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The sales woman at a furniture
store is speaking with a moderate Russian accent: "We don't
have air conditioning here, so that's the most awful part of
the Summer."
frittle (fritt'-ul) n.
a temporary mark on the skin caused by the impression of a textured
surface
- Bandits :)
A modern version
of Butch Cassidy mixed with
that film called F/X.
 Secret Passages
There are a lot of great shows on the History Channel (like
Modern Marvels and History vs. Hollywood) but my current favorite
is Secret Passages. Each week we are taken through an amazing
array of hidden doorways into every secret hiding places imaginable:
bomb shelters, smuggler's passageways, escape tunnels, eccentric
living spaces, underground headquarters... places you've never
imagined, often hiding right before everyone's eyes. Even if
you've already heard the secret data, it's wild to actually see
the inside of the these amazing hidden places.
 
Unamerican Activities
Leisure Town
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- "I've been an avid player of your games for about four
years now, and it was your essay 'Stoners
in the Haze' which finally convinced me that marijuana prohibition
should be ended. In fact, I'm attending Vermont Law School starting
this fall, and a good portion of the reason I'm attending law
school is that I want to help end prohibition as well." -- email from Joe Andriano
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Yikes! Origins is Looming! |
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 This
week finds us focusing on Origins. It's less than a month away
now, and since this is our biggest public event of the year,
we have a lot of getting ready to do. Since it takes time to
get stuff printed, now is when we're needing to finalize artwork
and such for whatever new products and propaganda we wish to
release at the show. And we have a bunch of stuff planned...
- Hypothermia #15: We're still very much grappling with
the question of what games to feature in the new issue of the
Journal of Icehouse Gaming. Just when I think we're starting
to get the list narrowed down, I hear about yet more cool new
games we should be considering. For example, I'm suddenly enamored
with Tic Tac
Doh!, a quick and easy 2 player game that uses just one Icehouse
stash (it's by Cathouse
creator, Brian Schultz). And I still haven't even played everything
on the list I posted a
few weeks ago yet! Even so, we'll be making our final decisions
in the next couple of weeks, so if you've got an opinion, join
the Icehouse Mailing
List and get in on the discussions!
- New Fluxx Promo Cards: As usual, we plan to create
a few special edition Fluxx promo cards to give away... this
time, we're planning a trio of New Rules. We're also making a
handy IceTowers reference card.
- Wooden Nickels: Having lost all hope of having Nanofictionary
ready to sell at Origins (we're still hopeful about Gen-Con though)
we'll be focusing on our most recent major release, Playing
with Pyramids. As we've done for the past two years,
we're making a new "show special" wooden nickel, offering
a $2 discount on copies of PwP purchased in-person at
the show.
- Tournaments, The Lab, The Booth, etc: Of course, we
also have to finalize our plans for the furnishings in our booth,
the setup in the lab, the signs we put up, the schedules we hand
out, prize medallions for the winners, and so on. Things are
coming along nicely, particularly because of the help we've been
getting from Liam (both Good and Evil) and from this year's summer
Intern, Lillian... but there's still a lot to do, particularly
since we're also hoping to officially launch SuperFRED by then.
(Uh, oh, did I just announce a deadline again?)
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now, you're probably wondering about this week's picture. That's
me, on the right, along with my mom, and brothers Howard and
Jeff. This was taken during a family trip to Hawaii in 1988.
There we are, stupidly risking injury or death to have our photo
taken a few feet from actual, oozing lava. To give you a sense
of the speed at which the lava was oozing, check out this close
up I took a couple of minutes earlier... as you can see in the
family portrait, the lava had moved a foot or two during that
time.
Why do I bring this all up? I'm getting to that. Having posted
the rules to the new Volcano variant, Mega-Volcano,
I couldn't resist also adding my house rule for who goes first.
Like many of the rules I suggest for which player should go first,
it's designed to give me an advantage: whoever's been the closest
to molten lava goes first!
Have you voted
for Cosmic
Coasters yet?
(The deadline is this Monday!)
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We have a new investor! His name is Bob and with
his help, we're finally moving forward with our colorful in-store
product display units! |
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"Even after last week's highly touted reorganization,
which included the reassignment of 400 narcotics agents to counterterrorism,
there will still be 2,100 agents spending their invaluable time
and energy fighting a fruitless drug war. This despite the fact
that combating drugs didn't even make Director Mueller's official
Top Ten list of priorities. According to high-ranking FBI officials,
Mueller originally intended to pull the plug on his agency's
involvement in the drug war but was talked out of it by drug
war generals who can't admit defeat. He should have listened
to his gut." -- Arianna Huffington, "Did
the Drug War Elude Sept. 11 Threats?" (the Sacramento
Bee, June 4 2002) |
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"In Star Wars: Episode II, the Khaminans
tell the Council that they have 200,000 soldiers ready to go,
and that another one million will be ready soon -- and that if
they want more, it will take time to get them (they grow at twice
the usual rate, so one assumes we are talking a decade here).
Now, according to CNN, the Indian army is about 1.3 million people,
and between the two, India and Pakistan have deployed over a
million soldiers to Kashmir. So this immense clone army, which
is going to bring tens of thousands of systems to heel, is only
slightly larger than the force that is fighting over a tiny area
between Pakistan and India." -- email from
Keith
Baker |
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