Yesterday's airport writeup of F!
My regret about Intercon is always that it's so *short*. There's not enough time to LARP and party and sleep and see all the people you want to see, or even three out of four.
Despite coming in already sleepdepped and out of the worst week I've had in a long time, I had a fantastic Intercon. Here's the obligatory character list, with possible spoilers behind the cuts:
Friday night I played in Operation Red Door as Tara Day, a famous indie actress who really just wanted to finish her undergrad career at Yale and go to Harvard Law. She was completely unaware of how much of an icon she was and she had _nothing_ to do with the porn films on the internet. I was shocked and appalled and disgusted to discover them. The hangar got blown up, so I guess poor Tara doesn't get to go to Harvard, and I guess the rumors will continue to live on. Honestly, though, she was just a normal girl. She played Vampire LARPs in high school, for crying out loud. I had fun; I'm not sure if it was helped or hindered by having a couple of drinks beforehand. The make-a-movie plot was fairly frenetic and whoever-makes-the-most-noise-wins, so both character and player were at a bit of a disadvantage, since I hate being interrupted and Tara was a genuinely nice person who was unwilling to shoot insults back at stuntwoman Margaret Sanger.
I managed to get five or six hours of sleep by craftily evading the people who wanted me to go to another party, and woke up the next morning almost on time to play Port Hidalgo as pirate crewman Solomon Ives a.k.a. Jean Jenkins. I hadn't had time to do more than check to make sure I could read my sheets before I printed them out on Thursday, and the GMs had sent me mail saying "we didn't crosscast you", so I had figured that I was some kind of pirate or wench or something and could wear my bodice. On Thursday I realized that although I was a woman, I was a woman disguised as a man. Oops. There goes my costume. I managed to borrow a billowy piratical shirt from my boyfriend ert and a pirate hat from Peter (and another offered by mattsachs) and poof, I had a costume. The game itself was a lot of fun, although I think the character sheets were way too long. They were fun to read and it was nice to have the background, but it was only a four hour game. I had a long conversation on Saturday night with some folks about this. I won pretty hard, ending the "night" with both the thought-to-be-dead love of my life and a slightly less piratical ship of my own, along with ten thousand gold pieces coming to Captain Stuart the gentleman pirate (played by clintlovesport) and his crew, including me. I even got that last little matter of being a woman on a ship which doesn't allow women to sign on cleared up with honor intact, and now I have my own.
A parasol lent by arachne8x and the perfect dress lent heroically at the last minute by Danielle-whose-lj-name-I-don't-know, and I was off to play Mimi Pinnacle in 'Tis No Deceit to Deceive the Deceiver. Wow. The only complaint I have about this game is that Mimi needs a "No one tells me anything!" song. I swear, I would play anything Kreg writes. The game is...well, it's a singing game. You sing. Enough said. I was supposed to marry Cuthbert Collingwood, stodgy old bureaucrat, and I wanted to marry the Blank Verse Bandit, dashing romantic scoundrel. Only...well, he wasn't quite as dashing as I had been expecting. I had some excellent songs, almost all of which I got to sing. I was completely blindsided by the near-unanimous support I had for not marrying Cuthbert. I anticipated having to kick and scream every inch of the way, and instead I said to my brother Marlowe (zebediah) "I don't want to marry Cuthbert!" and he said "Good!" That was pretty much standard. Even Cuthbert ended up not wanting the marriage to happen. Instead, I married the Blank Verse Bandit (half of him, anyway) after panicking my father with my "Oh, you just can't help giving in to him...in the moonlight, so much can happen. There was just no way of saying no!" and making him think I had given up my virtue to this bandit. He almost fainted.
But...darn. I forgot to swoon! And I practiced. I had so been looking forward to it.
I didn't have a Saturday night game; I was waitlisted for Lord of the Two Lands, but even that hadn't really caught my interest, and I decided I'd hang out in the con suite and talk to other people without games instead. This was good, because it meant that I ate, and it was even almost a real meal. citabria is amazing; the con suite was really impressive this year. So I hung out and talked to people, including baron_saturday and jingsaw, and then jingsaw and drdt recruited me to play one of the Intercon Z games, Choices, as Dr. Benjamin Kraft. My son was sick with AIDS and I'd found a valley in the Congo whose inhabitants had AIDS but didn't show any symptoms or have any problems with their immune systems. I had been bringing him to the valley after a native I'd brought back to the US died a month after leaving the valley, and I needed to complete this research. If I could discover what in the environment made people immune to AIDS, I could save not only my son but millions of other people infected as well. And of course, no one in the medical community believed my crackpot theory. After all, the native I'd brought back died like any other infected person. So it was vital that I live, in order to finish this research. Everyone else, naturally, had just as compelling reasons to live. One of us had to be killed by the natives, or all of us would be. Nobody was quite callous enough (or willing to appear so) to insist that the pregnant woman was the obvious choice, since her staying alive would save exactly two lives, hers and her baby's, and everyone else (except possibly the anthropologist) would save hundreds, thousands or millions. Or the rest of us, in the case of the captain. It was a terribly angsty game and I felt really guilty about not being willing to sacrifice myself. Eventually, the anthropologist chose herself without saying anything to the rest of us, and we made sure her work was published after we escaped.
