zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — Master Zenpundit echoing Master Rainer Maria Rilke ]
.

Zen (upper panel) this morning on FaceBook:

And Rilke (lower panel) speaking into the “maddening wind” (the Föhn) on the cliffs by Schloss Duino:

Or maybe Shakespeare can give us a no less powerful comparison?

Sound and fury, signifying nothing?

**

On the one hand, it’s the human condition, at least in these modern times: too much noise drowns out the signal… On the other, the occasional word belted into the wind does get through, eh? Or so we hope…

That’s why we blog.

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]
  

I Knew Hitler – Kurt Ludecke 

The Classical World – Robin Lane Fox 

Ludecke was an obscure “old fighter” Nazi and intimate of Hitler’s who fell out on the wrong side of the Night of the Long Knives and managed to escape Himmler’s death list and flee Germany to write a sizable memoir covering the Nazi Party’s earliest days. Like Putzi Hanfstaengl’s Hitler: the Missing Years, Ludecke is gamely trying to cast himself in the best light even as he illuminates  a less polished and amateurish provincial politician that was Hitler while the Fuhrer was clawing his way into power.

Fox is a well known classicist  and biographer of Alexander the Great  and his book is a sweeping review of the classical world from the end of the Greek dark age to the decline of Rome

[ by Charles Cameron — always on the lookout for intriguing double-images ]
.

This really clears up confusion between polar and cartesian coordinates. pic.twitter.com/02euAzTBQn

— Christopher Clark (@Frencil) January 1, 2014

.

There’s an implied “this is to that as this is to that” double analogy here. Just how well or ill it teaches coordinate systems I leave to others to decide — even without the analogical joking though, it’s an intriguing visual juxtaposition.

[ by Charles Cameron — some good advice from Tim Furnish, which Jerry Boykin doesn’t appear to have heard… ]
.

Gen. Jerry Boykin (upper panel, below), speaking with his visionary preacher friend, Rick Joyner, naturally has the right to voice his views, including those that see Middle Eastern geopolitics through the lens of Isaiah 17:1-3…

… but he might want to listen to blog-friend Dr Timothy Furnish (lower panel, above) — a fellow Christian and conservative — first.

**

I fear that at the moment, Boykin sounds more vigilant than sober, though both are jointly scripturally mandated at 1 Peter 5:8.

Here Boykin & Joyner discuss Syria, Biblical Prophecy, And The End Times:

Rick JOYNER: And we’re seeing Biblical prophecy unfold.
Jerry BOYKIN: We are.
JOYNER: These are times in which things are unfolding in scripture, and one of the Scriptures that has never been fulfilled…
BOYKIN: Unhuh…
JOYNER: …and has to be fulfilled before this age can end, is that Damascus will be destroyed, never inhabited again.
BOYKIN: I share your concern, Rick, and as you say, certainly, and I’ve said this for a long time, one of the ways that Damascus could be destroyed, never to be reoccupied, would be through a chemical attack. So let’s just take a scenario…

Interested? You can hear Boykin’s scenario of Assad’s final gesture in utter defeat, here.

**

Sources:

Boykin

Furnish

I hope to discuss Boykin’s friendship with Joyner [“our only hope is a military takeover; martial law“] and what it may portend, in a subsequent post.

[ by Charles Cameron — a project of keen interest to me, and a request for your support ]
.

Something is going on in one corner of the White House that has me agog in a pleasant way.

.

Mark DeLoura, Senior Advisor for Digital Media at the WH Office of Science and Technology Policy is soliciting ideas about Games that Can Change the World. I’ve jumped in, and so have some old friends, one auld acquaintance and one new…

**

The home page for this project is hosted on its own Games for Impact site, and I’d invite you to take a look, and note in particular…

This is my own page, for the HipBone / Sembl games and DoubleQuotes — and if you have found my style of analysis valuable, you may want to go there, (take the trouble to) log in, and upvote my idea — making a comment too, should you so wish.

Similarly, you can log in and upvote the whole idea by supporting this proposal, the current “leading” concept…

Part of what makes this entry so interesting is the fact that Chris Crawford, game designer and thinker non pareil, is discussing his own long-hoped-for paradigm shift in game design in this thread. Chris is the “auld acquaintance” I mentioned, and I met him via the good services of my old friend Mike Sellers late in the last century. It is good to read him again in the new millennium.

Mike’s own offering is this one, which I also highly recommend. Mike is one of the founding fathers of multiplayer games with graphical architecture, and has more recently been working to bring human psychology into gameplay with increasing subtlety. By all means give him a vote up if that sounds good.

As you know, my own games attempt to bring the game concept embedded in Hermann Hesse’s great novel, The Glass Bead Game / Magister Ludi into playable form, and my friend Paul Pilkington has been doing the same in a series of books [1, 2, 3] and a Twitter stream. Let’s help him get some recognition, too…

This one’s a game concept I like, too — it’s based on Conway‘s Game of Life… and brings it alive!

It was submitted by Olivier Auber, whom I hadn’t previously met — so he’s my new acquaintance, and I’m hoping his game ideas will flourish and that acquaintance will grow into friendship in as things unfold…

**

So that’s the overall project, along with a sampling of specific ideas that I admire and would invite you to support. I hope you’ll find (and support) some other game concepts of interest, too.

In a follow up post honoring Chris Crawford — which may still take a while to write and post — I’ll be looking at some of the historical background of “serious games” — and of the HipBone / Sembl style of thinking in particular.