And what did the Oracle say?

And what did the Oracle say to us?

"What you seek is beneath the hairy balls of the Blue Frog."

Damn! We found the frakkin blue frog. It was a great stone statue some ten feet tall.

There it was, wearing the strangest Haberdashery you ever did see, but what would one expect?

Well, I pulled on my great Uncles beard and thought about this.

Finally I strode right up to that frog and said "What, in the name of your ancestors, is under your hairy balls?"

One stone eye opened and looked at me. It worked it's mouth until it could speak: "It is the secret entry to the necro's tower, now go away you little twit."

After Christmas and still Talking

Sue and I are getting through a lot of soul searching about where we are going and what we can realistically get done.

We are having to break up our talks into hour long chunks, anything longer and we start veering off into worlds of fantasy, getting way off topic.

It is surprisingly hard work to craft long term reasonable goals and to work out the co-ordination we need to make it happen.

I feel truly blessed that Sue is able to deal with "touchy" subjects reasonably, however, both Sue and I have to watch a tendency to get defensive rather than constructive.

Are there any projects you folks out there would like to make sure we are looking at? Leave a comment, help us not to forget something important.

Merry Christmas!

Enjoy, Celebrate and think well of your fellow man.

Silence it is.

I have just realized that I have many thoughts which should not be exposed to the world in general. Some days those are the only thoughts floating around in what I call my mind. Like today.

Snow, Talking, Planning, and a little more.

Well, we finally have some actual snow, maybe the grass will quit growing now. I disappointed the local shoveling kids by doing my own driveway and walk. I counted it as my first morning work out.

Starting Thursday Sue and I began looking back at last year and forward to next year. We have a good deal of organizational work to do. We have gotten better at coordinating our work, but we both need work in that area. We can look at our successes and, ummm, errors, and work out a better way. We get better at it every year.

We are also working out a DS production schedule. It is tricky because we have to carve out the art time way ahead so it fits into her commission schedule as well. We are looking over the card submissions from our players. Most of the years new cards will come from what you folks submitted to the DS Beta blog. The pickings are thin this year, but what can we do. In the next two weeks we will have the rough outlines of our years releases in place so we know how the time allocation works out.

We are also looking at doing a good number of the Deluxe cards in the new standard card sets. We will be looking them over and trying to divide them up, as best we can. We will need to add a few new cards into the mix to make 9 and 18 card sets that make sense.

We are thinking that with new cards we can do more mixing and matching as we release new sets. I am not sure how people will react to that, but this is all new for us, so we will be trying several different directions to see what works and what does not.

Pre-ordering upcoming standard card sets is going to need a system to maintain. I know what to do to make it work, but that will require new software. *sigh* Something new to remember how to use, and of course, it has changed just a little in the past 15 years. The theory is the same, but the tools have changed.

There are a number of projects we want to do and a number we have to do. The trick of balancing them will be fun to work out.

Strangely I am looking forward to some serious head banging with Sue over many issues. I am just glad that neither of us are terribly thin skinned, we work well together. She is just too cool!

OK, off to work, or play, or housework. We shall see.

Lovely Day, Just a dusting of Snow and all is a dirty white.

I went out this morning with Mocha and we pretended we were shoveling snow, but with an accumulation of an 1/8th of an inch it was just to do it.

North of here they got real snow. South, snow. East and West, snow. Even the snow stays away from Flint. It is, however, cold, so we did not miss everything. I guess it is time to put away the swim suits.

I am working on Blind Fighting rules for Crypt Crawl. They should also be useable in DS, although I will leave that for others to test. The players were just plain thrilled to be experimenting on these rules. OK, Little Harry was not so thrilled. He awoke in the Vat after his death. Luckily the other characters did grab his body with stuff on it as they ran from the scene. That means he keeps his stuff and they have a body to put in his second grave. The ceremonies were wonderful. Even Little Harry, there for his own burial, had a tear in his eye.

OK, shipping to do.

Morning Exercise, Routines and Depressions

I have spent most of the past week in a depression, you know, that feeling that nothing is going to work out. It tries to get you to sit on your butt, eat and do nothing. Which brings on the nothing works ending. I do not know why this is going on and I really do not care what causes it.

I have forced myself to get work done and move on. Still depressed. So, I have decided that this is the time to add an exercise routine at least twice a day. May as well have a reason for being depressed. As they say "The beatings will continue until moral improves."

Have a good Day!

OK. I have been quiet.

I have been a bad boy. No blogs for a few days. I'll do better, really.

We are finally getting caught up with our set printer. The last sets got here late friday, so the backorders will ship Monday. I need to create an inventory system for these as there are some timing issues I need to work out. The easiest way will be to use the PayPal inventory function on line. The trick will be that whenever we have mail-orders or Con sales I will have to go on-line afterwards and adjust the inventory, that will be an extra step. If I kept the inventory in-house I would have to adjust that inventory every time there was an on-line sale, so there really is not a better way. Plus you would see on the on-line order that it was out-of-stock. I can even have the paypal system e-mail us when we get low. Now, I need to do a full inventory and get it done.

I got a lot of work done on Susan's new site using CSS etc. I got 150+ pages completed this week. A lot of time used up, but I am happy with how it is going. I am also redoing the art pictures to include keywords and all of that happy stuff. Once I get this done I can also use it as a crude way of checking our convention print books and keeping them up to date.

The big mission for our saturday off is going to be finding out about Shirataki noodles. Soluble fiber, no carbs or calories. We need a sample to try out. Interesting looking stuff. I'll let people know what we think about it, especially the taste, if anyone wants to know. These people sell the stuff, so they have to be eyed skeptically, but they do link to a good number of external studies.

Well, that is it for now.