He likely would not have liked Pixar's pushy behaviour, however.
Oh, brother. I personally have never negotiated with the Walt Disney Company, but one acquaintance who did described their negotiating technique as "Bad cop, Antichrist."
Disney has always had a reputation for what we may politely call hardball negotiations. Remember the memorable dinosaur sequence in Fantasia, set to "The Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky? Stravinsky was still alive when Walt was planning the movie, but under copyright law of the time, an American company didn't have to seek permission to use a work copyrighted only in Europe. Disney skipped negotiating with Stravinsky, sent him a check for $5,000, and went ahead and used his music. This incensed the composer, but there was nothing he could do. True, $5K was a lot of money back then, but really, that's what I call "pushy." Actually, I could think of worse terms.
"Balanced characters" is a convention, not an unbreakable natural law. In paper roleplaying games some very well regarded RPGs, such as Ars Magica, consciously abandon the principle that all character classes should be equivalent in power. (In ArM, for instance, mages totally rule, and everyone else is basically support.)
And you know what? Players still have fun. Players still play the "inferior" character types. Because in these games it's not about maximum firepower, it's about roleplaying. You can have fine roleplaying experiences in these classes that you can't have as a top gun. So, lo and behold, these games survive.
I could easily imagine a similar ethos prevailing in SWG.
For Sony's Star Wars: Galaxies MMORPG, programmer Ryan Palacio was seized by weird inspiration and, while no one was looking, created the most in-depth fishing simulation for any online RPG. It's quite amazing.
In SWG you can fish in most any sizable body of water, but different parts of a given lake provide better fishing at different times of day. The fish you catch vary by planet, of course, but also by region of the planet, and they have different nutritional characteristics. Very rarely you hook, not a fish, but some item from the game's spawn tables -- not lightsabers or Imperial AT-AT walkers, but just about anything else you can get or make in the game, including droids. There is no Fisher class, but it's possible to make a living fishing.
Ryan's managers were a bit bemused when he revealed the full extent of the fishing simulation. But ultimately they shrugged and said, "Well, why not?"
As with most any system in an online game, some players loved the system passionately and wanted even more detail. I don't know whether Ryan ever got around to expanding the fishing system, but I hope so. He seemed to really enjoy doing it.
In total, this is meaningless until you a) keep track of which page people got, and always give them the same one, and b) do it over a longer period.
Steve Pavlina of Dexterity Software detailed the tracking procedure in a post to the relevant topic on the Dexterity forums:
"A cookie does remember the odd/even distinction, so it's the same on every return to the site, unless something has wiped out the cookie or it's been blocked. Visitors who block cookies are tracked separately, so their data isn't part of the result set. The number of sales from visitors who block cookies is less than 1%, so it's not really significant anyway."
Pavlina also remarks that this is preliminary data: "Again, I want to keep running the experiment for at least a few more weeks, since as was previously discussed, the short-term effects may differ greatly from the long-term effects. And I definitely don't feel I've collected enough data just yet. So it's very possible that in the weeks ahead, these figures will change a great deal."
This/. story is more than usually off-target because the story lacks details of the experiment. Here's the pertinent thread:
Personally, I think that the gaming industry cares smeg-all about the artistic merits of games, and only what sells. This wasn't always the case, but seems to be the overwhelmingly prevalent attitude coming out of the industry today.
This/. discussion has so far focused exclusively on computer games, and in that field you're probably right -- though a few folks like Warren Spector are definitely interested in pushing the form forward.
But if we broaden the topic to include other games, there's definitely a strong starving-artist-in-garret mentality in indie RPGs -- the tabletop paper kind. Check out The Forge discussion boards, and the many odd small-press RPGs those designers post on the Web. They're all convinced roleplaying games can be an artform, and they don't care if their work earns a dime.
PSYCHOLOGY: Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli of the University of Rome, and Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, for their discerning report "Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities." [PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 385, February 1997, p. 493.]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Philip Zimbardo.
Philip Zimbardo made an earlier contribution to ignoble research with his notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. From the page: "Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress." Harrowing reading.
Cheap solar cells would open up quite a bit of land for human use that is accessible by road but has no power access. When you combine that with WiFi/satellite access the infrastructure advantages of cities become far less pronounced.
