-
an
extra day | measuring commonness & rosenguild
& sternencrantz, live! | a at eat neat neato
Scotch woodcock (skoch' wood'-kok)
n. buttered toast spread with anchovy paste with creamy
soft-scrambled eggs on top.
Scotland, PA :|
Someone took Cliff Notes
of Macbeth and smoked a joint,
then made a movie.
Also: Be
Kind Rewind
Titanic
in 5 Seconds
Dark
Roasted Blend: Retro-Future
"I learned to play Fluxx after a day at the Oregon Brewers
Festival. I have loved it ever since. It's fun precisely for
the reasons that 'gamers' hate it. Strategy can be planned and
formulated and then you have to scramble to reformulate it. Primarily,
for me, the game doesn't seem like work. One of the reasons I
don't enjoy computer RPG games is the grinding tedium of them
that makes them ultimately seem like very complicated but nevertheless
tedious factory work. Fluxx is more like backgammon than anything
else that I can think of. You can have a strategy, sure, but
one little dice roll can keep you bumped and ruin everything
you were working on for the whole game. That tends to be why
chess players don't care for backgammon. :)" --
CSBMonkey, comment #57 added to the
article about Fluxx on BoingBoing
Another bunch of links
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- What changes have you made to the rules to Zark
City so far?
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Our First Non-Trivial Annual
Shareholders' Meeting |
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 A little
over ten years ago, Kristin and I started a company called Looney Labs. At first we
funded the company with money we'd saved up from our old careers
in the aerospace industry, but over the years we've also borrowed
considerably from family and friends. Starting a new game company
isn't cheap, and while we've had a lot of success and made a
lot of money with Fluxx and our other innovative game products,
we've also continued to need more funding as we've built and
expanded our company and our product line.
A little over three years ago, we hired Robin Vinopal, who's
been a
close friend of ours since before Kristin and I even started
dating, and she became our Chief Operations Officer. Besides
just helping us run and build the company, one of her tasks was
to help us become more corporate. The more our homemade business
was succeeding, the more we were needing to function internally
as a real business. Robin's administration has meant lots more
meetings and memos and in some cases, painful changes and difficult
choices, but it's all been for the best and we've gradually been
getting our company a lot more shipshape.
Over a year ago, we started working on a major overhaul of
our corporate governance underpinnings. It started with us writing
an all-new business plan, followed by getting lawyers to write
us a new shareholder's agreement, and eventually resulting in
the issuance of more stock to a select group of our friends and
family members.
And so, after years of preparation, everything is suddenly
different. Whereas Looney Labs has always been owned fully by
myself & Kristin, we are now just founding co-owners, with
ownership shared between ourselves, our employees, and many of
the folks who've kept us going during difficult times by loaning
us money.
The culmination of all this internal restructuring occurred
this week as we held our 2008 Annual Shareholders' Meeting. Our
company has been having shareholders' meetings every evening
around the dinner table ever since we started, but now that we
have other shareholders, our official annual meeting is no longer
a simple triviality. And as part of becoming more corporate,
we took this meeting quite seriously.
We held our first non-trivial annual shareholders meeting
in a function room at the nearby Holiday Inn, and we prepared
a detailed 32 page presentation on the state of the company,
our successes in the previous year, and our plans for the years
to come. Of course we also had the formal election of the Board
of Directors as well, this being the main point of business we
were legally-bound to conduct.
Anyway, it was actually a lot more fun that it probably sounds.
Things are looking good for Looney Labs, and the accomplishments
which this meeting represented to us made us feel quite celebratory
afterwards.
Other than that, I don't have much else to report on just
now. We've been playing a lot of my new game Zark
City (including last weekend at a
party celebrating Luisa's new visa) and talking about what
to name my new Martian
Invasion version of Fluxx.
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Thanks for reading, and have a great fortnight! |
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This week, we in the adventure game industry are mourning
the loss of game designer Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons &
Dragons. Gygax represents the pinnacle of achievement for someone
in my profession: not only did his games create infinite hours
of fun for never-ending numbers of people, they also revolutionized
the culture, inspiring countless other such games, not to mention
computer games, books, cartoons, jokes, movies, clubs, businesses,
and so on. Goodbye Gary -- and thanks for all the fun. |
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"The genius of D&D is the way it parcels out rules
and fantasy. The game tethers the imagination just enough to
keep you focused on an imaginary world (main goal: slaying nasty
things for profit) without putting limits on what you could do
inside that world. Dungeons & Dragons is like the greatest
Etch A Sketch on earth: It gives you the tools to create whatever
you want." -- Jonathan Rubin, "Farewell to
the Dungeon Master: How D&D creator Gary Gygax changed
geekdom forever" |
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"Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've
been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating
them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective.
All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles
again; the drugs remain. 'A long habit of not thinking a thing
wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right,' wrote
Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy
- the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit,
we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. If asked
to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal
drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence
presented." -- Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane,
George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon, "The Wire's War on the Drug War" |
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