The things you learn...

Jun. 19th, 2025 08:11 am
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As if the fact that they were playing around with synthesizers in the early '80s wasn't proof enough that The Human League were big geeks, I fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole the other day and learned that their name came from a 1974 science fiction board game called Star Force: Alpha Centauri.

On a whim, I just checked and one can buy a copy of Star Force: Alpha Centauri on Ebay for about $20, including shipping.

And, in a final bit of trivia, the design of Star Force: Alpha Centauri, Redmond A. Simonsen, is credited with inventing the term "game designer." (According to an obituary for Simonsen written by Greg Costikyan: "Before he did, we had no good term – game inventor, game author... but he put his finger on what we do.")

A musical puzzle?

Jun. 18th, 2025 03:01 pm
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When I was playing "Time in a Bottle" last night, I noticed an Easter egg in the chorus. The chorus is like this: (The numbers in parentheses are the frets to play the chord on a ukulele. The bolded numbers will be explained below.)

  • D (2-2-2-5)
  • DMaj7 (2-2-2-4)
  • D6 (2-2-2-2)
  • D (2-2-2-0) alternate fingering for D
  • G (0-2-3-2)
  • G6 (0-2-2-2)
  • Em7 (0-2-0-2)
  • A7 (0-1-0-0)

The notes played by the bolded numbers are: D, C#, B, A, G, F#, E, A. Those notes may look kind of familiar to some of you: Pachelbel's Canon in D goes D, C#, B, A, G, F#, G, A! The seventh note is different, but otherwise it's the same, even in the same key!

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Today I finally got around to watching the trailer for the new Fantastic Four movie. I am absolutely jaw-dropped and looking forward to seeing this movie, which I never really expected to be. It's as if someone at Marvel read my post from last year about why previous Fantastic Four movies hadn't really worked well and taken my ideas to heart. I don't think I can ever recall a studio making the movie I wanted them to make!

Human Words Project

Jun. 8th, 2025 03:51 pm
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I learned today about Chris Osmond's "Human Words Project," a way for writers to indicate that their work is 100% human words, i.e. not generated by AI. Here's the logo for it, which you can add to your projects, if you want:

Human Words Project logo

ETA: Note that this is not the original logo. The website was moved after the original logo was created. I took the liberty of editing the logo to reflect the current URL, and at the same time changed the size of the logo, deleted a lot of white space around it, and changed the file type to JPG (thus making the file MUCH smaller).

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