Thursday, April 19, 2007
Pips Plus
With their collection of Pips: Original Card and Dice Games, Samuel and Jacob H. Stoddard have gifted us with, among many other delights, a collection of, as advertised, original playing card, dice and domino games. Original, well-documented, and apparently most worthy of some significant segment of your playtime.
No, no, there's nothing to buy, unless you don't have a deck of cards or a couple dice or a set of dominoes. I know that's going to make you feel that these games are not, like, "real" games. And, if these guys wanted to make them into genuine, commercial, K-mart-worthy games, well, they'd probably make some significant money. But they most apparently have a very different goal. They want to make some significant fun.
Which becomes even more apparent if you look at the stuff on the rest of their site (called "Rinkworks"). I, following a suggestion from the noble Presurfer, wound up in a subsection of a subsection called "Fun with Words," where I learned about... Wait, let me give you some examples. Can you guess what the following words have in common?
BOLT, FAST, GRADE, HANDICAP
No, silly, it's not that they're all written in upper case. It's that they're all "Contronyms" - words that are also their own opposites. Like BOLT, as in bolt the door, or bolt away; or FAST, as in moving fast or something made unmoving.
Mark well this site, for is much fun to be had therein and by.
from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith
No, no, there's nothing to buy, unless you don't have a deck of cards or a couple dice or a set of dominoes. I know that's going to make you feel that these games are not, like, "real" games. And, if these guys wanted to make them into genuine, commercial, K-mart-worthy games, well, they'd probably make some significant money. But they most apparently have a very different goal. They want to make some significant fun.
Which becomes even more apparent if you look at the stuff on the rest of their site (called "Rinkworks"). I, following a suggestion from the noble Presurfer, wound up in a subsection of a subsection called "Fun with Words," where I learned about... Wait, let me give you some examples. Can you guess what the following words have in common?
BOLT, FAST, GRADE, HANDICAP
No, silly, it's not that they're all written in upper case. It's that they're all "Contronyms" - words that are also their own opposites. Like BOLT, as in bolt the door, or bolt away; or FAST, as in moving fast or something made unmoving.
Mark well this site, for is much fun to be had therein and by.
from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith
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