WobbuPalooza

One quirk that comes to mind is /whatever.html files automatically redirect to /whatever, so I guess you should treat the name without the .html as canonical

It is open source: https://github.com/neocities

Reasonably featureful: https://neocities.org/supporter

I don't use its developer API, but it has one: https://neocities.org/api

It's been a nice place to host a simple static site. On a personal level, I guess I could probably use GitHub pages just as well? I haven't really thought about it, but Neocities occupies a different niche--small, social, especially friendly to people learning about the web--that I've been happy building on.

Comment · 2 years ago

Monopoly is a good example given in the article but also such a recent one that it may leave a misleading impression. The Tibetan game above is 13th C. The Chinese and Japanese games are roughly 17th C.

Maybe it's worth adding they descend from the didactic gambling game Shengguan Tu, which had its origins in the 9th C. and remained continuously popular enough that you could still buy it in the late 19th C. US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shengguan_Tu

Comment · 2 years ago

Board games with a moral/didactic dimension have a very long history that might be of interest here, e.g.

-- Mark Tatz and Jody Kent (1978), _Rebirth: The Tibetan Game of Liberation_: https://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setID=1524

-- May-Ying Mary Ngai (2011), "From entertainment to enlightenment : a study on a cross-cultural religious board game with emphasis on the Table of Buddha Selection designed by Ouyi Zhixu of the late Ming Dynasty": https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses...

-- Jingyi Yuan (2021), "Blurring the Boundary between Play and Ritual: Sugoroku Boards as Portable Cosmos in Japanese Religion": https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/etd/r/1501/10?clear=...

In Europe, many parlor games had some moral, didactic, or personal aspect to them:

-- Innocenzo Ringhieri (1551), _Cento giuochi liberali, et d'ingegno_ gave players 100 different games that were kind of complicated and often didactic in themselves, but the idea in making them complicated was for players to make mistakes they'd pay for at the end by answering questions that often had a moral dimension. I've made a rough translation here of seven of them that were translated into French in 1555 and that have to do with classical mythology: https://wobbupalooza.neocities.org/1555

-- One specifically political parlor game that I can recall off the top of my head is the variant of Avocat that GutsMuths gave in 1796 called Parlament, in which players become King, Chancellor, Secretary, etc. to address strategic matters of state such as "whether one should be allied with the [Ottoman] Porte, recognize the [French] Republic, continue the war, [or] levy a new tax or not," the trick being to respond to the question in lieu of a partner: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Spiele_zur_Übung_und_Er...

-- But that's pretty close in time to the 1804 astronomy board game that Margaret Bryan consulted on: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O26305/science-in-sport-o... / https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-264736 / https://www.cultureandcosmos.org/pdfs/16/Saridakis_INSAPVII_...

Comment · 3 years ago

I was delighted to see this--thanks for posting it. Games like this (and Semantle, etc.) have a surprisingly long history. The TikTok #gotitchallenge [0] shows one way to play in person, also demonstrated by the vlogbrothers [1]. But there was also a 19th C. parlor game called "What is My Thought Like?" [2] in which players had to make semantic connections between two random words or phrases, and that is basically the same game as "Le Jeu de la pensée" [3][my English translation 4], ca. 1701, which is an extended version with additional random features players have to connect to a random word

[0] https://www.tiktok.com/tag/gotitchallenge

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyx8iMKYrE8

[2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/American_Girl_s_Book/WO...

[3] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Les_jeux_d_esprit_ou_La...

[4] https://wobbupalooza.neocities.org/1701#tr_60

Comment · 3 years ago

In 1987, Alcida Ramos--an anthropologist who had worked with the Yanomami--published a terrific article going over what she recognized about them in other texts, including Chagnon's, but more importantly pointing out the degree to which each ethnographer's selective emphasis yields a very different overall picture. Although not too surprising, it's a useful summary for anyone who only knows the Yanomami from one point of view, and it offers a sense of what an anthropologist sees in other work about a group they've worked with themselves--rare insight. Her article is called "Reflecting on the Yanomami: Ethnographic Images and the Pursuit of the Exotic," and for the moment, it's online at http://webspace.pugetsound.edu/facultypages/bdasher/Chem361/...

Comment · 4 years ago

A fun thing about Twenty Questions is how old it is.

Here it is in French in 1788, as "The Twelve Questions" but still beginning with the question animal, vegetable, or mineral: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Les_soir%C3%A9es_amusan...

Here it is in English in 1796, as "Game of Twenty": https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Juvenile_Olio_Or_Me...

I haven't looked too hard for earlier examples in other sources. I see Sorel had a game called the Game of Questions in the 1600s, but it's pretty different: https://wobbupalooza.neocities.org/

Comment · 4 years ago

Hm, the link into page 52 of the book seems to have been cut off--it's here:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Home_Book_of_Pleasu...

A version from 1842 lacking "Fizz" is available here:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Girl_s_Own_Book/f_5...

A text with a version of Fizz Buzz over 150 years old (1867) books.google.com

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A text with a version of Fizz Buzz over 150 years old (1867) b books.google.com

A text with a version of Fizz Buzz over 150 years old (1867) books.google.com