Survivor games with Google

I hope your summer weekends have been everything you hoped for. As a game designer, I love it when my weekends are full of play and mirth as this past one was. Friday in particular which was as lovely and satisfying as any day I could hope for.

Two Xmases ago, Greg and I ran the December Game at a holiday party for Google. And then earlier this year we booked our second game for the LA Google team. A July luncheon at the beach, with fun and games and a Survivor theme. Our mission: design a challenge course of 3 mini games that anyone could play in any order over the course of a couple hours. Expected attendance was 600, plus kids.

Based on a game event we’d previously run for our friends and family at a church in El Cerrito, we designed a passport players could take around to every station collecting scores and stamps. The players with the highest total scores won prizes, but the point was a fun day of mental and physical games suitable for family play. In hindsight, I wish we had been notified how many kids would be present but luckily the games were suitable for all ages.

In designing the day we quickly settled on two of our perennial games, Dot Racing and No Match Catch. Myriad reasons make these games suitable for just such an event, not to mention the coincidence of the colors in the client’s iconic logo.

Our conjectural o course had a balance beam, retrieving something from the water, digging up a buried chest at coordinates, a lock and key, or perhaps combination lock (less vulnerable to sand when buried), ending with a puzzle or code as a mental catch-up. But problems multiplied before we even began. A game like this can be played only once at the party: no re-setting things that need to be dug up, plus a code or puzzle is only good once: when people see how it’s solved, it’s spoiled.

I came across the name of the game first, while looking on Wikipedia at lists of songs by the band KISS. It’s John Kirhoffer’s favorite band, and as challenge producer John ultimately decides which challenges make it past the idea stage and onto the board, which is one step on the way to a playtest, none of which is a one-way street to making it on the air. No matter how good a challenge is, it has to have a good name or it’ll never make it on the board. Sometimes we sit around getting sick of a good challenge because nobody can name it and we can’t move on until it goes on the board. Greg holds the record for best name for an endurance challenge that didn’t make it to air. I’ll let him post it in the comments, I don’t want to steal his thunder.

So there I was, mining for challenge names among rock songs with the plan to work backwards. When I read the track listing for Unmasked (1980), the song title Two Sides of the Coin made me think of this challenge. It came to me fully formed.

This, in its entirety, is a write-up from March 2011:

Two Sides of the Coin.

            In this individual challenge, every player has a solving station in front of him made of 4 colored stripes with 4 matching colored coins on them, each coin with a heads and tails side. Jeff reads a series of instruction on how the players are to turn, swap and move the coins. They must listen to the directions, try to remember them, and then move the pieces on their station. Then Jeff checks to see who is right; anyone whose station doesn't match his card is eliminated.

            With each elimination, instructions get longer and more complicated. Also, additional coins can be added to increase difficulty. Sample instruction: 

"Turn over the red coin. Swap the first two coins. Turn over the coin on the yellow space. Swap the middle two coins. Turn the first coin showing heads."

Before and after:

I did not make a playtest of this game for the Survivor room, which was probably its downfall, but a few weeks ago when Greg and Laura the intern were over at my house, I made up a playtest of it with scratch paper, Sharpies filched from my wife’s desk, and coasters we don’t use any more for a game where you roll coasters across the floor of a bar at a target, like a cuspidor. It’s called Roller Coasters and it could be suitable for Tiny Games.

We determined that the game was good enough and replay value high enough to build out further. Greg had the crucial idea that it could be played with 3 coins to start and then moving up to 4 coins, perhaps with a reversible game board.

To make the mats, I assigned Laura to find cheap placemats we could paint but she observed that getting raw materials and fabricating the boards out of items purchased in the garment district would be better. It took Greg a whole day to get what he needed because none of his usual haunts had all 4 colors, and he is very particular about quantities. He’s been to a lot of foreign countries and shopped in many bazaars so he’s a tough negotiator. He is the guy who will walk out the door. Many merchants have called him “my friend” but not meant it.

Greg designed boards that folded over and used Velcro to transform between three and four stripes. Funny story about the Velcro. We obtained it for the original Dot Racing board back in 2011 by getting it for free off Craigslist because a woman didn’t want it. Greg failed to bring it to the East Bay so we hot glued the dots on the big mat instead – that is, until someone suggested a pencilution.

During the move into our new workspace, I put the Velcro in a safe place, alongside other seldom used items. I retrieved the Velcro which Greg then hot glued to the fabric. Greg observed that in its initial state the game board resembled the flag of Romania. He also recognized that its reverse looked like the flag of Mexico, but rotated and lacking an Eagle. Further research showed its reverse is the flag of Mali.

I ordered wooden disks for the coins from this store. Never use this store: Stuff4crafts.com

http://t.co/AC3ODkWu9u, screw you forever. You will never get my business again. Ptooey.

— Myles Nye (@MylesNye) July 31, 2013

I still have no idea where the disks are. This store is terrible.

Greg got the wooden disks necessary from Michael’s in Burbank, along with other craft items. He also got some 1/8 inch foam in the correct colors and hole punches in the right sizes. This way, the coins could be punched out fully formed. There need be no painting, only stenciling on the heads and tails images. We agreed that the foam might be lighter than the wood coins, but it might be okay.

Greg’s first stencils were of eagles and George Washington heads but I opined that I preferred snakes and skulls for heads and tails. I used Bing to find images and sent them to him to make and cut stencils. He modified them in Photoshop first and printed them a couple times to get the right size. Cutting them then was accomplished easily enough but painting them was time consuming. After finishing half the job (1 side of each coin) we worked together to move the newspaper outside so the paint could dry and the lightest breeze blew the coins everywhere. This was a game intended for the beach. Wind would be a major factor.

