Officially Official..We are having a stork visit.

The Higgins House will sprout our newest Bloger some time in late July -early August. Names have been selected for both major genders. Ultrasounds jpgs and womb like mp3s are not an if but a when. The rights to stream the birth have been flatly turned down. Oh well, cant win em all:)-

Zine--The zine is called Countermoves and its humming along nicely. There is a yahoo group for it whcih you can go and join if you wish.

Jean Shepherd Netcast--I have been running the 24 Hour House of The Perpetual Ponderings of Jean Shepherd for over a year now witht he same 12 or so shows. Well this weekend I received a package of 8 cd crammed with over 800 of his shows all in mp3 and ready to netcast. There is now a special page for it which of course is hosted at Blogspot.

Zines. The word conjures up images of unearthed arcanea, underground lore and the days when we knew less then we thought and learned more than we knew. Maybe I’m waxing poetic but over the last few years the hankering to not only read zines but also make them has surfaced again. So I am doing a game zine.

Not an ezine, though there would be a pdf version of it, but a real honest to goodness printed on paper, Xeroxed, and stapled zine. Not a super gloss single focus publication nor a mimeographed anything goes fanzine but something in between.

No I’m not turning neoludite and shunning all ezines, blogs, ASCII files and etexts, it’s just that I want to make something I can hold in my hands and read on the crapper. Having access to a printer that does Booklet Printing and purchasing a Big Assed Stapler have solidifed my resolve.

Living in Portland OR I am fortunate to have the Independent Publishing Resource Center close by when I’m ready to get into the thick of the deed. One great web sites to jump into the world of zines and zine making is The Zine and Ezine Resource Guide .

The inspiration for doing a game zine is both a long yearning to do another zine, and places like Warpspawn, Games Cabinet, and the freebies section on PBEmporium. Games cabinet hasn't been updated in nearly a year, which bums me out. Warpspawn has so much going on all the time with new rules sets coming out I think we could easily get a full game or so in an issue with variants and the like.

Id also like to tap into reviews, articles about micro and macro strategy games as well as puzzle games, cheap ass style games and other games that make the mind work for its keep.

Id also like to make the zine freely distributable, that is while the articles themselves are copyrighted to the authors who wrote them anyone who grabs the pdf of the zine could print out copies for themselves and their buds so long as its not altered in any way and no fee is charged for the zine itself.

I have no aspirations whatsoever of making a dime off this project, I've been in too many projects to know that if you think your even going to break even on costs your mostly off your rocker. So knowing that going in I am thinking the cover price should be 0$. Im at a point in my life where the cost to do this as I see it being done would be less than many of my other projects.

With the PDF of the issue available folks can grab it, print it out and run off a few copies to seed to their game circles, local game stores, or where ever they think it would be good to have them. I myself would be able to run off and staple about 100 copies or so. Guerilla Distribution.

If you are interested in this drop me a line at tom@wsmf.org .

When you can not be there in person sometimes it helps to just see whats going on. I've been watching NYC from my office palantir all day, its good to see the beat returning.

Here and Back Again
In recent months I have been starting several projects which has ment this space has reamined unchanged. Now that the other projects are under their own speed I can refocus back here. If you have come here from the WSMF.ORG address then you will know some of the places I have been spending my time. Look to the column on the side of this page for a list of most of the places you can find me online.

WFF n Proof Rides Again
Ever have that urget o go back and regain the old Wff N Proff star? If you grew up with this game your probably right there with me. Well it may not be the game but the MetaMath Site sure does take it to new limits.

Gallery of CSS Descramblers
A vast lists of all the ways people express the means to descramble data encoded with CSS. Included are source code listing, pictures, movies and even songs. So while the push is on to restrict this message it spreads even wider. Good work Judge Kaplan.

Little Blue Books

Long before Everything, long before the internet there was the Little Blue Books. Created by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius in 1919 these were small low price paperback pocketbooks that were intended to sweep the ranks of the working class as well as the "educated" class. The idea was to get works of literature, a wide range of ideas, common sense knowledge and various points of view out to as large an audience as possible. For a nickel anyone could purchase a volume of the collection of over 2,000 titles known as the Little Blue Books

In just nine years the idea caught on all around the globe. The Little Blue Books were finding their ways into the pockets of laborers, scholars and the average citizen alike. The St. Louis Dispatch called Julius "the Henry Ford of literature". Amongst the better known names of the day to support the Little Blue Books were Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Admiral Richard Byrd, who took along a complete set to the South Pole, Franklin P. Adams of Information Please and the thousands of average folks who purchased the Little Blue Books through a mail order system and latter in book stores.

Because the topics of the Little Blue Books covered political ideas as well as a wide scope of religious views as well as literature and general knowledge, the FBI viewed his achievements as a threat and landed him on their enemies list. At the time of his death in 1951 Emanuel Haldeman-Julius had done something that transcended the paranoia of the establishment, for a nickel he offered everyone access to a world of learning.

