Postcard Contest: The Results!

  • November 11, 2020

The postcard contest is over! All cards have been mail, received and judged. It’s time for the final score.

To revise, at halftime the score was even-stevens, and the contest had been a nail-biter with close calls from the inscrutable judges.

I had mentioned at that point the existence of a mysterious fourth rule which hadn’t come into play and now it’s time to reveal what that was:

4) Each competitor has 2 points in total they can wager on cards. If they win that card, the points are added to their total score.

As of halftime neither of us had wagered any of our points which is why I didn’t mention it. But the points entered the contest in the last four cards: read on to see what effect they had!

Category 5: Horror

I chose this category, and when it came time to select an imagine regretted it since it proved to be a difficult one. I actually ended up making two cards and chose mine – on the left – at the last moment.

I chose well it seems, since the judges awarded me the win 3-2. The choice seemed difficult since some found the skeleton child unpleasant… but wasn’t that the point?

You’ll also note that here Bernard plays for the judges with his card by putting himself in the photo! As if the judges would fall for such an obvious gimmick…

Category 6: Lizard

This category was Bernard’s choice, possibly because he had his picture (the top one) in mind. I was so confident of my lovely chameleon I wagered one of my points on it.

Bernard won 3-2! My point was lost like tears in rain, and once again the overall score was tied! The judges that selected a Bernard’s card gave no comments on their choice, so I don’t know why his was chosen.

At this point KLS made an observation: Did the judges understand they were voting for postcards and not just photos? It was immaterial since judges decision was final, but I made that (slightly) clearer to them in the final two categories.

Category 7: Rain

This was Lakshmi’s category! Bernard’s card used a photo he took himself from inside a train in New Zealand, and mine was one of several I printed showing the Tokyo neon jungle on a rainy night.

Bernard won 5-0!!! This was the only blowout in the contest, and since not one judge gave any real comment I can’t say for sure why his was chosen unanimously.

I’ll attribute it to none of them having visited Tokyo on a rainy night 🙂

So the overall contest score is 4-3 Bernard’s way with one card left. If you’re keeping track you’ll know I have one point left to wager, and he has two. If I win the last category I’ll be the overall winner with 5-4; if he wins it it’ll be his rout at 7-3. It all came down to the very last card…

Category 8: Sculpture

The final category was chosen by Kristin, and it was a good one. Bernard’s card was the top (showing civic fountain in Newcastle) and mine the bottom showing a (real) photo of a moai against the stars.

Had I been a judge I would have said this was the most difficult pair to judge since they’re both good, and based on the comments this was indeed the case since a few judges took longest on this final card.

And in the end… my card won 3-2. As one judge said: Gotta be the moai.

So with my final point wagered the overall contest score was 5-4 with me as the winner. I’ll accept this triumphant victory with the humility I am known for!

Thanks to the judges. Thanks to Bernard for strong competition and thanks to Lakshmi and Kristin for the guest categories. This was a lot of fun to do and I already have some ideas for the next time we do it (such as have each judge pick a category) which I’m certain will happen before too long 🙂

Hot Button Baseball

  • November 8, 2020

I bought this a couple of weeks ago:

It’s a product from 2005 and yes, I paid $7.99. I found it in the budget bin of a weird store that sold toys and sports memorabilia. It caught my eye because it seemed to have a Barcode Battler vibe, and for that reason alone I needed to know more. Here’s the back of the package:

And here is the device itself unpacked:

Lots of buttons and what I originally thought were sensors lined up down the sides! It’s fairly compact and had promise. But how did it interact with the cards?

Speaking of which the cards themselves are plastic and transparent, with an amazing amount of littles codes lined up on each side. The backs have stats on the players, so (I suppose) they would be of interest to sports cards collectors as well?

The game is played by making teams with a limited amount of cards (the rules for making teams ate simultaneously restrictive and vague), then slotting the cards into the device like I have here. Then you…. well you just push the red button and watch lights flash randomly.

Randomly choosing a light is all this thing actually does! There’s no score keeping, no bar code reading, no calculations or anything. You push the red button, a light randomly lights, and then you decide what that means in the context of the baseball game yourself. In the example above ‘Go’ was lit, which means something different from if anything else was lit.

All the other buttons? They toggle things on and off on the screen for scoring purposes. It would be easier and faster to just use a piece of paper!

So this thing is just a random number generator linked to a bank of LEDs. A curiosity perhaps, but hardly a compelling game.

I packed it away into a box, never to be seen again 🙂

  • Posted in Toys
  • Robert

Inktober 2020

  • November 2, 2020

Another year, another one-drawing-a-day Inktober! This year my efforts were stymied by a lengthy power/internet outage and then my drawing app being crippled after an update. But I persisted and produced 31 works of art during the past month. Here’s seven of them, mostly selected by KLS as her favourites.

The usual motifs of light and dark returned often. This was an early attempt to show depth in poor light. Once again it took a while to get used to the app. As before this was all done on my phone, even though using the Apple Pencil on the iPad would have given me much more accuracy.

I’ve drawn a few maps on postcards this year, always more detailed than this. If you haven’t received a map and want one, leave a comment!

Everyone can draw Grimace from memory, and this one was inspired by me doing exactly that during lecture (yes, I drew grimace on Zoom)!

A tribute to Voyager. It looks simple but there’s many layers in that space background.

Art should tell a story, and the above was one of my attempts. I was going to do a followup showing the body which revealed it wasn’t human, but… I didn’t.

The above was drawn while sitting in the car at the drive in. That’s not a beverage coming out of the bottle, it’s a green slime (a monster).

Video games are another common theme, and there were several pieces this year inspired by them. This was perhaps the most obvious.

When I first did Inktober it was a silly joke, but now I’ve done almost 100 drawings over three years! I wonder if I’ll do it again in 2021?