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I'm sitting by myself at a table
in a Chinese food restaurant. I'm looking at an older woman standing
near the exit, talking to two employees. She says, "Do they
loiter? Teenagers? Just hang around?"
crankle (crank'-ul) n.
a bend or turn, a crinkle v.i. to bend, wind, or twist;
to move in a zig zag course v.t. to break into bends,
turns, or angles; to crinkle
- Life or Something Like It :)
Yet another film
that tells us to enjoy life
before it's over.
 The Lathe of Heaven
Trying to bring about positive change in the world by giving
hypnotic suggestions to a man whose dreams become reality is
like making a deal with the devil: it never works out as well
as you thought it would.
 
The
Flo Control Project
Intelligent Humor
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- "It's a great game: we keep one deck at home and the
other travels with us. An Aquarius
deck + 2 large coffees (decaf for me) + a table at our favorite
coffee place = a really nice Sunday afternoon. Thanks for making
the world a lot more fun." -- Barbara of
Chicago, in comments accompanying an order
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Hailstorms and Laser Lines |
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 My
big news of the week is that I invented a cool new Icehouse game!
I'm calling it Hailstorm.
It's wonderfully easy and heaps of fun. If you've got an Icehouse
set, give it a try!
How I Came To Invent This Game: Ever since our last
trip to Vegas, I've been thinking
about an Icehouse game that would permit, nay thrive upon, gambling.
If Icehouse pyramids are like playing cards and Gnostica
is our version of Bridge, then where is our equivalent to Poker
or Blackjack?
I figured such a game would need a huge luck factor, and I
wanted something that would involve dropping pieces and seeing
which way they land, since this would evoke the feeling of rolling
dice. Soon we were adapting the pointing rules from Icehouse
to fit, and the goal itself came to me late Saturday morning,
just as I was falling asleep.
We started playtesting it when I got up that evening, and
it was immediately successful, but also immediately begged the
question of how best to be sure of what a given piece is pointing
at. Alison suggested a laser pointer that projected a straight
line, so Kristin asked the geeks (on our geeks
mailing list), and before you could say "All
Hail the Internet!" we'd learned of the existence of
the STRAIT-LINE Laser Line Generator and were off on our way
to the local Home Depot to get one.
And let me tell you Dude, this thing is GREAT! It not only
turns the one drawback of my new game into something fun, but
it's also going to change the face of Icehouse tournaments.
No longer will a ref need to hold a thread over a table to make
a dreaded "floss call." One word of warning though:
since the Laser Line Generator is meant for use by carpenters,
it "features" a pair of sharp little spikes you can
stab into yourself with the push of a button!
But back to the key question: how does one put some money
down on a game of Hailstorm? I have no idea. I'm not a gambler
myself (I've been to Vegas 4 times but I've never gambled a penny
there) so I haven't worked that part out yet. But hey, one thing
at a time...
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In other news, this week we're finally getting Paper
Icehouse back into print, and there'll be a few minor changes
in the new edition. Now that Playing
with Pyramids is available, we're doing the same thing
we did with the a la carte plastic pyramids, namely eliminating
the rulebook. Also, we couldn't get the same shade of green cardstock
as before, so the new Paper Icehouse will include a more lime-colored
green. Lastly, instead of including ("for practice and experimentation")
an extra card of each color (which allowed you to make 18 pyramids
of each color, when you're only supposed to make 15), we'll be
including just one spare card, with a plain white pyramid of
each size. ROI will be doing the
assembly work early next week.
Also, at the request of many icehouse fans, we are making
a special alternate edition of Paper Icehouse. It will feature
3 stashes worth of plain white pyramids, along with a very special
4th stash: black. The Black and White edition of Paper Icehouse
will be available in the Dangling Carrot, at some still-unknown
point in the future when this new online store of ours is actually
finished. (And don't ask us when.)
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 Have
a Great Week! |
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- I received an Office Action from the PTO regarding my Chrononauts patent application,
and although they had some complaints about the wording of my
claims, they used the magic phrase "allowable subject matter,"
so it looks like I'm on my way to patent #3!
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- Before they started Apple, Steves Jobs and Woz invented the
classic videogame Breakout! (So why isn't a version of the game
included automatically on every iMac, like Solitaire on Windows?)
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"You don't have to like drugs to hate prohibition." -- something I heard at the NORML
conference |
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