I have had the opportunity to actually hold a few of these. Its pretty humbling if you let the scope sweep over you. Here are these discrete chunks of knowing that were available for a few cents. The size of the books are such they could easily fit in a shirt pocket. A worker could have a few tucked in their shirt pocket ready for the reading at any spare moment. It was more accessible then the net is now for most people. Until we get affordable wireless PDAs with affordable access to something like Project Guttenberg or Everything we are still lacking the scope and penetration the Little Blue Books had. This is not to knock what we have done on the net, its just to point out that we are standing on the shoulders of giants and have miles to go before we sleep.

A great resource for learning more about the Little Blue Books is http://library.pittstate.edu/spcoll/ndxhjulius.html

What is Guerilla Network Trading?

From http://www.gnutella.co.uk/guerilla/

What is Guerilla Network Trading?
A program made for spreading political propaganda in countries without the freedom of speech. Guerilla Network Trading is a distributed file system using network in network, inspired from Gnutella. The princip is, if you have a client, that client knows 3-5 other computers, that knows 3-5 other computers..... The problem using Gnutella is the traceability with downloading, the search for something is distributed, but the downloads is still performed peer to peer. We have (with the loss of performance) made a piece of software that downloads though the network in network. This means, if you are computer A, that searches for a file, and that file is found on the computer D, then the download could be from d-c-b-a. The point is that you never will know!

Due to the performance in this kind of file transfering, it is recommened only to use with high bandwith, and not with too many computers (100 computers is preferred). The communication between the clients is done by using RSA 2048 bit assynchronious cryptation and 128 bit blowfish. The cryptation between the different clients is also done with different blowfish keys, to avoid someone listening on the network and figure out who is sending the data.

The Postman Unleashes the Dogs of War

Unbriddled Ebay enthusiasm for my refound love of war games has made my mail box go BOOOM.

Recently foudn in the box:

Kriegspiel from Avalon Hill circa 1970

Asteroid Pirates from Yaquinto

the 15 Task Force Games listed a few days ago

PanzerBlitz from Avalon Hill (I actualy bought this one from a game store)

221 B Baker Street

Free Game: Battle Of Seattle

Heres a great little game I found this morning called The Battle Of Seatle. The premiss and plot center around the WTO civil/uncivil action up in Seattle. Its a perfect example of a good DTP game. The rules, map and game counters are all there for the grabbing, just add a printer and youve got another game in your cabinet.

I have writting the author to see if they have a CyberBoard for it; if not Im going to take a crack at it. If you play this game, let me know and we can meet on the streets for some civil unrest.

Free Zope Hosting

A compnay called NIP Ltd. is offering free zope hosting. This is the first of its kind i have come across. Yea its in the UK and yea its not the speediest connection but its free and its zope and they have Squish dot as one of thier allowed objects.

As some of you know WSMF was running some very usefull Zope projects up unitl i moved out of DSL land. Befoire I start send folks over there for new WSMF projects, like a wargame./boardgame site, Im going to shake it down over the next few days. If this works out it means I can do zope sites again over the internet. At work I have a few projects hosted, but not being able to do my own zope stuff on the internet has really taken a bite out of the effectiveness of WSMFs many projects. Egroups and Blogger are great for many things, but nothing near what a site running a few key zope objects can do (ie squishdot, zwiki, zsql, etc)

(if anyone has an internet based zope site up and wants to dontate some space to wsmf, well as nelson mandella says "aint to proud to beg")

Here are the links http://freezope.nipltd.net/

and the starts of a WSMF game site at http://freezope.nipltd.net/wsmf/games/

The microGames Keep Rolling In

15Task Force Mini Games Shrinkwrappedare now mine. In an ebay score I have won the auction that includes the following Task Force games:

• Valkenburg Castle
• Cerberus Task Force Game #3
• Intruder Task Force Game #6
• Starfire II
• Spellbinder
• Robots!
• Survival / The Barbarian
• Ultrawarrior
• Starfire III Empires
• Moon Base Clavius
• The Warriors of Batak
• Boarding Party
• Escape From Altassar
• City States of Arklyrell
• Checkpoint Omega

As a nice bonus there is a copy of the first issue of “Interplay” – The Metagaming house organ.

Now thats a lot of Game Luvin in one purchase.

Thin Devices

How to increase profits? Lower costs and sell it like hotcakes. Easier said than done for a large chunk of the production industry but this site shows at least one company with the goods.

DTC currently has a working model for a paper thin cell phone that can be used and rubishtized. Next up on thier agenda, a Paper Laptop Computer

221 B Baker Street on the Decks

Another day, another game has been reclaimed from the great entropy machine of time. This times its 221 B Baker Street, a game I hope to adopt so Heather can play soon.

As always Opponents Wanted.

Old and New Games for the Grabbing

Have you ever wanted to play Ancient Art of War, MULE, TacOps and a slew of other games that circulated on your computer over the last 30 or so years? If so head on over to The Underdog Games Site. Here you will find well over 1500 full computer games form the 70's thru the Now that are either Abandoned, Forgotten, or let out as Free by the creators. A truly amazing site when you see the scope of depth they reivew, document and comment on these games as well as making full versions of them available to play.

