Seattle FLGSopodes

Today I drove around to five of Seattle's Friendly Local Gaming Stores (FLGSs), trying to work out which ones make most sense for me to frequent. Here are my thoughts on them:

• The Dreaming: Wasn't a huge fan of this one. It's almost entirely comics and RPGs, with a smattering of board and card games. The staff was pretty nice, though, and apparently they do gaming afternoons on Sundays. It's pretty close to the University, and was definitely the tightest-knit of the places I went. But it's not selling my goods, so to speak.
• Gary's Games: I bought Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space here for a decent price - a game that is impossible to find online, and one for which Shut Up and Sit Down gave a strong recommendation. They seem to have a really good stock of obscure games and also had the widest selection of legacy card game products of any of the stores I visited. I think I'll come back here quite a bit, even though it's really out of the way.
• Blue Highway Games: This place was really crisp. Half for game hobbyists and half for the "lay folk", this store has a really impressive demo library and frequent community events. The prices were slightly steep and the purchasing selection wasn't perfect, but the location is really great, pretty much in the heart of Queen Anne.
• Card Kingdom: Now this place was badass. It's store almost wholly dedicated to hobbyists, with lots of open space and dedicated rooms for RPGs, card games, and miniatures, with a huge selection of board games sorted by themes and mechanics at incredibly reasonable prices. I expect to come here an awful lot.
• Gamma Ray Games: Assuming I live in Capitol Hill, this will be the most local of the FLGSi, but I wasn't too impressed by it. It's rather small with an accordingly small selection and space for playing games. In fact, I don't think they had a demo library, which is sad. The place looks very sharp, though, and has a neat feature to compensate for their slightly steep prices: they have both a "buy 1 get 1 half off" and a "spend $50 and get a game from this pile for free" offer, and while I think they don't stack, that's still a pretty decent deal. We'll see if it grows on me.

I think this is a pretty good sampling of this sort of venue in Seattle. I look forward to seeing how my impressions of these stores evolves over time, and hopefully meeting more people who share my hobby.

The Plant

One of the makers of the wonderful short form RPG Fiasco has made a solo, choose-your-own-adventure style game called The Plant, a game in which you enter a deserted power plant searching for your daughter. I thought I'd give it a whirl. Part of the game involves keeping a journal of what's going on, so I did so. Without further ado, here is:

My First Play of The Plant

I enter the furnace room. Someone has dragged a shopping cart and a rotten canvas tarp in here. I recall the taste of icing, seeing the shopping cart, which fills me with stubborn determination because I was only just Sunday shopping for my daughter's birthday. The icing was the only cake ingredient I forgot. When I get her back, I'll make sure to get her her favorite flavor.

Then I go into the rolling mill hall. It's all smashed up and broken. I get a flashback to its past, when the plant was still operational. The strong copper tang in the air reminds me of blood. I remember blood so strongly because I once cut my arm really deeply during a camping trip with my family. I tried to hide the wound from my kids, and the best way to do so as I walked over to the car was to push the cut closer to my face, where I almost passed out from the stench.

Next comes the coil room. I used to spend a lot of time here, eating lunch at this place every day. Once people found out that I was a suspect in my wife's murder, though, my lunches were eaten alone. They needn't have worried. I kept looking at the tree where people smoked, searching for my shit-eating brother in law, who demanded custody of my kids even after I was acquitted. He was the regional manager, the guy who gave me my job, but he never came by after Darlene died.

From there I scrambl into the crawlspace, ruined by decay and animal shit. I once spent a lot of time here, cleaning out gunk from the fans and such. One time, though, I saw Darlene down below, talking to her brother Mark. Talking about leaving the country with my kids, leaving me behind. Disappearing.

I reach the work line, where a stained and dessicated mattress adorns a corner. The utter wear and tear on the bed reminds me of our lazy cat, who in spite of her lethargy was a force of nature in destroying our furniture. But Darlene said a pet would be good for the family, so I just ate the repair bills.

I descend down a stairwell, two flights, then round into the trunk room, now flooded to knee height. It's like the pool of sweat I released when I went hiking with my daughter. I was out of shape since that camping injury, but she convinced me to come back to the outdoors. The memory makes me smile despite myself, and I spring forward to continue my search.

I go down to the deepest level of the factory, wary of the flood water, finding myself in the break room. Even this deep, graffiti adorns the place with the litter of drugs piled everywhere.

She's sitting among the rubble, asbestos like snow, and she's hurt. She was foolish, she's crying, but I pick her up and take her away from the plant and this awful life. I forget more with each step. It's just me and her, and she is safe. Safe, safe, safe.

