-
- playtests galore & banana oat nut surprise
Tenacious D: Pick of Destiny :)
A collapsed prequel
to the greatest rock story
ever told, bar none.
Code
Monkey
What's
Special About This Number?
"Thank you for all of your wonderful games - and for
being a company whose ethics I can recommend to my students.
We have played games with teachers and students from all over
the country at these events, and they have been very popular
with all audiences. We played a set of games (Fluxx, Are You
A Werewolf, Uber-Chrononauts, Volcano, and a couple of others)
last summer on the campus of Indiana University, with players
from Virginia, California, Massachusetts, Texas, and Oklahoma,
attracting interest in gamers aged 11 to over 80. It was fantastic,
and an experience I hope to continue." --
Teacher Rabbit Irina
Greenman
 Blogging
resumes - photos of cherry blossoms and California poppies
- Ecstasy in WET - a solution to global warming?
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A Rules Suggestion for Ellen
DeGeneres |
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 I'm a big fan
of Ellen DeGeneres, and now
that I have TIVO, I've become a pretty regular viewer of
her talk show. (Given my
bizarre sleep habits, I'd been missing it before because
I'm usually doing some of my best sleeping around 11 am on most
weekdays.) Anyway, on yesterday's show (March 21st), I noticed
she had a little problem with one of her on-air games, and being
as I am a professional game
designer, I just couldn't resist figuring out a solution
for her. (Actually, figuring it out was easy: the idea just popped
into my head, as I watched her show while soaking in the bathtub.)
Anyway, I present both the problem and my solution to it in
a new Ask Andy
video, entitled "A
Rules Suggestion for Ellen DeGeneres."
You may notice, however, that I haven't uploaded this one
to You Tube just yet. (The current link leads to a file stored
here at Wunderland.com.) This is because I incorporated clips
from the March 21st episode in my suggestion-box video (again,
thanks to TIVO), and now, since the upload interface at You Tube
makes you swear on 13 bibles that you aren't uploading anything
copyrighted in any form without permission, I got all paranoid
and decided against clicking that final upload button. Instead
I'm just parking it here at Wunderland.com for now, and I'm asking
with this text for permission from Ellen & NBC to post this
video on You Tube. (Yes, I know, everybody
else is doing it, but I just can't help it, I'm too much
of a Lawful Good Boy
Scout at heart.) Assuming I get a yes, I'll upload it later.
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 Anyway,
here's a royal Shout Out to you, Ellen! I hope you end up seeing
this and/or my video-blog-thingy,
and that you like the game design suggestion it contains. Please
Ellen, may I post this on YouTube?
As for those of you who are reading this who aren't Ellen,
well, thanks for surfing in!
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Speaking of people
getting into trouble after posting videos on You Tube that
included reworked copyrighted footage, did you see that redo
of the Apple 1984 ad with Hillary inserted in place of Big Brother?
I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, since it suits my politics
and I appreciated how clever and well executed it was. My favorite
detail of the "Big
Sister" ad was the addition of an iPod to the hammer-thrower's
jogging outfit. |
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Speaking of Apple and the dark side of the future, I got
badly burned by iMovie software this week. (I've been a big fan
since the original Macintosh and never have I felt so let down
by one of their applications.) I've been using iMovie '04 to
edit all the videos I've been doing these last few months, and
due to some screw-ups of my own, I mistakenly deleted a bunch
of important files. (My entire Superhero
audition video and the master files for the Fluxx
Espanol
videos I just posted, to be specific.) Had I upgraded to iMovie
'06, I'd have been able to recover my mistakenly-trashed files
from iMovie's special internal trash can. However, since money
is very tight we've been delaying upgrades, and the '04 version
had been treating me fine up until this point. But I've just
learned the hard way that in this older version of the software,
there's
just no access into that special internal trash can! I can
tell it's got hundreds of megs of my old clips in there, but
the only option you are given for this special internal trash
can is to empty it. Geez, what's the point of showing me a trash
can if you don't give me the option to retrieve junk from it?
The betrayal was compounded when the hope of recovering the files
by upgrading was dashed. I got the 2006 version (although since
this is now spring '07, I could feel it getting obsolete as I
drove home) and yes, it does indeed feature a Show Trash menu
from which dead files can be recovered... but when I load my
old project files (with their carefully preserved trash files
intact) into the new version, there's a no-going-back update
process which leaves my trash nice and empty. Sigh. It won't
really be that hard to recover from (since I have the finished
DVD of my Superhero audition video and the master tapes for the
Espanol videos) but it was a big setback nonetheless and a serious
disappointment for this loyal Apple user. It's very painful watching
data you'd very much like to recover being instead erased. |
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Speaking of mistakes in old versions of stuff, it's come
to my attention that there's a problem with the Hand Limit 0
card in the 3.0 series of Fluxx decks, which has been causing
debates
among some game groups as to how that card should be played.
The problem is in how this First Edition card interacts with
the card Inflation, which was added
in version 3.0. The way the fine print reads, some were arguing
that Hand Limit 0 was unaffected by Inflation, but had that been
my intention, the title of the card would have been Hand Limit
Zero. The fact is, it's an oversight, which we need to remember
to correct on the next version. |
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