This blog is for more informal writing which I don’t intend to revise or edit. It’s just day-to-day stuff, quick updates, or ephemeral writing. For more formal writing, see the notes. For everything, check the archive.
This list generates an RSS feed.The first bloom of my kohleria plant.
The 4th week of summer.
Megan and I found out about Cinq-O while looking for simple dice games with few components that aren’t Yahtzee or Ten Thousand. We’re always on the hunt for interesting games with few components; games which can easily be carried about. We also want to find nice strategically interesting dice games for two. Cinq-O is great for the former, but not so great for the latter.
For a game with so few materials, Pig can be very risky, stressful and intense. It is well suited for playing with children and impulsive gamblers.
Thoughts about playing board games.
Recently I was wondering why Y has received so much less attention than Hex. In any discussion I’ve seen about connection games or the elegance of modern abstracts, the name Hex comes up – why doesn’t Y? It seems as though Hex has become a much more widely known classic than Y.
Homeworlds is a game by John Cooper that uses Icehouse Pieces. It involves star systems and star ships and the battles and catastrophes that surround them.
Parker and I absolutely love Entropy. We do not, however, love the Domino Bead Game. The moves seem very forced to us, and the scoring is too extreme. So, we have combined a game that we love with a game that we wish to improve.
Eric Solomon’s Entropy is a perfect example of the theme of Chaos versus Order. Each player gets to assume each role once. As Chaos, you try to prevent your opponent from organizing patterns. As Order, you try to create as much structure as possible.
Yahtzee is a bit like Poker but uses dice. It is a game where Probability is either on your side or not on your side.
Oddball is a game that Parker and I created when we were visiting my mother on Gabriola Island, BC. It is inspired by the game Paletto.
Cribbage is my favourite card game. It is a two player game, but can be played with three players. The modifications for a three-player game are listed at the end of the rules.
It is easy to carry around a handful of dice. So, the more dice games you know, the more fun you can have with only a handful of materials.
Tablanette is a two-player card game. Parker and I discovered it when we were looking through the Pan Book of Card Games by Hubert Phillips. We have not played Tablanette in a while, but I remember enjoying this game and hope to play it again soon.
My mom and step-dad absolutely love the card game Rummy. As a result, my sister and I have also come to love this game. During my high school years, it was our main go-to game on homework-less evenings and slow weekend afternoons.
The first trick-taking game I ever played with Parker is French Tarot - the most complicated trick-taking game I have ever come across. We both enjoyed French Tarot and still talk about playing it again, but it took a while to get used to the rules. We soon after discovered 500 (a simpler form of French Tarot) and, because of our experience, took to it quickly.
At a staff Meeting on Tuesday, August 21st, my coworkers and I were asked to come up with a goal to achieve by Tuesday, September 25th. Since I’ve been wanting to play games more often, I decided on this goal: play games twenty times by the deadline.
Raj is my new ’new favourite game’. I learned about it by reading up on what Boardspace.net has available, and after reading the rules I instantly fell in love. Raj has that essentialness which is shared by certain abstracts. It is the simplest possible expression of a fundamental game mechanic and yet it still playable as an interesting game in itself.
Zendo is a great game. It’s a really, really, great game. It’s one of those perfect examples of a game mechanism distilled to its finest and packaged into a game that really works. Kory Heath, the game’s designer, really hit on a genius idea. It’s also a very general game. You can play Zendo with Looney Pyramids, designed by Looney Labs, one of my favourite game companies, or almost any other set of things that are plentiful and can be assembled into a large number of configurations. I’ve played Zendo with pictures on a chalkboard, and with words over e-mail. As an illustration I’ve included below a game played with strings of zeros and ones.
A very deep almost-tie in Catchup.
Last Friday, Parker and I began a new project: a six-week-long children’s program that is part homework help, part games workshop. Each class consists of forty five minutes of tutoring and forty five minutes of game play and discussion. Our first game of the workshop is Hex.
I’ve just finished playing a hundred games of Catchup (BGG). Here are the rules. Below I’ll talk mostly about how Catchup feels and what it makes me think of.
We’ve been trying to think up a large multi-player game that can be played asynchronously, doesn’t involve lying or back-stabbing, and isn’t going to be wrecked by the players communicating with each other. In fact, it’d be great if the game encouraged players to communicate and work collaboratively. Such a game is still in the works; but, while we were working on it, the following occured to us.
We played the Claude Soucie game Divide and Conquer at the laundromat. It was very good, but we found the hand management to be hard. It was too difficult to imagine what the other player was holding.
The second week of exams.
A mushroom that I spotted by the community center
A translation of a string figure from Juegos y Lenguajes de Hilo en El Gran Chaco
An Esperanto translation of the poem Hokusai Says.
A home fantasy turns into a nightmare.
The 3rd week of exams.
The 3rd week of summer.
Another visit to the Lakeshore AVS. Only three plants this year.
Writing online as a bunch of link
It’s nice to hear.
Gearing up for the next term.
A translation of a newpaper article about Esperanto being used as a spoken language.
The first week of exams.
A silly artistic riff.
