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- The Minitaur
sylva (also: silva) (sill'-vuh)
n. 1a: a title for a treatise on trees, or a descriptive
list or catalog of trees. b: the trees of a particular region
or period, collectively. (compare with flora). 2: a title
for a collection of pieces, especially of poems; also, a thesaurus
of words or phrases [from Latin, silva "forest."
second definition after the title (Silvae) of Statius's
collection of occasional poems. ]
McCabe & Mrs. Miller :)
Men and prostitutes
build a mining town from scratch
-- to film a shootout.
Watch
the Dots
"I run the Original Game Shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and
am a avid Fluxx player. It (Fluxx) is the only game in my store
on which I offer a moneyback guarentee. If you don't like it,
bring it back! I've done this since First edition, almost ten
years, and have never had to give money back. I love the game,
and demo it all de time. Long live the Emperor Looney!" -- Ben
Hopkin's Rabbit Bio
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Dragon*Con, Double-Sticky
Tape, and Sinister Homeworlds |
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Again
this week, I stayed home to focus on the job of packing while
others from Looney Labs
went to a big summer convention without me. This time, it was
Dragon*Con
I was skipping, and it sounds like I missed a really great time.
Once again, Russell
(our Rabbit Coordinator) did an awesome job of wrangling a team
of Mad Lab Rabbits as they put on a wonderful buffet of Looney
Gaming events. Once again, Giant
Circular Fluxx was tested! And once again, there were vendors
selling our games for us on site, so we didn't get a booth of
our own and were able to focus everyone's efforts just on demo
gaming. Kristin
got to spend a lot of time just playing games! Marlene
meanwhile headed off to Burning Man, so it was up to me and Alison
(who also stayed home) to finalize and send to the printer the
Family
Fluxx artwork we've all been working so hard on lately. Yay!
There's a lot more I could say here about Dragon*Con, based
on what I heard about it (for example, Russell is developing
an Icehouse game
that uses a set of dominos, which sounds really cool) but since
I wasn't there I'm just going to end this section by sending
out one more big "Thanks!" to all the Rabbits who worked
so hard to make Dragon*Con a success, specifically Josh, Ralph,
Marci, Amy, Roy, Jen, Joelle, Marc, Anna, Brian, Phillip, Robert,
David, Sharon, Molly, Dave, William, Maria, Jamie, and of course,
Russell. Thanks y-all!
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Ever
since I was a little kid, I've been cutting pictures out of magazines
and sticking them up on my walls. Pictures in frames are nice
of course, and we do that, too, but sometimes I like to cover
a whole wall with a collage of tightly placed images.
In the old days, I used thumbtacks, but 15 years ago when
we moved into the house we're in now, I switched to double-sticky
tape. (The walls of this 1937 house are solid plaster, and thumbtacks
just don't work here they way they do on modern wallboard.)
Double-sided tape has its pros and cons. It has the advantage
of not damaging the corners with poke-holes, but it has the disadvantage
of being a lot more trouble to move. With thumbtacks (or magnets,
if you're working on a metal surface), you can easily take things
down, pile them up, and arrange them again later on another vertical
surface. But once you go down the double-sticky path, there's
no turning back; occasionally the tape will stay on the wall
when you try to move it, but usually only by keeping with it
a layer of the paperstock it was attached to. Most of the time,
the stickiness is forever after a feature of the back of that
picture. This means when you take down a collage of this sort,
you need to immediately be sticking the images in their new homes,
or somehow sealing the stickiness up (like with a layer of single-sided
tape).
OK,
those of you still reading at this point probably also know that
we are preparing to move but that won't be arriving at our new
home any time soon. So how then do I solve the problem of needing
to take down all the stuff I've stuck to the walls here in the
last decade and a half, without having new walls ready to receive
them? The answer is, I'm putting it all into a scrapbook. And
that's what I've been doing this week.
Kristin got me a big empty scrapbook (and when I say big,
I mean enormous; the pages measure 18" x 24") and I've
been spending many hours painstakingly taking images off the
walls and reassembling them on the huge pages of my new scrapbook.
So far, I've finished 12 pages, and there are now many shockingly
plain walls in our house. (And yet, as with most of my packing
tasks, there's still so much left to do...)
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This
brings me to the photo shown here. Having removed it from a wall
(or more accurately, a filing cabinet), I decided to scan it
before pasting it into the scrapbook.
