Hudson Hawk, Steven Universe

Hudson Hawk

A film with Bruce Willis as a once-famous cat burglar just getting out of jail, blackmailed into taking several Leonardo Da Vinci related heists. I once played a very good 8-bit platform game based on it, which captured the feel of catburgling quite well for the time. It was one of the first games I actually finished, which was really exciting.

A few bits are really fun, when they sing the same song to time themselves and keep themselves in sync as they go around different parts of the building. And the introduction of the gang with candy-bar codenames. But then it descends from heist movie into slapstick action movie and I mostly lose interest.

Steven Universe

One of the animated children's TV shows which lots and lots of people have been very excited by recently. The crystal gems are three gemstone-themed alien people who protect the earth from various monsters, aided by half-human half-gem Steven.

A lot of people praise the handling of emotional themes, eg. Greta Christina on episode 5: http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2015/12/10/steven-universe-episode-5-frybo/ on how one of Steven's friends disappoints his father. It's generally a good role model, having lots of examples of flawed people who are not all good or bad and easily-accessible examples of complicated emotional stuff.

The episodes mostly about some of the humans don't hit my emotions as hard as they do other people, but I also liked a lot else about it.

The gems are all aliens who, it seems, don't have two different sexes, but are all coded as "female" in the show, whatever their role in society. Which I think works very well, considering the number shows which have used "male" as if it were equivalent to "default, no marked gender".

Steven's emotional maturity and skill with his gem powers are shown growing really realistically. It's not always a straightforward "he learns how to do this, and then can do it henceforth", but there's a clear sequence of "he can't do this", "he can do this some of the time and is excited when it works", "he makes a lot of effort and isn't sure if he'll succeed", and finally "he does this fairly reliably". I think, if you watched episodes slightly out of order, it would still work nearly as well, but there's a definite benefit to watching the whole series mostly in order.

And in many ways, the "struggling to learn how to do it" is more realistic than having a "one episode where he learns it". It's very moving to watch Steven progress from automatically being left at home during missions, to being automatically included in the team.

The worldbuilding is great. The early episodes do a very good job of painting the general situation, the gems, raising Steven, protecting the world, etc. But as we slowly learn more, learning about the gems original homeworld, and where the monsters come from, and the history of Steven's mother, we learn a richer story that doesn't contradict what we learned. And it's all sufficiently consistent, it's possible to speculate and be correct, and things introduced in later episodes don't make nonsense of the earlier episodes where they weren't established yet.

I'd rather have MORE of that, but then, it's not aimed primarily at me.

Dwarf University v2.0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bcvqhy6je92g512/dwarf_university_v2.pdf?dl=0

OK, after mulling over comments several people made at games evening, I made several changes to my dice game.

I changed the somewhat nebulous "two pairs of dice" concept to be that, on your turn, you roll four dice, and then may spend a pair of dice, either for 1 money, or to do an action square at the sum of the dice once for each meeple you have. And you may repeat as long as you have dice. So to start with, you have two dice, but some abilities let you roll another dice as well, or reclaim an already-spent dice. One extra dice means more choice, two extra dice mean another action.

It also removes a lot of the ambiguity, because now you can clearly say "a spent dice" or whatever.

I rewrote all the abilities to work in that way, and increased costs slightly to match the fact you get $1 per pair of dice, not $1 per turn.

And as you see, I wrote up a .pdf so other people can see, and can print out and play it if they want. I think the turn order is enough info to play in theory, although I think it'd be confusing to try without having seen it played first.

The new abilities are COMPLETELY untested. One of the first things I want to do is simply test the "spending dice" concept at all and see, does it give more choice in the right ways, is it intuitive, and does it maintain balance between actions?

Gay speed dating algorithm, the next-biggest hammer

Having failed to use the biggest hammer ("ask the internet if anyone can think of a general mathematical solution"), I tried the next-biggest, brute-force.

I wrote a program which divides people into random matchings, and then switches matches which are over- or -under represented. I'm not quite sure what sort of "random switching" is best, I hoped to just get lucky.

The first effort found a version for 9 people easily, but didn't find one any larger than that. The second was about the same. That's where I am now. I can describe the shuffling in detail if anyone is interested or thinks they might have any suggestions.