PastFuture
Linking? Use this URL!

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

Archives Games




a beautiful beltane & if i made mashups

plus: This month's Hero


Haiku Reviews

The Pillow Book :)

I think I've become
a calligraphiliac.
Help me, someone, please.


The ChubbChubbs


Tirade's Choice

Tiki Tract


"We've played Chrononauts every night since and that was over a week ago! What an outstanding game! My friends and I are in awe of how well thought out this game is.the myriad of inside jokes and homages to famous sci fi/time travel works, the outstanding quality of gameplay, and the depth of creative freedom while playing leave us in awe, good sir! You can rest assured we are permanent Loonies now, and I'm going to be submitting a Rabbit application tomorrow morning. We've even made plans to go back to the game store in a few weeks. They're having a LooneyLabs game night, and we're going to test our mettle against hardened Fluxxers and Chrononauts!" -- email from Christian B



Busy Times

Sorry, no new video this week (due to a severe hard drive failure)


Visiting Shepherdstown

It's been kind of a quiet week around here. Last week, Kristin went out to Las Vegas for the GAMA Trade Show, after which she continued traveling west to spend a week visiting friends and family in and around Los Angeles. She returned early this morning on a red-eye flight, and since she's just starting to get caught up after being gone, more details on her trip will have to wait. But it sounds like she had a wonderful trip, getting in some much needed R&R after what she described as being "hands-down" the most productive trade show she's ever been to.

Meanwhile, back at Wunderland.Earth, I took advantage of the quiet time around the house to dig in and get some work done, and I'm happy to report that I'm finally really moving forward again on the booklet we'll be calling 3HOUSE. I've been shaking out the bugs in the new game I cooked up for it (which I'm still referring to for now as Secret Project 3H-1) and I'm really pleased with how it plays now.

Also, with spring finally here and beautiful weather beckoning, I did a little traveling of my own, to a cool little town in West Virginia called Shepherdstown. Kristin & Alison had gone out there a few months ago and said it seemed quite promising as a Candidate City (even though it's really a very small town), and since Robin was interested in checking it out too, she and I decided to make a day of going out there for lunch.

We had a lovely day. Shepherdstown is very small, definitely not as big an urban center as we've been imagining, but it's really nice and wins in almost every other category. It's a college town (home of the also very small Shepherd University) and its location on the inner edge of the "donut" is just about ideal, being a 90 minute drive from the east side of DC, far enough away to be in West Virginia yet just barely across the border. And it's a beautiful town nestled in the rolling hills on the edge of the Potomac river, right by the C&O Canal. It's got a charming downtown area with interesting shops and cafes where the gaming coffeehouse we want to build someday would fit in perfectly.

Speaking of which, we checked out several of Shepherdstown's existing hang-out spots, including the Blue Moon Cafe, the Lost Dog Coffeeshop, and Stone Soup Bistro, which is where the photos shown here were taken. (Yes, the game we're seen playing in these photos is Secret Project 3H-1, so there's a tiny hint in how it's played to be seen in these images.)

While we were at the Lost Dog, I ran into an old acquaintance, who moved out to Harper's Ferry from our area in 1999, and he said they're loving it out there. He described Shepherdstown as a "hippie oasis," and of course I loved the sound of that. Apparently, this is an area which hippies have been migrating into for quite a while, and since one of my goals in moving is to find a place where we think we'll fit in, I really like what I'm hearing about this place. And there were plenty of visible indications of this too; little things, like the Amsterdam-style Coffeeshop sign on the Lost Dog's door and numerous sightings of t-shirts, products, signs, and graffiti with slogans like "Impeach Bush" and "No War." In short, I think we could be very happy if we decided to move to Shepherdstown.

To see more of Robin's photos of Shepherdstown, check out her FLICKR album.

AndyThanks for reading, and have a great week!

Thought Residue
While visiting Shepherdstown we also checked out nearby Charles Town, home of Charles Town Races & Slots. It looks and seems just like a Casino, but they don't call themselves that because they aren't permitted to run "table games" and literally have nothing other than Races and Slots. But man, they sure have a LOT of slot machines! It's huge! They're clearly poised to become a full-blown casino, and they may soon get to: on June 9th, there'll be a vote to decide on this very issue. It'll be interesting to see what happens if it passes...

My Zombie advisors keep loaning me Zombie movies to watch, so I saw my 4th one this week: Shock Waves. It's a campy classic from 1976, featuring Peter Cushing and, of all things, Nazi Zombies. The packaging features a quote describing it as "the best of the Nazi Zombie movies," which makes the mind reel: how many Nazi Zombie movies ARE there?
I'm riding on several bummers right now: 1) The hard drive where I keep all my video files stopped working (and I may have lost forever the high rez versions of a few of my recent movies). 2) I've been anticipating a free trip to Ireland for months, since I'd been invited to be a guest speaker at game design conference in Dublin called Ani-mates, but it's been canceled. 3.) One of our Mad Lab Rabbits, Josh Reed, has died after being struck by lightning (our deepest condolences to his next of kin).


News Search Gift Shop Games About Us

http://www.wunderland.com | contact us