Thursday, August 22, 2002

by the Writer's Guild of Wunderland

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• New Nanofictionary Home and About pages
• Tell us why you deserve a free copy of Nanofictionary
• Alison's First Animeld: The Angelope
• GinohnNews - Livingshroom Furniture
• Ginohn has a new recipe: Chicken Mushroom Cacciatore
• The Ember Update: Spending time, Traveling, XML and XSLT
• The Big Experiment Historical Index
• Also updated: The Icehouse Tournament Almanac

Although we keep postponing the official launch, we are inching closer and closer to switching over to our new web-robot SuperFRED. Here we see our team of programmers, working late into the night once again on the project. That's our new full time intern Liam in the center, with Kristin on the left and on the right that's Dale, who now only works here on evenings and weekends (but still seems to be here working almost all the time).

I know, I know, there still isn't anything for you, my typical reader, to see of all this work. To some of you I suppose this whole SuperFRED thing might even seem like something of a myth. And when I say that this week's big achievement was getting SuperFRED to automatically generate our invoices, you might not even think it very impressive, since the result looks a lot like our old invoices. Anyway, we are making progress and hopefully it won't be too much longer before the new site launches officially and you can see for yourself how cool our new system is going to be.

Did you get your Nanofictionary postcard(s) yet? Last week, to announce the shipment to stores of our newest card game, we sent out several thousand postcards, one to every entry in our mailing lists. If you got multiple copies -- and many of you did, as we decided to err on the side of redundancy -- please enter your codes on this page here... and hey, guess what? That's SuperFRED you'll be interfacing with! In fact, it was SuperFRED who generated all those address codes, and the mailing list we sent the cards to, as well! So there, he exists.

Have you gone to your local game store to pick up a copy of our new card game Nanofictionary yet?

The other big thing that's been on our minds this week is Dragon-Con. A few weeks ago, I announced that we'd decided to try exhibiting at this big sci-fi/gaming con in Atlanta, and that we'd decided to create a new Chrononauts promo card especially for it, as part of the new print run we were about to do anyway. Ever since then, we've been worriedly wondering if the new card sheets would be ready in time (particularly after Gen-Con, when we decided to swap out the IceTowers reference card reprint we were planning with a new general-purpose Icehouse ad card). This afternoon, we got the happy news that the vital cardsheets have been printed! And just barely in time, too... apparently, the printing press broke down as it was printing our cardsheets... check out this email I just got from Susan, our customer service contact at our card printer Carta Mundi:

"The head stops on the feeder were so badly damaged it took many hours to run Chrononauts. It took twice the time to print the job with the pressmen (Fred, Jeff and Toby) basically watching it go sheet by sheet instead of at a high rate of speed. The damage to the press caused the pressmen to constantly coax and baby-sit the press to keep it going. When the last sheet was printed, the press breathed it's last breath until a repairman arrives. Karma was definitely a factor in getting Chrononauts off the press in time!"

Susan said it'll probably take them a week to fix (which would definitely have meant no cake for DragonCon) so we really got lucky on this. Anyway, assuming nothing goes wrong with the card-cutting machines (and that the package doesn't get lost in shipping) we should be able to give free German Cake to everyone who visits our booth at DragonCon. I hope to see you there! (Hopefully we'll do a better job of coordinating fan-events there than we did at Gen-Con...)

[And if you were expecting to see us this weekend at the Alliance Open House, please look for Carol Townsend, whom you'll find demoing Nanofictionary for us in our booth, and tell her "Thanks for helping out the Looneys, Carol! You rock!"]

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