The 11’th week of classes. One year of Week Notes.
A little juggling break at the community center.
A poem about the cost of mortality.
The 10’th week of classes.
The 9th week of classes. Pi Day. Carol Deppe.
The 8th week of classes. SET Magic and Two Trees Variations.
We went to a seed exchange!
Seventh week of class. Back to teaching.
Reading Week. A bit of time to catch up.
An extended quote about interest formation from Cory Doctrow’s newsletter.
Sixth week of classes. Terribly nerd-sniped about random linear algebra.
I like chill blog posts. Little slices of life. Quick moments that give me a sense of the blogger I am reading. My natural inclination is to always write advice, or technical stuff, or week notes.
Inspired by Zak’s summer harvest pictures, I got an urge to do some “gardening.” The girls and their babysitter went ahead and re-potted a lot of the house plants. I seriously thinned out the african violets. Now, I’ve just got NK-Solaris, LE-Polkaris, and Strawberry Sunday. Most of these came from the Lakeshore AVS Spring Sale 2025, so they were due for potting up.
Fifth week of classes. An anniversary. A new card game.
Fourth week of classes. A snow day!
Second week of classes.
Third week of classes.
Back to Work!
A little anecdote about the folk process.
Christmas Time
A quick update after exams.
The CMS Winter Meeting and crafts
The end of term approaches
Another week of Term Tests
A peaceful Reading Week
The last week before Reading Week.
A quick note between midterms
Midterm season continues.
Learning to drive. Website history.
Ooops! The Term!
Midterm season begins and vertigo.
The first week of the new semester.
The first summer with Mira.
Back to work after the East Coast.
Making peace with less productivity.
Back from the East Coast.
Hanging out on the East Coast
Community Camp at NeeKauNis
Writing and teaching a mini-course.
A week of microfiction at NASK.
A short story in Esperanto.
What it feels like to think no particular language.
We spent the week camping.
Riffing off phenotypic variation.
Thoughts about the phrase: Trust the Process.
What is the process?
Getting back in to the rhythm of family life after travel.
Nannnss, a blogger who writes at pixel dirt, wrote a provocative post that I just had to reply to: Tell Me About Your Favourite Tree.
A trip to Montreal for EMF.
A poem by Nanao Sakaki about the distance that one could walk in a lifetime of walking.
A trip to La Renkontiĝo de Esperantistaj Familioj (REF) in Geyer, Germany.
Nature produces a surprising quantity of food.
Shanxi Province, sandstone, 11-13th century, Song dynasty.
Too many books is a great problem.
While writing a piece about mathematical braiding, I try actual braiding.
These are scattered bullet point notes from Lauren DeDieu’s Margaret Sinclair Award Lecture
Testing out my new photo upload script.
Some strawberry trailers re-potted in yoghurt containers.
We saw a deer on the ride in to work.
A photo of some white water in Highland Creek.
The best exam that I ever took.
A link dump of cool things I read about exercise.
Do people maintain plant diaries?
Reflections on community and religion.
A picture of an elegant string figure position from Nauru.
I collected up some cards for from my cardfile related to a topic.
Thoughts on AI and writing.
My first week notes!
I saw some deer remains on the walk to work.
Notes from Reading Week of Winter 2025.
A week offline at home.
Coming back to work after Reading Week.
Phones, minimalism, and the Amish.
Ramping up to Pi Day. Spring is sprung!
RSS, e-mail, and conscious consumption.
The eye of the cyclone week before exams.
Feeling odd during exam week. Also, lots of poetry?
The first visit to the garden plot.
A photo of a small blue and purple african violet.
A photo of a small white african violet.
Really, I’m just a student.
Getting excited about summer and such.
Lovely weather and a bit of a phone defeat.
A hustle before heading to a retreat.
A conference, a retreat, and some flowers.
The start of gardening season.
A visit to the Toronto Botanical Garden Spring Sale 2025.
A photo of some new african violets.
An e-mail from a student about my teaching and blogging.
A string figure formed from two loops.
A picture of a heavily pinned string figure.
A photo of a small pink african violet.
An image of a circular braid.
Some loose thoughts about people, labels, and approximation.
A photo of the math department with the sun rising.
A rant about why old Esperanto literature is neat.
A photo of a recently bloomed african violet.
A picture of the books on my book shelf.
A photo of a recently bloomed african violet.
A picture of some three loop braids on a pin board.
A physical puzzle related to braiding.
A photo of the african violets I got at the Fall Sale
A picture of the relation between twists and passes in $LB_n$.
A bunch of braid diagrams.
A physical example of the complicated braid relation.
Surprising candour and playfulness from Artin in an Annals paper.
Thoughts on taking a four year old to a memorial Meeting.
After a long trip, take a couple days of rest.
After print-and-playing a game, I discovered a couple accidental games.
Creating a repertoire of mathematical experiences for sharing with others.
Gratitude, exercise, and meditation as a means of overcoming the grumps and improving well-being.
The doctor said to exercise and then my basement flooded. I exercised anyway.
Thoughts about why it is so easy to overthing blogging.
A sunflower that Mira grew from seed.
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