Stained Glass is a game I invented while the rocks were still cooling in 1987. It was ported to the Macintosh by my good friend Nick Schlott, who then created Tesserae, a commercial game that was picked up by InLine Design a couple of years later.

Others have done versions of Stained Glass and Tesserae, which tickles me pink. A quick Google search found a Palm Pilot version you can play on the go, and a BYOND-enhanced version so you can play in front of an audience. I've also heard from college students who say their professors are asking them to implement Stained Glass in various languages; the best one I've seen had translucent floaty 3-D graphics and a thumping techno soundtrack. (If you find yourself doing this for classroom credit I'd really like to see what you came up with; ego strokes just don't get any better than that.)

Recently I've pulled together a JavaScript version, so anyone with a browser released since the turn of the century should be able to play online without further ado. If you've tried my JavaScript version and it won't work on your browser, all is not lost. The original Tesserae and Stained Glass are also available--sorry, PC formats only--at my personal site on SFF.net.

If you like it, all I ask is that you tell me so. Hit the Instructions link and you'll wind up in a place where you can leave feedback.

Okay, so it wasn't actually ready for prime time, but then I had an Ask Slashdot article posted and started to get hits ... so now the Mindsack is up and running.

It's an online community for anyone who wants to get better grades. You show up, find (or create) your school, department, and class, and then start asking and answering multiple-choice questions. Said questions also require feedback to provide results; questions that receive the highest scores bubble up to the top of the list.

The Mindsack ought to work best for people who are in large classes. There are three or four students in each class who will claim leadership positions by asking questions, and maybe five or ten more in each class who won't enter questions but will take the tests. By exam time--if people have been using it consistantly since the beginning of the class, that is--just about every possible question that might be asked will be there, with the popular ones sorted neatly to the top.

There's also room for everything2-style write-ups, discussion of anything and everything, and e-mail subscriptions to all that chatter. Please come by and take a peek if you're in the mood; your grades will be better.