As if with one mind, we had the idea to glue the foam coins to either side of the wooden disks. This would have more weight than foam or wood alone and, another nice side effect, look like madeleines. As we’ve learned from Minute to Win It, people have a good time when they’re playing with cookies.

Greg completed the coins and also fashioned boards that would somewhat elegantly serve two purposes, protecting players from wind and cheating competitors. He used foam board, bookends, and hot glue.

The hardest item to come up with was rubber stamps to put in the programs. Unless you get them custom made, and we were out of time, you can’t get a one-inch square stamp with a torch, a skull, a rat, a snake, an idol, an X marks the spot… Feel free to prove me wrong. Who would have thought this would be the item that would prove so tough? We went with bugs, as in what Survivors ate on season 1. Specifically, we used a scarab, a spider, and a ladybug (for Dot Racing of course).

Then there was the snafu at the printers where 250 of the passports were printed 50% offset, but it turns out Greg designed them with a nice symmetry so it wasn’t a problem, plus we gave away the good ones first. Adam the new intern did a noble job folding all those programs.

But Adam’s most noble work by far was building the Two Sides of the Coin application from scratch, with instructions from 2 guys he barely knew who were not always communicating in the best way. And he did it under deadline, on hardware that wasn’t easy to work with (mark 1 iPad), away from home and out of his comfort zone. It was a bang-up job. He has already named two good ideas for improvements to the app, but the product we played with on Friday was robust and easy to use. It’s a wonder. For someone like me who sees coding as achievable magic, it’s a fine thing. And I don’t usually work in digital games. I don’t think Two Sides of the Coin counts as a digital game, but the app is a crucial addition.

In addition to his proficiency at digital games, Adam was a great game show host for No Match Catch. It was a pleasure to be on the beach next to him as he capably led the teams through this game. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I packed everything the night before the game. Adam and Greg beat me to the restaurant but there wasn’t much for them to do until I arrive. I got there 10 minutes before the appointed time of 10 AM. The weather was partially cloudy and there was a snap in the air. I was permitted to park near the restaurant for loading, right off the Pacific Coast Highway. We loaded items.

First we snapped together the carpet pieces that assemble like a puzzle; Greg bought scores of them on a visit to the Depot for Creative Reuse in Oakland. Now we lay them on hardwood floors to put under the Dot Racing game for players’ comfort. We oriented the mat so as no to obstruct the bar but to block the door that led to the dangerous staircase to the beach. Down on the beach we placed the balls and buckets for No Match Catch. I taught Adam how to call the game and he understood it right away. I knew he had the right attitude when he asked me if he could tease and encourage the players.

  The two smartest things we did were show up early and expect wind would be a factor. Wind was a factor and being there early gave us time to deal with it. Part of the solution was borrowing duct tape; I had the idea to ask the guy with the ladder to use his. We never did give it back to him. Sorry mate. Then there was the remarkable coincidence of having 4 magnets that were packed along with the dry erase board on which I used red and blue tape to transform it into a scoreboard that looks like the American flag. Those magnets were also enlisted in the battle against the wind, adhered to the bookends hotglued to the foam board and duct taped to the table.

The restaurant manager gave his waitstaff a terrific pep talk. I’m going to do that more. Our support team comprised Jaclyn and Clinton, two all-star game confederates. You know they’re good because they both own Wise Guys shirts. They’re family. Greg and I wore polos. It was that kind of day.

The whole lunch was a big success and our games were a big success too. I was so grateful we didn’t build an O course. I had a great time playing Two Sides of the Coin. I hogged it so much I hardly let Jaclyn host any rounds at all, but she was there to step in and did a splendid job, allowing me to get some extra water, relieve myself, and check out the rest of the event.

If I’d hosted a little more I would have fallen into a more easy rhythm like I did with E3GoMania, but I got some good lines in there. I borrowed a line from Jeff Adamson, manager of ComedySportz Quad City, used in describing the brown bag foul: “Put your hands up in the I-work-at-7-11-position.”

But beyond the games going very well, which they did, there were some other remarkable things about the day. Some were very small but they added up to a day that was full of wonderful surprises and smiles.

• The woman who gave out programs to guests as they arrived was Pamela. Pamela was a student in an improv class I taught earlier this summer: other than that, we’d never met before. No coincidence, no story.

• During the very first coin game of the day, a woman earned the high score: 23 points. Her name was Tammy and after she played she said, “Aren’t you Owler from the NPL?” Which indeed I am. She also remembered me from when I ran a Go Game for Google interns about 6 years ago. Her intellect is simply off the charts. She has to be super human. Late in the day another contestant, Jesse, equaled her score but no one topped it. EDIT: Larry Hosken, a brilliant puzzler in his own right, has identified this player as Tammy McLeod, the reigning US Sudoku champ, so that kind of helps explain that.
  

• Another fun, spirited contestant who played our games had a mustache with waxed tips (styled points, Greg calls them) and piercings: his face rang a bell but I’m not good with faces. He confirmed that we knew each other; he’s Joseph, friends with Jason Stein, who is in graduate school with my wife. Actually Jason graduated recently but that’s beside the point. Another chance encounter: Joseph (or Seph) is a summer intern for Google.

