The "Five things I've done that you probably haven't" Meme

[jducoeur]

Coming late to the party, as usual, but what the heck:

1. Navigated for an airplane at age seven.
2. Demonstrated (the hard way) why one should always wear a bicycle helmet.
3. Built the first known board for a game that hadn't been played for ~700 years.
4. Written a technical article that was obsolete before it was published.
5. Proven that it is possible (if deeply unwise) to turn a single-player videogame into a multi-player one.

(Was going to list "Participated in every extant Carolingian guild", but on review there are still two or three I haven't done yet...)

Comments

[calygrey.livejournal.com]

Eh, I did #2 as well. Worn a helmet ever since.

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

#5... It's never too late to over-commit yourself. ;)

(Which ones?)

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

#1…I suppose it depends how you define ‘navigated for.’ If that includes things like charts and navaids, then you've got me beat by a few years. If that means sitting in the right seat of a small plane and pointing at things out the window, then I started doing that when a friend of the family got his pilot's license when I was three years old. Some of my earliest memories are of the cockpit of a plane, and I was following along on the yolk before I could reach the rudder peddles.

[dsrtao]

I made an emergency decision: other people or me? So I aimed for the gap between parked cars, hit the parking meter, and ended up in the middle of the street on my back. The parking meter was sheared away a few inches above the concrete base, and I had an imprint of it in my chest for a while... pure luck that I didn't suffer a concussion or brain damage.

Wear your helmet.

[fitzw.livejournal.com]

#4. I wrote several in-house technical articles that were obsolete before I started (legacy software that needed additional documentation). Would that count?

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Sheared away? What kind of bicycle were you *on*?

[dsrtao]

A steel-framed mountain bike, predating the era of shock absorbers and built with the objective of safety by right of superior mass.

Metahacker saw the remains, you can ask him.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I didn't know such things existed. Learn something new every day...

[jducoeur]

(Which ones?)

Lessee, checking the back of the Liber: Baron's Boast of Hunters, Middle Eastern Dance/Drumming, Needleworkers and Tailors. One of these days, I really need to get over my allergy to sewing and give it a try...

[jducoeur]

If that means sitting in the right seat of a small plane and pointing at things out the window

Yep, that's what I meant. My father's more or less always owned his own plane, so he had me taking the maps and matching them to the terrain on nice VFR days from a pretty early age. (I don't actually remember when I started, although I'm sure it was by age seven...)

[jducoeur]

Having gotten the concussion (the brain damage has always been debateable) -- oh, yeah...

[jducoeur]

Hmm. I dunno -- technically yes, but at least it was intentional. In my case, I was writing the VRML chapter for a Java book being edited by new_man -- by the time it was released, the state of things had already moved on substantially. It helped breed my skepticism of computer books...

Enabling

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

I have a couple Queen's Favor kits and an extra doumbek.

Can't help you on the hunting, that's not my bag.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

We talked of this for years.

Until he won a disagreement with a bookcase dropped from a second-story window, with his head.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Sadly, the memorium has been paved over for the new Union...

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

I played my first game of Byzantine Chess this weekend.

I liked it a lot.

How much have you played it?

[jducoeur]

Moderate amount. It's probably the most-played Chess variant in the SCA, although it's one of those slightly fringy games. That is, it's definitely period, but it's a little weird -- it's from a Spanish source describing how Chess is played in the Byzantine empire, on the other side of the world. So I take it with a modest grain of salt.

Overall, it's not a bad game, although I wouldn't say it's one of my favorite period variants: the bishop is ridiculously weak even by period standards, the pawns less useful than usual, and the rook is insanely powerful. A nice change of pace, but not as deep as some games.

I'm fonder of some other variations, including the four-player Chess of the Four Seasons and The Forced Game, also from the same book. (The Forced Game is my favorite way to foul up modern chess experts. It's straight period chess, with one difference: if you *can* make a capture on your turn, you *must* make a capture. Totally messes up every chess strategy...)

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

Well, I feel a bit validated now, because those -- along with the weakness of the queen -- were my observations about the game.

The forced capture sounds kinda cool.

[mikekn]

Haven't done it yet, but I should have #3 done in a few weeks - making some boards for El Mundo finally.

[jducoeur]

The weakness of the queen isn't peculiar to Byzantine -- that's standard Medieval chess. The modern hyper-powerful Queen came about only at the *very* tail end of SCA period.

Broadly speaking, period chess is like modern, except:

-- Queens move one space orthogonally;
-- Bishops have a short leap of two;
-- Some of the weird fiddly bits (castling, the initial pawn move) were occasional variants, rather than standard.

Overall, the result is a slower, more strategic game, with less of a tendency to turn suddenly...

[jducoeur]

Yay! Good for you, and I look forward to playing the reconstruction. Will you have it with you at Pennsic?

[mikekn]

Yep! I've even got a class scheduled for it.