'Sup.

So this is going to be a blog. About polyominoes and stuff, like. And sort of a sad attempt to drum up interest in polyominoes and related tiling puzzles etc. What I'd really like there to be is a sort of message board, a big central hub (like what the ConwayLife forums is for Conway's Game of Life, and the surge in breakthroughs and discoveries there in the past couple years), but I don't have the resources or know-how to get something like that up and running sadly. Or I would.

The focus of this blog is mainly going to be on constructions/rectangle-packing/making pretty shapes with the bog-standard polyominoes and other related polyforms. Most of which will be reinventing the wheel, but since existing information on this kind of stuff is scattered haphazardly around the internet or on sites and newsletters that are impossible to get a hold of anymore, it's tricky to say.

Figure 1 - The end product of an exciting, action-packed, well-spent evening

Here's the hexominoes in a 10x21 parallelogram. It's not really the kind of thing anyone's going to get excited about in any way (or even give half a toss about really, let's be honest here) but you can't just go straight in at the deep end knocking out sprawling enneomino constructions without getting a bit of technique down first. And this was a way of getting the technique down. The sacred art of "saving the bigger blockier more co-operative bits for last". Which I can't do because I'm impatient. I see a rectangle-shaped gap emerging, I stuff the rectangle there - who cares how much of a ball-ache it's going to be at the end, when I'm stuck with a handful of chronic wigglers and no way of making them behave.