I went to the dance party in my piratical satiny pants and a corset, and finally managed to get to bed in time for a mere three and a half hours of sleep, which was perfectly in character for Bright Alice in Wonderland 2.0. She was a little broken. Literally. And there was this mirror I was trying to reassemble, and it would have fixed us, but the March Hare (learnedax) had the last piece and didn't put it in before game end. I did take the red pill, mostly because I couldn't think of a good reason to say no (all adults are good and kind and wise!), but it didn't fix things entirely.
I did find it rather interesting as a contrast to Casino Xeno (spoiler warning), where I was playing what amounted to a female Ender. I was familiar with both Alice in Wonderland and the Matrix, and so there wasn't anything particularly surprising or confusing about being awakened, about Morpheus and Trinity wandering around, or about finding out that Wonderland was for the crazy people and non-linear thinkers the Victorian-England Matrix couldn't handle. I hadn't read Ender's Game (and in fact still haven't; it's on my list, which is ridiculously long) and so it wasn't at all hard to play (what was my character's name? Andrea?) as if she didn't understand what was going on. After all, *I* didn't understand what was going on. In Wonderland, on the other hand, I-the-player knew approximately what was happening, even if I-the-character had no idea, and it gets difficult to separate. It's also less fun, because you don't get the fun of discovery. Starting wrap-up with a bemused "I don't understand..." was much more fun than "oh, they restarted the Wonderland section of the Matrix. Right, that makes sense."
Then running around to say goodbye and I was off, way more tired than I should have been to drive. Dropped people off, got home, took a nap that only made me more tired, went to rehearsal (I'm playing Edmund in King Lear with the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble. Come see me! March 16-18, 23-25.), came home and packed, and now I'm sitting in the airport waiting for a flight to Calgary so I can go skiing with my dad.
See y'all next year!
Despite coming in already sleepdepped and out of the worst week I've had in a long time, I had a fantastic Intercon. Here's the obligatory character list, with possible spoilers behind the cuts:
Friday night I played in Operation Red Door as Tara Day, a famous indie actress who really just wanted to finish her undergrad career at Yale and go to Harvard Law. She was completely unaware of how much of an icon she was and she had _nothing_ to do with the porn films on the internet. I was shocked and appalled and disgusted to discover them. The hangar got blown up, so I guess poor Tara doesn't get to go to Harvard, and I guess the rumors will continue to live on. Honestly, though, she was just a normal girl. She played Vampire LARPs in high school, for crying out loud. I had fun; I'm not sure if it was helped or hindered by having a couple of drinks beforehand. The make-a-movie plot was fairly frenetic and whoever-makes-the-most-noise-wins, so both character and player were at a bit of a disadvantage, since I hate being interrupted and Tara was a genuinely nice person who was unwilling to shoot insults back at stuntwoman Margaret Sanger.
I managed to get five or six hours of sleep by craftily evading the people who wanted me to go to another party, and woke up the next morning almost on time to play Port Hidalgo as pirate crewman Solomon Ives a.k.a. Jean Jenkins. I hadn't had time to do more than check to make sure I could read my sheets before I printed them out on Thursday, and the GMs had sent me mail saying "we didn't crosscast you", so I had figured that I was some kind of pirate or wench or something and could wear my bodice. On Thursday I realized that although I was a woman, I was a woman disguised as a man. Oops. There goes my costume. I managed to borrow a billowy piratical shirt from my boyfriend ert and a pirate hat from Peter (and another offered by mattsachs) and poof, I had a costume. The game itself was a lot of fun, although I think the character sheets were way too long. They were fun to read and it was nice to have the background, but it was only a four hour game. I had a long conversation on Saturday night with some folks about this. I won pretty hard, ending the "night" with both the thought-to-be-dead love of my life and a slightly less piratical ship of my own, along with ten thousand gold pieces coming to Captain Stuart the gentleman pirate (played by clintlovesport) and his crew, including me. I even got that last little matter of being a woman on a ship which doesn't allow women to sign on cleared up with honor intact, and now I have my own.
