malvasia bianca

John Fairbairn and Mark Hall have been doing a series of books on single go games or a small series of games, and they’re really good: a great combination of historical context paired with detailed commentary on the moves of the games themselves. The one I just finished reading was The Go Consultants, devoted to [...]

Jesse Schell gave a great talk at DICE earlier this year on “design outside the box”. There are pretty good writeups by Kris Graft and Kim Pallister, and his slides are available, but if you’re at all interested, I recommend just watching it: his presentation style is very entertaining and engaging. The talk was all [...]

I’m rereading The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, in preparation for reading the other books in the series. And, again, I’m blown away by it: if the book contained nothing but the pictures in it, it would be worth it. But, of course, there’s a lot more to the book than pretty (beautiful, profound) [...]

I spent the day at this month’s Bay Area Go Players Association tournament. It was my first tournament in recent memory playing as a 1 dan; I had a record of 1 win and 3 losses and got the impression that 1 dan is a more accurate rating for me than 1 kyu, but that [...]

I recently learned that a Bay Area Go Players Association has been created, with the goal of ensuring that there’s at least one go tournament a month in the bay area. (And, so far, they seem to generally be holding their tournaments quite close to where I live.) I missed the first tournament, but the [...]

According to a helpful informant on rec.games.go, Viz has stopped publishing the Hikaru no Go DVDs in English: Viz has cancelled the release of the remaining DVDs as single disks due to poor sales. Basically, they’ve discovered how expensive it is to translate and market, and are instead focusing their energies on the shounen market [...]

I was happy when volume 11 of the DVD of Hikaru No Go included 5 episodes instead of 4 – more stuff, and we’ll make it through the qualifying tournament, right? Well, no: more stuff, but they leave us half way through Hikaru’s match versus Ochi. (Instead of stopping before the match, as would have [...]

Some random notes from our recent trip to Boston and its environs: T tokens are no more. Which made me a little sad, but I was very happy that, when arriving Tuesday evening for a trip where we’d be leaving the next Tuesday morning and would spend three days outside of Boston, there was a [...]

Ayse Sercan’s thesis work sounds really cool. I’m just linking to this list of Ruby techniques so that I’ll be able to find it a year from now when I’m in a position to better use it. More good stuff from Karl on copyright. Rice paddy art. Echochrome looks like an Escher video game. Quite [...]

What a glorious day yesterday was: the seventh Hikaru No Go DVD came out, and the ninth book. And now I have to wait another two months for the next DVD, another four months for the next book. Aargh! We finished the DVD today, after which Miranda asked me if we could play through the [...]

I haven’t kept up my go book collection recently, but I was once a serious go book collector: as far as I can tell, I have copies of all but five books in go that were published in English before the year 2000. I am pleased to report that the list is now down to [...]

I hope that those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had a nice one. We did; a congenial bunch of guests, a meal headed by cambodian chicken curry. Though there were other nice bits on the menu – in particular, Liesl made a very pleasant beef soup, also from The Elephant Walk Cookbook, and we made [...]

I was going over some pro games last weekend; as always, I was conflicted about how to approach that. Some options: Just play the moves as fast as you can. Go over as many games as possible, trying to get the moves into your fingers, without worrying about understanding them. Try to understand the key [...]

Some random comments, after four weeks of Netflix membership: One movie at a time works if you’re sure you don’t want to watch more than one movie a week, and if you don’t mind missing occasional weeks due to shipping vagaries. Neither of those proved to be the case for us, so we’ve switched to [...]

I think I made the right decision to give up playing go: I just don’t want to spend one evening a week doing that. But I was just looking at a picture of a game in Hikaru No Go (nine moves into the Ota vs. Akira game), and memories came back. It can be a [...]

I used to play go a lot, and I collected a lot of go books. In fact, by the time I was in grad school, I had copies of all but 10 or 15 or so of all the go books that had ever been published in English. (Just under 100 at the time.) The [...]