Canberra Intervarsity Choral Festival (CIV)

This was formerly the home of the 54th Australian Intervarsity Choral Festival in Canberra, held in July 2003.  It's not any more, of course. The official link (www.civ.aicsa.org.au) now points to the new CIV site.

60IV finished on Saturday 18 July 2009, or slightly later for people who were quarantined for the Dreaded Lurgi in the maximum security wing of Hobart Hospital.

The next Canberra IV starts on 15 January 2010, in hardly any time at all 2010-01-15T16:00:00+11:00 down %days% days + %hours%:%mins%:%secs%.

Car Bingo

The BatPup, my younger daughter, developed a fascination for cars: pretty much the first word she learned to recognise that wasn't a family member was Toyota.  So I produced Car Bingo, which is nothing more than what it sounds like: a game to play on car trips, in which you mark off the car logos you spot out the window.

Integrating it directly into this site would require writing a Drupal module, but it's late and I want to get this site up and running, so here it is in a plain  brown paper wrapper.  You'll have to click Back to get back her afterward -- yeah, I know, primitive, eh?

Comics: Make Me An Offer!

These comics are for sale in sets, because that makes it easier. I'm not asking much: ten or twenty bucks a box would be fine. They're not in mint condition, obviously - they're my comic collection for reading, not for investing! Here are the major sets; see below for a complete list of what I've got and some extras you might like:

¹ Resurrection Man, Power of SHAZAM, Supergirl, H.E.R.O., Challengers of the Unknown: a nice set of nineties/noughties stuff that didn't get the hype they deserved.
² All the output of Valiant Comics from their beginnings until the godawful Deathmate crossover, shortly before they went bust. Lots of good stuff in there, especially Harbinger and Solar.

Here's an approximate set of postage prices from where I am in Tasmania (post code 7116) to various well-known destinations:

All are published by DC unless otherwise noted. "SCH" means "Stopped Collecting Here", ie I gave up on collecting the series before it finished. Otherwise, I generally have the complete set.

Not Me

Occasionally I collect work by other practitioners of the filking arts who, for whatever reason, don't have their stuff safely stored on a webpage for posterity.  Without wishing to claim credit for anything at all, I would like to make these gems more available.  So here they are.

Operation: Orange Balloons

The following is from a blog post of mine, substantially rewritten and improved by Jacinta, an old Smithfieldian friend.  You're welcome to take this idea and use it yourself as well.  The plan is to stick an orange balloon and the following letter in an envelope and stick the envelope in a letter box; rinse and repeat for every house on your street.  Then see if Halloween can be made Australia-compatible.  Worth a try, anyhow...

Halloween is an American holiday that very few people in Australia see any reason to celebrate. 

Right up until you have kids.

Once you have kids, Halloween is an excuse to dress up and go for a walk. And so we need a way to lessen the two main issues with Halloween in Australia, which are these:

1. That very few people bother with it, so the kids that do go wandering from house to house feel rather alone and embarrassed to be doing so; and
2. That very few people bother with it, so the people who answer the door to these occasional kids end up having nothing in the house to offer and feel socially awkward for it.

So enter Operation: Orange Balloons. The plan goes like this:

I would like to encourage children of the area to come “trick or treating” around the neighbourhood (minus the tricks, thank you), but only to houses that have orange balloons showing. Along with this letter is an orange balloon.

If you want to see the cute costumes, and maybe send your own kids out as part of the celebration, blow up the balloon and hang it up outside.  On your letterbox is good.  Then lay on some lollies for the visiting munchkins.  If all else fails and nobody shows up, you’ve got some sugar to console you!

If you would prefer not to have anything to do with it, just throw the balloons away (or drop them back in our letter box for recycling) and ignore the whole mess.

Kids who want to go trick-or-treating must do so only at houses with balloons; doing so at any other house is a definite no-no.

If you run out of lollies, you can always take your balloons down.

I think it's worth a try. Halloween is Saturday this year, so it's a good year to start.

Let's see how it goes.

Quiz: What Item Of Office Equipment Are You?

The AICSA Standard Bartok Meta-Rules

Bartok

These are the rules and meta-rules for the game of Bartok, a card game for two or more players that falls into the general category of combination shedding games, and the specific category of satanically evil ones.

Superscripts in the rule sections refer to the meta-rules, below.

Initial Rules

The setup is a stack and a discard pile. The deck may be a single or double deck; no indication of the origin of a particular card from a double deck is required.

