modo madness

Mom and Grammy were out shopping. I was at home with the girls and started playing with modo. The girls thought it was the coolest thing ever. And it is, because they could sit right down and use it! I only gave them 10 minutes each, and here’s some of the silly stuff they made by deforming some of the canned objects…

reiley's racing chair Wrenny all of us

Oh brother Dan, where art thou?

Had a great time last weekend with my brother – my brother, my suffering brother, come out to the Volga! We got in our road trip, jam session, all-night-gaming, high-stakes-casino-play, lan party, studio recording time, night out on the town (fort lauderdale in this instance) non-stop party all in a measly sixty or so hours. What a ride.

The Millers are planning on a trip up here around Thanksgiving, can’t wait, see ya soon! :P

Friends Making Games!

Sam Clifford’s got his Heroes Incorporated boardgame onto store shelves! You can order a copy online from GameFest – if you look quickly you can see it still on the top of the newly released games list!

And in similar but unrelated news, for Reiley’s eighth (!) birthday, the day before yesterday, my folks sent her the boardgame version of Boxum!, the game for which John Carpenter made the PC version! It’s so great to hear that Boxum! is going strong, too – I don’t think my parents had any idea it was the game John did! I hope you’re getting something out of it, John. :P

Reiley also picked up Bohnanza, a really nice looking Rio Grande game with a decent amount of complexity. Andrea and I can’t wait to steal it and play!

Board gaming is everywhere! Whooo!





Heroes Incorporated

Sammy, a good friend of mine from way, way, way back in the salad days of high school, made his fortune, and nearly lost his sanity, producing The Two Towers video game for Electronic Arts (yes, “that” TTT). Hurling himself from the jaws of the corporate grind, he “quit the biz” and decided to pursue a true passion of his, creating his own board game. He’s been working hard on it for a while, and it’s looking great.

He chatted me up the other day to bounce around some ideas for a tagline for the game, which has a theme of superheroes fighting crime whilst simultaneously soliciting the funds needed to keep at it as a full time profession. I immediately thought “let’s extend ‘crime doesn’t pay’ in some way”, but we just couldn’t shorten it up enough.

Sam: Like, “crime doesn’t pay, but Heroes Incorporated does!”, only, not stupid…

Then he hit the nail on the head… check out the Quest Machine website for the answer to the perfect tagline!

Dogproofing the cat litterbox room

Our most recently inducted family members Julian and Simon, being feline, desired a place to discretely excrete. But our dogs wanted none of that! Thinking fast, I recollected the experiences of our good friends and “cat people”, brother and sister Ken Etterman and Kimberly Welch. Both have had DECADES of feline/canine interaction experience in a full house environment, leading them to the same conclusion:

THE DOGPROOFED CAT LITTERBOX!

Hopefully all this experience can be leveraged for the masses! So without further ado, the DOGPROOFED CAT LITTERBOX HOWTO:

Step 1: Pick a room with a door for the litterbox. Any room will do, as long as it’s OK to always keep the dogs out of it.
Step 2: Attach a small hook to the inside of the door frame, as such:




Step 3: Tie a slipnot in a thick short string or rope, as such:




Step 4: Tie the other end of the string around the hook, as such:




Step 5: Slip the loop of the string around the doorknob, and adjust the slipnot so that your cat(s), but not your dog(s), can fit through the door, as such:







Step 6: You and the cats can come and go, the dogs are verbotten! Enjoy!

Riding the Rails

Me folks visited for a short while recently. My pop’s still hard at work on his novel about the kids that spent a lot of time “riding the rails” during the Great Depression. He’s actually doing some research on his travels right now, and then the ‘rents are swinging back around to stay overnight on Thursday. I will try to get him to let me post a bit of the book on here soon…