Spontaneous ∂erivation

My, I never realized I’d end up using my iPhone as my Most Commonly Used Game Console. But then again, I don’t play anything other than turn-by-turn video games.

I always kind of thought “seeing Tetris blocks fall when I close my eyes” was… more… a figure of speech. Turns out to be far more than that.

Here are some I’ve just started seeing in my head, usually when I’m trying to fall asleep, and sometimes I dream of playing them.

TanZen

This is the best tangram puzzle game implementation on the iPhone. And, I daresay, anywhere. Including real tangrams. The graphics, the intuitive controls, the fact that you can turn the music off and listen to your own (not something to be overlooked), and the fact that new puzzles are added every few months. It comes with over 200 now.

Boggle (Official)

It’s ideal Boggle solitaire (and should, be after all, being official). It has everything, including the shaking-of-the-boggle-cube, which is not to be underestimated when implementing a word game. Includes little achievements to unlock, and some interesting variants that could only be implemented with a timer on an iPhone, like Portal Boggle (cubes at the beginning and end of words you make swap places).

Poison

If you’ve ever played the card game by Reiner Knizia, you know that it’s an addictive trick-taking game in the manner of hearts, except better. For instance, all three normal suits can score negative points, but you can shoot the moon in any of them (indeed, strategy centers around shooting the moon). And that’s just the start. It’s Evil Hearts with more strategy. The iPhone game is solo.

Rummikub (Official)

I don’t like playing Rummikub in person, because there is a lot of tile manipulation involved. Which is quite fun, but still: tons of tiles, tons of manipulation. This little app makes the manipulation intuitive and cool, and the little tile sounds are wonderful, as is the animation. As in real life, you’re best off with three—in this case virtual—opponents.

WordSearch [AFKsoft]

There are a lot of find-words-in-a-grid games in the App Store, but I currently like this one best. A lot of strange categories to please any geek (dinosaurs? constellations? greek myths?), as well as daily Small/Medium/Big-sized puzzles with results that go to a leader board server. It’s simple, and it doesn’t have eye-breaking backgrounds unless you want it to.

i.Game 16 Mahjong

This is real Mahjong, the rummy and, basically, discard deduction game, not that solitaire tile-matching thing. Mahjong has multiple variants, and this is Taiwanese 16-tile hands. The AI is not all that great, or so reviews say, but at least this app is stable. Mahjong tile sounds? Satisfying check. The games, like real-life Mahjong, can take foreeeeeever, but it auto-saves and picks up games easily. I suck at Mahjong, but am addicted anyways.

Button Men

The classic game of beating people up with dice of various polyhedral shapes. You can play it solo, or play with two in pass-and-play fashion. Comes with Soldiers and Vampires, along with a new exclusive set (so standard, swing, shadow, and poison dice). They plan to do more, so I hope one day for speed dice! There are individualized taunt and beaten messages for each Button Man you play against, which I really like.

I usually played Niles back when I had the buttons. Which might tell you everything you need to know about me.

Mach Dice

I quite like this die roller app. Does any number of polyhedral dice you like, including funny sizes (like 14 and 16) and the lesser sizes (like 2). Realistic rolling engine. Eats up CPU and memory like anything, but still very stable and better than rolling 15 d10s manually. I wish you could add custom dice (like Battlelore or Heroscape dice), but otherwise it does quite a good job. And now I have a war game that requires 2-sided dice (at one point 20 of them were required¹), so this has become an invaluable app.

1. The single unit being attacked did end up requiring this much to bring it down. Fickle, fickle dice. [↩]

A couple sessions ago, my psychologist gave me a little homework: use my living room more often.

This may sound strange to you, but my mind tends to think that my bedroom is the only room where one can truly feel safe, or at least, moderately safe. When you live in a dorm or with your parents and your room door is sometimes the only barrier between you and a father who wants to beat you, this is probably true.

When you live in purposely elevated house with two stories, with heavy front doors that are always locked, there is actually quite a large barrier to your (ever getting older) parents trying to invade and kill you, and holing up paranoid in the bedroom with all your stuff might be called under-utilization of the living space.