• And then as I passed the elaborately presented desert buffet, featuring a volcano of Cocoa Krispies Rice Krispie treats with Oreos and gummy worms that looked like lava, a woman called me by name. It was Sara, whose husband works at Google, and whose son Charlie attends My Gym with my son Fenton. At this point I was kind of gobsmacked, but I was having so much fun it just felt like a party where I kept seeing people I liked but never expected to run into. Because that’s what it was.

Greg and I did some fun back and forth MC banter at the scoring ceremony; we guilt tripped some people into rescinding their high scores so as not to exclude Ariella, a very bright girl of about age 11 who, with 17 points, had the second-highest score of the day in Two Sides of the Coin. About 4 people got 14 points in that game but the winners had 49, 52, and 59 points total.  

We gave out gag gifts as well as nice gifts donated by Google and a trophy for our first place finisher Adam (no relation to our intern). The highest scoring team at No Match Catch got Spelling Bee Participant ribbons. Their high score was 20. I’ve seen scores of 25 and I’m told at Lair of the Bear they got 30, but they are exceptional there.

And after all that, I got to go compete on The Experts, the YouTube game show, where my topic was Survivor. I won’t say too much about what happened until the episode airs but I did get to meet Rob Cesternino which was a privilege. I attest that in person he is warm and self-effacing and a pleasure to talk to. Jaclyn, who knows Rob through tennis friends they have in common, came along to cheer on all the contestants. But mostly me.

I won’t reveal the outcome of the competition, but afterward Jaclyn and I went out to celebratory drinks at Kay n Dave’s ;) and invited along Marty and Alan, the co-creators of The Experts. We geeked out on game shows like Million Dollar Mind Game, Merv Griffin Crosswords, Only Connect, Mastermind, and many more. Plus I drank a frozen blended mango margarita, make it a grande for $1 more. It was like putting a fruity milkshake of booze in my gob and I loved it. And that’s why I attest Friday was really great.

It’s times like this that make me appreciate how fortunate I am to have play in my life. Thank play, as intern Adam would say.

The story of E3GoMania

Everyone has his own strengths and weaknesses: I am a very confident public speaker, and though there are many other things I am not good at, oration is my wheelhouse. I have remarked before that were I as unafraid of snakes as I am of making a public address I would surely be dead, because I would have walked up to a viper or python and smacked it around. I did that once in Palau, though actually it was a triggerfish. But that is another story. 

I think it was Jerry Seinfeld who offered his interpretation on the oft-quoted statistic that generally more people would prefer illness or death to befall themselves or a loved one, rather than have to speak in public. That is to say, paraphrasing Seinfeld, that more people would prefer to be the corpse in the coffin than the person delivering the eulogy. By contrast, I joined ComedySportz 11 years ago, and ever since I have stood in front of strangers who have paid good money out of their own pocket for an entertaining show, and I have nothing prepared to say to them. 

I don't really get stage fright of any kind, so I have to keep pushing myself to do things that do frighten me, so I don't grow complacent. A couple years ago, I challenged myself to perform a one-man musical that was totally unscripted, minimally rehearsed, and partially improvised. It was one of the most fun and scary things I've ever done. I threw up the morning of the show. It was one night only. There's a video of that night here.

But it's been a while. I improvise musical comedies and foreign films and I love it, but it doesn't give make me perspire or give me butterflies. So this year I invented E3GoMania. This is the story of that game. 

To start, you need to know IndieCade is the international festival of independent games. It occurs every October in my neighborhood in LA, though they did one in NYC that I heard was a big success. For the last 2 years, my company Wise Guys Events has participated in the festival, and for the last 3 years IndieCade invited me and Greg to come to E3 to showcase some of our games.

E3 is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, an enormous trade show that happens at the dilapidated LA Convention Center every June. It is where the biggest video game companies unveil their new wares: consoles, games, promotions. It gets a lot of press.  

E3 is 100% digital games, IndieCade is something like 70% digital. Every year, E3 provides a booth for IndieCade in which indie games are showcased. Many of those games are digital, and they are frequently among the most enthusiastically and positively reviewed games of the whole conference. And alongside them, IndieCade shows off games like Humans Vs Zombies, Babel Build, and the games Greg and I do for Wise Guys: games like Pickpocket Junction (AKA Trenchcoat Grabass) and Dot Racing.

So when people ask, why are your weird physical games at a video games trade show, I say: IndieCade has a home at E3. Wise Guys has a home at IndieCade. And that's how we came to be there. 

Dot Racing at E3. 

Jane McGonigal plays Pickpocket Junction. This photo is from Come Out and Play, not E3. 

For the last two years I've noticed  - you can't help but notice - the women who are hired to dress in a provocative outfit and loiter around a booth to attract attention. They're called "booth babes" or "booth bunnies" and it seems to be a practice on the rise. I noticed it our first year there - you can see some of the women posing in the Dot Racing photo above - and last year I was following @br (Brenda Romero) and @hunicke (Robin Hunicke) whose pained Tweets stuck with me.

The whole booth bunny thing grossed me out. I'm married to a Wellesley grad. I'm a feminist. And I couldn't in good conscience attend E3 for another year without adding my voice to the ongoing conversation about the culture of booth babedom. But I don't have a soapbox. I'm a game designer. 

So I did what I do: I designed a game.

First thing I did was talk it over with Greg. I told him if this needed to be a Myles Nye project and not a Wise Guys thing, that would be OK. He was on board, and though he didn't have the fire in his belly about the game that I did, he did a great job making our game board and contributed some of the trivia questions. As always, Greg is a mensch. But he was firm on one thing: we weren't going to put any Wise Guys money into the project. 

