This is the personal homepage of P.D. Magnus, a philosopher whom I like to refer to as me. I have a separate professional homepage that links to courses, my cv, and academic papers.

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The Decktet rampant [permalink]

28dec2009: A game is not ranked in the BoardGameGeek database until it is rated by enough users. Of the over 44,000 games in the database, 5,831 are ranked. The ranking for a game is a function of the average of the ratings and the total number of ratings. This means that the highest ranked games are both rated highly and rated by thousands of people.

The Decktet is modestly-well rated by a few dozen users. Just yesterday it crossed the crucial threshold and entered the charts. As of this moment, it is at 2573rd. It is in the midst of some well established games. Especially since most of the copies of it are ones that people have made for themselves, it's holding its own. (Although I do sell spiffy printed copies, there are more BGG users who indicate that they own a Decktet than there are people who've bought copies from me.)

Fonts in the wild [permalink]

30nov2009: I stumbled across a cool thing today. My font Ambages was for the logo and packaging of the boardgame Aztec Market. The font was originally just intended to be a kind of block doodle, but this continues the trend of folks on the internet interpreting it to be mesoamerican.

Counterparts of speech [permalink]

7nov2009: As the saying goes, "Verbing weirds language."

It's good for a laugh if you haven't heard it before, but there are people who utter this bon mot anytime someone does some verbing. It can be a conversation stopper. What can I say in reply - other than perhaps, lamely, "Yes. Yes it does."

I now have a countersign. Next time someone says that verbing weirds language, I am prepared to reply: "And gerunding nouns verbs. What of it?"

Perhaps my interlocutor will reply that "gerund" isn't a verb and that, even if it were, you couldn't gerund "gerund." That will have kept the conversation alive for another volley, giving someone time to introduce a new topic.

"Look, a monkey!"

(Hat tip to David Morgan Mar.)

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