As you can imagine, staying downstairs is difficult for me. If I ever forget to keep stay in the damn living room directly in my consciousness, sooner or later I find that my subconscious has tucked me in at 7:30pm. I don’t have cable, so there’s not much that can zone me out into staying downstairs, and I stopped being interested in cooking or eating much some months ago.

Ah, but I do use the internets a lot… and switched to a laptop a few years ago, when I was in omfg run! mode (or at least, more so). Naturally, it migrated to the bedroom along with my DVD collection. I do a lot of stuff on it, like write and blog and suchlike, and it’s sadly the center of my life.

So I took my laptop to the living room, along with various cables and an external hard drive that would make it really, really inconvenient to drag back upstairs. (If I ever get the right converter, maybe I can connect it up to the TV, and then with Hulu, I’d basically have less annoying cable.¹) With my laptop anchored downstairs, and the fact that my subconsciousness has never managed to evolve thumbs, it would require my conscious mind to dismantle and drag the laptop back upstairs… and my consciousness chooses not to do so.

It’s been moderately successful. I say moderate because nowadays I find myself trying to do everything on my iPhone (which really cannot stay downstairs, because it’s also my pager, and I’m not about to sleep in the living room). Fortunately, Steve Jobs doesn’t believe in old-fashioned keyboards, which means the iPhone will never get an external keyboard without jailbreaking it. And while I have learned enough iPhone typing skillz during my commute to type 1000-word posts with just my thumbs, and the copy-paste feature from app to app has made it more convenient to include links, it’s all still really annoying.

Dear Steve Jobs, please continue disbelieving in external keyboards for iPhones. Love, S∂.

1. Yes, even if Hulu starts charging. [↩]

So this early morning, around 2am, I woke up after a disturbing nightmare, the kind that tends to leave me awake but tired and plagues with insomnia. I’d taken a full sleeping pill just four hours before, so it was too soon to resort to that.

Obviously the place to go next was Twitter. Where I discovered that @cleolinda recommended iZen Garden, a little iPhone app that replicates a dry sand garden, you know, the kind you put a few rocks in and then trace around them with a rake.

The app comes with 100 different kinds of objects you can place, move, and rake around, including fossils, bonsai trees, flowers, fountains that run and make soothing noises, and rocks. There are also animated butterflies you can add.

And of course, there must be soothing ambient sound in general, like tiny bells in the distance, rain, birds, etc. They all manage—even the bells—to not be annoying.

I bought it and played around with it, and the sounds and possibly the very simple act of raking repeatedly put me to sleep for the next eight hours, which I really quite needed. No dreams remembered at all, even, which is generally the way I like sleep to work.

I don’t know if it’ll continue to work (for instance, having Neil Gaiman read Coraline to me no longer works well). But it was relaxing. And it is rather pretty.

I had kind of a silly nightmare, compared to the ones I usually dread. It was more of a realization, kind of like the Obama dream.

This is going to ramble on a bit.

In my dream, I’d driven my car to where Home Depot used to be. Except there was a Toys ‘R Us instead! Bizarre, but I spent some time walking around.

Click here to read more »

I remember LexCycle’s Stanza mostly as Just Another Ebook Reader, not something that could be placed on a mobile device. I was impressed with the number of formats it reads (and, in many cases, writes). However, I soon learned its limitations on links and table of contents, which is to say, it had none at the time.

After that unpleasant experience, I was done with Stanza.

Some time later, apparently Stanza as an iPhone app is very tricked out—a lot of cool functionality, and, finally, tables of contents functionality. I personally didn’t know about all that, not having an iPhone.

After watching the video on Feedbooks’ iPhone/iPod Touch help page¹, I’m pretty happy about the situation, present and future, of Stanza on the iPhone.

Stanza on the Desktop though? While it’s great that it enables remote sharing of books with the iPhone Stanza, the desktop app is still not the most useful of readers. I don’t know if it’s even in LexCycle’s best interest to make Stanza Desktop any better reading-wise, since the iPhone application has taken off.

Conclusions: Stanza iPhone, spectacular. Stanza Desktop, still dead to me.

1. It’s also available from LexCycle’s movie page, but not as an embedded video. [↩]