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What
News Anchors Do During Commercial Breaks
How
History's Most Popular Board Game Helped Defend The Free World
"We've played FLUXX for nearly five years now. We have
introduced it to a number of friends who have also gone out to
get their own set. We LOVE it! I'm ordering now to pass it out
to Airmen who are deployed who look for something entertaining
and social after long hours defending our nation. Thank you for
this game - it is addictive! " -- Brian
N, comments with Order #101450
Assorted links &
comments on topics including Driving Through Future's Past,
a portfolio of probabilities for US Steel, the tenth conversation
class he's taught so far, Searching for value in ludicrous ideas,
A Toast to Toast, Hightower on Populism, Shannon Wheeler's first
New Yorker cartoon, Southern hemisphere stars, Odd Day, the Kalakala,
the link between 'Peanuts' and Beethoven, the Ten Most Photographed
Cities, the chocolate-fueled race car, Van Gogh ear revisionism,
Mallards in the swimming pool, Vinegar as deoderant, Chop Chop
Square, and more
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Welcome Jessica! / Origins
Prep |
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 This
week we're incredibly pleased to announce that we've hired another
full time employee! Her name is Jessica Blair and she is now
the Director of Sales and Marketing for Looney
Labs.
As you can see from our Press
Release about this news, Jessica is very well-qualified for
this job. Not only does she have executive-level skills and talents,
she also has years of experience in the hobby game industry.
Her most recent position was with Wizards of the Coast, where
her titles included Brand Manager of Publishing and Manager of
Direct Sales & Merchant Relations. (She's also previously
worked for Games Workshop and Sabertooth Games.) Best of all,
she says it's a dream come true for her to be working for Looney
Labs.
The timing of her arrival couldn't be better, since we're
just about to release a major new product (Are
You The Traitor?) and we have beautiful new
packaging and literature
for our product
line. Jessica has plenty of great stuff to talk about as
she picks up the phone and calls all our retailers and distributors.
For the last couple of years, we really have not had anyone
making outbound sales calls. Our sales team has been focused
only on keeping up with incoming sales (i.e. sales support) while
Kristin has led our marketing efforts as part of her general
duties as President and Business Czar. These marketing efforts
along with several hot new versions of Fluxx
have doubled our sales in the last two years - but that doesn't
mean we don't need a sales department! So we're all very excited
to be bringing in someone new who can really pick up the ball
and run with it.
Jessica will be continuing to live in Renton, WA with her
husband and young baby, but we're confident she'll be able to
do great work for us with telecommuting and frequent working
visits.
Anyway, welcome aboard Jessica! It's great to have you "here"!
In other HR news, we're bidding farewell this week to our
office temp Susannah.
As with Nikki
before her, the demands of school and the complexities of part-time
scheduling have made it necessary for her to move on, but we've
already got someone else from the temp agency lined up and ready
to start next week. So good luck with your next adventures Susannah!
It's been fun having you around, and have a great summer!
The other big news around here at this time is Origins
Prep. It's just a few weeks away now, and as usual, our big event
of the year requires a lot of our time and attention. This will
be our 10th Big Experiment and our 20th Icehouse
Tournament, so we've got quite a bit of experience now in
getting ready, but even so, it's always a lot of work.
For one thing, there are the medallions. At this point, most
of the events we run every year have a standardized medallion
design, but every year we add a few new events and/or new designs.
This year, there were nine new designs we needed. Four were simply
updates, replacing the old-style artwork on the Fluxx finalist
medallions with the new
color Keeper art, but the other five were for new games:
Monty
Python Fluxx, Are
You The Traitor?, World
War 5, Zark
City, and a Floating Treehouse
tournament. Of those, the first 3 were easily enough created
using existing artwork -- look for them on the new Medallion
Gallery page to see what they'll be like. As for the last
two, I drew new images for them, which are shown here:
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Of course, there's a lot more to the Origins planning than
the prize
medallions and the event schedule...
we're also debuting a new product there, which means now is also
the time when we're sending all the required files for the game
off to the card printers. But I'm delighted to report that the
last piece they needed, the rulesheet, was submitted last night,
so Traitor
is officially at the printer! Woo-hoo!
As always, there's lots of other stuff going on too... for
example, our house was used as the set for a murder scene in
a 48-hour film project
we helped with, called Execute,
we attended Kate Jones'
annual gaming party, and were dazzled by the mind control magic
of Ian Rowland, and
we planted a pair of new hopefully-blight-resistant American
Chestnut tree seedlings we were lucky enough to be given the
responsibility of nurturing by the American
Chestnut Foundation.
 Thanks for reading and have a great whenever!
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In the film Fanboys, the characters call out "Chewie!"
instead of "Shotgun!" as a way of saying they want
to sit in the front passenger seat. But we don't need a different
word for that, we already have a perfectly good term. What's
actually needed is a way of calling the driver seat, so in our
household we've started calling "Han Solo!" while heading
out to the vehicle. |
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These are exciting days for long-time anti-prohibitionists
like myself. After decades of being ignored, dismissed, and told
to shut up, our arguments
are finally being listened to. "It's an idea that's taking
hold across the nation," reports the Christian Science
Monitor (seen quoted in The Week). In California,
where pot has become "semi-legal," the Republican Governor
has called for an open debate on taxing marijuana sales. The
new drug czar wants to abandon the phrase "war on drugs,"
and in national surveys, support for legalization has tipped
over the 50% point. It's just like 1933 -- violence by gangsters
is out of control and the public coffers are too empty for us
to continue this nonsense. Drug prohibition is crumbling before
our eyes. |
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"Science fiction writers build castles
in the air; the fans move into them; and the publishers collect
the rent." -- Sharyn McCrumb, from the intro to her
novel about sci-fi conventions called Bimbos of the Death
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