3

Falling behind in journaling (and every other thing I do outside work) due to increased demand for bookage. Mumble mumble, grovel grovel... I am not having fun, but you knew that.

Big smiles allthesame to cthulhia, who has been taking her self-assumed gadfly role very seriously, setting up a work/reward schedule for the coming week over brunch this morning. (work is having, at various points, N chapters complete, so that I can attend someone's game night or a party.)

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On a lighter note, M and N went across the street yesterday to buy some more Snood and came home with an additional find: a Scottish concoction called Fraoch Heather Ale. Their motivation came from its packaging, which sounds pretty shallow but you have to see this thing. The 4-pack box is shaped and printed like a little stone keep, complete with castellations at the top, and patterned with painted, semi-cartoony stone blocks covered with faux-runic carvings. So, really, it looks like a cheapo cardboard Warhammer accessory, except with bottles of beer in it. They had to buy it.

The Fraoch website gives you only the merest taste of this artwork, alas. I note that furthermore the page looks incomplete without that one animated .gif of the flickering torch on either side, and maybe the dripping-blood-horizontal rule .gif beneath it. My next book will be Making circa 1996 webpages: the definitive guide.

Actually, the website of Fraoch's U.S. distributors is there already: Huh, how did I end up at the site of someone's historical reenactment / museum replica side business? [reads text] Oh, never mind.

Anyway; the beer is pretty good, for all that. M and N got all excited about their find and declared it the official beer of Minas Morgul and sure, why not.

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I have been naughty and sneaking a few hours into playing The Fool's Errand, since I finally found Cliff Johnson's Website.

When I have time (emphasis mine, intended audience myself) I will play 3 in Three again, and this time I shall finish it. The game was a defining joy of my early college experience, but, alas, I managed to lose both my floppy and hard disk copies before I tackled the final, tie-it-all-together puzzle. I tell you, I was koo-koo about that game, and remember babbling at my bemused friends about it at great length. Nothing before or since has spoken so directly to the fascination for typography that I developed as a toddler but hadn't thought actively about since I stopped watching Sesame Street. For me, discovering this game was like rediscovering your favorite teddy bear, who has, in your mutual absence, also grown up independently of you and can now engage you in intellectually stimulating conversation. I'm no longer making any sense, no, but it's pretty clear that Johnson also had a love for letters he needed to express with this game; in many ways, 3 in Three is a love sonnet to the Chicago font. And, ah, 3 herself... she may be the only computer-game character I ever had a crush on. And now I have frightened you and will stop. Sorry, sorry.