In the belated announcements department: the Game Cabinet completed its first year of publication last month and I let the date slip by without celebration! With the sudden rush of new users from America On-Line and CompuServe, accesses have also topped the 13,000 per month mark. Welcome aboard folks! I'm looking forward to hearing from more of you.
And a special thanks to all of the good folks on the Net that have made the Game Cabinet possible through their submissions and support. The first year was a lot of fun!
June continued our three month jag of travel and visitors. We attended a birthday party for The Evil Mr. Cox, that infamous bastahd, at his ancestral home atop Mt. Doom on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Look for more on that in the next few weeks including photographic evidence of the Sake Bouy Contest.
Our visitor for the month of June was that erstwhile Slug, Dan Rabin, just returned from several years in scenic New Haven where he laid the groundwork for the acquisition of a Doctorate. Dan still needs to finish up his dissertation so he had no sheepskin to display smugly, however, he did dig up an autographed, hardback copy of the original edition of Sid Sackson's "Gamut of Games". Bastahd.
The rain has finally given way to Summer here and Summer is making up for lost time. The thermometer topped 100 yesterday and promises to do the same today! The music scene has been hot, as well.
Dr. Alex Patterson has reworked The Orb's stage presence since last year's tour. That tour featured a two hour long, patented Orb style ambient ramble complete with sub-sub-woofers that simulated a Formula 1 race car zooming through the audience. Ouch. The visuals on that tour were also excessively lame. This year's tour featured a series of sets that sounded remarkably like individual songs. There was also an increased emphasis on dance beats and the visuals were a bit more coherent and context sensetive, though still pretty technically lame. The crowd included a lot more grunge and mainstream folk and had lost a lot of that chill out room feel. King Crimson is tomorrow night (well, last night by the time you read this but...).
The Vegans continue their fascination with Hong Kong Kung Fu flicks. I can heartily recommend Legend of Fong Sai Yuk I and II. Josephine Siao has impressive comic timing. She and Jet Li are both amazing atheletes, as well, to carry off the many fly by wire stunts required by the over-the-top adventure script. More flying Fongs than you can shake a paralyzed chicken at.
Anyway, all these fun activities combined with recent activity here at Kaleida have made for a very busy June, indeed. If I've been slow in replying to mail or seemed a bit short when I did reply, please forgive me. Hopefully, July will be busy but a bit less trying.
Back on the subject at hand: the Belgians have checked in! Piet Notebaert from Brugge, Belgium, dropped me a note packed with lots of helpful information and promising still more (including Dutch game translations!) Piet is the founder of "Hof van Watervliet," a 140 strong games club in Brugge. Brugge is one of our favorite cities in Europe (Jos and I went there on our honeymoon!) and we would have visited even more often if we had known about Piet and his crew before this! Welcome, Piet!
Ahem! Remember all those nice things I said about the folks joining us from AOL and CompuServe? Well, I meant 'em but, folks, you've got to give yourselves time to get adjusted. You are no longer in a commercial environment where you can just drop a load of demands on somebody and expect them to hop to it.
Also, it looks like you don't have Telnet capability. Forget trying to play many of the interactive games on the Net without it. Or, at least, don't be surpised when the link fails. Take a quick look at the protocol field of the URL and make sure that it doesn't ask for Telnet before looking further for problems.