Thursday

June 17, 1999

Placing Orders

This week finds us placing lots of orders. It's now just a couple of weeks until Origins, which means the deadline for getting new stuff made by then is upon us. So we've been busily sending off final artwork for the set of nine Fluxx Keeper T-shirts we're making, as well as art for a bunch of new buttons we plan on giving out as promos at the show. (As with the T-shirts, we'll be making whatever leftovers we come back with for sale in the Gift Shop when we return.) We've also been working up the furniture request for our booth at Origins, plotting out the uniforms our staff will be wearing this year, and ordering up more of the Contagious Dreams best sellers, so that we'll have plenty on hand at the show (a task requiring difficult predictions... we will no doubt run out of whatever items prove to be the most popular).

Meanwhile, we've also been preparing a new one page wholesale catalog for inclusion in the next GAMA mailing, which goes out to their list of 7000 game retailers. As part of that job, we've created a new testimonials page, using the best of the comments we've gotten in with online orders during the past year. Thanks for your kind words, everyone! Nothing is as impressive as quotes from satisfied customers.

And as if all that weren't enough, we have at long last selected an Icehouse piece manufacturer! Many moons ago, we issued a request for bids on the job of making injection-molded plastic Icehouse pieces. We got back a number of quotes, including some that were feasible, but then we got busy building Contagious Dreams instead, leaving this project to simmer on the back burner. But yesterday, we finally got around to visiting the top contender, a firm called PlastiCert Inc., just over the border in Pennsylvania, for a site inspection. And so far, all system are go!

It was a good meeting. We spent a lot of time going over the details of the job, and feel very good about PlastiCert's corporate identity as well as their capabilities. If all goes well, we'll have engineering diagrams from them to review and show off at the 10th Icehouse Tournament, next month at Origins.

Don't forget to play!

"He's dead, Jim." I've always figured that Scotty would be the first member of the original Enterprise crew to beam out for good, but this week, the Star Trek reunion movie industry suffered a major setback when Dr. McCoy took the ultimate journey into the Final Frontier. So long, Bones.

Precedence Publishing is developing a Tomb Raider CCG! I don't normally go in for Collectible Card Games very much, but as a big fan of Lara Croft, I'm actually looking forward to this one. It's hard to imagine how the fun of the videogame can be translated into a CCG, but it'll be interesting to see what they come up with.

We Americans just have too much stuff. We don't know where to put it all. I can tell because everywhere I look I see a new Self Storage Center being built. We all seem to need an extra storage space to stick some of our junk in.