Well, it was bound to happen eventually - an entire month has gone by without an update to the Cabinet. Starting my new company and a trip to The Gathering of Friends ate up the whole of April without so much as a satisfying belch to show for it.
And as a result changes or, rather, reversions are afoot. I will go back to my old style of updating the Cabinet in bursts whenever something interesting comes my way instead of shooting for one big issue per month. That should work out best till I recover my life!
My apologies to all of the fine folks who have sent in submissions over the last month or so! As I sit here on Sunday night trying to finish up this Cabinet I am overwhelmed by the volume of articles queued up and ready to role (and two new Bruno Faidutti games just arrived! Look for those next month - or sooner!). I want to thank you all for your support and enthusiasm. And I hope you won't take this lapse as a lack of enthusiasm on my part - I assure you it is merely exhaustion!
Mario Boller apparently suffers from no such exhaustion and his tireless work has produced the amazing GameBase (now defunct and replaced by Luding but check out Mario's picture database at the old location), a massive database of games detailing publisher, designer, and a host of additional information. It engulfs, contains, and overshadows the gameography we've been working on here in the Cabinet. Check it out!
Though taking more of my time than I would like, the new company goes well. We are called TechOblique and have had absolutely no spare time to prepare a Web page for ourselves (witness one missing Cabinet as proof of that!). You can have a look in at our work by visiting the Web sites for Fantasy Cup Auto Racing, a fantasy sports game centering around the Winston Cup, or Burpee, the well known American seed company.
The Gathering of Friends was great fun again this year. A complete report will follow soon (no. really.).
Jos and I also managed to fit in a one day visit to Boston, as well, where we checked out the glass flowers exhibit at the Museum of Natural History at Harvard. Very bizarre. A family of German glass artists spent most of their lives building this huge exhibit of exactingly correct glass flowers. When I first heard about the exhibit I imagined a very artistic rendering of flowers in sparkling, transluscent glass. In fact, these are exact replicas of the plants (and often diseases and pests which afflict the plant in question). The glass is coated with a material to give it a correctly textured appearance. The resulting specimens are so fragile that several had been damaged by the vibrations caused by folks leaning against the display cases!
I could probably rattle on like this all day but if the May Cabinet is ever going to make it out on the Web, I should be doing other things!
Take care,
ken
By the way, all that remains of the aborted April issue is the editorial. I present it here for the completists amongst us (and you know who you are!).