Science Made Cool

Sushi Deluxe

On Monday the Zygotes visited the famous Kaiyukan Aquarium in Osaka, Japan. It’s a truly impressive place, specializing in creatures of the Pacific Rim. The arrangement is very well-thought-out:  one starts at the top, looking at coastal and riverside organisms like penguins, otters, monkeys, sloths, and sea lions. The visitor gradually descends through the building, seeing creatures at different depths in their respective environments.

The star of the aquarium is the resident whale shark, Kai-Kun. Kai-Kun is an exceedingly big fish, with fins as long as a tall man, and a wide mouth which is very menacing if you’re a krill. Kai-Kun swims around and around in the giant center tank of the aquarium, escorted by rays and smaller fish. He’s the living mascot of the Kaiyukan Aquarium, and the gift shop is full of Kai-Kun merchandise and photos of various celebrities posing with a Kai-Kun model.

Worldcon Update

Jim will be participating at Worldcon in both game designer and writer modes, so they’re keeping him pretty busy. I’ll join him on the very last panel on the very last day to talk about Zygote Games.

Here's the schedule:

Thu    14:00 Want to Play a Game? Teaching Other People to Play
How many times have you flipped through the rulebook, trying to find answers while others wonder "can we just start playing already?" Learn what not to tell people, why the rulebooks are bad and other ways of assuring that you're not ruining a good game with a bad explanation.
James L. CAMBIAS, Michele ELLINGTON, Terry O'BRIEN

Fri    10:00 James L. CAMBIAS reads “The Dinosaur Train” (forthcoming in F&SF)

Fri    16:00    Kaffeeklatsche with James L. CAMBIAS

Sun    10:00    Alternate Futures
We talk about alternate histories, but there are also alternate futures. What futures might plausibly grow from today? Are the traditional SF futures still possible? Is history really at an end? How do you build a future anyway? How about futures based on alternate pasts -- do they count?
Charles STROSS, James L. CAMBIAS

Sun    14:00    Free Will? Or Neurochemistry?
Some behaviors (anger, violence) might be neurological in nature. If these traits can be identified and treated, what implications does this have on social interactions, legal contracts and frameworks? The social contract? The idea of individual responsibility? Could we program ourselves into becoming mindless sheep? Should we?
Eileen GUNN, Jack William BELL, James L. CAMBIAS

Mon    11:00    The Zygote (Games) Panel
The last panel of the convention. We talk about Zygotes or whatever other fancy comes to mind.
James L. CAMBIAS, Diane A. KELLY

Zygotes In Japan

Jim put on his science-fiction author hat (it has a propeller beanie) for the World Science Fiction convention. The con starts in Yokohama later this week, but we’re touring around a bit first. So far, we’ve seen the bounty of seafood on display at the Tsukiji fish market at 5 am (thank you jet lag!) and been mugged by the semi-tame deer in Nara. NB: if you feed deer for centuries, they start to feel entitled.

                           

Tomorrow, we’ll see what the aquarium in Osaka looks like.

Friday Parasite #40: Invading Japan

Those of us who live in the United States are familiar with the foreign organisms that changed our environment, like European starlings, kudzu, zebra mussels, the Asian fungus that killed off the American chestnut, and the other Asian fungus that nearly wiped out the American elm. But species from North America also get moved to other parts of the world, and given the right conditions they can become invasive and destructive too. Since I’m visiting Japan, let’s look at what happened when the North American pine wood nematode (Bursaphelenchus xylophilus) got accidentally got moved to Asia inside some packing crates early in the 20th century.

GenCon Report: The Final Chapter

Sunday was the last day of GenCon, and was by far the busiest day on the exhibit hall floor. At times it was difficult to move about in the hall because of the crowds packed into the aisles. The convention management were apparently trying a new technique: family memberships for Sunday, so that an entire family of four could come in and browse for the price of a single membership. It worked. Sales were brisk, and it seems that everyone had a good con.

And promptly at four o'clock the exhibit hall closed, the air conditioning shut off, and the exhibitors began hastily tearing down and packing up their booths. Within minutes the carpets were rolled up, forklifts were darting around, and the rumble of truck engines from the loading dock filled the air. The exhibitors who weren't working hard were busy dashing from booth to booth trying to exchange surplus merchandise for other people's surplus merchandise -- because most game publishers are still gamers at heart.

