Catan: Picnic Edition

This has been a long-standing project of mine. I love Settlers of Catan, but the actual game set is cheaply made of flimsy cardboard. We can do better, yes we Catan!

So I set out to design a wooden board. 

I wanted it to be a few things:

1. Entirely self-contained. I wanted this to be a travel edition, no table required, so the entire game can be played in the box—including dice rolls. 
2. A perfect fit. The official Catan game is boxed with an annoying plastic vacuum-formed liner that never quite fits the pieces properly or intuitively. Most serious players I know toss that piece and put the parts in baggies. I wanted my board to waste no space.
3. Handsome. I wanted it to be made entirely out of wood and metal. The sole exception is the clear acrylic frame that the hexes sit in.

Here is how it turned out. I'll make a video tour of it soon.

Poetry Cigarettes

What if we replaced bad habits with good ones? Would it be weird to step outside for a poem, rather than a smoke?

RadioShack Kickstarter

Very often when working on a creative project, I will need some supplies. And I will say to myself: I should drop by RadioShack and pick that thing up, whatever it is.

But every time I go to RadioShack, I leave empty-handed. They either don't have what I am looking for, or they have it and it is double or triple the price I could get online. The staff are not helpful either.

It's such a shame. RadioShack is supposed to be the place you can go to get answers. It's where tech nerds converge. They sell everything. Right? It hasn't been that way for years, even decades maybe. Instead of being a gathering place for people who want to make stuff, it's become a bland, overpriced cell phone store.

This experience gave me a vision for RadioShack. Normally I would just let this vision fester in my mind while bitterly ordering my parts online. But this is the Age of the Internet. So I decided to do something about it.

And I launched a brief, ambitious, and failed Kickstarter:  www.letsbuyradioshack.com

The point wasn't to actually buy RadioShack. The point was to just get the idea out there.

I launched this campaign on a Thursday evening. At that time, RadioShack shares were selling at $0.10, with over 100 million shares. So in theory, for $10,000,000 we could actually buy RadioShack.

The next morning, RadioShack declared bankruptcy. We had raised $226, a mere $9,999,774 short of our goal. Alas.