clayton
-0.9808 Omar
-2.3666 Whendy
-3.2834 Ben

Win Ratings:
 1.9741 Tim won 2 of 4
 1.9741 RussW won 2 of 5
 0.8109 William won 1 of 3
 0.8109 Adam won 1 of 3
 0.8109 KevinU won 2 of 4
 0.6931 JimG won 1 of 2
 0.6286 MarkY won 1 of 2
 0.5878 Jeffles won 1 of 4
 0.5232 Clayton won 1 of 4
 0.5108 SarahM won 1 of 2
 0.3001 Matt won 1 of 3
 0.0000 Garrett won 1 of 3
-0.8630 Whendy won 0 of 3
-1.3863 Omar won 0 of 3
-2.1203 Ben won 0 of 5

Tim is the Devil! William, Jeffles, and I are Co-Vice-Devils. Ben is the Generous Angel.

If you are confused how the ratings work, you could peruse the FAQ.

I used GraphViz to generate the graph image.

Meta Game

Clayton was the Meta Devil and designed the following Meta Game.

Due to questionable circumstances, I find that I am the Meta Devil for this coming RussCon [2004-12-22]. Therefore, I use my infernal powers to declare that the Meta-Game shall be:

The Carcassonne Meta-Game!

Contestants will be awarded the following points:

    For each game of Carcassonne you play .........................    250 Meta-Points
    For each different Carcassonne variant you play, add ..........    250 Meta-Points
    For each expansion used in a Carcassonne game you play, add ...    250 Meta-Points
    For each game of Carcassonne you win, add .....................    250 Meta-Points

Examples:

1) Biff, Tanya and Poindexter play three (3) games of Carcassonne [750 Meta-Points per player]. The games are: Carcassonne (original), Hunters and Gatherers and Ark of the Covenant: three (3) different variants equals an additional 750 Meta-Points [total now = 1,500 Meta-Points per player]. In additional, during (original) Carcassonne, they used the Inns-on-Lakes/Cathedral expansion [add 250 Meta-Points] and during Hunters and Gatherers they used the Shaman expansion [add 250 Meta-Points], for a grand total of 2,000 Meta-Points each. Poindexter won, so his total is 2,250 Meta-Points.

2) Later that evening, Tanya also played Carcassonne (original) with Mary-Ellen, Sid and Yuri [250 Meta-Points]. They used both the Inns-on-Lakes/Cathedral and Traders-and-Builders expansions [add 500 Meta-Points], for a grand total of 750 Meta-Points each. Yuri won, so his total is 1,000 Meta-Points.

At this point, the standings are:

    Biff .........    2,000 Meta-Points
    Tanya ........    2,750 Meta-Points
    Poindexter ...    2,250 Meta-Points
    Mary-Ellen ...      750 Meta-Points
    Sid ..........      750 Meta-Points
    Yuri .........    1,000 Meta-Points

So Tanya would have the most Meta-Points and would therefore win the coveted title of Meta-Devil, with all the rights and privileges that accrue thereto.

In the event of a tie, the Meta-Devil will be determined by die-roll (highest score wins).

I, of course, will recuse myself from this contest.

Enjoy,

Clayton

All results will be awarded at the sole discretion of the judges. All judgments are final. Void where prohibited by law. Your mileage my vary: tough. This contest not offered in: AK, AL, DE, PA, WI, Belgian Congo, 40 Eridani and Lichtenstein. Not responsible for lost or damaged property. Insert tab "A" into slot "B". You are not who you think you are: we are.

I think Clayton earned the most meta points (how could he not, when the Meta Game involves playing lots of Carcassonne?), but he's pulling his weak recusing stuff, so according to Clayton, William is the Meta Devil and will design next week's Meta Game!

Links

Sin City movie trailer!

The Graphing Calculator Story is fascinating

Study: Cell phones scramble DNA

Everyone else has had more sex than me Flash music video

Parents Refused Access to Dead Marine's Email Messages I'm surprised there aren't many more cases like this.

Green Eggs and Sam by Dr. Seuss-Tolkien

Robbers scared off by dialog in Grand Theft Auto

Man Evicted From Hut On Chicago Drawbridge

Making Fiends Flash cartoons

Scared of Santa gallery

Cute Asian fake food photos

Harvard Sucks prank at football game

A Thought on Racism, complete with illustrations

Down and Out in Discount America: more good reasons not to support Walmart:

Appealing to the poor was Sam Walton's real genius. He figured out how to make money off of poverty. He located his first stores in poor rural areas and discovered a real market. The only problem with the business model is that it really needs to create more poverty to grow. That problem is cleverly solved by creating more bad jobs worldwide. In a chilling reversal of Henry Ford's strategy, which was to pay his workers amply so they could buy Ford cars, Wal-Mart's stingy compensation policies--workers make, on average, just over $8 an hour, and if they want health insurance, they must pay more than a third of the premium--contribute to an economy in which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart.

...

Wal-Mart spokespeople have denied that the company encourages employees to collect public assistance, but the documents speak for themselves. They bear the Wal-Mart logo, and one is labeled "Wal-Mart: Instructions for Associates." Both documents instruct employees in procedures for applying to "Social Service Agencies." Most Wal-Mart workers I've interviewed had co-workers who worked full time for the company and received public assistance, and some had been in that situation themselves. Public assistance is very clearly part of the retailer's cost-cutting strategy. (It's ironic that a company so dependent on the public dole supports so many right-wing politicians who'd like to dismantle the welfare state.)

2004-12-22 RussCon Report

News

Game Results

Ratings

Meta Game

Evening's Soundtrack

Links