The next person I needed on my side was Celia, co-founder of IndieCade. I knew she would be into the game, and I pitched it to her over the phone while visiting my inlaws in Claremont. I told her that I had come to the conclusion that the game couldn't be done for zero dollars, but that I would put up my own money to make it happen. Celia got the whole picture right away and pledged to do the same. We figured it we got a few people who supported the message behind this project to make a donation in the 1-2 hundred dollar range, we could make it happen. Celia mentioned doing a Kickstarter, but with less than 2 weeks before E3 I said this isn't a Kickstarter. This is pass the hat.

Celia felt that it was important to make the game happen this year, because she thought the heat would be off the issue by next year. My thought was, "Sorry, the heat will be off FEMINISM?" but I went with it anyway.  

So at this point I should probably describe the game.

As I first pitched it to Greg, it's simple a trivia quiz like something from the second season of Survivor: when you answer a question right, you move your game piece forward. The questions would all be Trivial Pursuit style Q&A about video games, classic and contemporary. Greg said if this was going to be a Wise Guys project, it would need to have a gameplay mechanism with a little more razzle-dazzle, and I took his point.

I thought it over and, inspired a little by games like The Breakaway on BBC, I proposed a game with a small, fairly simple strategy element to it, and Greg helped me refine it to the version we ended up playing. Players move a game piece across the board by advancing it on red or yellow spaces. When you buzz in an answer a question right, you earn a point of movement, either yellow (by answering an easy question) or red (by answering a hard one). Whoever buzzes in first gets first crack at answering and, if they get the answer right, select the color of the next question and thus help propel their own piece to the finish line. You can also use your point of movement to move an opponent's piece backward. Nothing too tricky, but original, and with opportunities for strategic play and come-from-behind victories.

But of course I'm leaving out the main part of the game. The game "pieces" that players move down the board are hunky men with their shirts off. 

That's all. Just that. Like I said, adding my voice, in a mischievous way, to say, Hey if the big companies use scantily clad women to sell their wares, why can't I do the same with men to promote nothing? And if nothing else, there would be some fairness at the trade show: for the straight women and gay men who would rather ogle a man's body, something to ogle.  Is more fair than just women on display.

You don't have to be a feminist to be into fairness. I happen to be both. 

And this is why the game couldn't be done for $0. Greg and I are used to bootstrapping everything, and a good amount of sweat equity went into this game, but the models had to be talent and the talent would need to be paid for their time. I figured that you could probably get some men for a few hours over the course of 3 days for a couple hundred bucks, but that's more than zero which is what we had when we passed the hat. 

And, amazingly, thanks to Megan Gaiser, Heidi Gamer, Akira Thompson, Richard LeMarchand, Brenda Romero, and Celia Pearce, we raised the funds we needed. Now all that was left was to generate enough content to play a Q&A trivia game for 3 days about a subject about which I know virtually nothing, video games. I've seen "The King of Kong" and "Wreck-It Ralph." That's about it. Jeopardy! has a team of writers, fact-checkers, editors, and researchers to crank out their content. Plus they know the format of the game and how many questions is enough. We had just me and whoever I could get to help write questions, and no idea how many was enough and how many would bring the game to an abrupt end. Plus, now that we were committed to producing a game show live on the showroom floor, there were many other details to figure out.

Eek! I perspired. I got butterflies. I got what I signed up for.

For the four days leading up to E3, I was in Boston attending my wife's 10 year college reunion. Seeing the Welleseley alumni parade reminded me of why I was glad to be doing what I was doing. I got some support from by sister-in-law Ashley-Renee, lots from Celia Pearce and Megan Gaiser, and some great questions from Chris de Leon. The rest were written by me, using Wikipedia as my source. Very bad form, but I didn't have a lot of choices.

Meanwhile, our intern Laura secured the models. Two of them were hired from Craigslist; the third was a friend of mine who is a personal trainer. You can read more about Laura and the casting process on her splendid blog, here. 

Also while in Boston, we had to straighten out a minor hiccup. Celia was informed by E3 that they wouldn't approve shirtless men because "partial nudity" is not allowed at E3. This of course is an enormous double standard. Look at the women. Just look. So this was even more eye-opening than I was expecting. 

It was all a whirlwind, but soon enough it was Day 1 of IndieCade. We had the models in their costumes (wrestling style singlets obtained from a local dance store), a binder full of trivia questions, a gameshow buzzer system, a game board, an announcer, a host. All we needed was contestants and to begin.

I went to the men's room, changed my shirt, looked at myself in the mirror and got psyched up. All right, I said to myself. Let's do this.

This is me with Timmy and Sammy. We have a special relationship: Timmy was the first person ever to volunteer to play this game. Sammy was the second volunteer, and won. But Timmy started the ball rolling. As a game designer and the first person who ever played it, there is a special bond between me and Timmy and I'll always be grateful. 

That first day, the game went fine. The questions were way too hard, I wasn't using the buzzer system in the easiest possible way, and I was perspiring like I was under hot lights, which I kind of was. But we had some fun and we discovered that the game wasn't broken. It was a thing. 

On the second day, after spending a late night with Wikipedia and editing material from day 1, we began with a better collection of material. And this was when we began to relax a bit and have some fun. This was also the day we had our best contestant, Adam, who was there with his game Love in a Dangerous Spacetime. He knows a LOT about video games! 

Another of my favorite moments came on Day 2. We had our first female contestant, Ryan, who volunteered without knowing what she was signing up for. Once she discovered it was a quiz about video games she turned pale, claiming not to know anything about the topic. But she was the only person who buzzed in and answered correctly that the name of the classic PC game where an abominable snowman chases down and eats the player is SkiFree! And then her avatar, James, whom I had coached earlier, pretended to be lost and not know where to go on the game board. I invited Ryan to go take him by the hand and lead him there, but instead she put James on her back and carried him the two feet to the next stripe on the game board!.