...Until your well runs dry. And the septic tank fills up. And the dump near your house gets too smelly. And your car runs out of gas. And you break your ankle and need a doctor.
First I drilled pilot holes to get the tool bits in. Then I started cutting to remove the big chunks, then I cut closer to the edges with my dremel tool, and finally filed it smooth with my half round bastard (not shown here). Those that know the joke are now snickering.
Well, I tried googling for "half round bastard file joke" and got nothing. Clue me in, someone?
It's sad that most MMORPG developers seem to be bent on profit and refuse to let go of this obsolete payment model. Either go for monthly supscriptions or go for a one time fee. NOT both.
At the Austin Game Conference last weekend, John Taylor of Electronic Arts and (previously) Kesmai, among many others, explained that almost the entire profit of the boxed game goes to the publisher, which is often a different entity entirely from the company that runs the actual online service. The profit on the retail box is an incentive for the publisher to distribute the game widely, a necessity for the online service to build its audience.
Yes, the MMORPG developers are bent on profit -- being, you know, businesses -- but they're not holding onto an "obsolete payment model" out of greed for the box profits. The boxes are only the means to an end.
The freshest stuff in sci-fi in the last 20 years is the cyberpunk genre. This is, IMHO, the cutting edge of sci-fi.
Egad, I'd never have thought that anyone still thinks slick supercool data cowboys jacking into cyberspace are "cutting edge." Such people must not have looked at the SF section in ten years.
Check out China Mieville, Charlie Stross, Ken McLeod, and Greg Egan, among others.
I worked in the adventure gaming field from 1984 until 1997, and then sporadically thereafter. I started at Steve Jackson Games, editing Space Gamer magazine under Warren Spector, and later freelanced for many paper game companies. This article does a decent job, for its length, of conveying the broad development of "core game design" mechanics. But I notice some odd oversights:
RuneQuest. The article's slighting of the first significant skill-based system (unless you count Ken St. Andre's Tunnels & Trolls) is a grave distortion. Steve Perrin's RQ is a landmark in RPG mechanical design, for many reasons beyond its "universal model" aspect.
TOON and Paranoia. From the article: "Traditionally, since their advent in 1973, RPGs had offered up the idea that the rules were the ultimate authority in a game and couldn't be spontaneously added to on the spot. Ars Magica (1988) was one of the first games to change this." Not even! Greg Costikyan's TOON, The Cartoon Roleplaying Game (developed by Warren Spector and me) and Paranoia (which Greg developed with Eric Goldberg and Ken Rolston from a setting by Dan Gelber) both appeared in 1985. They completely blew away the "rules authority" attitude in a way Ars Magica never matched. Both sold tons more copies than Ars Magica, too, at least in its first couple of editions. This installment of the article glosses over Paranoia (calling it a "storytelling game" -- really?) and ignores TOON completely.
Weird White Wolf views. Of all the reasons to single out Mark Rein-Hagen's breakthrough Vampire: The Masquerade as a "consistent model" pioneer, this article chooses how it "break down the artificial distinction between attribute and skill rankings." Uh, okay. I know the article focuses on "core game design," but trying to establish the state of the art in RPGs on the basis of "the exact same scale for skills, relationships, personality traits, magic, combat, and even items" is nearsighted and excessively reductionist. On that basis, the author should have discussed instead the one-table systems of the mid-'80s, such as Greg Gorden's DC Heroes and the Pacesetter line.
"Character Modeling Games." From the article: "[T]he first branch of the RPG tree was a style of game that lasted only a couple of years as a serious design meme, and which was eventually totally overcome by character development games. These early character modeling games placed as their goal the accurate portrayal of some character in a game environment. There was no opportunity for growth or change, simply a static existence. There's very little to say about this branch, because it so quickly dead-ended." Insofar as this distinction has merit, I could argue that, functionally, all the GDW roleplaying games (Twilight: 2000, Dark Conspiracy, etc.) amounted to this kind of design, whatever arbitrary advancement mechanics the designers tacked on as afterthoughts.
