Mind Games

   Life is a joy.  One of the cats came in through the window and startled me.  He dropped a leaf and looked at me waiting for response.  Then the leaf moved and i saw that it was a lizard.  And the cat picked it right back up and took it into the next room.  It is now 10 minutes later and the cat is still toying with the lizard.  Slow moving and tail-less, my guess is that the lizard will escape as the cat is playing, not hunting and the dog has awaken to become a distraction.  Life is a joy to watch.
   Life has become a difficult game to play.  It used to be that you could put your pink and blue plastic pegs in the back of the station wagon and head off to the promised land, spinning the spinner and sometimes taking large jumps of real estate.  Now Twister is a more realistic game.
   I like to play chess.  Actually, I like to play with chess pieces - there are many other games than chess that use a grid of 64 and a white versus black motif.  The internet has allowed a whole genre of chess games where light and dark is part of the context - you can't not see the pieces when the other player is in the same room across the table from you.
   Scheming Mind is an internet chess game site, that sets a time limit and allows players to move at their leisure.  There are nearly 500 paid members that have multiple games going on-line as a background context to their life.  Since most of these games are fairly new, there is not a lot of opening theory or extra homework - you just play other players one on one and earn a rating.  At the beginning of each month, the ratings are updated based on games ending during the prior month.
   I also like the conversation between people on distant turfs - everywhere in the world.  I can ask questions and get the answer from another culture, where people do not think mono-chromatically like here.  Here is an excerpt from a conversation that i had with a friend from England.  The game we were playing is called Alice Chess 1 - you make a move and your piece phase changes onto a second chess-board.  The next time you move that piece, it returns to the first chess board.  The king may not move into check on either board.


lemme howdt: good game - sometimes in alice, i can't tell and end up hanging pieces, because i think they are protected and i'm on the wrong boardIucounu: Good win. It's a pity there isn't a board that shows the location of all the pieces, perhaps with the pieces on the "B" board 'translucent'. It can be hard (for me anyway) to grasp that there is really only one board and that the pieces 'phase' from one 'frequency' to another when they move... I hope that wasn't too incoherent! ;)lemme howdt: it seems like how life works sometimesIucounu: Life seems to be quite similar to Stanley Random Chess! ;)lemme howdt: i think its more like lao tzu chess - in the dark and dealing with all sorts of flying shitIucounu: Perhaps it's the misbegotten lovechild of Stanley and Alice; in the dark dealing with unexpected nastiness and then having your hands tied behind your back at inopportune moments... ;)----- Iucounu: The trouble with the variants is that most of the people who want to play them have been playing them long enough to be much stronger!lemme howdt: yes - that is a human trait - first come, well served.lemme howdt: that's why some people are good at taking risks - but some games just take time. I work with concepts like group theory and symmetry, so alice really is my kind of game - but i too often make the move fast and then regret that i didn't look at the position better. Lao forces you to take your time - but time isn't what we think it is.        If you wish to have a new distraction because life has become rhythmic (same old television, same old ballgames, same old kids, same old life - you know the drill), come pay a $25 dollar annual membership and start thinking about nothing in particular while you learn a new game with social interaction all over the world.namaste'   doc