A parasol lent by arachne8x and the perfect dress lent heroically at the last minute by Danielle-whose-lj-name-I-don't-know, and I was off to play Mimi Pinnacle in 'Tis No Deceit to Deceive the Deceiver. Wow. The only complaint I have about this game is that Mimi needs a "No one tells me anything!" song. I swear, I would play anything Kreg writes. The game is...well, it's a singing game. You sing. Enough said. I was supposed to marry Cuthbert Collingwood, stodgy old bureaucrat, and I wanted to marry the Blank Verse Bandit, dashing romantic scoundrel. Only...well, he wasn't quite as dashing as I had been expecting. I had some excellent songs, almost all of which I got to sing. I was completely blindsided by the near-unanimous support I had for not marrying Cuthbert. I anticipated having to kick and scream every inch of the way, and instead I said to my brother Marlowe (zebediah) "I don't want to marry Cuthbert!" and he said "Good!" That was pretty much standard. Even Cuthbert ended up not wanting the marriage to happen. Instead, I married the Blank Verse Bandit (half of him, anyway) after panicking my father with my "Oh, you just can't help giving in to him...in the moonlight, so much can happen. There was just no way of saying no!" and making him think I had given up my virtue to this bandit. He almost fainted.
But...darn. I forgot to swoon! And I practiced. I had so been looking forward to it.
I didn't have a Saturday night game; I was waitlisted for Lord of the Two Lands, but even that hadn't really caught my interest, and I decided I'd hang out in the con suite and talk to other people without games instead. This was good, because it meant that I ate, and it was even almost a real meal. citabria is amazing; the con suite was really impressive this year. So I hung out and talked to people, including baron_saturday and jingsaw, and then jingsaw and drdt recruited me to play one of the Intercon Z games, Choices, as Dr. Benjamin Kraft. My son was sick with AIDS and I'd found a valley in the Congo whose inhabitants had AIDS but didn't show any symptoms or have any problems with their immune systems. I had been bringing him to the valley after a native I'd brought back to the US died a month after leaving the valley, and I needed to complete this research. If I could discover what in the environment made people immune to AIDS, I could save not only my son but millions of other people infected as well. And of course, no one in the medical community believed my crackpot theory. After all, the native I'd brought back died like any other infected person. So it was vital that I live, in order to finish this research. Everyone else, naturally, had just as compelling reasons to live. One of us had to be killed by the natives, or all of us would be. Nobody was quite callous enough (or willing to appear so) to insist that the pregnant woman was the obvious choice, since her staying alive would save exactly two lives, hers and her baby's, and everyone else (except possibly the anthropologist) would save hundreds, thousands or millions. Or the rest of us, in the case of the captain. It was a terribly angsty game and I felt really guilty about not being willing to sacrifice myself. Eventually, the anthropologist chose herself without saying anything to the rest of us, and we made sure her work was published after we escaped.
I went to the dance party in my piratical satiny pants and a corset, and finally managed to get to bed in time for a mere three and a half hours of sleep, which was perfectly in character for Bright Alice in Wonderland 2.0. She was a little broken. Literally. And there was this mirror I was trying to reassemble, and it would have fixed us, but the March Hare (learnedax) had the last piece and didn't put it in before game end. I did take the red pill, mostly because I couldn't think of a good reason to say no (all adults are good and kind and wise!), but it didn't fix things entirely.
I did find it rather interesting as a contrast to Casino Xeno (spoiler warning), where I was playing what amounted to a female Ender. I was familiar with both Alice in Wonderland and the Matrix, and so there wasn't anything particularly surprising or confusing about being awakened, about Morpheus and Trinity wandering around, or about finding out that Wonderland was for the crazy people and non-linear thinkers the Victorian-England Matrix couldn't handle. I hadn't read Ender's Game (and in fact still haven't; it's on my list, which is ridiculously long) and so it wasn't at all hard to play (what was my character's name? Andrea?) as if she didn't understand what was going on. After all, *I* didn't understand what was going on. In Wonderland, on the other hand, I-the-player knew approximately what was happening, even if I-the-character had no idea, and it gets difficult to separate. It's also less fun, because you don't get the fun of discovery. Starting wrap-up with a bemused "I don't understand..." was much more fun than "oh, they restarted the Wonderland section of the Matrix. Right, that makes sense."
Then running around to say goodbye and I was off, way more tired than I should have been to drive. Dropped people off, got home, took a nap that only made me more tired, went to rehearsal (I'm playing Edmund in King Lear with the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble. Come see me! March 16-18, 23-25.), came home and packed, and now I'm sitting in the airport waiting for a flight to Calgary so I can go skiing with my dad.
See y'all next year!