But even if you disagree, the field has always enjoyed a tremendous ongoing current of small-press one-shot RPGs, what you might call the "short stories" of the form. Nowadays you find many such designers active on the Forge, the Burgess Shale of modern small-press RPG design. See, for example, the much-praised Little Fears, Universalis, The Riddle of Steel, and Sorcerer, as well as curiosities like Bedlam, Courts & Corsets, octaNe, and Nicotine Girls. And for a twisted mix of horror, humor, and emotion both high and low, check out Paul Czege's My Life With Maste
One of many reasons why Black Isle Studios' Planescape Torment is my (and many others') favorite computer RPG is its haunting ending. The nameless protagonist, having finally achieved self-knowledge, descends unresistingly to his ultimate fate. The single cutscene made sense regardless of whether you played the game as good or evil. An exceptionally nice work, that game.
The development of rendering engines is driven by two major factors. One of these is, of course, the question, "When you finish a game, is it time to write a new engine?" The answer is based on what is happening in the hardware space.
Carmack goes on to discuss current hardware specs, but as far as I could tell, he never named the other major factor in the development of rendering engines. Were it anyone else but Carmack, I might assume it's, "Do we have the money to license an existing engine?" But that obviously doesn't apply here. Sorry to be braindead, but what is it?
Palast's piece was invigorating and/or infuriating, regardless of the reader's own politics. I give him a hearty cheer for intent and a solid +5 Flamebait for phrasing his argument in such a way as to polarize everyone reading it. I wanted to say both "Bravo!" and "Can't we all just get along?"
Bruce Sterling reprinted Palast's ZNet piece in his latest Vridian Note. A typically inflammatory extract:
"Meanwhile, the deregulation bug made it to New York where Republican Governor George Pataki and his industry-picked utility commissioners ripped the lid off electric bills and relieved my old friends at Niagara Mohawk of the expensive obligation to properly fund the maintenance of the grid system.
"And the Pataki-Bush Axis of Weasels permitted something that must have former New York governor Roosevelt spinning in his wheelchair in Heaven: They allowed a foreign company, the notoriously incompetent National Grid of England, to buy up NiMo, get rid of 800 workers and pocket most of their wages -- producing a bonus for NiMo stockholders approaching $90 million.
"Is tonight's black-out a surprise? Heck, no, not to us in the field who've watched Bush's buddies flick the switches across the globe. In Brazil, Houston Industries seized ownership of Rio de Janeiro's electric company. The Texans (aided by their French partners) fired workers, raised prices, cut maintenance expenditures and, CLICK! the juice went out so often the locals now call it, 'Rio Dark.'
"So too the free-market British buckaroos controlling Niagara Mohawk raised prices, slashed staff, cut maintenance and CLICK! -- New York joins Brazil in the Dark Ages.
"Californians have found the solution to the deregulation disaster: recall the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to the electricity price fixers. And unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called Reliant Corp of Houston a pack of 'pirates' -- and now he'll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.
"So where's the President? Just before he landed on the deck of the Abe Lincoln, the White House was so concerned about our brave troops facing the foe that they used the cover of war for a new push in Congress for yet more electricity deregulation. This has a certain logic: there's no sense defeating Iraq if a hostile regime remains in California.
"Sitting in the dark, as my laptop battery runs low, I don't know if the truth about deregulation will ever see the light -- until we change the dim bulb in the White House."
Back then my computer chirped. Bill Clinton's voice coming from the White House web page in 1996 was scratchy. Now my entire music collection is on it.
You put your entire music collection on the White House Web page? That is so cool!
expect things to be about 50-60 times as powerful as they are today.
Actually storage capacities are doubling each year, not each 18 months, and have been doubling annually since about 1989. So in 10 years your 100G hard drive will be 100 terabytes. Unfortunately, access speeds are only improving by about 10%/year, so searching for a file on your 100T drive will take about a week....
Sure, there are some people who really get off on reading all that carefully-scripted NPC chatter, paragraph after paragraph of it, like you find in a lot of NWN modules, but most of us don't fire up a High Fantasy Adventure game so we can read pre-generated text.
