Thursday, January 11th, 2007

Sponsored by Looney Labs

---

This week's article is presented to you in glorious Bulletized List Format. In other words, I have no specific topic to talk about in particular, so I'm just yammering...

• Happy New Year! Yes, I'm still in post-holidays recovery mode and haven't quite gotten used to the idea that the year is 2007. Pretty soon this decade will be over, and we still don't have a consensus about what the nostalgic-trend watchers will call it in the Future. What comes after the Nineties? The Ohs? The Zeros? The Double-ohs? Once we get into the Teens it'll be cut-and-dried again, but we live in a difficult-to-refer-to time of history.
• Did you have a nice holiday? We sure did... lots of very good times with families and friends, sprinkled with piles of candy and gifts and other fun things which continue to bring us joy even now. Thank you again to all for the wonderful generosity!
• My 10-year old nephew James had "Magic: The Gathering Starter Set" on his Christmas Wish-list, so I dug out my old cards and built for him a very special beginner's kit. Unlike your basic M:tG starter deck, which contains the usual randomized assortment of different-colored low-end cards, I built for James a set of five well-balanced, ready-to-use intro decks. Each of these decks was centered around one of the five M:tG colors, and included a good range of creatures and spells for that color, with no cards (besides land) being duplicated, and with plenty of fun stuff like artifacts but nothing overly complicated, mostly monsters and straightforward spells (i.e. no "Summon Rules Lawyer"-type spells). Then I taught James to play, and he won his first game! He picked it up amazingly fast, as did his twin sister Sharon, who continued playing with him throughout the day.
• We got a new Lovely Beverage Machine! Some friends of ours work for a company who'd decided to get rid of this perfectly-good soda machine, and all we had to do was pay the cost of delivery. Other friends of ours helped with the very tricky task of getting this behemoth (it's much bigger than our first one) through the rather small doorframe of our vintage Victorian house. We actually had to take the machine apart to accomplish this, and we have some lingering issues to address before the machine can be declared fully operational (like getting it switched over to Free Vend and making it look a little more Lovely) but Wunderland will soon be serviced by a beverage-dispensing robot once again. Yay! Thank you to all involved, in particular Landru, who did a lot of above-and-beyond the call of duty work in getting the door removed and reattached. I don't think we're going to want to move this thing out ever again, so here's hoping when we sell the house the future owners want this machine to convey!

"I've been traveling around the world doing the global vagabond thing and meeting some amazing people all over the world. When I left I was looking for some simple and small game to bring with me and regular playing cards were boring. So I brought Fluxx! I have now shared Fluxx with dozens of other backpackers in several countries from Iceland to Turkey. Its been a really fun way to make friends. We made up a few new cards to match with traveling and playing Fluxx: a Keeper called Boots and Goal: World Traveler (boots and earth). I look forward to coming back to the States in May and checking out what Looney Labs has been up to." -- email from Matthew Davidson