To see a bit of their goods, here is a list of War Games sorted by Yeard , heres just the SSI Games. The fun is never ending at this site.

If nothing else this will be a great tool to work out new game ideas by using the old ones as test beds and jumping off points.

Warp War on the Decks

Yes strategy game fever is taking hold. I just own an ebay auction for a copy of Warp War . This is the first ebay thing i have bid on in years, had to make a new account and everything.

If things go well I should be able to play this in a week or two. I think i already have the Cyberboard gamebox for it. If anyone wants to partake in a few games let me know.

FlashBack Philosophy

Ive been spending the last few months reading and working thru the masses of mouths talking about/peddling/ushing various hazzanas to P2P. Seems to me its yet another hype fest set up by and for the same mouths that were feed by the hype of B2B, TheWeb, IntraNetworking, and going back to the 80's..Expert Systems.

Sharing data and building group workspaces is nothing new. Its the continuing extension of the need for people to be connected. Everything and Egroups are more P2P in practice than 80% of the schemes Ive heard come out of the lists of pundits.

The best thing to come out of the whole thing is my refinding Adam Ant. Yea its a jump or two on the tree of interconnectedness, but it is the shiz.....

I'm the dandy highwayman so sick of easy fashion
the clumsy boots, peek-a-boo roots that people think so dashing
so what's the point of robbery when nothing is worth taking? (oh oh)
it's kind of tough to tell a scruff the big mistake he's making


we're the dandy highwaymen so tired of excuses
of deep meaning philosophies where only showbiz loses
we're the dandy highwaymen and here's our invitation (oh oh)
"throw your safety overboard and join our insect nation"


stand and deliver your money or your life!
try and use a mirror no bullet or a knife!


and even though you fool your soul
your conscience will be mine
all mine

Let the Games Begin

Having spent the last few weeks reintroducing myself to the wonderfull world of war and strategy games I am wanting more now than ever to play these things. If you are a playa drop me a line.

The person who got me itching for these things, one Mr T Blake, as released a new game of his own creation. Im going to sit down today to learn it and possibly get the author himself to playtest a game with me. The game is called Insectica , go give it a whirl.

Once More Into The Breech

Whats made out of paper and can conquere the world? An old war game chit. Back from teh days of yesteryear the Wargame Fever is back on me. Since finding Cyberboard [1], a program that allows people to play these old crusties on a PC, I have been getting the hankering to take over the world, drop into a bug hunt, flip some cards and roll the dice once more.If you are a dormant wargamer I would suggest heading over to The PBem Emporium for a quick refresher. If your interested I am working on compiling the best of the web, ftp and other sites onto one cd. So far its packed with rules, boards, game playing aids and other utilities like Cyberboard.

[1]The CyberBoard board gaming system makes playing board games by mail and electronic mail a more enjoyable experience. The system allows you to easily graphically design the various parts of a board game on your computer. The players can make their moves and exchange recorded versions of the moves with their opponents. The opponent can then play back the moves. Although many types of games may be created using CyberBoard, games that use counters or chits such as war games work particularly well.

The OTR 800 News LIne

Need a fix of whats new, exciting and bubling up in the world of OTR? Dial the number belwo and follow the easy instructions. Its a real 800 number, so dont worry about charges or scams.
The message will have the current status of the OTree System, news and information on OTR happenings in general, and lots of information you might find helpfull in your OTR endevours.
Updates will happen at least once a day, probably more if things are jumping.
So how do you listen to to the OTR Announcements?
1. Call Tellme at 1-800-555-TELL. 2. At the Tellme Menu, enter the Announcement number: 1-509-749.

Free Legit Books Online

Some authors get it, that treating unfetered file sharing as a possible entry into the consumers mindspace could boost sales of tangible objects. The book publisher Bean has opened its web site up to its authors who would like to make thier works avialble for free to the nets populace. The Bean Free Library has only a few authors now, but I expect it will grow over time. Its good to see a publisher make a move like this in a market full of other companys falling over each other to make proprietary fee based system and over priced reader devices to peddle thier books.

1 800 555 TELL

I have been using the TellMe service off an on for a few months, but recently things seem to be jumping up with new features, extensions, more free services, and some great users making the most of the services. http://www.tellme.com/ is where to go on the net to learn more about it or just pick up any phone and dial 1 800 555 TELL

New Offerings in the OTree System

The following Collections are beinging injected into the OTree system. If your not a memeber head on over to the Otree Main Egroup and read the FAQ on the hows and wherefors of joining up and having your snailmail box blessed wiht OTR goodies.

The Great Gildersleve (4 cds) (package 013)

Have Gun Will Travle + Six Shooter + Ft Larimie (3 cds) (package 014)

Amos and Andy (3 cds) (package 015)

Boston Blackie + Frank Race (3 cds) (package 016)

Stephen Hawkings -- Dropping Da Bombs

Most of the world knows Prof Hawkings for his thoughts on the universe and its workings. Few people know of his lyrical stylings. The www.mchawking.com site will go a long way to correcting this. Be sure to check out the mp3 section.