Jesus H. Christ. Seriously?

All right, well, what else is going on? I played a little of that Spiral Knights game that Jick mentioned on our inaugural episode of Video Game Hot Dog, or whatever we end up calling it. It’s okay. It’s like a cute superdeformed steampunk Diablo.

It’s got kind of an interesting mechanic where, on every level of a dungeon, you can get a mineral, in one of five colors. When you eventually leave the dungeon, you dump all your collected minerals into a hopper, and get a little gold in return. When some large number of minerals of each color have been collected by all the players together, a new dungeon opens. From what I’ve seen, through, the dungeons are probably procedurally generated, so a “new” dungeon means… what? A new texture set, I guess? There doesn’t seem to be much of an overarching plot to speak of, just the barest amount necessary to explain who “Spiral Knights” are and why you’re collecting minerals. Something about getting to the planet core to access some massive power source to make your crashed spaceship go. Eh.

Anyway, if you like that sort of thing, give it a look. It’s free, in essentially the same way KoL is free.

Also, some kind KoL player (who doesn’t seem to have included her playername, but thanks! (EDIT: I’ve been informed it was ‘acm’. I assumed that was just her initials, heh.)) sent me a little booklet — more precisely, a Little Blue Book — she found in her mother’s house. “500 Riddles Conundrums and Problems”. It appears to date back to 1946.

It’s mainly the sort of thing you’d expect:

“Why is it that a man can never starve in the desert?”
“Because of the sandwiches (sand which is) there.”

although there are a couple logic puzzles, including the “Pour X liters of water into a bucket using only a Y-liter and a Z-liter flask” one and the fox-sheep-cabbage one, and a couple of the classical poem-type riddles.

“What is that which

Wait.

“Vin Diesel is that which is
the beginning of eternity,
the end of time and space,
the beginning of every end,
the end of every race.
What the hell?”

“Answer: Vin Diesel is the letter E.”

So there you go.