Another memorable moment was when Sarah sang the song that made her famous, the theme to "Spaceteam." Spacetheme, I guess. 

By the third day, we were really cooking. We had our routine down, there were audience members (women) who had come just to see the avatars, and we had some returning players defending their titles in a championship battle with a lot of right answers coming fast and furious and exciting, strategic gameplay. 

By the third day, we were getting some press on some blogs, which was great. And Adam, defending his championship from the day before, won the game by answering the last question I had in my binder. What a squeaker!

Unsurprisingly, nothing changed. Booth babe culture did not shrivel up and die, and the men who see nothing wrong with the women being objectified didn't change their opinions because of our little stunt. 

I was actually hoping to attract some negative attention from people who didn't like the game. I wanted to get the chance to be brave like Annita Sarkezian and fight off the trolls. That didn't happen. Maybe I got a pass because I'm a man. But I wanted people to attack me and suggest that I am gay or insecure in my masculinity. I had good answers ready for those things. 

But we did what we set out to do: designed a game intended to make things more fair and to bring a different tenor to the conversation about models at trade shows. Judging by the comments on the other blogs, I'd say we succeeded. 

Thanks to everybody who made this cockamamie scheme a reality. Now who wants to help us to produce GDCegomania?

For more on this game: 

Kotaku 

Miami New Times

Indie Statik

Laura's intern blog

And see lots of photos and videos of the game. 

Passenger Project: LAX to BOS

The Passenger Project

LAX to Portland

PDX to LAX

Play it yourself on your next flight: search for Ivan Cash's Passenger Project.​

Jerk

Tonight I played the party game "Wise and Otherwise" with a group of friends. I had not played the game for a while and it was more fun than I remembered it. My best wise-guy answer was for the setup, "There's an old Polish saying that goes, If they don't answer after three knocks..." My response was, "Steal the welcome mat." Some people said they would have voted for it if I'd gone with my original idea, "Steal the wash off the line," which I rejected for being overly pastoral.​

​On the other hand, most people guessed my answer for the setup, "There's an old Jamaican saying that goes, If you play with monkey..." For my bluff, I thought of one of the words in the setup and tried to think of the most basic thing associated with that word and the answer came to me. One of these is my bluff and the other is the answer:

​"If you play with monkey, don't play with his tail."

"If you play with monkey, play with his friends."​

Most people guessed mine and I guessed the right one. I felt really proud, as someone who makes playfulness his business, that I got the most points on this one and I got it right coming and going.​

Now which one do you think is real? According to the makers of the game, anyhow. They could all be made up.​

Come my little monkey do

Animal kingdom

Spotted this morning in our backyard. A possum, about the size of a medium housecat, bearing on her back at least 9 babies, each the size of a large mouse. Something about the way the tail looks makes this animal slightly revolting to me. But the way she cared for her children, and the way she limped, and the way she was clearly looking for a shelter from the driving rain, and the fact that I was holding my own small child in my arms, made me feel emotional. This has been one of the side effects of fatherhood. I'm not as robotic as I one was.​

Drawn to them

​You know what I can't get enough of? This style of illustration:

Does this style have a name? It's also what I generally see in the Talk of the Town part of The New Yorker magazine.​

Our first visit to the Magic Castle

They only allow you to take photos in the lobby. The bookcase slides back when you murmur the password, "SEXYGARFIELD."​

When my wife and 2 other guests from our party were away from the table, I discovered to my surprise I had a second tie in my blazer's inside pocket. I changed ties while they were gone. My wife was the first to notice, although it was a couple hours later. The magic and the company both were much more interesting than my neckwear. ​

Thanks to John and Jessica, to Aaron and Laura, and to Jeff and Andy for being such great company.​

View fullsize

OK the story here is there was an awful woman, whom we called "Peroxide" because she used a lot, who had been cut off by the bar and was drunken, disorderly, and immensely trashy. It was a "the most obnoxious person in the room wants everyone to know the titleholder is present" sort of situation. In this photo, we're pretending to be her.​

In praise of Community 409

The season on the whole has been womp womp with a few highlights. But I loved this episode. I'm a big Muppets fan, and the songs were beautiful. In fact, I've been listening to them over and over and over. You can too:​​

But there's more than just being charmed by the puppets and the music. (And also that the puppets aren't used just for the hell of it: there's a reason, grounded in what happened to the group.) This episode is as important to the canon of the group as Competitive Ecology. or Cooperative Calligraphy.

They recognize they're doing what they always do so they go outside their comfort zone and something terrible happens to them. This will reenforce their need to stay safely in the study room and fall into their safe comfortable patterns. Perfect addition to this self-aware sitcom. It's as though the "Cheers" gang decided to go on safari and Carla got attacked by a hippo. They'd say, "Whoah, we'd better just stay in the bar where it's safe from now on."​

​There's also the matter of the secrets. I think the little Indian princess story Jeff told Abed is a more dark secret than the one he told the group in 409. What's more, that story plays into the group's expectations of him, since they all seem obsessed by his relationship with his dad (I hate the way they seem to hit this on the nose in every episode). If Abed did confess a secret, and if he remembers the secrets of all the others, then he alone knows Jeff is lying about his secret. Jeff is the one who suggested they start confessing in the light of day; he got the ball rolling with a story that conveniently fits into what the group already thinks about him. Abed may be keeping Jeff's secret secret as well as his own.

