From the archives: August 2007

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Family fun for future Führers

Sunday, 26 August 2007 — 11:51pm | Board games

If Settlers of Catan is any indication, Germany sure has a grand tradition of designing tabletop amusements. Last week, German board games made headlines when a British auction house put several Nazi-era propaganda games on the block. On Friday, the BBC followed it up with a story about some of the British wartime equivalents, which included stimulating titles like “Decorate Goering” and “Hang Your Washing on the Siegfried Line.”

Regrettably, the mainstream press saw fit to stop at the level of goals, objectives and the roleplay element, and did not appear to find the game mechanics themselves to be newsworthy. This is understandable, given that the representational level of “Bomb London for 100 points” is probably of more interest to historians than the question of how exactly one goes about conducting such a blitz.

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Reveille

Monday, 20 August 2007 — 11:38pm

For a new dawn?

In place of saying anything profound enough to break a champagne bottle or two, I am going to proceed directly to a few technical notes.

After much deliberation on the matter of selectivity, I have imported all of the posts from the original Nick’s Café. The majority of the links in the older posts are horribly broken and beyond repair, and the links to my own posts still point to the old location. I may eventually fix the latter.

The HaloScan comments have not been carried over, and none of them were ever so profound as to be worth preserving for posterity. To improve readability, I will probably make liberal use of post breaks for new posts where it is appropriate, but it is unlikely I will go back and do it for older posts, in part because many of them cover multifarious topics at which the opening paragraph cannot begin to hint.

Not every post has been properly sorted into all of the right categories, and there are many that will remain uncategorized.

The bells and whistles of the old site—the CSS style switcher, the U of A weather report, the post index at the top of every page—may or may not arrive at some point, depending on how much I feel like implementing them.

I am still tweaking the present design, and I would appreciate feedback on things that don’t work or could be improved.

I am eminently aware that the right-hand column of the site does not display properly in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows. I made a very conscious design decision to not bother accommodating browsers that do not adhere to longstanding web standards.

The new RSS feed is here.

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