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Archive for March 9th, 2008



Flowchart: How D&D is a gateway drug to every flavor of nerdiness


Sunday, March 9, 2008

Another silly diagramme unearthed by the people at BoingBoing and themed on Dungeons and Dragons whose creator Gary Gygax died recently.

When you look at the full version of the diagramme, you’ll see a rectangle about “people blogging about diagrams”. I am such a nerd!

Flowchart: How D&D is a gateway drug to every flavor of nerdiness: “Wired’s Adam Rogers wrote a lovely, sweeping obit for Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax in this weekend’s New York Times that included this flowchart showing how D&D was a gateway drug into every kind of nerd-dom:


We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group…

Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.

Link

(Thanks, Ethan!)


“

(Via Boing Boing.)

By Rija Posted in Games, Maps, Social No Comments

London Transport Museum


Sunday, March 9, 2008

I’ve come back from the open weekend organised by The London Transport Museum Depot in Acton.
Part of it consisted in a tour of all the posters, maps and the original artworks they were based upon since 1908.

These posters were used mainly as promotional material for London (and therefore the Underground), and it was quite fascinating: the diversity of artistic styles as well as the messages conveyed through them.

These posters can be browsed online on on a dedicated web site.

Among the original artworks, there was a special edition of Harry Beck’s London map:
The topology is about the same as the original, but all the station names are replaced by personalities names and the lines name are replaced by careers(engineers, dignitaries, film actors, italian artists,…)
A cross between two lines represents someone who’s known for being more than one thing, which make the whole process quite a challenge :-)
unfortunately I couldn’t find this map on the online collection but It was quite funny to read and is nice followup to my previous post.

    Here are some suggestions for other alternative London maps:

  • each station represents an airport and the lines are airline companies
  • each station represents a food and the lines are the group of nutriments supplied by the food
  • each station represents a london pub and the lines are types of beverage served ;-)

Any more ideas?

By Rija Posted in London, Maps, Transport No Comments