I wish there had been something other than a fire in the cafeteria, since we already had one of those last year and we also had Troy confessing to starting a fire. I wish the Dean hadn't worn a Pinnocchio costume. And I wish Jeff had a better zinger for the Dean than "shut up." But on the whole, this episode is worthy of the show I love so much.​

Cranky and full of negativity

​The new iTunes is an abomination. I say "new" because a few months ago I let myself get bullied into an update and now getting my podcasts onto my iPod is a Herculean chore. The desktop interface is just as bad. I'm listening to an album in my Music and it doesn't show me what number track it is. I can see the song before this one is 8 and the one after it is 10, but instead of 9 it's showing me a sound icon, to show me that I am listening to a song. It's not that I can't do the math. It's that I don't want my music player to be coy with me and play guessing games. It's withholding information instead of disseminating, because of design awfulness.

​But what I'm really cranky about is Survivor. The last two episodes have been the best of the season, and the only good ones since the first episode. The Brandon meltdown doesn't count as a good episode because that's just ugliness and that's not what I'm watching for. Anyhow, tonight's episode had enough good game play to fill a whole season, and all the challenge footage was cool. Footage of people winning immunities. People like Brenda.

Last week I heard Stephen Fishbach say on Rob Cesternino's podcast that Brenda had been in 7 episodes and hadn't spoken to the camera in confessional yet. Tonight makes 8 and there still haven't been any that I can remember. Even though she won an individual immunity.​

I cry foul. I cry sexism. What male player wouldn't get a confessional talking about how good it feels to win? We saw the other players speak to Brenda and compliment her performance in the challenge, which was Tom Westman-worthy. But no words from her. Not even the "it feels good to win" sound bite.​

Who else could win an immunity idol and not get a confessional? Jerri Manthey in Heroes Vs. Villains certainly didn't get much attention when she won the house of cards immunity against Russell. We didn't see any players strategizing with her, even though the person with immunity is a major factor. ​

​Sure, Brett didn't get much camera time either, but he had more than 0 confessionals this time in the season. Brenda got visited by medical: they bandaged her leg, and then I guess it got better. We don't know. We haven't seen any of that. Rob gets footage when he gets a case of crybabyitis.

At IndieCade last year, Celia asked every in the room to raise their hand and then said, "If you think men and women should be treated equally, leave your hand in the air." Everyone left their hands in the air. She said, "If you have your hand in the air, you are a feminist." My wife graduated from Wellesley. I am attending her 10 year reunion this summer, with our son. I am part of a proud family of feminists. And I am calling sexism on Survivor for its portrayal of Brenda, and as a mega-fan it bums me out in a mega-way. ​

So there it is, a grumpy complaining blog post about a show I love. I feel that Malcolm's move belongs in the hall of fame along with Amanda's idol play in Fans Vs. Favorites and Parvati giving out 2 idols, and Russell finding his 2nd hidden idol without a clue, but does Andrea's?​ I'm not sure. What do you think?

Pie fight in Griffith park

Myles's many movements

My wife paid me a nice compliment last night about the way I accompany the stories I tell with movements, which makes the stories easy to follow, compared to what they might otherwise be without the movements. I learned from watching great spacework masters like Doug Neithercott and John Kirhoffer, but I said thank you for the compliment.

Tonight was a normal Monday except that instead of her taking our son to the weekly elite toddler cabal in Santa Monica it was me. I stopped minding my inbox at 3:20 PM so I could fit in a quick talk with her about daycare choices and still be driving away from the house at 3:30. I drove around the corner and parked at our local bagel place, checked in on Foursquare (I am the mayor), and then drove another quarter mile or so to Shakespeare's day care. I paid the caretaker, having forgotten to pay on Friday, and inquired about his stools. The question and answer were relayed among 2 other workers, both Spanish speaking, but the response satisfied me and I strapped the boy in and drove to Santa Monica on the freeway, encountering no problems with highway congestion or finding a parking place adjacent to a working elevator in the high rise parking structure, which only recently raised its rates; no more three hours free parking. Likewise Westfield Century City. Everyone's taking a bite out of me just because I drive a car.​

By 4:10 PM we were at ground level, Shakespeare in his stroller and me in my sweater. And him also in a sweater, the heavy jacket (a hand me down from a colleague and friend) tucked in the stroller's sparse cargo hold, a mesh bag which can accommodate the overgarment, a sippy cup, a burp rag, and precious little else. It is an umbrella stroller, no elephantine leviathan with a cupholder.​

Since we're early for the cabal, I pushed Shakespeare down the promenade. There was no drumming busquer today, but he showed interest in the soprano sax player and, more so, to the lady with a guitar singing original songs for kids. Her name was Claire Means, which I remember because of the Spoonerism: a housekeeping horse, I suppose. I wish she'd become a household name so I can use her in my forthcoming game Spoonbenders. I gave her a dollar in quarters.​

I pushed the stroller to 3rd between Santa Monica and Broadway to check out the new location of the Apple store. I think it's what used to be the Borders. Now I suppose the old space, nearer Wilshire, will stay vacant a long time. Urban blight. I wheeled us quickly to the church and we attended the session.​

At 6 I walked us to Tender Greens, ordered food for myself (an indulgence, but no dessert), and fed the baby in the highchair. I fed him from the yellow zip bag with food in it I'd brought from the car, hooked to the back of the umbrella story. I didn't tell you it was there before because I wanted this story to have a twist. The bag also contains spoons with which to feed Shakespeare yams, courtesy of mom, and mashed potatoes, courtesy of the magicians in the kitchen at Tender Greens. ​There's also wet paper towels in the yellow zip bag.

