Kevin's Compendium of Useless Fantasia

Let's take a look at what I did in July:

• I volunteered some time at a friend's art cafe at ArtBeat 2002. People came in and ordered art. I wrote some poetry for it.

• Someone's LiveJournal had the idea of mixing the casts of two shows together. I came up with the A-Team doing The Wizard of Oz: Murdock as the Scarecrow, Face as the Tin Woodsman, B.A. as the Cowardly Lion, and Hannibal as Dorothy. It's such a perfect fit that I wonder if the writers of The A-Team were inspired by The Wizard of Oz. Well, okay, probably not.

• I wrote a food-related haiku at work, and then I wrote another one the same day.

• I wrote a work-related haiku at work. As sometimes happens, I surprised myself with the last word. As also sometimes happens, I found it to be true.

• I wrote some anagrams for my employer (former employer as of 31 July 2002) and its parent company, with help from the Internet Anagram Server.

  Prentice Hall =
  Hic repellant
  All phrenetic
  Hair pentacle
  
  Pearson Education = Upon a desecration
  

• I wrote a stupid anagram:

  Compendium = I'm cup demon
  

  I tried to find an anagram for the complete title, but none of the online anagram servers could handle that many letters. I had some thoughts about writing my own anagram program, and I even wrote down a list of qualities I wanted it to have. It pretty much ended up being like the Internet Anagram Server's advanced search except with no character limit and the ability to include or exclude more than one word. I may even write that program some day.

• I played a very little bit with a song lyric in my head. Just one line: "We can be together as two as one." Or maybe "as two as one as two." Or maybe just keep going, fading off: "We can be together as two as one as two as one as two as one as two as one . . ." Trying to get the idea across of two people being together yet still retaining their individual identities. Two people coming together as one unit, functioning as two people. Or something.

• I wrote some anagrams based on my LiveJournal user name. I don't think I want to post them, though, since I don't know if I want my LiveJournal name being as public as this.

  However, it is worth noting that posting of these anagrams (there were three) lead some people to comment that they thought it was haiku, at first. So I got the idea of trying to write anagram haiku, where each line is an anagram of the same thing. Hmm, maybe a pair of haiku, where one haiku is an anagram of the other, line by line. I haven't done any of this, but maybe seeing it up here will get me to work on that some day.

  It is also worth noting that ensuing comments in my journal about this entry were what got me to start seriously thinking about the Compendium.

• This is really stupid. I made it into the 411 for 4 July 2002. I met John Cooper at a game convention this year. He helped design one of my favorite games, Gnostica. Anyway, he sets his alarm for 4:11 PM every day, and he records a snippet of what is going on right then. I happened to be talking to him at 4:11 on 4 July 2002. It's stupid because it's not anything creative that I did; I just think it's really cool. Therefore, I deem it worthy to be included here.

• When I got back from the gaming convention, the current Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle was a two-week creative challenge. The challenge was to take a movie title and create either a review or a synopsis of the movie for which the title is an acronym. I could have spent more time on this, but I didn't. Here are the two I came up with:

  BEN-HUR = Being Enslaved Never Hurt -- Up Rome!
  CLERKS = Complete Losers Endure Reality -- Kevin Smith
  

• While searching job listings, I noticed that my eyes tended to focus on jobs with Director in the title. I thought about this for a while, and I realized that I was doing this because Director has the same letters as Editor plus a couple more. So I connected them (with the help of the Internet Anagram Server) with cordite. I decided to work my way all the way down to one letter and up as far as I could. With the help of friends, here is the list I came up with:

  I
  ID
  DIE
  TIED (TIDE, DIET, EDIT)
  TIRED (TRIED)
  EDITOR
  CORDITE
  DIRECTOR
  DIRECTORY
  PREDICTORY
  PREDICATORY
  DEPRECIATORY
  

  I tried to find a name for these kind of things. I was thinking word chains, but I only found one place on the web that called them that, and I didn't find any other names. So, they're word chains for now. But there's also something called word chains where you keep the same number of letters and turn one word into another, one letter at a time (LOVE, LAVE, LATE, HATE).

• It is worth noting that I have thought about collecting on a web page all sorts of games that don't require any equipment. There are ones that definitely don't require equipment (like 3-2-1 Contact and 1-2-3), and then there are ones that might generally be thought of as paper-and-pencil but could be played without any equipment by motivated people with good memories (Jotto). I had wanted to get a start on this web page before this first issue of the Compendium came out, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen. I hope that having it here will get me to work on it, and it might get me some suggestions of games from people.

Watch for Issue 02 coming out 1 September 2002.