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Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

Robin's photos of Shepherdstown

This Week's Looney News Looney Labs in the News: The Game We Play After the Kid Goes to Bed

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

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.