I got a chance to play it a few times at lunch and thought it was a lot of fun! The idea is you put down tiles “domino-style” and try to build loops, competing against your opponent to finish them. It’s easy to pick up, plays fast (about 20 minutes), it’s cleverly strategic, and well balanced. I think young kids would have an easy time of this one, but adults will enjoy the brain-bending situations and risky strategies that come from trying to out-think your opponent’s next move.

You can play with paper pieces, but Louis’ set is printed on stickers and then stuck to fancy wooden tiles. Clever monkeys could do the same thing with some foam-core or cardboard and have a nice set of their own.

To spite the treadmill for making assumptions about how fit people my age should be, I ran a little faster and further than normal, fueled by leftover cupcakes.

I bring the bag to the checkout and the lady looks at the numbers I drew on the bag – 2 of xxxx, 4 of yyyy, and 4 of zzzz.

Even though I tagged the bag, I guess they make the cash people double-triple-quadruple check everything.  She spent a while scrutinizing the bag from the outside, flipped it and recounted from the other side, stuck her hand in and felt around, scrutinized again… Finally she pulls everything out, lays it down on the counter, sorts them into groups, compares against the bag list again, considers for a while, and ONLY THEN, finally like forever minutes later, types it in.

Pop Quiz: Can you count to 10?

I’d have to be just about the worst, most desperate shoplifter ever to sneak a washer past a cashier -in- the bag I presented to her. They cost literally pennies and must be the cheapest single items in the store.  Imagine the paperwork if they inventory their washers and come up one short!

As I was playing with them at home, I saw that there are teeny-tiny numbers printed along the edges of all the hardware – maybe she was actually trying to read every individual nut to verify? I don’t know what she gets paid per hour, but there’s probably some economic benefit to actually trusting the customers.

Incidentally, the clamps work great. If you’re ever looking for a bolt that fits your camera tripod mount, it’s a UNC 1/4-20. With a washer and a nut you can lock your camera down to just about anything.

Forget that – I’d already been outside for an hour and a half and I couldn’t stand around anymore. I decided to walk.  It wasn’t that bad, really, except that I had a bag full of dinner and was looking forward to getting home. I was facing away from the rain the entire way, it was pretty warm out and I’d dressed properly. But my coat was getting stiffer as I walked – when I get home I saw why. My coat and bag had literally frozen solid all along the backside.

It’s a really elegant algorithm that in a simple way mirrors what’s happening with things like pigmentation and growth formation in living systems – I thought this particular set of rules looked kindof like brain coral. It’s fun to look for patterns in the shapes – it’s like looking at clouds, except after a while your eyes hurt!

(Brain Coral from the USGS Archive)

After rummaging through the basement and a trip out to the hardware store, I managed to build a rudimentary fluorescent lightbox that works pretty well (successes are boring – more about that later). After all that effort, I suddenly realized what an idiot I’d been: I had been staring all along at readily available lightboxes all over my house – backlit lcd monitors!

It suddenly seemed almost too easy: Open up a blank white document, sit the slide on the bevel of my laptop screen, and snap a digital picture!

But something unexpected happened – the slide is so small that when I got a macro shot of the picture, I could see the pixels of my lcd! They’re not visible to the naked eye, but when you’re stretching an inch of film out to 3000 pixels wide, and doing a relatively long exposure through a piece of opaque film, the brightness difference between the pixels and the troughs becomes really vivid.

So it wasn’t so stupid of me to build my own lightbox after all! There’s a couple of easy ways to get around the pixels showing up if I was really dedicated to using a laptop screen as my light source:

1) Put a diffusing material, like some white plexiglass, over the screen. I’m basically doing this with my “real” lightbox already. This should smooth out the pixels underneath into a uniformly white area.

2) Easier: Bring the slide forward off the screen and shoot with a wide open lens so the pixels blur in the background depth of field

3) Harder: Open up the monitor, peel all the LCD layers off and just shoot slides against the solid self-illuminated background layer. (If I had a broken LCD kicking around someplace I might consider this)

But then you can take it into Photoshop and add a “Chromatic Abberation” effect to it. There’s no filter for doing this (at least in my version of PS), but you can easily make an action to do this – grab all the colour channels individually and use sphereize with a low setting to distort them slightly. This has the added benefit of doing a bit of fisheye distortion and defocus on your final image, so it looks a little more dynamic. You can do all kinds of neat things to generate rainbow distortions. There’s a way to approximate this in the RAW image importer by picking absurd values for Chromatic Correction, but that’s a really roundabout technique. I’ve found gaussian blurring the individual colour channels on a highlight layer is particularly effective at adding crystalline rainbows to your sparkling highlights.

I don’t have a problem with using Photoshop to polish up your 3d work, but if you look around on Flickr at a lot of folks doing generative art, you’ll see the effect being used everywhere as a crutch for doing decent camera work and interesting lighting. Now that I’ve done it in front of you, you’ll start to see it all over. Like lens flares, and those horrible instagram gradients everyone’s throwing on their pictures – it’s super trendy now but it’ll date your work and in a couple of years you’ll look back on it and be embarrassed by how cheesy it is.

A good friend lent me his slide scanner, which does an awesome job, but takes like two minutes per frame to scan them in – if I’m going to go through a box of a few hundred, I need something a bit faster. Turns out a digital camera set to macro and shot through a dark tube (lined with not-shiny black construction paper) can get pretty decent images! I’ll take a photo of my rig once I have it all figured out.