Bogstandard

Poqueta Update Late April '26: New Variants & Usable Collection

You can now allow special variants in your collection to appear within the game (if they occur within the puzzle).

The latest update to Poqueta lets plays toggle their special variants to be used with in the core daily game. If you have a special variant of a card in your collection, you can now choose to allow it to be used in the daily puzzle instead of the regular card. This means that if the daily puzzle includes a card that has a special variant in your collection, you may see the special variant appear in the game instead of the regular card.

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Poqueta Update April '26: Booster Packs

This video has sound, so turn it on to hear the satisfying pack opening noise.

The latest update to Poqueta is a visual follow on from the previous update of adding special cards. Now, instead of just getting a card without any build up, you’ll earn a booster pack for completing the daily puzzle. Opening the booster pack will grant you a random card from the winning hands, just with more fanfare.

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Poqueta Update March '26: Special Collectables

With each daily winning, there’s a chance to gain a special variant instead.

Poqueta is a daily puzzle game based on Poker Squares, it’s different each day and takes on average about 2 minutes to play. If you haven’t tried it yet, check it out at poqueta.com.

The latest update to Poqueta introduces special collectable cards. Now when you win a daily game, there’s a chance you may get a special variant of the card instead. These variants are purely cosmetic and don’t affect gameplay, but they add an extra layer of collectability for players who enjoy collecting cards. The special variants are rarer than the regular cards, each card has a standard and four special variants to collect.

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Poqueta Update Feb '26: Collecting Cards

Each daily win awards you a random card from the winning hands.

Poqueta is a daily puzzle game based on Poker Squares, it’s different each day and takes on average about 2 minutes to play. If you haven’t tried it yet, check it out at poqueta.com.

The latest update to Poqueta introduces collecting cards. Each time you win a daily game, you are awarded a random card from the winning hands. This won’t be the same for each person, so you can collect different cards by playing every day. For now the cards are purely cosmetic and don’t affect gameplay.

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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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