[Looney
Labs] [Shopping
Center]
 
News Archives
-
- [Guide] [Games] [E-Books]
[WTS]
The
Hippypotamus
demersal (dim-merss-all) adj.
living near, deposited on, or sinking to the bottom of the sea.
Bad Santa :)
He's a twisted one,
this drunken Grinch, a twisted
wreck with a message.
 
Why
Don't We Have Answers To These 9/11 Questions?
Staccato
"Friend brought back Chrononauts from a Gencon. I refused
to play. I hated card games (starts with 'm' and rhymes with
-agic.) I was bullied into playing, and boy was I glad! Have
been hooked for ~ 3 years and am seeking to hook my little brother.
This is one of the best concepts ever. I look forward to the
prequel (someday). Love the Origins booth and the Big Experiment." -- comments accompanying an order from Kristy of
Cincinnati
|
|
|
 
|
 |
Into Phase 2 on 76-EAC / PBEM
Homeworlds |
|
|
 As usual, there's
a lot going on here at the Lab... the holidays are here, which
makes us busier than ever, and little things like being interviewed
on the radio
about Stoner
Fluxx have been causing a few distractions. We've also got
some new products shipping out (including Cyan
pyramids, now finally available in the Dangling
Carrot), but the thing that's really been dominating my thoughts
this week (aside from the Homeworlds
game I started played by email with Russell) is something
we've code-named Secret Project 76-EAC. If all goes well, 76-EAC
will be announced this spring and released at Origins,
but until I get a little further into the design, I don't want
to say anything officially. But I'm starting to feel pretty confident
that I can make it work, and if so, it's gonna be *really* cool.
I'm now in what I call Phase 2 of the development process, which
is the part where I'm doing the "heavy-lifting" work,
hammering out the design, and obsessively thinking about it constantly
as I do. (Phase 1 is the spin-up time, when you're trying to
get going on the project, and the process ends with Phase 3,
the testing and debug phase.)
In other news, I'm happy to say that I can finally send email
to my brother Jeff again! Some months ago, I discovered why he
hadn't been writing back to me. At first I thought he was just
too busy (he's been under a lot of pressure to meet a publishing
deadline) or that my messages were getting caught in spam filters
or something... but it proved to be an even trickier firewall-type
problem. Fortunately, our new SysAdmin got it straightened out.
Yay! Thanks Fuzz!
|
 I
remember the first time I encountered the play-by-mail concept:
it was in an episode of Family Affair which I saw as a kid. I
don't remember the details now but the kids were rough-housing
or playing ball in the house or something, and they knocked over
Mr. French's in-progress chessboard. Mr. French got really upset
but then decided it was OK since he could reconstruct the board
by writing back to his opponent and asking for a description
of the layout. Anyway, ever since then I've loved the idea of
playing games by mail, and have done so myself many times. Currently,
I'm playing a game of Homeworlds
with Russell... He and I have played Homeworlds dozens of
times now, all over Europe
and even on the Grassy Knoll,
and we're still really into it, so Russell worked out a play-by-email
notation system. Then, as the game started developing, and our
in-game chatter proved amusing, it seemed obvious I should turn
the project into a series of webpages, so others could watch
too. So, this week you'll find the first two reports on game
#1 available for your enjoyment. (Unfortunately, he's got the
upper hand... I'm worried I may lose this one!)
|
|
 Thanks
for reading! |
|
 
|
 |
"[John Lennon] was a counterrevolutionary
and was very dangerous to the government. If he had said 'Bomb
the White House tomorrow,' there would have been 10,000 people
who would have done it. The pacifist revolutionaries are historically
killed by the government, and anybody who thinks Mark Chapman
was just some crazy guy who killed my dad for his own personal
interest is insane or very naive. It was in the best interest
of the United States to have my dad killed."
-- John Lennon's son, Sean, quoted in Salvador Astucia's article,
"Rethinking
John Lennon's Assassination: The FBI's War on Rock Stars" |
|
|
"Many of us remember spending the summer of 1973 glued
to the television, watching Sam Erwin's Watergate hearings. They
were public, unrehearsed and very effective. They spotlighted
a conspiracy orchestrated by the Oval Office. They helped the
public see what was going on in the shadows. Will we ever see
such a robust, no-holds-barred inquiry into 9/11?" -- "Where's
the Watchdog?" by Danny Schechter and Colleen Kelly |
|
"Congress wants to run anti-marijuana ads
with your tax money, while at the same time banning you from
using your own money to run ads in support of marijuana law reform.
They want to prohibit you from spending money on things you believe
in, while taking money out of your paycheck to spend on things
you don't believe in." -- email from the
Drug Policy Alliance about an
attempt by Congress to ban private marijuana reform advertising
on public transportation |
|
|