​After dinner my son and I return to the car. This is where mom's plan really pays off. We play at the car for about 15 minutes. Him in the trunk, going nuts and expending a lot of energy. I quickly hide the hatchet I keep in the trunk. I won it at John Russell Terrier's house for answering the most trivia questions right at an all-day screening of the first three Indiana Jones movies, before the 4th one came out. I like the fridge nuking scene, by the way. So Shakespeare's not allowed to play with the hatchet - I keep it in the trunk because, where else really? - but he can play with the bag of balls.

This boy loves ball pits. Loves them. He squeals with glee when we put him in one. He has recently taken to throwing all the balls out, one at a time, but I can usually stop him from doing that by juggling the balls. It's a great distraction, and I'm grateful to myself in high school for doing all that practice, because I can now juggle sufficiently well enough to appease a squirmy baby.

So I give the bag, a canvas tote, to Shakespeare. It contains about a dozen orange balls like the kind you find in a ballpit. This is the first time since fatherhood that the bag in the trunk has come in handy, but not the first time altogether. The balls themselves are leftovers from the big bags I buy at Toys R Us for the games we play at Wise Guys, such as No Match Catch, a wonderful game I made up (immodest) while working on a very good game show. No Match Catch requires balls in green, red, yellow, and blue, but not orange, so I pulled those out and keep them in my car.  ​

The first time they came in handy, I was a guest on the late night show "Up Late With Adam Fisher." I was appearing in the role of a guest I'd made up, an eccentric, wealthy, British playboy, a combination of a real-life Willy Wonka and Richard Branson. When I entered, I was throwing the orange balls into the audience. I spoke in a British accent, and since I don't normally do accent work, Adam was taken by surprise, which I liked. I told him that the candies I'd thrown into the audience were a combination of gumdrops, some of them, while others were deep psychedelics that, if licked, would last for days before its effects wore off. This was to freak out anyone who might have put their mouths on the balls, which I'm sure was no one, but the character would be confident people would taste his free sweets.​

Adam said, "I understand you're doing a night of entertainment at the Disney Concert Hall. It's one night only. What is the name of the show?"​

My character's name was Taylor Bloomberg. "A Night With Taylor Bloomberg," was my answer, and the audience laughed. I'm not sure why, but I'm glad they did. The character's name came from my asking Danny Ricker to get from the audience the last name of a US President and the name of a US Mayor.​

So Shakespeare played with those balls in the trunk - Greg recovered many of them after the show, though I'd planned on leaving them behind, since he was in the audience - and at 7:15 I put butt cream on him and combed his hair and put his overnight diaper on (on Shakespeare, wisenheimer), ​and put him in his jammies, and he was just as agreeable as he could be, far more so than he is at home where he needs four hands and a lot of distraction. Sometimes even juggling isn't enough. I took him out of the trunk, folded the umbrella stroller with him under one arm, tossed it in the trunk, closed the trunk securely, opened the rear driver side seat, tossed the hatchet back in the trunk, sat the baby on my lap, and read to him the 6 or 7 stories I'd packed along. Then I offered him a sippy cup of milk, which he waved off - not uncommon - and I buckled him in his carseat and arranged a scarf around him to dampen out some of the view and the light. I moved to the drivers' seat, inserted earbuds and listened to John Darnielle on the Marc Maron podcast.

There was no traffic on the freeway, and it wasn't until we were off the freeway that I heard the literal sound of Shakespeare conking out, his hand, which had been raised a moment ago, hitting the side of the window as his little body went to the land of nod. I drove around the block 3 times, parked in the garage, went and opened the study door, went back to the car, unfastened his carseat, nested him in my arms cradle-style, rather than putting him over my shoulder, which wakes him up.​

Inside, the house is dark. I carry him into the nursery, where the space heater and humidifier and noise maker are on, and a pacifier is resting on the changing table. I pull the pacifier out of his mouth - it is on a leash - and replace it with the untethered one on the changing table. He sucks it and remains asleep. I tug free the pacifier clipped on his pajamas, rest him in the crib, exit the nursery and close the door. I retrieve the remote baby monitor (which we call "the gadget" in our house) and close the doors to the master bedroom and the hallway. I'm now ready to retrieve the scattered contents of the car parked in the garage.​

I've just brought all those items in, which I managed to do in a single trip by employing a couple of my efficiency techniques. These include: do it now while you're thinking of it. Don't carry too many things at once, a habit I have come to call the Myles Nye mistake, because I think it causes more misery and misfortune in my life than any other mistake I make as frequently. And, if you are reminded of a task you must do while in the middle of another task you must do, ask yourself which one of them you are more likely to remember to come back to after completing the other. For example, suppose you are carrying some dirty clothes to the laundry hamper when, part way, you notice a flaming squirrel running amok in your front room. You could throw the laundry to the floor, extinguish the squirrel with a bucket of water or by chasing it out of the house with a broom - either of which would require both your hands - and then pick up the laundry and finish the job. Or you could go put the laundry in the basket and come back and then deal with the squirrel. In this instance, the choice is obvious, but it's not always that clear. Some tasks are flaming squirrels, and some are just chores.​