The dealer shuffles the deck. Players are dealt five cards each from the deck.¹ The remaining cards are placed face-down in the stack. At her leisure the dealer turns up the top card from the stack and places it beside the stack to begin the discard pile, whereupon the hand begins. Play begins immediately with the player to the left of the dealer.

In turn, each player must follow rank or suit. (So, if the top card on the discard pile is a 3♡, a legal play is any 3 or any ♡). If a player cannot play a card, she must pick up a card from the stack, after which her turn is complete.²

A player with one card left in her hand must speak the word “Bartok” clearly at some time before the next player begins his turn. If another player notices that she failed to do this and calls her on it, she must pick up a card from the stack and place it in her hand.³

The first player to dispose of all her cards in accordance with the rules is the winner of the hand. The winner of the hand makes up a new rule to add to the initial rules. Rules accumulate over the duration of a game.⁴

The player to left of the last dealer now becomes the dealer, and a new hand begins. Rinse, repeat.

Penalties

Certain illegal actions are deserving of penalty during the course of a hand.⁵ Initially the illegal actions are:

• Asking a question.⁶
• Taking too long to play.⁷
• Failing to say Bartok immediately after discarding one's penultimate card.
• Playing out of turn.
• Playing illegally (for example, not following suit or face value).
• Contravening the letter or the spirit of a rule.⁸
• Falsely accusing another player of performing an illegal action.⁹

The standard penalty is to pick up a card and add it to one’s hand of cards. Cards picked up as penalties cannot immediately be played unless it happens to be that player’s turn.

The AICSA Standard Bartok Meta-Rules

1. The general mechanics of the game should be considered mutable. For example, the initial number of cards dealt may vary by general consensus without requiring an explicit new rule.
2. As a way to streamline the game and take some of the sting out of a common situation, a player who picks up a card as a result of being unable to play may play that card, if it is otherwise legal to do so, at any time before she places it into her hand. Once she places a picked-up card in her hand, her turn is over and she can’t then say “Oops, look at that” and play the card like some silly person.
3. The window of opportunity for penalising a player for not saying Bartok is from when her hand initially contains only one card, until when the next player plays or picks up a card or otherwise indicates that he has begun his turn. After that point, calling out a player on this matter is a false accusation, and is itself penalised. The player is expected to say Bartok immediately, but see meta-rule 9.
4. The fundamental nature of the game may be changed by any new rule. To change the game or make a rule in a way that implicitly invalidates former rules is a matter of conscience, not law. That is to say, you can do it and deal with the wrath of the players; the rules are explicitly silent on the advisability of this -- but see metarule 9.
5. Actions that are worthy of penalty during a hand may not be penalised between hands. So, for example, if a player asks a question after the hand is finished, she doesn’t need to pick up a card for doing so. Since she doesn’t have a hand of cards at that point, this would seem obvious, but you’d be amazed how a long game and a fair bit of drink can affect some people’s capacity for logic.
6. Questions fairly penalised must be truthfully and reasonably answered. The player who asks the question is designated the asker; the player who calls her on this matter and issues the penalty is the answerer. Play pauses until the answerer answers the question to the best of his ability. In the case of reasonable and answerable questions (“oh dear, did I do that?” is a common one) a true, reasonable answer is a simple thing (“yes, you did, and you also asked a question”); in the case of unanswerable questions (“what is the final digit of the decimal expansion of pi?”) or unreasonable questions (“what are the first ten trillion digits of pi?”) the answerer may give an answer equivalent to “mu”, which means “that question is unasked”. Any answer approved of by consensus among the other players, excluding the asker, will be counted as a true and reasonable answer; otherwise the answerer must try again or pay a forfeit agreeable to the entire company.
7. A reasonable time limit for playing a card is a matter for the conscience of the individual churchgoer, in consultation and consensus with all players.
8. Any action that materially disadvantages a player alone is never illegal when performed by that player. Thus, there is no need to penalise a player for, for example, picking up a card and adding it to her hand because she believed incorrectly that she had performed an illegal action. A polite player might point out that she didn’t need to do that, but once she has placed the card in her hand, it’s hers. Of course, if the rules have evolved to the point where adding a card to one’s hand of cards confers some advantage -- suppose players are penalised when they have an even number of cards, say -- or causes a disadvantage for another player as well, then this is an illegal action and would be penalised.
9. In general, while a fast game is a good game and the ingenious application of penalties is one of the joys of Bartok, it is better to be kind than clever. A fun game is better than a nasty, vindictive game, and a player who delights in making other players suffer is to be discouraged. Therefore, the players as a group may choose occasionally to override a penalty or reinterpret the application of a rule out of compassion, when to do otherwise would make the game a less pleasant experience for some of the players.