2005-03-02 RussCon Report

News

bonvolu trafi la pilkon malforte 13 of us played 11 games!

Putt-Putt Golf!: Our Most Assiduous Reader will recall that a recent Meta Game left us with $51 (thanks to high bidder JeffS) to use for the Greater Good of RussCon somehow. After some discussion, it has been decided to do a lavish all-expenses-paid luxurious and glamorous Putt-Putt golf outing (as suggested by Ben)! Saturday 2005-03-12 interested parties will convene at the Putt-Putt at 6700 Burnet, at 3pm. We'll play standard Putt-Putt rules, and the winner is the player with the best (lowest) score. In the case of tie, we'll do Einfach Genial type scoring (e.g. if Alf got 3 holes in one and Bert only got 2, then Alf wins the tie.) "What glory and honor shall rain down upon the winner like manna from heaven?" you might wonder. Well, any money left over from the $51 will get used for some additional RussCon festivity, chosen by the winner of the Putt-Putt tournament! (I will exercise veto power if it is too ridiculous.) In the unlikely event that $51 is not enough to cover all of our playing costs, let's just split the extra costs. If you are seriously interested in showing up for this but can't make it by 3pm and want to petition me to push it later, please contact me very soon.

STAPLE is an independent media (comics, art, zines, etc) expo from 10am to 6pm on Saturday March 5. It only costs $5 and people like Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man) and Scott Kurtz (Player vs Player) will be there.

Spanish: 2pm Sunday at Texspresso on Anderson Lane (by Alamo Drafthouse Village) is the weekly basic informal Spanish RussCon study group... so far it consists of me studying Spanish by myself at Texspresso, except one time Whendy came with a Spanish instructional CD we played around with. :)

Game Results

FairyTale	5	Jeffles 4 KevinU 2 Ben 0 MikeC -2 JP -4
Tayu	2	RussW 1 MarkY -1
LostCities	2	RussW 1 MarkY -1
RicochetRobot	2	MarkY 1 RussW -1
Tichu	2	( KevinU William ) 1 ( Ben Jeffles ) -1
PuertoRico	5	ToddG 4 JP 2 MikeC 0 TimG -2 Clayton -4
MasterLabyrinth	2	RussW 1 MarkY -1
Therapy	6	William 5 Ben 2 Whendy 2 SarahM -3 Jeffles -3 KevinU -3
Boggle	5	RussW 4 MarkY 2 JP 0 TimG -2 Clayton -4
UndTschuess	6	KevinU 5 SarahM 3 Jeffles 1 Whendy -2 William -2 Ben -5
Bluff	7	Clayton 6 Jeffles 4 KevinU 2 JP 0 Ben -2 Whendy -4 RussW -6

Fairy Tale is a Japanese card game Mike brought. You're trying to collect a set of cards that scores well. Very loosely like Guillotine in that sense, and in the sense that there is a card type that scores like Palace Guards. That's all I know about it.

Due to our continually finishing games while everyone else was still playing, MarkY and I got to play a series of four 2-player games (from which I emerged the 2-player victor). (I started off great in Ricochet Robot, too, but then MarkY woke up or something and ended up beating me by 2 points in the end.)

Therapy is some sort of social/party/trivia game which Sarah brought; judging by the sounds of mirth, it was entertaining. Apparently there was a crucial rules misunderstanding which hurled Whendy from the heights of victory to the slums of third place.

Hall of Shame: A reminder to please record the games carefully, otherwise I end up throwing away the record or else emailing people from the game to try to figure it out. Sometimes the devil points are wrong or missing, sometimes, players' names are ambiguous, and on rare occasions, the same name shows up twice. This one was amusing! I discovered that my program does not check for duplicate player name in a game record. :)

Ratings

Rank Ratings:       
 2.9957 KevinU
 1.9741 William
 1.6094 ToddG
 1.6094 Jeffles
 1.0498 RussW
 0.2231 SarahM
-0.6931 MikeC
-0.6931 MarkY
-0.9163 JP
-1.0987 Whendy
-1.2730 Clayton
-1.3863 TimG
-2.4853 Ben

Win Ratings:
 2.8416 RussW won 4 of 6
 2.3026 William won 2 of 3
 1.9253 KevinU won 2 of 5
 1.6094 ToddG won 1 of 1
 1.4996 Clayton won 1 of 3
 0.3975 Jeffles won 1 of 5
-0.3647 SarahM won 0 of 2
-0.4463 MikeC won 0 of 2
-0.4463 TimG won 0 of 2
-0.5189 Whendy won 0 of 3
-0.8235 JP won 0 of 4
-1.4351 Ben won 0 of 5
-1.6094 MarkY won 1 of 5

Kevin, William, and I are Co-Devils! Todd is Vice-Devil. 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

Tim was the Meta Devil and mailed out the following Meta Game:

Did you know that March 2 is Texas Independence Day?
A metagame in honor thereof:

Receive 5 points for playing a game involving Texas;
Receive 1 point for playing a game with T in the title or 3 points for playing a game with X in the title;
Receive 5 points for playing a game involving state employees;
Receive 10 points for playing a game with a state employee;
Receive 3.1416 points for playing a game involving yellow roses;
Receive 11 points for singing the state song ("Texas, Our Texas") at any time between 7pm and 10pm Wednesday, or receive 2.5 points for singing "Yellow Rose of Texas" or 2 points for "Deep in the Heart of Texas";
Receive 4 points if you arrive at Russcon in a pickup truck.

It was not explicitly stated, so I assume this was a simple "high score wins" scoring system. There were 3 types of game played: Those with 'T' in them (earning 1 meta point), those with a state employee (earning 10 meta points), and those with 'T' in them with a state employee playing (earning 11 meta points). Only 4 1-point games were played (all the 2-player games with me and MarkY, coincidentally), so they are irrelevant. By my reckoning, the meta points earned were as follows:

44 Ben, Jeffles, KevinU
32 JP
22 MikeC, SarahM, William, Whendy
21 Clayton, TimG
14 MarkY, RussW
11 ToddG

It should also be noted that Whendy gave rousing renditions of "Texas, Our Texas" and "Deep in the Heart of Texas", but they did not count since they were after 10pm. Perhaps luckily for her, the additional points wouldn't have affected the final outcome. I also somebody talking about somebody coming in a pickup, but I don't know who and it wasn't recorded anywhere that I can see, so tough noogies on that. The 4 points wouldn't change anything unless it was Jeffles or Kevin. Hmm, I've heard Kevin has a pickup, so maybe it was him. Oh well! I am cruel and capricious!

There is a 3-way tie for first, and no tie-breaker specified, so I will just break it randomly as usual. Thus I find that Ben is the Meta Devil and will design next week's Meta Game!

Links

Superhero fun:

Spider-man's greatest bible stories!
Motivational Posters with comic characters
This Place Sucks Justice League Office Space cartoon

Weird science:

N.E. PA Polar Shift Preparedness Site - Look out, the earth may stop rotating in summer of 2003!!!
The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time ... I'm not sure I agree with a lot of things on this list, and there are some glaring omissions, but it's amusing nonetheless.
Analysis of the Texas Instruments DST RFID "The Texas Instruments DST tag is a cryptographically enabled RFID transponder used in several wide-scale systems including vehicle immobilizers and the ExxonMobil SpeedPass system. This page serves as an overview of our successful attacks on DST enabled systems."

The Zoomquilt is a cool piece of art that you can keep zooming into

Self-Referential Aptitude Test (SRAT) logic puzzle

Austin Game Exchange is a mailing list based on the Freecycle concept