I recently finished a six-month contract on a high-profile MMORPG, scripting missions and writing NPC dialogue of exactly the type you disdain. The company's polls show that about 5% of the player base enjoys reading the dialogue. With that figure, text is certainly not a priority for any design team -- but if you've got the resources, why not include the text? A MMORPG tries to be all things to all players, or at least as many things as possible to as many players as you can get. The text entertains the 5%, and the other 95% ignore it.
From the company's viewpoint it's just an incidental nicety. Because -- believe me! -- compared to artists and coders, writers are cheap.
Now thinking back, the best flight sim I recall playing was the one by the guys who made System Shock. It was an aerobatics focused sim, and the physics seemed very accurate.
That's assuming current speeds. Well, as data gets more dense, the access speed inherently gets much faster, assuming the RPMs stay constant. If physical size stays the same, random access can't really get too much slower. So what is it that is going to be bad about terabyte disks?
"But starting about 1989, disk densities began to double each year. Rather than going slower than Moore's Law, they grew faster. Moore's Law is something like 60 percent a year, and disk densities improved 100 percent per year.
"Today disk-capacity growth continues at this blistering rate, maybe a little slower. But disk access, which is to say, 'Move the disk arm to the right cylinder and rotate the disk to the right block,' has improved about tenfold. The rotation speed has gone up from 3,000 to 15,000 RPM, and the access times have gone from 50 milliseconds down to 5 milliseconds. That's a factor of 10. Bandwidth has improved about 40-fold, from 1 megabyte per second to 40 megabytes per second. Access times are improving about 7 to 10 percent per year. Meanwhile, densities have been improving at 100 percent per year."
There's a lot more about this in the article. Check it out; it's +5 Informative stuff.
This conversation with Jim Gray, head of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, has grim, eye-opening comments on the growing gap between storage densities and access speeds/bandwidth. Currently the most effective way to send a multi-terabyte disk array is by UPS -- turns out a UPS truck has a "bandwidth" equivalent to about 7 megabytes/second. And the problem of practical access speeds is only going to get worse. At current and near-future access speeds, searching a 20-terabyte disk might take a year.
"At the FAST [File and Storage Technologies] conference about a year-and-a-half ago, Mark Kryder of Seagate Research was very apologetic. He said the end is near; we only have a factor of 100 left in density--then the Seagate guys are out of ideas. So this 200-gig disk that you're holding will soon be 20 terabytes, and then the disk guys are out of ideas. The database guys are already out of ideas!"
I'm not a pinball aficionado, but among those who are, Steve Ritchie is revered as one of the world's great pinball designers. He designed the first two-level layout, Black Knight (1980), and holds several important patents. Some call him "The Master of Flow."
This interview with Ritchie isn't perhaps gripping in itself for the non-hobbyist, but it does show the veneration fans hold for him.
Slashdot Mirror
If that asteroid were in Texas, the guy wouldn't be able to collect rent unless he'd lived there at least a year.
(Yes, I made that up.)
Oh, brother. I personally have never negotiated with the Walt Disney Company, but one acquaintance who did described their negotiating technique as "Bad cop, Antichrist."
Disney has always had a reputation for what we may politely call hardball negotiations. Remember the memorable dinosaur sequence in Fantasia, set to "The Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky? Stravinsky was still alive when Walt was planning the movie, but under copyright law of the time, an American company didn't have to seek permission to use a work copyrighted only in Europe. Disney skipped negotiating with Stravinsky, sent him a check for $5,000, and went ahead and used his music. This incensed the composer, but there was nothing he could do. True, $5K was a lot of money back then, but really, that's what I call "pushy." Actually, I could think of worse terms.
"Balanced characters" is a convention, not an unbreakable natural law. In paper roleplaying games some very well regarded RPGs, such as Ars Magica, consciously abandon the principle that all character classes should be equivalent in power. (In ArM, for instance, mages totally rule, and everyone else is basically support.)
And you know what? Players still have fun. Players still play the "inferior" character types. Because in these games it's not about maximum firepower, it's about roleplaying. You can have fine roleplaying experiences in these classes that you can't have as a top gun. So, lo and behold, these games survive.
I could easily imagine a similar ethos prevailing in SWG.