I believe this to be the first photo ever taken of an Icehouse
game. I took this picture at the Renn Fair in September 1988,
just days or weeks after John
first showed me the game he'd come up with based on my original
5
paragraph description. We had agreed to meet up at the Fair
and I'd brought my first set (hand-made by Chort) in case we
had a chance to try the game.
I was using the blue pieces, and I stepped back from the table
to take this photo with my then-very-new Pentax K-1000. That's
John on the right, but I have no idea who the third player (or
the spectator) was. As far as I recall he was just some other
guy at the fair we talked into joining us.
A few years later when we were marketing the Xyloid Icehouse
set, and we needed marketing imagery for our all-purpose ad-flyer,
I created the drawing below by basically tracing this photo.
Later, Dawn
drew a better picture of 2 people playing Icehouse, which now
appears on page 91 of Playing
with Pyramids, which was inspired by the drawing based
on the photo.
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Finally,
in Homeworlds
news, there's finally a way to play
it online! I haven't tried it myself yet, but I'm certainly
excited about it!
But I'm even more excited to say that I think I've finally
figured out how to play a satisfying game with more than 2 players
that doesn't involve using the Werewolf-style Good & Evil
rules. It's so simple I can't believe it took us this long to
come up with it!
Here's the rule: You win if you eliminate the player on your
left. (If some other player causes their elimination, the game
continues without that player and y our goal changes to the new
person on your left.)
That's it! That's all it takes! It's basically a standard
Attack-Left Defend-Right structure, used in Grand Melee Magic
(which inspired Giant
Circular Fluxx, the pondering of which got me to this new
idea.) We used this same idea long ago when expanding Cosmic
Coasters to work with more than 2, so again, I can't believe
it took me this long to think of doing this with Homeworlds.
But I'm just happy to have figured it out at last.
By way of differentiating it from Classic Homeworlds, I'm
calling this Sinister Homeworlds, since Sinister means both Evil
and Left.
This new Homeworlds discovery leaves me wanting more than
ever to find other people interested in playing Homeworlds with
me. Would any of my DC-area readers be interested in meeting
up with me for a couple of games this weekend at the College
Perk Coffee House?
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Thanks
for playing our games and reading our webzine, and have a great
week!
PS: Happy Anniversary To Us! Kristin and I got married 15
years ago today! Yay! I Love You Kristin!
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"Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated
by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the
flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited
to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by
then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment,
a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was
the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
When did this calamity happen? It hasn't-yet. But the doomsday
scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management
Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the
most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake
in California or a terrorist attack on New York City." -- Joel K. Bourne, Jr. "Louisiana's
Wetlands," National Geographic magazine, October 2004 |
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"According to Drudge, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice has recently enjoyed a little Broadway entertainment. And
Page Six reports that she's also working on her backhand with
Monica Seles. So the Gulf Coast has gone all Mad Max, women are
being raped in the Superdome, and Rice is enjoying a brief vacation
in New York. We wish we were surprised. What does surprise us:
Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice
was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice,
new shoes (we've confirmed this, so her new heels will surely
get coverage from the WaPo's Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper,
unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice's timing, went up to the
Secretary and reportedly shouted, 'How dare you shop for shoes
while thousands are dying and homeless!' Never one to have her
fashion choices questioned, Rice had security PHYSICALLY REMOVE
the woman. Angry Lady, whoever you are, we love you. You are
a true American, and we'll go shoe shopping with you anytime." -- Gawker.com, "Condi
Rice Spends Salary on Shoes" |
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"There's nothing wrong with mountain biking, but when
you are president of the United States and you are engaged in
a war where people are dying every day because of your decisions,
mountain biking is not where your energies should go. Now is
simply not a good time for the commander-in-chief to take a month-long
vacation, bouncing from his bucolic Texas ranch to the forest
trails of Idaho. The president is evidently more concerned
with recreation than reconciliation for the costly blunders of
his administration. Bush seems to be heavily narcotized given
his lackadaisical role in this volatile, often tragic, world.
His recent speech about the devastation of Katrina was almost
glib, and there's got to be a chemical rationale for the 'What,
me worry?' Alfred E. Newman caricature presiding in the
Oval Office." -- Paul Andersen, "Time
For Your Pee Test, George" |
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