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I'm holding a hand of cards, waiting for my turn,
and absently looking out of the New Deal Cafe's picture window
at a short red haired woman with strong white legs. She straightens
a very short, navy blue skirt, then adjusts her bright green
shirt, and walks out of view.
hoyden (hoy'-den) n.
a girl or woman of saucy, boisterous or carefree behavior
- Memento %}
- Carefully designed
to make you forget what you
just saw. A good scam!
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
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 On the
face of it, this is a really bad movie, and actually, it is a
really bad movie. A couple of airheads who are flunking out of
high school are given a time machine by a dude from the future
so they can pass a history test and thus go on to fulfill their
important destinies as world-changing rock stars. So they use
the time machine to bring various historical personalities to
a modern school auditorium in California, where they all perform
a show for the enraptured student body. OK, it's not much better
than it sounds. Even so, there are a few chuckles, and more importantly,
the time travel is nicely thought out, featuring excellent Future
Self encounters and clever fourth dimensional solutions to common
adventure story problems, like making a mental note to return,
in the future, to deposit a badly needed item right when and
where they need it in the present. Plus George Carlin is great
as their most excellent guide from the future.
 
Betty Bowers
is a Better Christian Than You
Ancient Messages
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- "Fluxx is pretty kickass when stoned."
-- Aimee the Magdalene, on rec.music.tori-amos
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We Finally Got Into the GameKeeper! |
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 We're
having a great week. Years of yearning and ten months of Kristin's
concerted efforts have finally borne fruit, and if the follow-through
is as good as the initial pay-off, we may come to regard this
as a real turning point on our road to success. Today, we shipped
out our biggest order ever, to a major new account: the GameKeeper,
a chain of nearly 100 mall stores located in shopping centers
all over the country! Here we see our usual FedEx Ground pick
up guy, Dale, as he transfers an amazing 600 pounds worth of
Fluxx and Chrononauts from our van to his truck, for shipment
to the GameKeeper. (Yes, we still really need to get our fulfillment
outsourced!)
Getting into the GameKeepr (which is actually now owned by
Wizards of the Coast and even called that in some places) is
something Kristin's been trying to do for a long time... but
it's not easy to convince a big chain of stores to carry something
new from a small company like us when they only want sure sellers.
However, demand for our two hit products has grown so strong,
with customers asking for these items by name, as to finally
get our foot in the door. Once there, we hope and expect our
items to sell quickly, given how well their reputation has proceeded
them. (Of course, anything our Rabbits can do to help assure
this would be greatly appreciated...)
This dramatic change in accounts receivable, along with the
changing of the seasons and the crushing weight of our current
workload, has convinced us that we really need to hire
some help. Of course, cash flow is still very tight, but
we figure we can at least afford a few months of part-time pay
for a college student looking for a fun and different summer
job. Hopefully we can even find someone who's majoring in business
or marketing, living nearby, with a love of games, similar political
viewpoints, and plenty of energy and enthusiasm. I wonder how
many resumes we'll get after we place an ad in the Diamondback
(our local college's newspaper)...
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 What
you see here is Alison shoveling several hundred pounds of mulch
into a structure she designed for the growing of potatoes. Having
successfully conquered our yard, she's asked our neighbor if
she can use a section of his yard for some additional gardening
space, and he's cool with it, so having gained an inch Alison
immediately built a 20 foot long planting zone. It's like she's
started playing the Farming Game in real life. She is, shall
we say, digging it. Meanwhile, in other news:
- Kristin was contracted to make a run of 24 identical customized
Rubik's Cubes for a giant scavenger hunt puzzle event thing
being run somewhere in California. In doing so, she's finally
worked out the process and cost accounting, so that she can offer
creation of more such stickers, or even fully built custom cubes,
for anyone willing to pay the rather exorbitant manpower costs.
Check our her updated Custom Cube pages for more.
- Secret Project 45-NF is developing
nicely. Though the basic constructs have proven sound, the ruleset
continues to evolve as we playtest it, improving with every game.
But hey, that's how this process works...
- The Lost
Identities Nanofiction Writing Contest has garnered 12 entries
thus far, and several of them are pretty darned good! Keep 'em
coming!
- Despite meeting their deadlines with properly filled paperwork,
none of our Big Experiment events were listed in the recently
mailed Origins pre-event program book. Grrr!!! Go to Liam's page
for the schedule
of Looney Labs events at Origins.
Earlier in the week, we went downtown
to attend the NORML 2001 annual conference, and it was without
a doubt the best one ever. Our movement
is rapidly gaining steam, and we are seeing marijuana prohibition
crumble before our very eyes. We've only been attending these
conferences for three years now, but in that time, we've seen
some amazing things. We've seen Medical and Industrial use voter
initiatives win, one after another, by wide margins. We've seen
an election where both candidates were former drug users and
no one ever brought up the subject. We've seen a shift in the
popular culture, with prohibition-challenging movies like "Traffic"
receiving critical acclaim instead of censorship. Other countries,
including Canada, are in the process of legalizing or decriminalizing
cannabis, even though the press in our country typically ignores
such news. Prominent politicians, like congressman Barney Frank
and New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, are speaking out on this
issue, even to the point of attending this conference. Related
issues like prison over-crowding, racial profiling, and invasion
of privacy are now being widely discussed, even as the broader
issue that connects them all is still a difficult question to
broach. The public now overwhelmingly agrees that the war on
drugs is a failure. What they aren't sure about is what to do
instead. But one thing is clear: things are changing faster than
most people realize.
Let Freedom Grow,
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- What more proof do you need that drug prohibition is the
work of Satan than for a plane filled with Christian missionaries
to be shot down by an "anti-drug" fighter plane? And
would this story have gotten any press attention if the civilians
murdered had been ordinary drug dealers?
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- "The thing that struck me was that this whole scare
story was a lie. I had been brought up believing lies. It was
like when I found out that Santa Claus didn't exist. My God,
that meant that the tooth fairy didn't exist! And neither did
the Easter Bunny! This was kind of the same thing. I thought
'Gee, this is all a lie!'" -- New Mexico
Governor Gary Johnson addressing the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), as reported in the Washington
Post, 4/20/1
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- "I have nothing to add. I just like saying "the
player who has sex on the table wins.'"
-- Andrew J. Petrarca, on the Fluxx
mailing list, in a discussion of new Keeper and Goal ideas
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