PAX UNPLUGGED

Looney Labs will have a booth where you can demo all of our games, playtest the latest prototypes, and purchase gifts for yourself or your loved ones!  Andy will be handing out promo cards and signing autographs. Come play games with Andy... and don't forget to pick up a Pinny Arcade pin!

PAX Unplugged is the newest addition to the Penny Arcade line of conventions. While most of their conventions are more video game focussed, this one is geared exclusively to tabletop games. Other conventions in this line include PAX West (formerly called PAX Prime), PAX South, PAX East, PAX Australia, and PAX-DEV.

DICE TOWER CRUISE

Kristin and Laurie will be on the Dice Tower Cruise for the third time with a new experiment/challenge for attendees. They can be found in the game areas pretty much all the time, often into the wee hours of the morning. Come cruise with Looney Labs and the Dice Tower!

The Dice Tower Cruise started in 2016 as an idea between Tom Vasel and Jason Levine to bring the same Dice Tower board game convention experience to sea. Using the same core values as The Dice Tower they strive to ensure that the cruise is a family friendly event and that everyone feels welcomed into our hobby. As the fastest growing board game convention at sea they will always make sure to create great value for all attendees.

GameSchoolCon

Kristin and Laurie look forward to meeting all you homeschoolers who use games at GameSchoolCon! We will be demoing our entire educational line (and maybe a few others just for fun).

GameSchoolCon is brought to you by Sasha Kuczynski, producer of HSC DiscoveryCon, the first hybrid homeschool/gaming conference, and Edward Stafford, the man behind Gamerunner, a board game, RPG, geeky crafts, and music appreciation space for homeschooled kids. GameSchoolCon grew out of Sasha and Edward's convictions that people learn best when we are having fun, and that Gameschoolers should have a conference of our own, where we can let our freak flags fly.

A:  We worked in Telemetry Processing, which is NASA-speak for collecting data from orbiting spacecraft and passing it along to the scientists. We were part of a team building a new Telemetry System the size of a mini-fridge which was being designed to replace a roomful of aging mainframes. Kristin was a chip designer, using a VLSI CAD system to create several custom Gate Arrays including a frame synchronizer which she named FREDD (Frame Recognition Error Detection Device).

As for me, I was a code monkey, writing software for the specialized operating system being used by our new system, called PDOS. This was in 1986, in the formative years of the internet, so email existed on some systems, but not PDOS, and one of the most useful and notable things I did was to write my own file transfer system called ETRANS, which allowed us to move files between different PDOS-driven systems, a process otherwise only achievable by putting the files onto floppy discs.

But I really wanted to get into Flight Software, so after a few years I transferred onto the Hubble Space Telescope project, which was bringing in all the help they could ask for after receiving the mandate to fix the flaw in the mirror and everything else that was wrong with the spacecraft. Due to failures in the memory units of the DF-224, the computer which handled the telescope’s attitude and pointing systems, a new computer was attached to the DF-224 during HST’s first servicing mission, in 1993. I wrote several thousand lines of code that were part of the new computer’s startup system. The new computer, called the Co-Processor, was removed along with the DF-224 itself during the third servicing mission, in 1997, but I had software flying in space for 4 years! Kristin and I even went to Florida to watch as the space shuttle Atlantis, carrying the Co-Processor loaded with my code, was launched into space.

The Strand has been a beloved New York City bookstore since 1927, and is third generation family owned and operated. They carry over 2.5 million used, new, and rare books—18 miles of books!—as well as an ever-changing array of gifts, including Looney Labs games! They also recently featured Fluxx in one of their subscription boxes. In addition to their main location at the corner of 12th Street and Broadway, they have fun outdoor kiosks in Central Park and Times Square, and will also be at Bryant Park Winter Village and Union Square Holiday Market for the holiday season.

P.S. - If you would like us to feature your store in an upcoming newsletter, submit your info here: Feature Store Submission Form