I was taught how to play a game I thought I already knew, but of course, it originally being Chinese, I had played a bastardized version.

The short version is you shuffle the tiles, make 4 rows of 2 high stacked 18 tiles. There are some dice involved and you roll to decide where you start taking tiles (this bit gets fuzzy for me, from memory) and you take your tiles. One end of the remaining gap in the rows is the beginning, the other is the end. You take turns, taking a new tile from the beginning, and discarding another one. You can pick up the tile in the discard area only if it is the last one discarded, unless you can win from picking the last tile discarded by either player, in which case you can do that, but only if it causes you to win. Also, you can only pick up if it completes a ‘pattern’, and you must then set the pattern down for all to see, and continue with a discard.

If you have any flower tiles at the start, you must show them, and pick as many tiles from the end of the rows, and if you pick one up in the course of the game, you immediately set it down and take a new tile from the end.

To win (ignoring the complicated scoring system), you need a pair of something, and then the rest must be ‘patterns’. Patterns are either ’straights’, made up of the same kind of number tiles (chinese numbers, bams (sticks), or circles), which are in sequences of 3, no more, no less… or they can be 3 of a kind, or 4 of a kind, or something. If you pick up a discarded tile (following the rules of whos you can pick up) to complete a set, you must say something, I prefer ‘Yangzi’, which is like a Chinese Yatzee or something. Or yell ‘bingo’, or ‘you sank my scrabbleship’.

This game was bloody confusing, especially for one I thought was matching two tiles and taking them off the table, gah.

Here are the fun tiles:

These are the sticks, or bams, they are numeric, and fairly easy to understand, except the bird for number 1, which is baffling.

These are wheels, or circles, they are also numeric, colours are meaningless. At least this is easy to count.

These are the chinese numbers, and the hardest bit for me. 1, 2 and 3 are easy, like roman numerals on their side, 4 is easy enough. 5 is just a jumble of crap, which is how I remembered it. 6 looks like a little hut to me. 7 looks like an upsidedown 7. 8 is a lamda, and 9 is like a cursive r. Lovely, it’s great trying to work out if you have a straight if you can’t understand the numbers

These are the cardinal directions of the wind, and the seasons, just match them up, lest headaches set in.

These are, apparently, dragons. When I played, I thought the first was a dagger thing, the middle one was just “the ugly”, and the last one was, cleverly enough, “rectangle”

These are so easy that they are like a blind spot, see a flower, lay it down.

They tried to explain scoring, but I threatened to kill myself, so they stopped.

I’ll go play the tile matching game now.

So I made the mistake in trying to upgrade my computer yesterday, yes, should have learned, but I never do.

I went out and bought a DVD writer, an LG 16X Super Multi DVD/CD Rewriter (why do they need the super, ugh), and put it in the computer… restart….. windows has detected signigicant change in your computer hardware and must reauthenticate within 3 days. (changing one component is significant?)

So I was going to phone in the code like I did when I first bought the thing, except, where the code was supposed to be, nothing…. the screen had all the info on it, but it seems it forgot to display the code I needed to phone in. Contacting customer support helped nothing, as they hadn’t seen this problem before, and upper support claimed the computer, given it’s serial number, was supposed to be running 64bit windows which was impossible and what the hell are Staples, Proteva and Synergio respectively. That got us nowhere.

Finally, rebooting the computer seemed to fix it. I’m sick of that, no reason for it to fail, but it did…. fine, phoned in the code, authenticated windows again, and vowed to pirate ever after.

Not that any of this helped though, the DVD writer doesn’t quite work. I’ve got that drive, and also a simple DVD ROM drive not 2 years old in it, but when trying to copy a DVD disc to disc (even a DVD I had just burned myself with some test files on it) it would immediately crap out saying it couldn’t be done, but of course, gave no reason. This is in Nero Express, came with the drive.

Couldn’t even make an image from a DVD that sits in the old drive, had to move it to the writer drive to even save an image to the hard drive…. so I took some DVD my father wanted copied, a memorial movie about a company he was involved with, it had been burned too, so I figured there shouldn’t be any problem. After burning 2 copies of it via the image-to-harddisk method, here are the results.

My Computer’s DVD software:
Original Disc – Freezes and crashes DVD software when accessing some menus
Burned Disc – same thing in the same places

My parents’ new standalone DVD player:
Original Disc – Plays fine
Burned Disc – Says the disc is incompatible with the player, even though the manual says it can play virtually every format, including and explicitly the one I used.

My brother’s old standalone DVD player:
Original Disc – Plays fine
Burned Disc – plays for a while, craps out in some places, turning the player off.

That’s some consistency. I should have stopped when I was ahead (merely wanting a DVD writer, rather than having one, and wanting to tear my hair out)

At least writing simple files to the damn thing seems to work, so I can finally shift some crap off my computer, gig’s and gig’s of star trek. god I’m lame.

Thought I’d post a picture of the new family cat, just to put some content in this thing, and also, he’s a fairly cute cat.

I suggest that everyone try to play this game, or at least see it played. It is simply one of the most amusing and addictive puzzle games I’ve played, and the soundtrack is perfectly enjoyable on it’s own.

See the crazy opening movie here

Oh, and merry xmas all.

All of a sudden, things started to work again. Accouding to php’s info, the version is still the same, but things work, so I assume that Zend was upgraded, I’m surprised, the office is supposed to be closed.

Anyway, my other entries will return in a bit, I’m off to a family get-together right now.

Hmm, some of my marks have appeared already, including the dreaded Actsci 231 mark. If I had failed that course, it would have totally derailed university, and I would have had to take another term to make it up, which would have sucked incredibly. But, it seems, against all likelyhood, that I passed it, and it’s not even my worst mark ever either.

It’s my second worst

Well, not sure how this will look, as it appears I’m typing right into the menu in the entry-composer. I guess this thing doesn’t like the version of NS installed on this comp. I’m back home, at the moment, from ‘loo, on the family box.

Anyway, hopefully this blog will be more frequently updated, and less frequently embarassing/personal/painful than my old journal, as this is not a journal. I’ll make a proper website button to convey that, but I can’t until I get my comp up and running, as I made the buttons in 3d studio.