Testosterone overwhelms bullshit detectors.

The other day, Omaha and I were at a restaurant, and as we sat there I listened to the conversation behind me, one which encapsulated everything that's wrong with humanity in one utterly unreflective sentence:

If it brings out the beauty of life, why the fuck would you care if it's true?

Along the way, I also learned from the babbling young woman that Hiesenberg's Uncertainty Principle not only proves that telepathy is real, but that it validates the Tarot.

Grief, young men will listen to any amount of bullshit necessary to maintain the attentions of a pretty girl, won't they?

Pheremone poisoning

Last night, Omaha and I went to a local pagan potluck. We took Kouryou-can with us, and I have to say that watching her interact with boys her age was a highly enlightening experience. She's completely immune to the boys in her classroom, most of which she's grown up with, but with boys she doesn't know, it's a bit shocking.

She and another girl, E., have seen each other on and off for most of their lives, as well as the boy T. But their encounters with one another have been, at most, once a month, and usually far less often. Both Kouryou-chan and E.-chan are (usually) the kind of independent, hard-working, shockingly brilliant young women that come out of private schools. In the presence of T.-kun, however, they dissolved into giggling fits of girlhood. Half their mental capacity disappeared.

I made a joke about how they were all the same age. T.-kun objected. "I am not the same age. They're twelve. I'm thirteen." I said, "Right. Mentally, all about the same age." That immediately sent the three of them roaring with laughter and indignation.

Later, E.-chan suggested I just leave the three of them alone in one of the guest bedrooms in the house. "If you think I, or your father, or his father, would leave the three of you alone in a closed room, you're crazy." At which point both Kouryou-chan and E.-chan leapt to their feet, got in my face, and told me that I was being sick and perverted. "Good," I said. "You keep thinking that way, both of you, for, oh... about the next six years."

"Yeah, right," Kouryou-chan said. "Not likely," E.-chan agreed. But they kept the door open.

It's all very disheartening to a father, in a way. I'm sure they're both smart girls still, underneath it all. But if T.-kun's pheremones affect them that strongly... Naturally, I'm a dad. I worry about these things.

The Amazeing Labyrinth for the iPad [video game] [review]

Labyrinth is one of those board games that became an instant classic among a certain set, those who remember playing D&D in college and perhaps still play it but who now have children of their own. It's a simple enough game: you and your peers have a set number of prizes to find in a maze that's clearly laid out on the game board in front of everyone. Each player draws a card to determine their specific prize, which they keep secret from the others.

The board is made up of tiles that can be re-arranged. On his or her turn, a player takes the one loose tile and places it somewhere along the edge, shifting an entire row or column on the board, and freeing up another tile. This action re-arranges the entire maze, closing off some parts of the maze and making others accessible. If you're good, you can make a subtle shift that gives you access to your prize, while denying others access to theirs. Once all the prizes have been collected, you have to escape the maze. Your opponents try to stop you.

The players pieces are vaguely magical: knights, sorcerers, witches. The board has a strong D&D feel to it, and the objects you're recovering are cutely retro as well: magic lamps, scrolls, pots of gold.

My family loves this game. So when Omaha got a copy of the electronic version for her iPad, I agreed to play it with her. The original name ("The aMAZEing Labyrinth") has been brought back to distinguish it from the American "Labyrinth" game, a video game version of the classic physics puzzle. Omaha's due to make her own review, of course, that's what she does. But here's my impression.

It succeeds completely in translating the rules of the game into a working video experience. It doesn't sacrifice anything at all in that regard. To that extent, it's a playable, portable version of a beloved board game.

The cards have been eliminated. It's just your pieces on the board. Each time you would need to consult a card in the real-world version, the video game informs you in a pop-up "Your next prize will be shown when you press Okay. Don't let anyone else know your prize!" You're supposed to pick up the iPad and view it privately, then place it down so others can see your progress. Along the right is a control for the loose tile, as you get to decide it's orientation before placing it, as well as tallies for each player. Yellow arrows, as in the original, show where the tile can be inserted to shift a column, and the game enforces the "no undo" rule by eliding the one insertion point that would undo the previous player's turn. When you can't find your prize, there's a button that hides the players in case someone is standing on it-- a smart and very thoughtful utility.

Labyrinth for the iPad is a translation of a board game with strong emotional appeal enhanced by the physicality of the game pieces and moving tiles into an electronic game, an "experience under glass." As such, it loses a lot in translation. The transition from 3D to 2D means that a number of the visual cues I use to make sense of the board are missing. Your character pieces "dance" and occasionally fidget to distinguish themselves from the reward goals on the board, which may be distracting. The visual separation of tiles is "seamless" in this version, which makes planning even more difficult-- it's hard to tell what will move when you insert your piece. A faux-3D shadow effect makes the board very confusing when it's upside-down, meaning that when the other player is going I had a heck of a time planning my moves, and the art doesn't help.

The placement of the card and tallies makes good use of the landscape display, but the art is understandably different from the (now 25-year-old) original. There are some artistic clashes between the original stone-and-dirt artistic theme of the maze, and the new elements with their emphasis on calligraphic illumination and faux-stained glass. The cover art is silly and irrelevant (what the heck is that ghost doing?). A video game necessitates the use of text that was completely unnecessary in the original. Removing characters from the playlist was poorly documented and difficult to discover.

Labyrinth for the iPad is an excellent road trip tool: it will keep the kids, and the adults, occupied for quite a while: each game lasts about 45 minutes. It accomplishes what it set out to accomplish. But it's still no substitute for sitting around with the real board game, pop and chips, and having fun with the family.

Ouch!

I'm not sure who's playing on KUOW right now, but I was listening to a woman talk about how her ability to read other women was terrible. I think I heard her use the word "semiotic" in a sentence. But whatever else she said, her comment about reading women in Seattle was spot on:

I was in Seattle recently and I saw all these hard-looking women hanging out in cafes, and they had half-shaved heads and lots of peircings and nose rings and stretched ear lobes, and I turned to my friend and said, "Wow, there are all these comely lesbians in Seattle."

My friend snorted and said, "Those aren't lesbians. Those are women who were forced to become men because the men won't."

Yeeeowch.