Your Guide to Wunderland
Guidebook
[Games] [E-Books] [WTS] [Gift Shop]

News Archives
PastFuture
Sketchbook HarvestNanofiction

Mona Lisa Switcheroo, Part 1

A few years before Werner's time machine became operational, the Mona Lisa disappeared and was never recovered. So Werner's first trip into the past involved replacing Leonardo's original work with a replica, and bringing back the original. But the art experts denounced it as a fake - the canvas was too new, the paint too fresh.

#12's Nanofics

New this week:
Orgasm

4:11

"'I'm a vampire.' And I had this really long conversation with her about uh, this --"
"Drink your coffee."
-- me and Barchan

Cool Words

fungible (fun'-ji-bul) adj. 1: of such a kind or nature that one specimen or part may be used in place of another specimen or equal part in the satisfaction of an obligation 2: interchangeable

Haiku Reviews

Man On The Moon :-|

OK... so, this is a
good film... I like it, OK?
...Tenk you veddy much.
 
Daddy-O's Reviews

Fantasia

Dinosaurs and Greek mythology, dancing hippos and marching brooms, woodland sprites, the lord of darkness, and the plucky little soundtrack... if these things aren't enough to liven up classical music for you, then nothing will. On the whole, this timeless classic has aged quite well (though it is interesting to see a depiction of the twilight of the dinosaurs that was created before the popularization of the asteroid-based extinction theory).


Tirade's Choice

MicroSith
Fruits of Chaos
Mercury Center Comics
#12's Webcomic picks
Dr. Fun

Thursday, January 6, 2000
by the Wunderland Toast Society


New this week:


What's New? Welcome to the Future! / The Amazing Leslie

Wow. We've been getting ready for Y2K for so long, it's hard to believe it's really arrived. But here we are, in the Year 2000, the very definition (when I was growing up at least) of "the Future". And while it's not quite the Future we all envisioned back in the Seventies, it's still a pretty cool one. Technology has changed forever the way we live and work, in ways They said it would, and in ways They never could have imagined. Of course, today's Future is no utopia; we still have the burden of marijuana prohibition, not to mention AIDS, global warming, rap music, massacres at high schools, a prison population of nearly 2 million Americans, long distance phone rate commercials, South Park, and drive-by shootings... but we also have VCRs, wireless hand-held communicators, computers-built-in-to-everything, remote control units for everything else, microwave ovens, this thing called the Internet, Tomb Raider, a fully-operational Moonbase, Caller ID, and Time Travel. (Wait, have they invented Time Travel yet? What year is this again?)

Anyway, I'm excited about the Future. We stand now at the entrance to a whole new century, a time filled with endless possibilities and tremendous potential. It's a great time to be alive. How will the new century be different from the old one? I look forward to finding out.

But man, that "1/6/00" thing up at the top of this page sure is weird. It looks so wrong, so *unreal*. It doesn't look like a date at all, it looks like a model number or an access code. Alison is advocating using "2K" instead of "00" in cases like this.. perhaps I'll give that a try. As for computers having trouble with the date, the only rollover problems I've seen myself are those that were done deliberately, for comedic effect. Y2K was Halley's comet all over again... lots of hype and buildup, but nothing much to see in the end. But I guess that's really just as well.

We marked the passing of the century by testing out our Nuclear Home Defense System, the infamous Atomic Bomb. Leslie ushered in the New Year for us by pushing the button at 11:59PM, so that the blast would occur right at midnight... but of course, our bomb malfunctioned as usual, and so a happy new year will be had by all. Let's make it a good one!


Speaking of Leslie, this girl is amazing. She's like a machine. We're about halfway through her 19-day visit, and let me tell you, it's been an intense week. She's here to write a 2-year business plan for us, and she's been working on it night and day ever since getting here. It's like 20 or 30 pages long at this point, and it's still growing and evolving. (I haven't read much of it yet, since I'm waiting until the first draft is complete, but from what I can tell, it's gonna be great.)

