2005-06-22 RussCon Report

News

10 of us played 17 games! The turnout was quite bafflingly light in the first part of the evening. Some speculated that people were frightened away by the Meta Game.

On Saturday 2005-06-23, Alamo Drafthouse will be presenting the Flaming Lips' music disks Zaireeka (4 CDs meant to played together on different sound systems - long ago this was a New Year's tradition at JeffS's for several years). I recommend checking it out, but I myself will be in Lithuania at the time, alas.

Which reminds me to remind you that I shall be travelling in Eastern Europe from mid-July to mid-August. At this point I assume RussCon will continue as SansRussCon in my absence.

Game Results

Crokinole	2	Marty 1 JP -1
Boggle	2	RussW 1 Ben -1
Crokinole	2	Ben 1 Marty -1
Transamerica	3	Clayton 2 JP 0 RussW -2
Cloud9	4	Ben 3 William 1 Marty -2 SarahM -2
Tichu	2	( Ben William ) 1 ( SarahM Marty ) -1
Crokinole	2	JP 1 SarahM -1
Crokinole	2	SarahM 1 JP -1
Boggle	5	William 4 Chad 2 RussW 0 MarkY -3 Ben -3
Crokinole	2	( William Clayton ) 1 ( MarkY Chad ) -1
RicochetRobot	5	SarahM 3 Jeffles 3 JP 0 Ben -3 RussW -3
Can'tStop	4	MarkY 3 Clayton 1 William -1 JP -3
Cribbage	2	William 1 MarkY -1
Crokinole	2	( Chad Jeffles ) 1 ( Ben SarahM ) -1
Crokinole	2	( Chad RussW ) 1 ( Ben SarahM ) -1
DevilBunny	3	MarkY 2 SarahM 0 RussW -2
Frank'sZoo	4	Ben 3 JP 1 Clayton -1 Chad -3

As you can see, Crokinole got played an awful lot for some reason. The hot new old game!

I was utterly lame in Ricochet Robot and only barely managed to tie Ben for last place when I wond the last disk of the game.

Then in Devil Bunny Needs A Ham, I idiotically sent one of my chefs above the Line Of Death with only chefs of MarkY (who moved right after me) below him. Oh well, I didn't need that chef anyway.

Ratings

Rank Ratings:       
 3.6889 William
 1.7918 Clayton
 1.6094 Jeffles
 0.2469 Ben
 0.1823 MarkY
 0.0000 Chad
-1.3863 Marty
-1.6740 JP
-1.7271 RussW
-1.8560 SarahM

Win Ratings:
 3.1135 William won 4 of 6
 1.6094 Jeffles won 2 of 2
 1.3455 Ben won 4 of 9
 1.2164 Clayton won 2 of 4
 0.8755 MarkY won 2 of 5
 0.1823 Chad won 2 of 5
-0.1586 RussW won 2 of 6
-0.9808 Marty won 1 of 4
-1.8560 SarahM won 2 of 8
-2.1848 JP won 1 of 7

William is the Devil! Jeffles and Clayton are Co-Vice-Devils. Then Ben. Then MarkY.

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

I used GraphViz to generate the graph image.

Meta Game

I was the Meta Devil and created the following Meta Game:

The Meta Game is an arm wrestling contest, conducted as a self-paired round-robin tournament (i.e. each participant will arm-wrestle every other participant once, and you can do your matches any time during the evening and record your own results on a supplied tournament sheet). Your score is your number of wins. High score is the Meta Devil; ties broken randomly. All interested participants sign up on a list that will have the results matrix to keep track of who's wrestled whom. If you are leaving RussCon early, it would be good form to announce that you are leaving and give others a chance to arm wrestle you.

Several people seemed very surprised or confused at this Meta Game, thinking it was a joke. In fact it was inspired by a social card game at Flipside a few weeks ago which required the bearer of a card to challenge people to arm wrestle, and upon losing a match, give the card to the victor. JasonW had the card, and wrestled with fool, me, and Justin (who prevailed).

In hindsight, I should have made first tie-breaker be the head-to-head result between the tying players, but oh well.

Anyway, the full results were as follows (presented in a table like side tournaments at the US Go Congress):

	RussW	JP	Marty	Ben	MarkY	Chad	Jeffles	Total Wins
RussW		1		0	1	0		2
JP	0			0	1	0		1
Marty				0				0
Ben	1	1	1		1	0	1	5
MarkY	0	0		0		0		0
Chad	1	1		1	1		1	5
Jeffles				0		0		0

Ben was doing well in the contest with a total winning streak, until Chad showed up, who beat Ben as well as all others he challenged. They both ended up with 5 wins (since Ben wrestled Marty, who took off before Chad got a chance to), and by mutual consent agreed Chad is the Meta Devil and will design next week's Meta Game!

Links

Greg Mitchell column about Bush's missing WMD joke and more recent media toadying

Ohio GOP Coin-gate scandal gradually becomes more widely known

Eliminate them - more and more fascist torture-justifying rhetoric from defenders of Gitmo

"things people have said to me in language classes during the past year or so."

Chinese Factory Worker Can't Believe The Shit He Makes For Americans

Rock shirts (and Paper and Scissors) from Too Much Coffee Man... might appeal to certain fans of the game "Rock".

Rock Paper Scissors movie!

The Periodic Table of Comic Books

Mind Games: Hypnotist puts a guy playing a zombie shooter game into a trance and releases him into a real-life simulation of the zombie game. Film here. For multiple reasons, I highly doubt this stunt is for real!

Tom Cruise Kills Oprah short film clip

Baldwinsville man's Quran contest called hurtful: idiot new army recruit has website with contest called "Create A Pig With The Koran."

Bush's America shows the number of dead US soldiers in the Iraq War

Heart of the Beholder sounds like an interesting film!

Guys and Balls sounds like a cute film!

Nightlife: New York in the 70s

Six-legged puppy found in Malaysia: curiously, the locals regard this dog, probably mutated by our polluted modern environment, as a good luck sign!

Cambodian Troops Quarantine Quan'sul: There has been a small outbreak of "zombism" in a small town near the border of Laos in North-Eastern Cambodia.

Katy Flatland Century is a fun-sounding biking and skating event in Houston which I'd be tempted to go to except that it's July 17 and I'll be in Helsinki that day.

Open Letter to Kansas School Board about the Flying Spaghetti Monster