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Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse previewed

My hands-on preview of the upcoming Sam & Max season was posted this morning at Adventure Gamers. This was an interesting article to write, because for more than three years, I was the PR person soliciting articles just like this one. Tales of Monkey Island was already underway when I left Telltale, so even though most of the episodes launched after I left the company, I always went into them feeling like I knew too much. But during my last days at Telltale, The Devil’s Playhouse was still but a glimmer in the designers’ eyes—which means I finally get to experience a Telltale series as a fan, rather than an employee.

Sure, you’d think working for a company that makes your favorite type of game would be the best job ever, because you’d get to play all the games before everyone else. Problem is, playing games before everyone else means playing them long before they’re ready to be played. And dissecting the games months in advance of their release in order to figure out how to market and promote them saps a lot of the fun out of actually playing them.

Okay, so I DID play the upcoming Sam & Max episode before it was finished, and therefore before it was quite ready for prime time, but that’s not the point. I went into the experience knowing next to nothing about the storyline or what’s in store for the season. And after playing most of the first episode, I still don’t know what the design team has up their sleeves. Nor can I wait to find out.

Anyway. Go read all about it.

Recent half scale projects

This week I finished cross-stitching a “Blue Kirman” carpet in half scale. It’s stitched over-one on 35-count linen. The finished size is about 2.75″ by 4.5″ (which would be 5.5′ by 9′ if it were life-sized). This design comes from a free pattern that I found online.

Here it is in the Fairfield’s dining room (which I’m thinking of turning into a music room…)

I’ve also been working on filling up the Fairfield’s bookcase. I’m using a technique that I wrote up for Miniature Collector a few years ago. That article is archived here if you’d like to try it yourself (posted with permission from Scott Publications). Once the book covers are scanned, assembling them is an easy project that can be done while watching television. (Lately Wonderfalls has been my diversion of choice.)

Last but not least, I’ve written a how-to article for building half scale ladderback chairs that will appear in the April issue of American Miniaturist. So if you’d like to learn how to make them, that’s where to look! (My local mini shop is closed for renovations at the moment so I’m not sure if this issue is available yet…)

I feel violated

I love looking at Google Analytics to see what search terms people type in to land on my site. The keywords are usually pretty obvious (“emily morganti blog” for example), or have something to do with dollhouses (“tomy dollhouse” and “christmas roombox” crop up a lot). Back when I was complaining about my crappy experience with a Chase late fee, I got a lot of visits from people trying to hunt down Kelly Hanick, Chase’s customer service guy. Et cetera.

Okay, those all make sense. Even searches like “a puzzle that puts a house together” and “adopt a pet like emely” make sense, in a wonky internet kind of way. But what happened today does not make sense, because today someone found this site by searching for “daddy sniffed my panties.”

*shudder*

Of course, upon seeing this, the first thing I did was type that phrase into Google to see what happened. The search returned so many pages of porn I couldn’t even find my website among them until I restricted the search to this site only. As it turns out, Google thinks that a short story I wrote, Story of O, is a decent match for that phrase. Not because it contains the exact phrase (which it doesn’t), but because it contains, at various points in the text, the words “daddy” and “my” and “pants.”

So I guess I should apologize to whoever it was who waded through all those pages of porn to land on my short story—which in spite of having the same title as an erotic novel and being a tad racy, is not porn, and depicts neither daddies nor panty sniffing.

(I can’t wait to see what happens to my search traffic after I post this blog entry…)

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