For Sony's Star Wars: Galaxies MMORPG, programmer Ryan Palacio was seized by weird inspiration and, while no one was looking, created the most in-depth fishing simulation for any online RPG. It's quite amazing.
In SWG you can fish in most any sizable body of water, but different parts of a given lake provide better fishing at different times of day. The fish you catch vary by planet, of course, but also by region of the planet, and they have different nutritional characteristics. Very rarely you hook, not a fish, but some item from the game's spawn tables -- not lightsabers or Imperial AT-AT walkers, but just about anything else you can get or make in the game, including droids. There is no Fisher class, but it's possible to make a living fishing.
Ryan's managers were a bit bemused when he revealed the full extent of the fishing simulation. But ultimately they shrugged and said, "Well, why not?"
As with most any system in an online game, some players loved the system passionately and wanted even more detail. I don't know whether Ryan ever got around to expanding the fishing system, but I hope so. He seemed to really enjoy doing it.
Steve Pavlina of Dexterity Software detailed the tracking procedure in a post to the relevant topic on the Dexterity forums:
"A cookie does remember the odd/even distinction, so it's the same on every return to the site, unless something has wiped out the cookie or it's been blocked. Visitors who block cookies are tracked separately, so their data isn't part of the result set. The number of sales from visitors who block cookies is less than 1%, so it's not really significant anyway."
Pavlina also remarks that this is preliminary data: "Again, I want to keep running the experiment for at least a few more weeks, since as was previously discussed, the short-term effects may differ greatly from the long-term effects. And I definitely don't feel I've collected enough data just yet. So it's very possible that in the weeks ahead, these figures will change a great deal."
This /. story is more than usually off-target because the story lacks details of the experiment. Here's the pertinent thread:
http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s =&threadid=1579
This /. discussion has so far focused exclusively on computer games, and in that field you're probably right -- though a few folks like Warren Spector are definitely interested in pushing the form forward.
But if we broaden the topic to include other games, there's definitely a strong starving-artist-in-garret mentality in indie RPGs -- the tabletop paper kind. Check out The Forge discussion boards, and the many odd small-press RPGs those designers post on the Web. They're all convinced roleplaying games can be an artform, and they don't care if their work earns a dime.
Philip Zimbardo made an earlier contribution to ignoble research with his notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. From the page: "Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress." Harrowing reading.
...Until your well runs dry. And the septic tank fills up. And the dump near your house gets too smelly. And your car runs out of gas. And you break your ankle and need a doctor.
Well, I tried googling for "half round bastard file joke" and got nothing. Clue me in, someone?
At the Austin Game Conference last weekend, John Taylor of Electronic Arts and (previously) Kesmai, among many others, explained that almost the entire profit of the boxed game goes to the publisher, which is often a different entity entirely from the company that runs the actual online service. The profit on the retail box is an incentive for the publisher to distribute the game widely, a necessity for the online service to build its audience.
Yes, the MMORPG developers are bent on profit -- being, you know, businesses -- but they're not holding onto an "obsolete payment model" out of greed for the box profits. The boxes are only the means to an end.
The freshest stuff in sci-fi in the last 20 years is the cyberpunk genre. This is, IMHO, the cutting edge of sci-fi.
Egad, I'd never have thought that anyone still thinks slick supercool data cowboys jacking into cyberspace are "cutting edge." Such people must not have looked at the SF section in ten years.
Check out China Mieville, Charlie Stross, Ken McLeod, and Greg Egan, among others.
I worked in the adventure gaming field from 1984 until 1997, and then sporadically thereafter. I started at Steve Jackson Games, editing Space Gamer magazine under Warren Spector, and later freelanced for many paper game companies. This article does a decent job, for its length, of conveying the broad development of "core game design" mechanics. But I notice some odd oversights:
But even if you disagree, the field has always enjoyed a tremendous ongoing current of small-press one-shot RPGs, what you might call the "short stories" of the form. Nowadays you find many such designers active on the Forge, the Burgess Shale of modern small-press RPG design. See, for example, the much-praised Little Fears, Universalis, The Riddle of Steel, and Sorcerer, as well as curiosities like Bedlam, Courts & Corsets, octaNe, and Nicotine Girls. And for a twisted mix of horror, humor, and emotion both high and low, check out Paul Czege's My Life With Maste
One of many reasons why Black Isle Studios' Planescape Torment is my (and many others') favorite computer RPG is its haunting ending. The nameless protagonist, having finally achieved self-knowledge, descends unresistingly to his ultimate fate. The single cutscene made sense regardless of whether you played the game as good or evil. An exceptionally nice work, that game.
