Tuesday, February 26, 2013

SnoutCast #158: Oscars Post-Game

In which we review this year's Best Picture nominees (except for Amour, which we have not seen), and ponder why so many Game themes are movie-based.


[ Download mp3 - 31 MB ]

00:00 - stabby teaser
01:03 - "Academic"
04:03 - Argo
05:31 - Beasts of the Southern Wild
05:42 - Django Unchained
06:08 - Les Misérables
06:14 - Life of Pi
06:52 - Lincoln
08:06 - Silver Linings Playbook
16:03 - Zero Dark Thirty
27:09 - which movie inspired The Famine Game?
33:06 - The End

Tell us we're wrong on the Internet! E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast.

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "My Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

Curtis DeeAnn

Friday, February 22, 2013

Oscar Party Preparations

DeeAnn and I started hosting Academy Awards viewing parties years ago in the Bay Area. We don't attract quite as big a crowd here in Portland, but it's still fun. For me, there are three big content pieces that get updated every year:

1. Oscar Acceptance Speech BINGO



Let's face it, many of the winners' speeches are dead boring. As with many things, we decided to make them interesting by turning them into a game! And because I'm a software geek, I wrote a program (actually, a series of Perl and shell scripts) to create the game.

The idea is simple: fill a BINGO card (5x5 grid) with words commonly used in actual, past Oscar acceptance speeches, then mark off a square when the word shown therein is uttered in an acceptance speech during the live telecast. Center square is free; any horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row of five wins. After that, blackout wins again. (This often leads to calls of "No, thank your dad now! YOUR DAD!")

Print your own Oscar Acceptance Speech BINGO card (reload the page for a new card)!

2. Trivia Slides



I used to actually print these out and put them up on the wall, but at some point I realized it was easier to run a repeating slide show on one of the many computers sitting around our house. The effort is here is mostly research, plus a little layout work in Powerpoint.

The hard part isn't finding trivia; it's finding interesting trivia on each of the Best Picture nominees. I usually don't research much beyond that, because it becomes increasingly difficult to dig up fun facts about films nobody has ever heard of (sorry, Best Documentary Short nominees). Some years, if I have time, I'll work up every movie that's nominated for at least two awards.

View 2013 Oscar Trivia images online (for slideshow, set delay to 20 seconds)!

3. Predict-the-Winners Ballot



This one's the easiest of the lot; usually I just select one of the many PDFs available from various web sites. Players must fill out their ballots before the first award of the evening is presented; if anybody arrives late, they're handicapped because they can't guess any of the already-announced winners.

The problem is, I don't like the formatting on many of these ballots, and my laziness is such that I prefer to scour the Internet for existing docs rather than create my own. My big concern is printing. The official ABC ballot looks fine, but wastes a lot of ink top and bottom. Moviefone's ballot is cleaner, but the over-branding all over the page bugs me. And graphic designer Jessica Jones' 2013 Oscar Ballot has a nice, old-timey look, but again, there's a lot of black in that huge logo.

In the end, I decided to go with the Yahoo! Movies ballot, which is nice and clean with minimal branding. The categories are also laid out neatly, so it'll be easy to score at the end of the night.

Of course, there's more to hosting the party: inviting people, buying prizes and food, putting up decorations, and making sure you've got enough liquid refreshment on hand. All that is left as an exercise for the reader.

(Just for me: cf. the 2009 "DIY Oscar Party Kit.")

Curtis

Friday Flash Fiction: "The Space Between"

Part five of five: in which domestic violence is not really an issue.

Read "The Space Between" at 512 Words or Fewer

Curtis

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

SnoutCast #157: Dilettantism

In which we discuss the importance of belonging to a variety of different social circles.


[ Download mp3 - 23 MB ]

01:00 - "gregarious"
...
(Show notes? You want show notes, after we've been at sea for a whole week and running a live puzzle hunt event? Sorry, no-can-do's-ville, baby doll.)
...
24:36 - The End

Tell us we're wrong on the Internet! E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast.

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "I Crush Everything" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

Curtis DeeAnn Jasper Tye

Friday, February 15, 2013

Friday Flash Fiction: "Funny Story"

Part four of five: in which Liz gets friendly with the ship's doctor, who does not reciprocate.

Read "Funny Story" at 512 Words or Fewer

Curtis

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

SnoutCast #156: Too Many Secrets

Puzzle hunts are, on some level, all about secrets: keeping them, discovering them, or revealing them at the proper moment. But how many secrets is too many? And when is it appropriate to reveal some of them?


[ Download mp3 - 27 MB ]

00:58 - "secretive"
02:42 - secrets during an event
14:35 - secrets during playtesting
27:25 - upcoming events: GC Summit, DASH 5, WarTron: Boston, The Famine Game, and more!
29:09 - The End

Tell us we're wrong on the Internet! E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast.

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "Re: Your Brains" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

Curtis DeeAnn Tye

Friday, February 08, 2013

Friday Flash Fiction: "Dinner Conversation"

This is part three of a five-part story.

I wrote the first part back in the summer of 2011, at the request of one of my Clarion Write-a-thon sponsors: he wanted a piece of short fiction which might persuade his girlfriend to come with him (and D and me) on JoCo Cruise Crazy II.

I wrote the second part at the request of said girlfriend, after she'd decided to go on the cruise with our whole group of friends; it was a sort of counter-surprise back to the original requestor.

At that point, I had a longer story in mind, so I went ahead and finished it. It's set in the same universe--in fact, on the same interplanetary cruise ship--as my novel-in-progress Waypoint Kangaroo, but is a horse of an entirely different color. So to speak.

The finished piece was an odd bird, with a science fictional setting but really no other genre elements, and has been rejected by multiple markets already. So now, as #JCCC3 approaches, I've decided to just put it out there for your enjoyment, 512 words (or fewer) at a time. You'll see part four next week, and part five the week after that.

Now here's part three of Liz and Barrett's adventures between Earth and Mars...

Read "Dinner Conversation" at 512 Words or Fewer

Curtis

Tuesday, February 05, 2013

SnoutCast #155: Kicking Back

In which we discuss Mike Selinker's Maze of Games, and toss around some ideas for Kickstarter projects we might try to crowdfund.


[ Download mp3 - 32 MB ]

00:59 - "fundamental"
07:52 - Hypothetical Kickstarter #1: A Day Game in Portland
14:55 - Hypothetical Kickstarter #2: Puzzle Cruise Crazy
23:38 - Hypothetical Kickstarter #3: Curtis' Puzzle Hunt Thriller Novel
31:02 - upcoming events: WarTron: Boston, GC Summit, The Famine Game, and more!
34:13 - The End

Tell us we're wrong on the Internet! E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast.

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

Curtis DeeAnn

Friday, February 01, 2013

Friday Flash Fiction: "This Scene Lacks Tension"

Yes, this is a continuation of last month's "CSI: Computer Science Investigation," and the title is one of the critiques this draft received from my weekly writer's group. I'm working on it!

Read "This Scene Lacks Tension" at 512 Words or Fewer

Curtis