unforum

[cassandra]

[UPDATE] Perplexcityacademy.com Cube Team info

[GuyP]

Good find, me old mucker, good find.

Any unbelievers are sure to be sucked in for the inevitable Tippy beach volleyball pics, right? I have this imaginary situation where the artist wanders into the study, all "Hey, just gotta do a quick sketch for the Academy website, you know, something professional..." and Ms. Ankron's just like "Something professional you say? Let me see what I can do..."

I must say it's good to see Caine - an alternate reality without rock and roll just wouldn't be cricket.

<desperately struggles to make a sensible comment>
<fails>

Garnet is the PXC-version of Virgil from AotH, right?

[Seej]

Mmmm, Tippy.....

Uh, anyway, is Caine the guy from the card with Violet's phone number?

Also, def of ailihphilia is 'a lover of palindromes'. I did wonder who Anna (palindromic name, natch) was after doing the flag card. I guess that all the names on the cards (we see Kurt on #27 and #138 and an Anna ambigram on #74) relate to this lot. Well, except the guest artists of course....

EDIT: while we're talking about this site, the library login still won't work (checked source).

[MarcB]

I've never seen such a collection of dodgy looking characters!

[GuyP]

That's because they obviously had to do all the drawings in the middle of a powercut - still, it adds atmosphere. That is to say a "we're terribly shady and definitely not above suspicion" kind of atmosphere...

[cassandra]

In case anyone was curious, an informative page on Georges Perec (Anna Heath's Earth-interest):

http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/perec.html

[JebJoya]

Multi-language crossword puzzles - 3d latin, french, italin AND spanish cryptic crosswords - heehee

Jeb

And also - YAY FOR THE MATHMO BEING IN A THRASH METAL BAND

edit(2)

[toongoon]

[spugmeistress]

[QBKooky]

[Alex Smith]

There are Seven members. There are seven basic groups of cards. Kurt likes playing with computers, and we found a computer puzzle on one. Tippy is a puzzle mimic, and we found hieroglyphs on one. Coincidence?

[Rob_Riv]

[jbd]

[leakingpen]

this answers teh question of how well they copy our tech. vons got a gameboy, old style. and..

is that a cup, or a rubics cube in the background?


and
they are all "pretty people" skinny, toned, worked out, styled cuts, ect. even with the lack of geekness associated with intelligence there, im not buying it.

[Leeravitz]

Yeah, seems to me that the Academy Seven 'Special Projects' Team all have a specific 'puzzle - related' area of expertise (Anna's is linguistic, Caine's is musical, Kurt's has to do with mathematics and computing, Aiko's is [presumably] pictorial etc. etc.). That's the obvious conclusion, and maybe the card sets either a) relate to the specific member of the seven involved (say, all Anna's cards will be red) or b) more likely, different Academy members set different puzzles at each card level (so, there are, say, straighforward linguistic puzzles on the most common cards, and they get harder and harder the rarer the cards get, same for the musical problems and so on...)...but I guess aspects of all this have been covered already...


I was more interested in saying something more about George Perec. Everyone's been absolutely right to point out that he was as interested in playing puzzle games with words as Anna also seems to be. Perec was a prominent member of a continentally based writing collective known as OULIPO (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentionelle - in English, the Workshop for Potential Literature), which flourished back in the 1950's - 1970's. They were fascinated with the idea of 'constraining' the way in which they wrote fiction, and came up with hundreds of ingenious 'rules' which would then be applied to their writing. So, for instance, one game was S+7, which involves writing a piece of text normally (say, a poem) then looking up key nouns (I think) in that text in the dictionary, counting seven on from the given word, and substituting the new phrase found in the poem. Perec and his associates, such as Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, were fascinated by anagrams, acrostics, and so on...many of the sort of puzzles that the game has already thrown up examples of...

In his most famous novel, 'Life: A User's Manuel', Perec tells the story of a certain shared apartment, and the story is structured in such a way that it follows the patterns that a knight's piece would make moving around the chessboard. In another of his novels 'La Disparition' (I think) he never includes the letter 'e' once (the big joke is that the novel is about a search for this missing 'factor' in the world of the novel).

Italo Calvino, in a similar way, wrote a book called 'The Castle of Crossed Destinies' in which all the stories revolve around Tarot Card imagery - anything to do with the Five of Cups, do you think?

The other interesting thing about Anna's entry not yet remarked on (to my knowledge) is the caption. It seems to be just a play on baby talk, but the use of Dada puts me in mind of the proto - surrealist art movement that emerged in Zurich between the wars, and whose leading light, the artist Tristan Tzara, was famous for 'penning' poems that were cut up and rearranged into new forms of expression - proto OuLIPO, if you like. So, probably an in - joke, but an interesting one...

It's equally interesting that Caine's into Bach...That puts me in mind of Douglas Hoftstadter's classic 'Godel, Escher, Bach,' , a book in which the author ingeniously tries to point out the similarities between the mathematical basis of Bach's work, that of artist M.C. Escher, Artificial Intelligence development, and linguistic consciousness...

Just some thoughts...