Voting Now Open
Voting for the ENnie Awards is now (finally) open at the following URL:
http://www.ennieawards.com/voting/index.phtml
Voting will run from Monday, July 28th until Wednesday August 6th.
Nominees can be found here:
http://www.ennieawards.com/08/2008noms-1.html
You don’t have to vote in every category, or fill out all the slots in any one category. (To quote the voting site: “If you don’t like a product, don’t vote for it. You cannot hurt a product’s chances of winning by putting it on a low ranking ballot. Quite to the contrary, you’ll help it out if the race goes down to the wire.”)
If you liked Hobby Games 100 please consider voting for us.
And good luck to all the nominees!
Posted in General on July 28, 2008 by Jesse
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1/99 of a Nomination
Hey, I was nominated for an ENie Award…well, to be honest, Hobby Games: The 100 Best made the final ballot in the regalia category (“best product used to complement role playing game play”).
As I contributed one essay to this terrific collection (as I’ve said a few times now), I’m 1/99 in the running for an award. This makes me very happy!
The finalists in the regalia category can be found here.
Links to the entire slate of nominees can be found here:
Hobby Games: The 100 Best is nominated in the regalia category, which recognizes products that are not games, but add to the enjoyment of gaming.
Voting is held online, and anyone can vote. Voting is tracked by IP address and limited to one vote per individual, as tracked by IP. And they take this very seriously. Please don’t screw around. The ENies are one of the few industry awards that really means something. But it only means something if we treat the award process with the respect it deserves.
Voting begins Monday, July 21st and runs through Sunday, August 3rd. The voting site can be reached through http://www.ennieawards.com.
The awards will be announced during Gen Con, with the ceremony taking place Friday, August 15th at the at the Westin Grand Ballroom, at 7:30 pm.
I’ll do my best to make it out, though how they’ll get all 100 of us around one table, I dunno. Last year was a lot of fun. And this year Teflon Billy better not ditch me for the better party!
Posted in General on July 23, 2008 by Jesse
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Puzzle House
This article is about a pretty amazing “puzzle house.” Basically, the woman gave her architect carte blanche to completely redesign, nay rebuild her apartment. With more than a touch of whimsy.
It all began simply enough, Ms. Sherry said, when she and her husband bought the 4,200-square-foot apartment for $8.5 million in 2003.
What Ms. Sherry didn’t realize until much later was that Mr. Clough had a number of other ideas about her apartment that he didn’t share with her. It began when [her husband] threw in his two cents, a vague request that a poem he had written for and about his family be lodged in a wall somewhere, Ms. Sherry said, “put in a bottle and hidden away as if it were a time capsule.”
That got Mr. Clough, who is the sort of person who has a brainstorm on a daily basis, thinking about children and inspiration and how the latter strikes the former. “I’d just read something about Einstein being inspired by a compass he’d been given as a child,” he said. The Einstein story set Mr. Clough off, and he began to ponder ways to spark a child’s mind. “I was thinking that maybe there could be a game or a scavenger hunt embedded in the apartment — that was the beginning,” he said.
And then it gets even more cool and all kinds of awesome.
But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough…
The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code” (without the funky religion or buckets of blood) and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the children’s classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover — and solve — a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer and songwriter with a lusty, alternative, Joni Mitchell-ish sound, with whom Mr. Clough fell in love during the project.
Really, it is the stuff of fantasy to have the money to design something like this, and find someone who is willing to do it (and I’m sure worked far beyond the money, no matter how good it was), and then have them do it as a surprise to you…like Willy Wonka meeting Holmes on Homes or something.
Not sure if I could ever work it into a story without sounding too far-fetched, but read the whole article here and see for yourself.
Posted in Current Events, Urban Fables, Writing on by Jesse
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Wasp Knife!?!
Senior police officers have been warned to look out for a new knife which can inject a ball of compressed gas into its victim that instantly freezes internal organs.
The ‘wasp knife’, which can deliver a ball of compressed gas capable of killing its victim at the press of a button, may be heading for Britain, the Metropolitan Police fear.
A needle in the tip of the blade shoots out the frozen ball of gas which instantly balloons to the size of a basketball, freezing organs.
The Metropolitan Police have told colleagues in the West Midlands to be on the lookout for the blade, which is designed to kill sharks and bears.
What a crazy thing. Be great for some high-tech espionage game or perhaps a gritty superhero thing.
Posted in General, Pointy Things on July 20, 2008 by Jesse
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