Leslie is like the only person I've ever seen who works as hard and as continually as Kristin, and when the two of them started working together on this project, you could see this really cool synergy forming from their combined energies. Since I am one with little knowledge of business matters (and no desire to learn of them), my eyes tend to glaze over when Kristin starts taking about business-type concerns. So it's been really cool seeing her plan the future of Looney Labs with someone who not only speaks the language, but wants to talk that language all day and all night. And that's what they've been doing, hammering away on this business plan non-stop, filling up spreadsheets with all kinds of numbers, making pie charts, performing break-even analyses and sales forecasting, and even closing out the '99 books and going out to Annapolis to review them with our accountant.

It's enough to make your head spin, and while Alison and I have been doing everything we can to help out, we've also kind of just been staying out of their way. We've had plenty of other things to do: Alison did the year-end inventory, and I've been up to my eyebones in web work this week, overhauling all my archive pages. Plus we've been tying up the loose ends from Christmas. (You know, taking down the tree, figuring out what to do with all the new stuff we got, eating chocolate, and finally getting the last of the gifts and letters mailed out.)

Anyway, Leslie is incredible, and the work she is doing for us right now is indispensable. Since she's a college student, she's still willing to do things like dropping everything else and diving into a huge and challenging project with no real pay to speak of (aside from room & board, entertainment expenses, and a big box of Looney Labs games) but someday she'll be out there in the real world looking for a job that actually pays, and if you happen to be the one doing the interview, then hire her, she's amazing. Just remember the name: Leslie Burgoyne.


One thing we noticed right away when we did inventory is that we still have a fair number of 1999 calendar shirts left over, and now that the year has rolled, the market for these things has really dried up. So, we've decided to try to sell them all off, by offering them to you at cost. That's right, leftover calendar shirts are now just $7.28 each! And they're tie-dyes, too! Get 'em while they last!

The shirts originally came in a plain off-white ("ash") as well as colorful tie-dye, but most of the ash shirts are now gone. (We're gonna hang on to the last few ash shirts, since they'll be useful in pitching the idea for a 2001 calendar shirt to manufacturers and distributors of calendars. And say... does anyone out there know anyone in the novelty calendar industry?)

So it's the leftover tie-dyes that we're hoping to liquidate. (At first, it seemed like they'd be the most popular; at the product release party, when we were giving them out free, almost everyone chose tie-dye over ash; but when we put 'em on sale, we charged a premium for the tie-dyes (well, they cost us extra, too) and consequently, they didn't sell as well.

But now, they're a bargain. It's still a tie-dyed shirt, and even though the year is no longer correct, the calendar events are still cool, since most of them aren't current year-specific. (Lots of people continued to wear their '92 calendar shirts for years after it was out of date.) So grab one now, before they're all gone!


On Tuesday, we got to hang out for a bit with Dave Bondi. He did the game art for Icebreaker and he's a really cool guy, but I haven't seen him since he fled the Magnet implosion by packing up and moving out to Los Angeles. Sadly, he was only in town for a few days, but it was really fun catching up with him... I wish he didn't live so far away.

Hanging out with Bondi made me think about that year we spent developing Icebreaker, and after he'd gone, I pulled out the logbook I'd kept during the writing of that software. I decided to look up the entry for that day's date, to see what I was back doing then. It's an interesting entry, with a taped-in code sample and a little drawing of a seeker trying to move between two pits. And it has a great quote:

"Dare I contemplate a full Hazard Avoidance re-write?"

I raised this possibility on 1/4/95; it appears that by January 10th, I had finished doing exactly that. And as I recall, it made a big difference.


Let freedom grow,Andy


New Iceland cartoonthe story so far

Thought Residue
Judging from the feedback we've been getting, it would seem that the Q-turn rules changes I posted last week will take care of the stalemate problem. And while I still want to encourage players to scrounge up their own playing tokens, I have to admit that I Iike the idea of including a set of clear, tinted tiddlywinks with the 16 wooden nickels.
"They give the illusion of achievement without any sort of negative consequence in the event of failure." - An anonymously submitted response to our survey question, "Why do you play games?"
Tiki-Tour: Rash tells me that this is a New Zealander's term for a pointless excursion, as in "Let's just get in the car and drive around."

Mailing ListsBoostersAwardsFAQTestimonials

Comments?

Send email to
LooneyLabs
Contagious DreamsSponsersLooney LabsMakers of:
Aquarius
Fluxx
Icehouse
Proton
GinohnNews


News Search Gift Shop Games About Us

http://www.wunderland.com | contact us