The Zygote/Rogue/Heliograph/Grey Ghost booth was relatively small and had a large staff, so we were packed up and moving out by 4:30. Our crack Zygote representative was on the road by 5:00.

For us, and apparently for everyone else, this year's GenCon was a great success, and we're almost certainly going back in 2008. See you there!

GenCon Report: Day Three

It appears that this GenCon is turning out to be a good one for exhibitors. There are lots of people on the exhibit hall floor, and a lot of them are buying stuff. While games like Starcraft and the limited edition of Talisman are hits, they're not the sort of hits that suck the customers away from everyone else. The electronic games presence appears to have done exactly what everyone hoped: draw in people who might not otherwise come, but not monopolize the customers. Traffic at the Grey Ghost/Heliograph/Rogue/Zygote booth was sufficiently brisk that I didn't get much opportunity to walk the floor on Saturday.

This good news has deprived the industry professionals of one of their favorite pastimes:  gathering in the Ram brewpub after hours to gripe about slow sales. Instead they've had to fall back on their second-favorite pastime, which is griping about the slow sales at previous conventions.

GenCon Report: Day Two

The convention goes well. More traffic Friday, which means our crack sales staff spent pretty much the whole day running demo games of Bone Wars. 

During one walk around the exhibit hall floor I did see what may well be the ultimate Geek Bait. Now since this is a convention founded by the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons, everything here is Geek Bait by definition. But of course it's only Gamer Geek Bait.

These manage to be Triple Geek Bait, as they're not just miniature figures, not just Star Wars themed, they're also computer hardware!

GenCon Report: Day One

GenCon opened yesterday for its 40th year, with Zygote Games occupying a booth in the exhibit hall. We're sharing our space with three other small independent game publishers:  Grey Ghost Press, Heliograph Inc., and Rogue Games.  This makes for a very cozy booth, even without customers.

The convention is huge, and the exhibitor hall is approximately the size of a dirigible hangar. This year there's a big electronic games presence -- Sony Online Entertainment has staked out a vast space. But it was interesting to note that the computer goodies weren't drawing any more traffic than the good old paper and ink games.

Coolest Thing Inside the Booth:  (Other than Zygote stuff, of course.) This is a tough call, but I'd have to give the nod to Colonial Gothic, an elegant little roleplaying game from Rogue Games, set in early America. It's a near-perfect time and place for roleplaying adventures, and has been shockingly neglected.

Coolest Thing Outside the Booth:  On my initial walkaround the niftiest thing I've seen is the book 40 Years of Gen Con, by Robin Laws. People are buying copies and getting them signed by industry professionals. It's like a high-school yearbook for our business. (Of course, you usually get your yearbook signed right before you leave high school . . .)

Biggest Buzz:  The booth with the most traffic for a single product appeared to be Fantasy Flight Games, for their new Starcraft wargame. It's rather nice that the game people are lining up to buy is a good old-fashioned tabletop war game. That's where this whole hobby started.

Biggest News That Everybody Already Knew:  The official announcement of a Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It's certainly interesting news, but it's about as surprising as a "twist ending" in a Shayalaman film -- the surprise would be if it didn't happen.

Friday Parasite #39: No Horror Here

People make a big fuss about vampire fish, also known as candiru, but when you consider their normal life cycle they’re actually a bit dull. They’re a family of tiny, relatively nondescript Amazon catfish that spend most of their time buried in the mud. When one gets hungry, it swims out into the water column and finds itself a larger fish to feed on. It bores into the host fish’s gills tapping into the arteries there. It stays until it’s engorged with blood, then drops off and heads back to its hiding place in the mud.

                     

That’s it. No complex navigation through multiple hosts, no dramatic changes in body form between hosts, no insidious mind control to modify its host’s behavior. Just sharp teeth, anchoring spines, and an appetite for blood. They would hardly rate any attention at all if they didn’t sometimes get lost on their way to a fishy host.

Catapult Construction: Phase 2

After finishing the model, the girls decided to make their full sized version four times larger. So they applied the power of math to scale up all the pieces of the frame, bought a couple of 8’ pine studs, and cut them into pieces.

                                     

(More beneath the fold)