Now all the items are inside the house and I've changed into comfy clothes though not pajamas. Not yet. Now I have to put the items away, put the clean items in the dish dry rack away, upload and watermark photos and organize them into albums, do some write-ups for my consulting job tomorrow, and prepare a vegetable and a grain for dinner guests tomorrow night. But before doing those things I wanted to write this down, this snapshot in time, of the way I navigate my way through time and through space as best as I can, trying to make good decision all along the way, and making many movements, big and small, and trying to keep them precise without worrying too much about if some of them are needless.​

Without a net

I wasn't able to attend last night's Mindshare at V Lounge in Santa Monica but it did remind me of this silly thing I did in 2009. "Power Point Karaoke" is a competition where you get up on stage and have to talk through slides of a presentation you have never seen before - it was downloaded at random from Slideshare. I decided to take on the extra challenge of doing it in just my underwear. When I asked the organizer, Heather Vescent, if that was okay, she responded by saying that it was fine as long as I wore bikini briefs. I took her up on that and bought some at Ross. I think this presentation went very well, possibly better than the original.​

Posting on Everyone's Wall

The Vaudeville, radio, movie, and television comedian Jack Benny was born in 1894 on February 14th. If you don't know the name, I think the closest analogy in today's comedy scene is Jerry Seinfeld. Although the Jack Benny show had more jokes and one-liners than Seinfeld's, both shows were situational and derived comedy from the personality traits of Jack's radio family, and Jack himself got laughs less from delivering punchlines than his inflections, nuances, and the comic musicality of exasperation. He was a major celebrity in the 40's up through the 60's, and most old people still remember his most notorious punchline, "I'm thinking it over!" Trust that it is funny in context.

I went to a small high school, and one of the things I was known for among my friends was that I was a big Jack Benny fan. My idolatry was anachronistic, but I thought Jack's radio shows were very funny and I thought he was a noble man worthy of admiration, the same way I felt about Atticus Finch. I made a big deal about Jack Benny, and intentionally tied his identity up with mine, the same way I did with Harpo Marx, Tom Waits, and Bruce Springsteen. Also Ani DiFranco and Kurt Vonnegut, which I think are more commonplace artists to be drawn to in high school in the 90's, but to me they all took a backseat to Jack Benny.

One of the ways I manifested my admiration was, on February 14th, I would make signs with his picture on them wishing Jack Benny a happy birthday and put them up in the halls of the school. It wasn't commonplace for kids to put up signs when their favorite celebrity's birthday occurred; I was the only person doing this. There weren't even a lot of signs on the walls in general: there was a student bulletin board where you could put up notifications, and I put a sign there too, but I did them all up and down the halls. It was probably against the rules, but nobody seemed bothered enough to take them down or discipline me. Probably I took them down at the end of the day, but I don't remember.

One year one of the signs was an excerpt from a chapter of a book written by George Burns, who was Jack's best friend for 50 years. I typed the chapter out long hand and posted it to the wall. I don't know who I was thinking would read it.

Since today (as I'm writing this) it is February 14th, I was thinking back about that old habit I used to have. It hadn't struck me until today that it's funny that I was "writing on everyone's wall" long before Facebook existed. One December, for my birthday, my mom made a bunch of signs with Jack Benny on them, wishing ME a happy birthday. She had my older sister put them up before I got to school. I ran from sign to sign gleefully, not even thinking who might be behind it. It should have been obvious, but I was so pleased at the stunt, how personal it was to me, that the guessing part of my brain didn't even engage. I just enjoyed the prank, in the best way.

And then today I found out that February 14th is also the birthday of tap dancer Gregory Hines. I have a story about him too. I'll post that later. But for now, here's the photo.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151429543338617&set=a.264520208616.138126.797843616&type=1&theater

Survivor Caramoan

I am so excited for this season. I'm glad Erik R. is back. It's been too long. They should have brought him back as an All-Star a long time ago. He was a great player. I'm glad Brenda is back, and many of the others too. I haven't checked out any of the fans yet. We'll see what they bring to the party. I have it on good authority that, as good as last season was - and it was really good - this one is even better. Can't wait.

The Newlywed Game.

One cool thing I did one time was appear on this corny game show with my wife. LA has a lot of downsides - traffic, jaded people - but this is where game shows happen. I love game shows. When you're a contestant on them, people give you money and prizes for answering questions correctly. As it happens, I am good at answering questions correctly. And it turns out my wife is too.

Our episode is posted below in 3 installments:

First break

Second break

Third break

Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. →

It is my ambition to be on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

I would love to appear on "Not My Job," but I have to become more significant first. Alternatively, I could rob a bank while riding a Segway and smuggling a loris in my pants, in which case I would surely be the final answer to a question in "Lightning Fill in the Blank" that Moe Rocca would guess wildly and get correct, or would cost Paula Poundstone the game.

More likely than either of those, however, is that I will be hired to replace Phillip G., who writes the limericks for the show. I'm not sure what that guy thinks rhyming is, but he seems to think it's a couple degrees removed from assonance.

Watch these limericks, two of which were made up on the spot.

Click the title of this blog post to watch the video.

Thirty til Thirty overtime

My friend Andy Crocker directed this music video as part of her Thirty til Thirty project, and now the finished article is available:

The Black Plague

Among other things, this video is very well cast, which makes sense. I'll be honest, I don't really remember the shoot day, but my friends know I will agree to just about anything if I get to tap dance in it, and if I get to be dressed like a fancy man, all the better.

I am pleased to be re-experiencing getting this song in my head. I don't know anything about the band. Someone want to tell me what I should know?

My favorite party might be when I get to whistle conspiratorially with Ashley and Maurissa.

Andy,  can you post a link to the original Thirty til 30 blog? I can't find. Sorry.