bunsen_h

I had a game ad pop up while I was playing another game on my phone. There's a kind of "negging" that some of the ads use: "You can't handle this!" "What a loser!" "Only 0.008% of people can reach level 23!" and such. Presumably they're intending the viewers to get a feeling of superiority, trying to prove that they can do it. For me, such comments tell me that there's no way I want to try that game. If I "can't handle it" I'll only feel frustrated, and why would I voluntarily spend time with a person or thing that keeps insulting me?

But this ad was a little different. "Only left brain thinkers can handle this!"  The goal of the puzzle is to separate the rings by sliding them out in an order that lets them move freely.  But the sample shown has no solution.  The red, orange, and medium-green rings can't be detached from each other without cutting at least one, or resorting to a higher dimension.

It's the same configuration of rings that I made for myself as a "fiddle toy" many years ago.  It looks like a wire puzzle, with small gaps in the rings, as though the rings could be separated if one only manipulated the thing properly.  In reality, it's just a pretty symmetrical arrangement that makes a pleasant chiming if it's tossed in the air without spinning.  Occasionally, I hand it to people to play with, without comment, and watch them try to figure out what they assume is a puzzle.  Once, years ago at a convention in Minneapolis, I was chatting with some friends and pulled the thing out to fiddle with.  When I explained to Pamela Dean that it wasn't actually a puzzle, it only looked like one and had no "solution", etc., she said to Patricia C. Wrede, "Pat!  It's a Mike Ford toy!"

The night before last, I was at the Foglios' for a fannish party — come one, come all, and there were a lot of "all".  One main event was in a large banquet hall: a bingo-style game called "Pick 50".  Players had double-sided bingo-type cards with grids of answers: words, numbers, phrases.  The caller asked riddles, puzzles, cryptic questions, fannish trivia, other trivia.  To mark a space, one had to find an answer on the card which correctly answered a question.

In retrospect, I think it would be too frustrating to play that game, but it could sure keep a lot of people busy for a long time.
 

Seanan McGuire won the Campbell Award!  Tiara for Seanan, ponies for all!

cthulhu penguin
txullhu
propeller beanie
twirling beanie
twirling propeller

For a long time now, I've been trying to identify the first comic book that I ever owned.  I've asked around, posted in newsgroups, etc., without success.  Here's what I wrote in a newsgroup message in August 1993:

Yesterday evening, I referred back to that ancient mystery in a follow-up to a different story-ID request.  And this time, finally, someone came through!

It's an issue of Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, a weird science-fiction comic apparently published for the Catholic Church and distributed primarily to students at Catholic schools.  Which goes some way towards explaining why I wasn't having a lot of luck tracking it down.

It's interesting to note what I've remembered and what I've forgotten about it, in the nearly-40-years since I read it.  Many of the details of the "science" and "technology" are pretty clear, as is the overall appearance of the space ship (with its ice-cream-cone-shaped  engines) and the nature of the letter column.  I don't remember much about the people, nothing about the plot with the aliens remains with me, and that bizarre cover doesn't look remotely familiar.  The guy who tracked the thing down suggested that my old copy might not have had its cover, and that's certainly a possibility.

Getting that little mystery solved was a nice event in a day that was, in other respects, remarkably crappy.

Re: a post by anghara , a question: What kind of LJ icon could be used to represent "SF convention", in the general sense? — not a specific convention, and ideally something specifically indicating "convention" rather than the more general "fandom".  It has to be an image which is understandable at 100x100 pixel resolution, of course.

I think that a picture of a condom, tagged with the acronym "CIAWOL", would probably give the wrong idea.  At least for the aspects of con-going that I focus on.  (I'm a bit surprised that "condom is a way of life" doesn't appear yet in Google.  It seems to be an obvious joke for some of those other conventions.)