Wow, people are snarky. If you aren't allowed to self promote on your own damn website, what the heck good is it? People are willing to scroll past other newsbites they don't care about, but this one is too much for them? Boing boing is MUCH to interesting to leave because of one set of posts.

sorry to hear you won't be coming to Portland this time around. I just finished the book, and I'd love to shake your hand.

Good for you for not pulling punches in a YA book. I think that I'm going to be buying copies of this for the young'ins in my life (though, really, i should just mail them the link to the download. 'Paper books are so passe, dude.')

Question: A few times in this book you mention things that lead me to suspect you've spent some time at the BIG renaissance faire in so. cal (or northern cal, before it closed). Have you? I was a performer in a group down there for 8 years; imma gonna kick myself if i never realized you were there.

#25, we must have posted at the same time. They do look a sight, don't they?

I have no idea if this works, but it reminds me of my next door neighbors as a kid; they had glass jars of water on their lawn. They swore up and down it kept dogs off of their grass.

My thought, even as a kid was 'Ok, so you don't have poop making your yard ugly... instead you have frekin strange jars of water. Go you!'

#1 and #2 are both right.

Ooak is Internet Artist Slang for One Of a Kind, and the 'unusual' ones are chimp babies.

@#1 "In my opinion,the Serbs are a race of criminals"...

Wow, way to be racist and bigoted. It's that kind of black and white thinking that leads to the very thing you're condemning, you know... Ah, sweet irony.

And yes, I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but this one had such cute purple hair.

@#2

"My wife's carnivorous..."

Wow, so you eat no meat, and she eats only meat? It's like the nursery rhyme Jack Spratt...

@EggOnStilts: Nope, but thank you for playing! Your consolation prize is a lovely set of mandlebrots.

Different movie entirely. In this one, the realitor actually finds the body and has to get the prospective buyers out of the house before they see him.

Wow. I saw this exact thing in a movie once. I'd tell you which one, but then people would yell at me for spoiling the ending for them.

::explodes into tiny pieces quivering with anticipation::

I find it amusing that people either love Fluxx or hate it, with a few people in between. It's like a reverse bell curve.

I wonder if we plotted the enjoyment of Fluxx against the enjoyment of Risk if there would be an inverse relationship...

I agree with #21; it's fun for a lot of people because it's random, and the tide can turn from one person winning to another very quickly. We've had the 6 year old win. Many strategic games lose their 'fun' for any player that's not clearly in the lead; it's not as much fun playing if you know you have no chance of winning.

Fluxx makes it possible to be the player who has the least going for you, and then turn around and win. In that, it's more like pure game of chance. As a game of chance, I find it engaging and usually interesting.

I've owned that game for years. You're right; it IS insainly fun. There's a bunch of 'themed' decks as well; a stoner deck (it advises you to not actually follow any of the 'smoke weed' rules until it is legal in your area), a ecosystem deck (where you get rules like 'spiders eat bugs' and Global warming), and I think a family deck.

The Winning Condition is my favorite type of card. Some of my favorites: Brain but no TV (if there's no TV out on the table, and you have the brain, you win) and Cookies and Milk.

Talk about taping into the Zeitgist; #8, that was the first thing I thought of, and #11, I'm listening to that song right now.

I'd like to know if you just stuff your arm in, or if there's some kind of attachment. Perhaps a strap you curl your hand around?

I want to make one with a shoulder strap (so it's flat on top) and a rod in the tip so you can twitch the end around...

Just in case anyone finds this and hasn't fixed it, the answer is here:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402004

Looks like the culprit is a service(flexnet) that can get turned off in Windows.

"I would prefer blue=cool, orange=warm, however. "

Problem with that, of course, is that during the 'cool down', it'd have to go from orange to blue... and possibly pass through the dreaded warm neutral --> cool neutral area.

Orange - brown - gray - blue.

...

Yeah. How about green for Go, white for 'OMG, THE MRSA'?

As I said, is it the same dog? Certainly could be. Probable, even. The fact that it's a playing field (not a different rug) behind the dog makes it more likely in my mind that it's the same picture (part of my disbelief was that anyone would cut out the pug and put it on a different rug. Why, for god sakes? But cutting it out and putting it over video makes more sense.

While I don't particularly like Fox (unbiased news? Yup, and I'm a senator.), I'm playing devil's advocate here and possibly opening up myself to flaming. ::Puts on her asbestos jammies::

It could be a coincidence. Hear me out:

The Santa suit looks like one that is commercially available (found several close matches on commercially websites.)

The pug looks like a standard 'Fawn' colored pug, which is the breeding standard in the US, so many pugs have the same look.

Pose: this is the one that's giving us all so much trouble. Fact is, if you overlay the pictures, they don't match exactly. His(?) back foot is sligtly off, and if you line up his face exactly, his front foot is also off a bit. BOTH of those could be because the Fox photo is so low res, though. There's also some angle/perspective mismatches on the dog body. Element of doubt introduced.

Clearly, the photo would have to be Photoshopped if it WAS the same pug. The hat, the rug, and the shadow all are very different.

Here's my thought: Why in the hell would someone go to the trouble of Photoshoping in a hat, and a new rug and shadow just for a throw away graphic? The rug and shadow are done well, and the hat looks pretty good to me for such a low res version (light matches pretty well, and it doesn't look blatantly fake. I'd have to see a better res version to tell you if it's PSed at all, as I can't test the digital noise signature from this). The people that make on air graphics are often on a very tight schedule, and I just don't think they have this kind of time on their hands.

I'd say there's a chance that this is just a strange, unlikely coincidence. If I was convicting this person, wouldn't be able to say that I'm convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is a stolen Photoshoped picture.

(That being said, it certainly COULD be, no doubt, I just think it's possible it's not. Do I think that Fox is above stealing a graphic and then claiming copyright for it? Not for a second.)

Ray, when someone asks, if you're in a game, you say YES!

Ahem. Sorry.

Ghostbusters is a beloved thing to me, and I can't wait to see how this pans out.