Blog: Archive for December, 2003

Slashdot featured an article about producing your own board and card games, which led to the following links:

• The Piecepack generic game system. All the pieces you might need for a board or card game, along with some additional useful parts.
• The Icehouse generic game system from Looney Labs, who also make a bunch of other games that look like they could be fun.

While puzzling over the options at Looney Labs, one of which includes the use of a deck of tarot cards for use in a game, I got interested in tarot decks again and spent some time browsing through U.S. Games, the biggest U.S. manufacturer of tarot cards (and regular playing cards); Llewellyn, a U.S. publisher of books on esoteric topics, now also big in the tarot world; and Learning the Tarot, an online course with an attached shop.

After much contemplation, I ended up buying myself a deck of Llewellyn's Witches' Tarot (also viewable on LearnTarot), an attractive deck that also happened to be on sale.

After following a couple of links from Llewellyn's page on the Victoria Regina tarot to articles about the artist and the deck, I found Sarah Ovenall's own website for the deck, where she enticed me into buying a signed copy of the deck directly from her.

Sarah seems like a neat person. Not only did she put together some really amazing tarot cards (especially if you're interested in Victorian England), but she also has a site full of advice on the collisions between copyright law and collage and an art car!

Llewellyn has some silly stuff in their fun & free section, including an online tarot reading, a “spell-a-day” feature, and a magical personality quiz. Mine, it turns out, is Pegasus. The positive description is fairly flattering, although the same can't be said for that of my “dark side”. I hope I'm not that bad....

I managed to please M with my gift of a desktop trebuchet. (A friend of ours mentioned that she was teaching some high school students about trebuchets, which reminded me that we'd seen these a couple of months ago and both of us said, “We've got to have one!”)

Meanwhile, M made me happy by getting me the standard Cuboro starter set and the Cuboro book, which has plans and ideas. Of course she's spent nearly as much time playing with it as I have. (See this old entry for details on my discovery of Cuboro and more links.)

For Christmas dinner, we tried out an infamous Tofurkey. It actually wasn't too bad, and the carrots we made to go with it were excellent.

Messy desks common among the “Kings of Chaos”, via a discussion on Speak Up, a graphic-design discussion site.

From the same discussion, a pointer to Malcolm Gladwell's site, which has links to his articles, including “Designs for Working”, on the social office; “The Social Life of Paper”; coolhunters (cf. Gibson's take; and khakis.

[An interesting side comment on khaki—in America, khaki is a light tan; in the UK, khaki (pronounced “CAR-key”) is a dark brownish green. Next time you get into an argument with someone from Britain about the color, you'll know why.]