From the interview>
Carmack goes on to discuss current hardware specs, but as far as I could tell, he never named the other major factor in the development of rendering engines. Were it anyone else but Carmack, I might assume it's, "Do we have the money to license an existing engine?" But that obviously doesn't apply here. Sorry to be braindead, but what is it?
Palast's piece was invigorating and/or infuriating, regardless of the reader's own politics. I give him a hearty cheer for intent and a solid +5 Flamebait for phrasing his argument in such a way as to polarize everyone reading it. I wanted to say both "Bravo!" and "Can't we all just get along?"
Bruce Sterling reprinted Palast's ZNet piece in his latest Vridian Note. A typically inflammatory extract:
Back then my computer chirped. Bill Clinton's voice coming from the White House web page in 1996 was scratchy. Now my entire music collection is on it.
You put your entire music collection on the White House Web page? That is so cool!
expect things to be about 50-60 times as powerful as they are today.
Actually storage capacities are doubling each year, not each 18 months, and have been doubling annually since about 1989. So in 10 years your 100G hard drive will be 100 terabytes. Unfortunately, access speeds are only improving by about 10%/year, so searching for a file on your 100T drive will take about a week....
I recently finished a six-month contract on a high-profile MMORPG, scripting missions and writing NPC dialogue of exactly the type you disdain. The company's polls show that about 5% of the player base enjoys reading the dialogue. With that figure, text is certainly not a priority for any design team -- but if you've got the resources, why not include the text? A MMORPG tries to be all things to all players, or at least as many things as possible to as many players as you can get. The text entertains the 5%, and the other 95% ignore it.
From the company's viewpoint it's just an incidental nicety. Because -- believe me! -- compared to artists and coders, writers are cheap.
Just claim to have forgotten your card EVERY TIME, and the nice cashier will usually swipe a "store card" through for you. Problem solved.
When I try this at my local privacy-invading supermarket, the cashier says, "I can look up your membership by you phone number. What is it?"
Now thinking back, the best flight sim I recall playing was the one by the guys who made System Shock. It was an aerobatics focused sim, and the physics seemed very accurate.
Flight Unlimited III by Looking Glass Technologies (1999). Review.
That's assuming current speeds. Well, as data gets more dense, the access speed inherently gets much faster, assuming the RPMs stay constant. If physical size stays the same, random access can't really get too much slower. So what is it that is going to be bad about terabyte disks?
The problem, as Jim Gray outlines it in the ACMQueue article:
There's a lot more about this in the article. Check it out; it's +5 Informative stuff.
This conversation with Jim Gray, head of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, has grim, eye-opening comments on the growing gap between storage densities and access speeds/bandwidth. Currently the most effective way to send a multi-terabyte disk array is by UPS -- turns out a UPS truck has a "bandwidth" equivalent to about 7 megabytes/second. And the problem of practical access speeds is only going to get worse. At current and near-future access speeds, searching a 20-terabyte disk might take a year.
SVG is similar in scope to Macromedia's proprietary Flash technology
Nowadays Flash handles a whole lot more than animation, which is why Flash and SVG are more complementary technologies than competitors.
There's more about this in my /. journal entry "Flash no longer evil! Update your talking points!"
I'm not a pinball aficionado, but among those who are, Steve Ritchie is revered as one of the world's great pinball designers. He designed the first two-level layout, Black Knight (1980), and holds several important patents. Some call him "The Master of Flow."
This interview with Ritchie isn't perhaps gripping in itself for the non-hobbyist, but it does show the veneration fans hold for him.
Sheesh, it was a joke! Archie McPhee sells, like, X-ray specs and weird googly-eyed dolls and rubber alligators. Sheesh again. I'll shut up now.