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Mister Know-It-All

4:11

Ashton: "I wanna see it."
Douglas: "See what?"
Ashton: "My arcade game."
Douglas pushes the thirteenth floor button.

Cool Words

imane (im-mane') adj. archaic. huge; also: monstrous in character

Haiku Reviews

Me, Myself, and Irene :)
Stupid, disgusting,
excretory comedy
-- that's why we liked it.

Daddy-O's Reviews

Psycho

To properly appreciate the infamous shower scene (which regrettably spawned the entire mad-slasher genre) you have to understand that Janet Leigh was *the* big name talent that everyone believed was the star of the picture. I wish I could have been there to experience the shock that went through unsuspecting audiences when this movie first opened in 1960. [more]


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Ciffipur Pathways
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#12's Webcomic picks
AM i DUMMY?

Thursday, June 22, 2000
by the Wunderland Toast Society

What's New?


What's Going On? The Looney Labs Big Experiment

Last Thursday, I said the deadline was upon us for deciding what to call the series of related tournaments we're planning for Origins. On Friday, Eeyore posted a new suggestion to the Icehouse list: The Looney Labs Big Experiment. "It's got that 'Alan Parsons Project' feel to it," he wrote, "You can give out name tags that say 'Test Subject' on them. (Actually, ear tags would be more appropriate, but also more painful.)"

Well, congratulations Eeyore, you're the winner of our Name The Event contest! (Oh, and thanks too for fixing the atom on our signpost! We're so glad it came with a warranty!)

Actually, this decision was made democratically. Since the in-house team was divided on what name to choose, I asked the people on the Icehouse mailing list to vote, and the Big Experiment was the clear winner. It captured 42% of the vote, with Martian Interplanetary Gaming Championships taking second place (26%), followed by the LooneyLympics (19%) and variations on the Polyhedrothon/Pentahedrathon idea (13%). So the Big Experiment it is!

So now we're quickly developing plans around this new theme. I sketched out a logo, and Alison worked it up in Illustrator, and tomorrow Kristin will place an order with our button manufacturer for the "Test Subject" buttons we'll be giving to participants of the Big Experiment. [Note to IceTourney vets: if you want to try to get the same player number you had in the old Icehouse Games days, get there early or make your reservations in advance!] Plus, we're brainstorming new competitions to include in the Big Experiment... we have in mind adding a few on-going challenges in the booth that will reinforce the notion that the con-goers are hordes of mice in a giant maze and we're scientists controlling it all from the outside, rewarding the best performers with pieces of cheese, or in this case, prizes. Plus, this clinches it: we're getting lab coats to outfit our team with.


In other news, we decided at the very last minute NOT to drop the outer display box during the now-underway next printing of Fluxx version 2.1. On Friday, we went up to Baltimore to meet with the sales team at Alliance, the giant game distributorship, and it was very instructive... we learned a lot about how best to coordinate the release of our new game Chrononauts, we saw that our soon-to-be-released Looney Games carrying bag so cool we need to make it available to them for pitching to stores, and, like I said, we learned that the fancy display cartoon that ICE created to hold 6 Fluxx decks is more worthwhile than we were giving it credit for. "The display box was the best thing ICE did for Fluxx," one of the sales guys said. The existence of a bulk pack makes it easier to get a store to buy 6 decks instead of 2 or 3, but more importantly, when the decks are all gone, there's this empty box on the counter reminding the store owner that a) Fluxx sells well, and b) they need to re-order more of them. Without a display, a store owner can easily forget to restock even a very popular item.

So, we're back to having the decks packed into 6 packs, but over the weekend we hastily redesigned the appearance of the existing box. ICE's colorful confetti design was cute, but we wanted something that would say "under new management." The new box will be black, with stars, and Keeper art floating in space, not unlike the design of the new Fluxx Zone T-shirt. Hopefully, we'll have new decks packed in these new cartons by Origins, but the lateness of this decision has us bracing ourselves for disappointment.

And now for the bad news: we're also contemplating a price increase. Needless to say, we don't want to, but we were planning to get rid of the display box because of its added expense, and now, with that extra cost factored back in, it's looking like we'll need to raise the price to $10. (So if you want to save a buck, buy a deck now before we run out of the old version!)


And finally, we achieved another corporate milestone this week: we now have a warehouse! It's just a unit in one of those ubiquitous self-storage facilities, but hey, that's just what we need: a place to store more stuff. We've been making do by shoving boxes into every corner of the house, and in particular the attic; a year ago, we put in a ladder and a floor, and the added space allowed us to get by for quite awhile without getting real warehouse space. But now, with over 2 tons of Fluxx decks on order, we have to start preparing a bigger facility, hence the chamber at the local U-Store-type place. (OK, so it's not very exciting, but hey, that's what's going on here this week!)

AndyRemember Peter McWilliams!


New Iceland cartoonthe story so far

Thought Residue
Best-selling author, cancer/AIDS patient, and medical-marijuana advocate Peter McWilliams has died. Awaiting sentencing for the medical use of marijuana in a state where it's supposed to be legal, after a trial he lost because he was forbidden to explain how marijuana singularly helped his severe medical conditions, he had no choice but to stop using a vital medication that was helping him stay alive. He was forced into this by *daily* urine testing, any failure of which would not just send him back to jail, but would also allow the government to confiscate his mother's house. With nothing to effectively quell his intense nausea, he died, by choking on his own vomit. If this story doesn't make you question what our government is doing in this War on Drug Users, you have no soul.
"He was murdered by the United States Government as surely as if they shot him. If an individual did what the federal government did to Peter McWilliams, deliberately deprive him of medicine that would save his life, that person would be indicted for murder. And this was murder. Moreover, it was premeditated, and a part of a pattern of the criminal abuse of power. Consider the evidence." - Richard Cowan
"The Federal prosecutor personally called my mother to tell her that if I was found with even a trace of medical marijuana, her house would be taken away." - Peter McWilliams

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