Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

Last night in a dream I was playing an interesting (possibly) RPG. Again it was one of these modern-style restrictive one-off systems, designed solely for whodunnits, for a GM and one or two players. The general idea was that the players (who are detectives along the lines of Poirot etc) advance through various predefined scenes and encounters, gathering information and impressions, and then at the end they are given a multiple-choice sheet in which they have to tick the box of the NPC who they think was the culprit.

In the dream it was quite fun, although I dare say in real life it would be quite hard for the GM to generate scenarios. But that is true of any 'solving mystery' type of game, and at least this one, because of the restrictions on what the PCs can do, you know that you don't have to cover too much ground outside of the main plot.

But really first I should do a proper test of the Haunted House game, as my migraine rather knackered the first one.

I wait with slight terror to find out which of you are going to be getting heavily into these.

Desperation or genius on LJ's part? You decide.

Edited to add: I should have had a sweepstake on who would be the first to crack and sign up.
Impulsiveness, thy name is kauket...
(Yes, the games page helpfully tells you which of your friends have signed up for stuff.)

You might like to check out this new Flash game by a friend of mine.  Control a unicyclist, propeller twirling and grapple swinging, as he steals the Tzar's treasure: just the sort of game that I'm hopeless at, but still great fun because of the charming design.

Click here http://undyingking.mybrute.com to trounce my purple-haired warrior in a neat little Flash game. It doesn't take much time, you don't get to control your fighter or make moves or anything technical like that! But a pyramid scheme means that you can power me up just by giving it a go (and also presumably power up chrisvenus, who suckered me in). Go on, you don' have to register or anything...

Wired is that prestigious magazine of the technological elites, its finger firmly on the cutting edge of all things geeky and zeitgeisty, right?

Apparently there's a new boardgame called Settlers of Catan, which is "poised" to become popular in the US. "Along the way, it's teaching Americans that board games don't have to be either predictable fluff aimed at kids or competitive, hyperintellectual pastimes for eggheads. Through the complex, artful dance of algorithms and probabilities lurking at its core, Settlers manages to be effortlessly fun, intuitively enjoyable, and still intellectually rewarding, a potent combination that's changing the American idea of what a board game can be."

Who'd have thought it? Why have none of us ever heard of this game before -- why have the Germans been keeping it secret for the fourteen years since its launch? What will those fiendish foreigners come up with next?

You may have been idly wondering why I haven't run my usual Premiership prediction game this season. (Or of course you may be relieved, in which case you'll probably want to skip the rest of this post too.)

I think the Premiership race is going to be even more tedious this year than it has for the last few. It looks like Chelsea will get back ahead of Man Utd, and it's seems likely Liverpool will overtake Arsenal. Spurs or maybe Pompey for 5th, with Villa, Blackburn and Everton all falling away. Maybe a surprise strong showing from Sunderland or Newcastle. That's about as exciting as it'll get.

I have to admit though that the reason I'm so unenthused is because of deep sickening trepidation about West Ham's season to come. This is the most pessimistic I've been at season kickoff since the pre-Redknapp days. I fully expect us to be struggling to avoid relegation, and can only hope that there'll be three sides sufficiently worse.

How has this happened, after finishing solidly in the top half last year? Since then we've managed to alienate our best goalkeeper and sell his only decent backup; our only purchase of the summer looked hopelessly outclassed on Sunday; we've sold one of our first-choice centre-halves, despite already being hopelessly short there -- and a whole gang of lesser squad members; we've had to pay something like £6M just to get rid of one particularly disappointing signing; and two of the most expensive players in the club's history are still injured, having played less than a dozen games between them since signing last year. I could go on.

It's clear that the owners have basically fouled up hideously financially; spending far more money than they could afford, and seeking to claw back as much of it as they can, now that the credit crunch has hit their bank. Curbishley didn't help, sloshing that money into notoriously injury-prone players like Bellamy and Dyer. After just two games he's already got that hunted expression we normally assocate with January onwards. I suspect the only thing that may keep him in post is if they can't afford to fire him.

The only bright aspect is that it looks like a West Ham fan may be the next ruler of the soi-disant free world. I son't suppose that'll really help much, but at least it's better than Arsenal's most famous supporter, whose name differs by only one letter.

A few things that have caught my eye just lately:

• PMOG, The Passively Multiplayer Online Game -- mentioned by killalla, basically a way of making ar$ing around on the Web more fun. Needs Firefox. See also pmog.
  
• What does atheism mean to you? Interesting finding from the Pew Foundation that an impressive 15% of US atheists are either absolutely or fairly certain that there is a God. (As are a mighty 40% of agnostics.)
• Nice little film of a mechanical escalator device. I just think this is a really ingenious design.
• Labrador have released their free 2008 Summer Sampler, to which I can't find a link on their site, but here's a direct link to the zip itself. "A summerish mix of recent favourites from The Sound of Arrows, The Radio Dept. and Club 8, lost classics from Acid House Kings, Caroline Soul and Chasing Dorotea and sun packed songs by [ingenting] and lots more." Many of the 30 songs will already be familiar if you know Labrador stuff, but if not then you really should.
• Typetester is a neat little online utility that allows you easily to compare your chosen sample text in a variety of fonts, spacings, colours, weights etc. I anticipate using this a lot.
• Relatedly, see your chosen text as smoke, droplets, lovehearts, fireworks etc, here. Pretty!
  
• This looks like a good recipe for elderflower cordial, which now is the time to make. Anyone tried doing so?
• Does reading Stephen R Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books make you feel as gelidly preterite as a carious scoria? It does me, but this useful page helps make sense of it all.
• Conservapedia has posted this email exchange with evolutionary microbiologist Professor Robert Lenski (longish, but worth reading). Good example of how a scientist can comprehensively demolish an idiotic opponent. I can only guess that one of the other Conservapedia editors hates Schlafly.

That'll probably do for now!

Goodbye Gary Gygax, it seems.

Like most people of my sort of age, he provided my introduction to role-playing. We may have moved onwards and outwards, but we can still thank him for our beginnings.

I met him a couple of times at Gamesfairs, when he was still with TSR. Being young and cocky, I did not pay him as much respect as I later thought I probably should have. But he seemed like a pleasant chap, and took the teasing in very good part.

I don't really know what he'd been up to in recent years, but I hope he was able to put the various disputes etc behind him and look happily over what he achieved.

If you haven't already seen this, you might like to give it a go -- not just because of the free rice aspect, but because it's a fun and well-designed game.

Get three in a row right and you go up a level -- get one wrong and you go down a level. At higher levels you get asked more difficult words, difficulty being assessed by the proportion of previous contestants who've got them wrong.

50 is the highest level, so if you can stay there for any length of time, you're doing pretty well. My longest run at 50 was 4 words. Beat that if you dare!

And you'll learn lots of interesting (but, for the most part, practically useless) words.

(Thanks to watervole for pointing me at it!)

This is quite a funny idea, I thought. Do any ofyou still play Minesweeper?