Sexegenary Cycles - Exploring Chinese Culture with Modulus Proofs

Today in my Chinese Literature class we started reading 运命 (transliteration: yun4ming4, translation: fate) by Lu Xun. In it, he talks about the poor fate of Japanese women born in the "丙午" (bing3wu3) year - the 43rd year of Eastern Asia's Sexegenary (60 year) Cycle. Apparently they curse their husbands, so people don't want to marry them.

Our professor talked briefly about this cycle. In China, in addition to the base 10 numerals, there are two other systems of ordinals: the 10 heavenly stems {甲乙丙丁戊己庚辛壬癸} and the 12 earthly stems {子丑寅卯辰巳午未申酉戌亥}. Each year in the cycle corresponds to a certain combination of those two stems - for example, the first year is 甲子 (1-1), and the second is 乙丑(2-2). The final year in the system is 癸亥(10-12).

This means of combination leads to 60 total combinations. Before I understood the system, I didn't see why it wasn't 120 combinations - after all, aren't there 10 of the heavenly stems and 12 of the earthly ones? 120 would be right if the years went: 甲子(1-1)，甲丑(1-2)，甲寅(1-3) etc. because that would indeed exhaustively go through the combinations of stems.

But that's not how it progresses: apparently half of the potential combinations don't show up. Why is this? And if we were to change the number of stems in either set, how would that effect the number of years in the cycle?

In my head in class, I played with some other examples to work out the following pattern: multiply the size of each set, and divide the result by the greatest common multiple between those sizes:

|heavenly| * |earthly| = 10 * 12 = 120
GCM(10, 12) = 2
|heavenly| * |earthly| / GCM(|heavenly|, |earthly|) = 120 / 2 = 60.

A more succinct way of explaining it would be to say that the length of the cycle is the least common multiple of the sizes of the two sets (which I worked out on the way back home).

Now let's prove it!
______

We clearly have some cycles going on here. We'll drop the Chinese characters because ugh, and instead replace them with English letters. The heavenly stems will thus be {A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J} and the earthly stems will be {a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l}. And integers will be proper, sensible names for the year. So the calendar looks like:

0: (A,a)
1: (B, b)
2: (C, c)
...
9: (J, j)
10: (A, k)
11: (B, l)
12: (C, a)
...
42: (C, g) (poor bingwu ladies!)
...
57: (H, j)
58: (I, k)
59: (J, l)
60: (A, a)

I start from 0 because I'm a meanie poo-poo face computer scientist. And because it will help out the math a bit.

The sets of stems are both "circular" sets - they loop around when we're done. In a sense, they're like clocks. The heavenly stem clock has ten hours on it, and the earthly stem one has twelve hours. If we start them both at zero hour (i.e. 10 o'clock and 12 o'clock) at the same time, how long will it be until they both reach zero hour again?

In mathy terms: given least residue system S modulo n and least residue system S' n' respectively, what is k such that k > 0 and (k ≡ 0) mod n and (k ≡ 0) mod n'?

Ew! Gross maths!

Let's break it down a bit. Why "k > 0"? Well, that's saying "how long will it be until they both reach zero hour again". We don't want to count the first time, that would say it's a 0-year cycle!

What does "(k ≡ 0) mod n" mean? In something resembling English: "k is congruent to 0 modulo n". Closer to English: "k is a number that, when you divide it by n, has a remainder of 0". Or put super simply "n divides k evenly".

So we're looking for the first number k bigger than 0 where n divides k evenly and n' divides k evenly. With our example, n is the size of the heavenly stem set, 10, and n' is the size of the earthly stem set, 12.

What are some numbers that 10 divides evenly? 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 etc. "Multiples of 10". And the multiples of 12 are 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72... wait a minute, we saw 60 in both lists! So that's when they'll both strike "a" at the same time - at hour 60.

What's special about 60, relative to 10 and 12? It's their lowest common multiple - the first number such that it is a multiple of 10 and a multiple of 12. Suddenly it makes sense! But how do we calculate that number, given an arbitrary n and n'? After all, with big n and n', that could involve trying to find a match in a very long list indeed...

Well, fortunately for math, it's easy to find it (ish). Find the greatest common divisor (which is sorta kinda easy-ish, but I don't want to get into it), and divide the product of the numbers by the GCD. So, exactly the thing I came up with in class.

Alright, I can tell I'm starting to lose articulation. Still, to those who are vaguely interested, does this explanation make it clear why there aren't 120 years in the Sexegenary Cycle?

Ben Finkel