HIGH ALERT

I like pie.  I like pie a whole-damned bunch.  My life was once a proud example of debaucherous excess and consumptive revelry.  Health and common sense have in recent years stripped, simplified and cleansed my habits to a point where very few vices remain.  The occasional pie is one such vice.  

As an x-mas gift this year, my beloved wife was kind enough to give me a handmade pie-of-the-month-club type coupon book allowing me to get a true and proper handle on the pie scene here in Montreal.  I am (of course) keeping the results of my monthly pie tasting in a publicly available database.  Follow along with me in my pie adventure at www.andorandrew.com/pies.

Legendary game designer Steve Jackson (US) (not to be confused with legendary game designer Steve Jackson (UK)) talks about game design in general as well the genesis of classic games such as OGRE and GURPS in this great excerpt from the upcoming documentary 'Adventure on the Table Top'.

I ran into Unix patch command creator Larry Wall's stunning poem Black Perl poem in a Boing Boing post last year.  It was only recently, however, that I discovered the Perl-based poetry of Sharon Hopkins and her fascinating 2002 paper "Camels and Needles: Computer Poetry Meets the Perl Programming Language".  Sharon's paper contains and references numerous poems written as runnable code in the Perl programming language.

Larry Wall's Black Perl:

BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time.

    open spellbook, study, read (scan, select, tell us);

write it, print the hex while each watches,

    reverse its length, write again;

    kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them.

        unlink arms, shift, wait & listen (listening, wait),

sort the flock (then, warn the "goats" & kill the "sheep");

    kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities,

    values aside, each one;

        die sheep! die to reverse the system

        you accept (reject, respect);

next step,

    kill the next sacrifice, each sacrifice,

    wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased";

    do it ("as they say").

do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***forbidden**s*e*x*).

return last victim; package body;

    exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it,

    select (quickly) & warn your next victim;

AFTERWORDS: tell nobody.

    wait, wait until time;

    wait until next year, next decade;

        sleep, sleep, die yourself,

        die at last