Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

1. Are you easily intimidated by people in some sort of power position, like say your boss or a former teacher, when you meet them on the street?
   
   For some of them, perhaps, or I would give them deference based on how well I liked them at the time, but for others, no, there's no intimidation. Perhaps collegiality, given that we are likely closer to equals in our social status.


2. Do you like pants pockets and what do you tend to put in them?
   
   Heck yes! Pockets of sufficient size are what I basically need to carry my existence on my person - communication devices, identity documents, credit chits, all of it. For events, I tend to want to expand into cargo pants with Pockets of Holding, or a bag to carry things in. So yeah, pockets are awesome and should be functional in all garments that could use them.


3. Do you believe the saying, 'Everything old is new again?'
   
   Literally, no, but I do believe in the underlying sentiment that things tend to be cyclical, coming into prominence and then fading away, only to return to prominence in a new form as culture-makers attempt to define the future in terms of the past. Or define alternate futures using nexus points of the past and branching out into what seems most aesthetically pleasing from there.


4. Do you believe in serendipity?
   
   The possibility that things align in just the right ways, using coincidence and excellent timing, to allow for insight, knowledge, special events, remarkable successes, and the manifestation of things in such a way that it might almost look like destiny or fate out everything together?
   
   Only if it makes me look foolish at the end of things. I'm much more likely to believe in a multiversal conspiracy to pop my ego and make me laugh (or not) than I am that any sort of force is working in my favor or to assist me through everything to come out on top.
   
   You may contrast with the earlier entry on the Bastard's Prayer and call me a hypocrite, if you like. Because that seems to be a religious belief founded on the idea that serendipity shows up when we truly need it, planted there by a god whose existence is formally denied.


5. Did you have to look up serendipity before answering Question 4?
   
   Nope. Although the official definition says:

   n. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
   n. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
   n. An instance of making such a discovery.

   So, I suppose it's a different serendipity I'm talking about than this one, but discovery-by-accident is totally a thing that happens when you're a walking edge case. Sometimes searching for one thing results in seeing a different thing in the results and following that as a promising lead in your own or another journey. And considering the nature of the Internet as a giant hypertext document, indexed by robots that can be both surprisingly literal and seemingly sublime, the possibility of making a chance discovery is pretty high. And if you do enough of them in the course of a short time, you have a Wiki Walk.
   
   Unfortunate discoveries happen that way, too, like "the things above the register lane lines are too small to walk under." Or "no, you can't really search for things like 'text message and first amendment' because the boolean logic behind search engines will serve up lots of results about the text of the First Amendment." (The joys of being an information professional - you know exactly why your searches are falling and that most engines don't have sufficiently sophisticated syntax so that you can tell them exactly what you want to make them search better.)

We're over halfway done now. Suggestions still welcome.

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

Board and card games have been a part of my life since the very beginning of memory. Computer games followed shortly after, but the requisite manual dexterity to move and push buttons at the same time would come later on in life, as would the necessary keyboard and mouse skills. We'll get back to that in a bit.

I don't remember much of games like Candy Land or other toddler games. Presumably, they got played all the same, but memory for me tends to start around five or six years of age, and I already know that at those times, I was intellectually ahead of my social development. Early games in memory, then, are games like Sorry!, which have relatively complicated rules about movement of pieces, and a little dose of strategic thinking, once more than one of your pieces is on the board at any given time. That game could also be a good one for a card counter to start learning on, if they were so inclined.

The random element of Sorry! may have been a little too much for me, even though it got played a lot. Perhaps because the large numbers encourage counting in multiple, but also that there's a card that requires you to count backward and one that lets you split the number among as many pieces as you can move, so there's a little bit of addition and subtraction practice there, too.

Cribbage is also a favored card game in the family. Not just because of the low numbers it takes to play, but also because there's maths practice there, counting, adding, keeping a running total in your head, finding lots of creative ways to add up to 15.

Pinochle and Wizard help with bidding and tricks and trumps games, as well as figuring out how to keep a handful of cards all together. Hearts is there for when you want to get gently annoyed with each other for a bit and really practice your card counting.

I mention the math practice a lot because in games that involved a bank, like Payday or Life (not Conway's Game of Life), it always fell to a child to take on the role of the banker. The older children were wise to this, and happily deferred to the younger children on the matter. A child doesn't necessarily realize it, but playing games of this sort provides plenty of maths opportunities that won't occur in schools. (Payday, for example, uses simple interest as a core mechanic for building score.)

Surprisingly, we're not a Scrabble family, not really. Our linguistic pursuits tended to Boggle, so that we could show off the variety of language we had, rather than being constrained by point values and grid placements. Or spot-the-object games, where being able to describe objects by alternate names could often net useful points.

We don't play Cluedo with Dad any more, not since he was able to successfully win on one room, with one or two cards shown him.

I'm not entirely sure where the divide between "games are fun to play with children" and "look at all the lovely practice kids get" was for my parents, but considering how much they discouraged the use of computer and video gaming in favor of other activities, I suspect the weight falls a little bit more on the practice side. At least for the early years.

Right now, the library does occasional programs meant to help young people with their reading and math skills, and the specifically math-focused games always seem dry to me. We get to play a fractions game by building pizza pies. This game has a mechanic where you roll two number dice and an addition of subtraction symbol, along with an endless loop that you have to get out of by reaching the exit exactly. They're serviceable, certainly, but I've always felt that things that are supposed to be games should be enjoyable first and educational later.

Which brings us to Math Blaster. Which I enjoyed playing its early days incarnation, with an alien running back and forth between rockets, where you had to stop them at the one that would launch into the correct solution. And the incarnations of the Carmen Sandiego series (of which World was the only one I could finish - after a while, the time constraints on USA and Time started to get ridiculous to me, expecting me to chart a path where I only needed one clue to get to the next destination, but also to consistently pick the interview that would provide details about the suspect so that I could eventually collect the warrant necessary.) And an okay game called Headline Harry, where the player was a cross-time newspaper reporter collecting the facts and key words on an important historical event - but on a deadline against a tabloid that would distort the events if they made it to print first. (You had to figure out what time period you were in amongst a couple of possible stories and then input the correct people, places, and so forth.) At the time, all of these games came with a reference work that was supposed to be instrumental to your success in helping you decrypt the clues and go forward.

My absolute favorite of the bunch of those sorts of games are the Dr. Brain series. Puzzle-solving at its finest, with adjustable difficulty, no less, across a wide range of disciplines from art and music to logic, programming, and cryptography. Sadly, with the general demise of the Sierra brand, Dr. Brain hasn't been around for a couple decades.

So there was plenty of "edutainment" in my early computer gaming as well. I'm not surprised that I went into school pretty confident that I could handle whatever it threw at me, at least in terms of the schoolwork.