Bogstandard

Christmas Decorations Online

Ho Ho Ho! It’s Christmas on CoD4!

It’s Christmas time again, and so the better sort of private servers are running Christmas variations of their popular map rotations. This is mostly always a fan effort but occassionally official creators will get involved and delivery us gems like Winter Crash, an enduring classic.

Digital decoration is a tradition I hope never breaks. For this site’s festive bulbs we’re using the wonderful Christmas-Lights.js by Bradly Feeley.

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On Silver's Brief Instructions (1/?)

The Duel After the Masquerade by Gérôme Jean Leon

Everything written in this article is done using George Silver’s Brief Instructions as the single source, with Greg Lindahl’s transcription used for understandable quotes, but you can view a copy of the text that’s nearer to the original on the Internet Archive if you enjoy squinting and headaches.

I’m deliberately ignoring the original Paradoxes of Defense here, it’s a bit of chore to read, and somewhat an angry embarrassing mess. Like Marcion rejecting the Old Testament, followers of Silver should be lauding the clear, rules-based methodology of the later Brief Instructions and shunning of the polemic Paradoxes of Defense. Brief Instructions existing at all hints that even Silver understood his original work was pretty cryptic and his later adoption of manualistic style hints that he knew also the original was a bit rubbish for teaching anything.

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Ode to Dubious Lenses: "HD MC 162728"

I’ve got roughly ten or so lenses in my collection, most are second-hand manual lenses of varying prestige, quality, and cost. I dislike my official Fujis the most, they are totems of wasted money and frustration (“Maybe this time I’ll get along with the autofocus!”). My old Soviet & East German lenses are okay, but I find myself playing pretend that they’re good and worth keeping going with (there’s a political joke somewhere there), they are just so cumbersome to use casually and using a mount adapter is always shit. Soviet lenses have not aged well, despite my misguided affection for that mess of history.

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OM-3 et al; Retro to a fault

Continuing to place the viewfinder in the center of mirrorless cameras & continuing to include the weird pentaprism lump feels a bit daft, to me at least. Sure it looks the part (no accounting for taste) but it’s an awkward and a redundant hangover from the days when these things were physically required to be centeral on the camera body for the camera to work.

There’s no good reason for modern mirrorless cameras to continue to force the user to squish their noses against the back-screen in the age of digital. Rangefinder manufacturers figured this out decades ago; there wasn’t a physical requirement to have a pentaprism and central VF - so they didn’t, and now mirrorless cameras don’t need to either, so why continue to ape an SLR era compromise? Taste.

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Analogue Correspondence Card Games

To play a card game like poker by correspondence would require the decks to be exactly the same sequence in both locations similar to correspondence chess where the boards must be exactly the same states in both locations. (For simplicity I am speaking on the assumption of two players, but for n players the rule remains.)

However unlike chess where the players can openly see the state of the board, the players in a card game like poker must be unaware of the state of the deck. This makes things trickier, and so both players must perform a shared seeded blind shuffle of their decks, the goal being to have both shuffle their decks fairly but result in the same unknown sequences.

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Correspondence Poker by Seeded Random

I enjoy correspondence chess, plaintext computing, stateless APIs and Jamstack, and I also enjoy poker; so a while back I created a means of playing poker by correspondence via linked webpages: Plaintext-Poker (repo).

This utilises a seeded random (actually Java’s Random ported to Javascript!) to ensure that players stay on the same deck and same game state without any memory being used anywhere. It does this in a stateless fashion by using the seed to perform the exact same previous actions for each stage, given the seed via the URL, with a player number, the number of players and the game stage also included.

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∸ Monus without Max

Monus is an fun operator, its symbol is a dot above a minus; ∸. Monus is truncated subtraction, or in clearer terms, subtraction where the result stops at zero, eg. if you perform 5 ∸ 10, you get 0 instead of -5. But 5 – 3 will result in 2 as normal.

The Wikipedia article for Monus describes a few methods to perform the operation which involve conditionals or abstract functions like Max(x, 0) but my preferred method is the simple (x+|x|)/2

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Supposed Notation/Shorthand for Fencing Plays

There is not as far as I’m aware a common, system agnostic, simple textual notation for fencing; moves that can be written without advanced ligatures or illustrations. There’s a pretty extensive history of written notation for dance, which in terms of motion is fairly close to fencing, but none besides Labanotation (which is used by the US for the copyright of dance) have significantly caught on and endured in history. Dance/Movement notation is a relatively niche field and jam-packed with advanced symbols and flexible geometry. Without resorting to clunky spoken language, it’s tough to describe a sequence of bodily movements quickly, casually and succinctly in non-graphical form.

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Brute Force Maths, Solving Any Dice

While trying to solve the opposing face for what I’ve dubbed as “Butterfly” configured dice, I had a bit of an epiphany and realised all my recent dice problems could be brute forced by exploiting zero to a power, that 00 equals 1 but 0¹ ᵒʳ ᵍʳᵉᵃᵗᵉʳ equals 0 allows us to essentially conditionally select what result we get from an input. The trick gives us an If statement without the notation, we can cheat around my self imposed no-ifs rule.

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