Thursday, December 17, 1998

First, the New Stuff:

• I've started a Best of Thought Residue page
• John wrote a comparative religions satire called Hankisms
• Kristin wrote a poemish thing called Never Having to Escape the Closet
• Chapter 64 of the Empty City (in which Jim gets a reply to his response to a personals ad)

Last Minute Shoppers Alert: The Looney Labs Gift Shop usually processes orders once a week, on Tuesday nights, with packages being mailed Wednesday mornings. In order to help meet those holiday deadlines, this week we will also fill orders on Sunday night, and (this week only) the minimum shipping rate will be $3 (so that everything goes Priority Mail). Also, if you want us to FedEx your Rush order, say so in the comment area and we can pass along the FedEx charges by billing them directly to your card.

This has been a less than perfect week here at the lab. On Sunday, our main computer suffered a catastrophic hard disk failure. Since we long ago learned the importance of having a good backup system, we didn't lose any data, but even so, dealing with a hard drive failure is a lot of unwanted trouble and expense. But everything's back to normal now - better than, in fact, since our new hard disk is twice as big as before! Plus, since Kristin had the computer open anyway, we got more memory, too.

Moreover, we got the official results back on the TV ad campaign for Aquarius, and, well... it was a failure. We're all kind of mystified by this; as our contact at AMG said, we're "surprised and disappointed" by the results. We're still trying to figure out what went wrong; maybe this kind of ad just doesn't work for card games; maybe the ad didn't air as often as it was supposed to, or perhaps it was on when no one was watching... or possibly it's the shrinking role of board games in modern American society as a whole. In any event, it didn't work, so we're back to the drawing board on how best to market Aquarius.

And on top of all that, I've had an annoying headcold, plus there's the fact that we're at war again (always a bummer for us peace-loving hippies). But we're not letting these things get us down. We've been selling lots and lots of Fluxx and Aquarius decks through the gift shop, our cable company gave us TV Land, and Christmas is just a week away! (We got our tree yesterday - tomorrow we need to get serious about doing our Christmas shopping.)

Although I hate the telephone, I'll be tempted to get a cel phone if they ever make one that works like a speakerphone and has a gold metal flip-top (particularly if it makes the proper clicking-chirp noise when you open the lid)

Enjoy Life!

"I believe that God left certain drugs growing naturally upon our planet to help speed up and facilitate our evolution." -- Comedian Bill Hicks

"I believe very strongly in people's rights to live in neighborhoods free of drugs." -- Sheriff Robert R. Schlicher, after his deputies shot an Ohio man 8 times, killing him in his own home during a marijuana raid last October