(1) Cephalopod Coffeehouse
The esteemed Armchair Squid is hosting an online book club, in which each participant can choose their own favorite book (which was read during the current month) and post a review of it on the last day of the month. I just started reading the new book by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. It's kind of a beast, though -- 592 pages chock full of philosophy and linguistics. I hope to have it finished by the end of the month! It looks fantastic, and it may end up being useful "glass bead game research" for me, too.
(2) Obscure RPG Appreciation Day
Hosted by the enigmatic Catacomb Librarian, this old-school role-playing game celebration aims to shine a light on the lesser-known, and hopefully not yet completely forgotten, games that often don't get their due in the shadow of their more famous older brother, Dungeons & Dragons.The aim is to post a review (or rant, or some other related material) about a fantasy-themed RPG published between 1975 and 1989, on May 30. That's just one day prior to Squid's book club deadline, so I hope to have this one 'in the can' a bit sooner than that. I've identified my game, but won't be revealing its identity until the day of the post. :-)
I saw the Hofstadter book in the shop when I picked up the one I'm (probably) going to be profiling. It looked too ... thick. I passed on it based on dimensions alone but now I'll get to read your thoughts on it -- yay!
ReplyDeleteOr at least my thoughts on the first N pages of it! Thick is right, but Hofstadter has never let me down before.
DeleteFirst name not Leonard. Probably less nerdy, I expect.
ReplyDeleteAs I was typing his name, it did pop into my mind to write a parenthetical note: "(maybe Leonard's namesake?)" but I decided against it. And it's actually not the case, either! :-)
DeleteI really liked "Godel, Escher, Bach," by Hofstadter although I sometimes felt lost in the recursion.
ReplyDeleteYeah, G-E-B wasn't always the easiest read. I got through it with much more confidence once I realized that the stuff about Godel's theorem was just meant to be one example of something that a loopy, complex system (like a brain) can deal with, that modern-day computers can't... yet. :-)
DeleteThat 'yet' haunts Girl.
DeleteIt's a lot to come to terms with, but it's kind of a resurgence of the old idea of mind-body dualism. After all, if it's even remotely possible to produce either intelligent AI or a way to upload our brains to a computer, then spirit is software. That can mean a lot of things, but one thing it definitely means is "not hardware."
DeleteI found it to be mind opening in that I had heard people make reference to the idea that there were relationships between math, art, music and logic but this book did a nice job in explicating them. Probably not significant for other people but it was a paradigm shifting for me.
DeleteMe, too. I had already read Hesse's Glass Bead Game (which was built on the idea of those relationships) when I discovered G-E-B, but the latter showed how those relationships are really all around us -- it's not just a fictional hypothesis. :-)
DeleteHey, thanks for the plug!
ReplyDeleteThe other bloghop sounds fun, too. The only other RPG my friends and I played back in the day was Traveller. Did you play that one? Is it still around? (Have we had this discussion?) One friend did buy the intro book for the Star Trek RPG but I don't think we ever got past the player generation stage. That was usually my favorite part of those games anyway.
I've never played Traveller, but it's still definitely around. I played a Trek-inspired wargame, but never any of the licensed RPGs.
DeleteThe neglected old/rare game that I'm thinking of writing about later this month is something in that sci-fi genre, though I never had the chance to sit down and play it.
Do you ever look around your living room and think of the things that wouldn't be there if you didn't have kids? I feel somewhat the same way about my brain and RPGs. Words like paladin and hobgoblin probably wouldn't have entered my consciousness until years later without D&D.
ReplyDelete:-) Definitely. I always loved the various synonyms for magic spells... dweomer, cantrip, etc.
DeleteAnd of course, one can't forget stuff like this!