Self-Referential

These are the weeknotes1 on the games I’ve played purely for fun2 in the last few months. There’s very few listed below, which is very disappointing to look back on… I can’t help thinking I’ve missed a couple. But I do have a “new” Xbox360, and I’ve been tidying up some space, so maybe that will change. Board games With some more overdue tidying needed, and with a Dining Room that is essentially a wide corridor, I struggle to play board games, even solo ones, but here’s a couple I made time for: ...

My current keyboard is a Perixx PX-1200 Illuminated Gaming Keyboard but it’s wearing out, and they don’t make them any more, so I’m looking at different models. As is often the case with technology, I don’t think my requirements are that unusual, but then I start looking for something I think is common, and it doesn’t exist. So in the hope that someone who reads this ( probably because I pointed them at it ) has better knowledge than I do, I’ve listed my requirements here. ...

How can we help each other? Introduction What’s your preferred working situation - completely alone and self-driven? As half of a pair, as a leader or advisor in a group, or as a “cog” in a much larger hierarchy? For me I believe I’m much better at working in a pair, or in a small team, rather than purely on my own, be it co-writing something, or brainstorming with a customer on a project or solution. ...

Introduction This question was asked in the Generalist World Slack a little while ago: Quick Question - I often find myself feeling like I’m not doing enough. There are just SO many things I want to do that I feel like time is running out and I should get at it. I often end up in confusion, panic and anxiety. Does anyone else struggle with this? How do you calm yourself or redirect yourself to focus on ’top priorities'? ...

Prologue: As I wrote up in my recent weeknotes, earlier this month I helped run a hybrid megagame called Bad Moon Rising, organised by South West Megagames. This was a megagame based in an alternate history of the world, set in the 1970s during the Cold War, but with all the nuclear powers having also established bases on the Moon. If you’re not familiar with megagames do watch this video, or think of a “megagame” as just being a board game or tabletop role playing game, except with anywhere from 20 to 300 players. ...

From about July 2021 until June 2022 I played “Battle of Tuyệt Quá HởTấn”, one of the “Section by Section” games by Hearts of Oak. This was played online over WhatsApp and Google Slides. The setting is a small village during the Vietnam War. Both the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army are defending the civilians in the village, with American soldiers coming to interrogate them using four platoons from two companies. That’s about 200 hundred soldiers on each side. Before any pieces are placed on the virtual board, the game looks like the image below. The village to the North of the map, the darkest green is jungle, the light green is brush, the blue is paddy fields. ...

An intentionally browseable set of weeknotes for my previous week1. I worked: Cynefin, the sense-making framework, was covered in a personal introduction by Greg Brougham, which I was able to access as part of my membership of Liminal. While I’ve read or watched introductions to Cynefin before, to get a rough idea of the core concepts, this was more of a personal view. It covered the origin of the concept, and what appealed to Greg about it, some of which I understood, some of which I needed to read up on. But - as with much other systems thinking, and conceptual advances in general - I was struck by how much of the knowledge and theories were attached to their main creator, or to a single book or other piece of work. Personally I’m both aware of how much those concepts, and their authors, must owe to the team around them - and also I tend to be far more interested in the concepts than the people, so the strength of that link feels like unnecessary baggage. ...

I worked: I attended DSET - an online military training conference. It was good to see them go hybrid, although I found their chosen platform Hopin disappointing. The event was well handled by Ruddy Nice Limited, especially the issues such as intermittent connectivity and an emergency alarm in the middle of the very first session. Similarly I was at CPCF 6, the Cyber Physical Convergence Forum. I was particularly impressed by Helen Sutton of Dataminr and their presentation, and the emphasis on selling through demonstrating knowledge rather than hard marketing. And also impressed by the overall aim of the event to be hybrid, even with a relatively small space representing the physical side of the event. CTG Intelligence is worth keeping an eye on if you work in any part of security. ...

As fifty percent of my readership complained about the breathless bulleted format I’ve been using, which is a very fair point to make, I’m experimenting with different formatting this “week”, although I’ve much less material. Considering how I create these blogs I should be able to generate an index easily, so it’s trivial for people to see if there’s something of interest each time. ( A newsletter that does this really well is the tl;dr sec newsletter, the format actively encourages picking and choosing the sections relevant to you, I aspire to do the same. ) ...

Mainly as a result of discussions at the CardStock meetups, along with Nick Kellet’s release of the Deckible platform, and a couple of projects I’m working on, I got to wondering what makes a card deck recognisable as a typical deck of cards, rather than something else? So… What makes a card deck a card deck? Is this what you see? In no particular order… Cards are two dimensional Viewable areas are single or double sided only All cards within a deck are the same shape All cards within a deck have the same finish All cards are flat All cards are solid Cards are intended to be handled Cards are opaque Cards are of sufficient size to be handled comfortably by humans Detail on the cards can be read unaided The cards’ shape is symmetrical Cards are divided into suits Each card is individual, and are not duplicated within the deck ( arguably, what about Uno? ) Cards are made of paper or a paper-like material Cards have the same style of design throughout a deck Decks contain approximately fifty cards Corners are rounded, mostly The back is usually different to the front They can be shuffled They can be dealt Cards are interacted with through visual and tactile stimuli only What did I miss? ...