GenCon 2006
Well, I'm back.
It was four days of gaming and geeks, walking and debauchery. It flew by so fast, but every minute felt alive. Rob, Emily and I set out from IUS around 8:45 and got to our hotel around 10:30. Check-in wasn't until 4pm so we had to kill the rest of the afternoon. That was hardly a problem. We parked and headed out to the convention center. This year, I didn't lug my backpack full of books and my toolbox full of minis with me like I did last year, an act of foolishness that cost me dearly later on in the first day. No, this time I took only my camera, and it was a smart move.
The convention floor looked about the same as last year. Thousands of people milling around, moving from booth to booth, buying, selling, gawking. It's not a place for the agoraphobic or people with crowd anxiety. WOTC dominated the center of the convention floor with a massive exhibition booth over which hung a 50-foot wide banner of a red dragon spouting flames. It was sweet, but I couldn't get a good picture of it because of the sheer size of it.
I bought a few things, nothing terribly exciting. I demoed some games, mostly to win prizes. WOTC has a deal where you can demo their products (by playing a 5 to 10 minute instruction session on a particular game, such as D&D minis or Axis and Allies) and then get a mark saying you did so. If you do two or more demos, you can then go up to this booth and roll a basketball-sized d20 and add the number of demos you played to the roll. Depending on what you roll, you can win a prize. The higher you roll, the better stuff you can get. Even if you got a really low roll, you could get a paltry prize, like a pack of Magic cards or a T-shirt, but if you rolled high you could win a hardcover D&D book. I demoed three games (that was about all I could stand in the heat and the noise) and stood in line to roll the die. There was one book I was very interested in getting (Hordes of the Abyss) and hoped like hell I could roll high enough. So, I rolled the big die and got a 17 (a guy standing nearby actually bumped it just as it stopped to rest and turned it over to a 10, but the WOTC official let me keep the 17) for a total of 20. That won me a book! But, sadly, the book I wanted was all out. All that was left was Eberron and Forgotten Realms crap (which ought to tell WOTC something about those products). Eventually I did manage to find a book called the Red Hand of Doom, which is a mini-campaign taking players from level 6 to 12. It's actually pretty cool and I'm very happy with it, although I would have much preferred Hordes of the Abyss.
After we had our fill of the con floor, we headed back to our hotel around 3:30, thinking surely they would let us check in a bit early. But nothing's ever that simple. Our hotel was brand new; it opened August 1st. In fact, that was pretty much the only thing that let us get a room there, since it had only been added to the GenCon hotel list a few weeks before we got our reservation. As such, they were still working the kinks out. Apparently they hadn't gotten all the rooms cleaned and readied for that day's check-ins, so we ended up having to wait until 5pm to finally get into our room. We sat in the hotel's lobby all that time. We were all exhausted from the walking we'd done, not to mention having been up since 7 or earlier. Here are some pics of us sitting around in our boredom as we waited:
Emily (I screwed up the focus on this picture so it came out all blurry...Sorry Em >.<):
Rob "Bastard" (yes, that's people call him, and he likes it):
Me, doing an extreme close-up self portrait:
Our room, when we finally got into it, was wonderful. It was huge; I don't know square footage, but this thing was as big as some apartments or condos I've seen. It had a sectional sofa with a pullout bed, a full kitchen (range, oven, microwave, full-sized refrigerator, dishwasher, cabinets), two queen-size beds, a large closet, a huge bathroom, two tables with chairs, two widescreen plasma TVs, a chest of drawers, and more. I've seldom seen such a nice hotel room. We had way more space than we needed and it was a pity no one else came to help us split the cost a little more. Here are some pics:
The kitchen and living area. The sofa was just to the left of the frame. Emily slept on it every night:
The beds:
The bathroom (the huge bathtub/shower was just to the right of the frame):
This year, I elected not to register for many official events, since they're a pain to get into, and they cost money. Last year I went to several but had much more fun with the open gaming over in the Hyatt. I ended up registering for only for three events: two Lord of the Rings RPG games and Hickman's Killer Breakfast. More on that later. The games were very much on my "want to do" list because I am/was planning to run a LOTR RPG campaign of my own eventually, but the rules kinda suck and I was hoping to see someone else run it before I jumped in fully. So I went to the first scheduled game on Friday and found myself at a table with a middle-aged couple. We waited and waited and waited but the GM never showed up. This happens more than you might think, and fortunately they allow you to get your money back in that event. The other game I had registered for was with the same GM, so I decided to cancel that one too. The official that gave me the refund said this particular GM hadn't shown up at all and that his had happened to numerous people already during the con. I was bummed that I didn't get to play the game and do some field research on it, but at least I got my money back.
The Indianpolis Convention Center is a huge building and it's surrounded by more huge buildings. But the city planners of downtown Indy were smart because they built a network of skywalks and crosstubes between most of the big downtown attractions. This makes getting around much easier. The convention center links up with a big mall, and is kind of a convenient through-way for convention traffic, instead of winding around the buildings outside. Also, the mall has a food court which feeds a huge portion of the convention attendees. While mall food court prices are hardly cheap, compared to the food they have on-hand in the convention center itself, it's a real deal. We spent a lot of time walking through the mall to get where we were going. Where our hotel was located, we ended up cutting through Nordstrom's every time we went in, which amused me because the staff of such a hoity toity store like Nordstrom's must not have known what hit them: masses of often unwashed, style-challeneged geeks striding through the designer clothes and costume jewelry. Suck it, rich bitches.
In the Hyatt hotel, con attendees could take part in open gaming, that is, free games that didn't require any kind of registration. Instead, you could walk up to a table, ask if the group there needed a player, and sit right down. It was very casual and fun, and it was all held in the foyer of the Hyatt, which has to be one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever been inside. We gamed in the Hyatt every night with a group of Rob's friends who were staying in another hotel. I ran one night, and it was pretty fun, but we usually didn't get started till 8 or 9pm and by then, everyone was usually wiped out. The Hyatt is also unique in that it has several fast food restaurants on its first floor (a McDonald's, a pizza place and a Subway), which makes it damn convenient to just run down and grab some food. The Hyatt also hosted most of the non-gaming events I went to, which I'll talk about in a bit. First, here are some pictures of the inside of the Hyatt:
These are the main elevators. The bluish stuff at the base is actually water: the structure is a really cool fountain that continuously pours sheets of water down over the tiles like a waterfall.
This is immediately above the previous picture, as an elevator rises up to the residential floors. I couldn't even get the whole height of it in a single shot without lying down on the floor.
This is 180 degrees behind the previous picture, looking up into the hotel (as you can see, it's wide open in the center, thus allowing these shots). I imagine the rooms up near the center are the penthouses and super-expensive suites:
This is overlooking one of the open gaming areas. On Saturday night we played at the table on the left in the foreground:
Friday night we went to see The Great Luke Ski in concert. I was introduced to Luke Ski last year at GenCon, where I saw him perform live, before a crowd of perhaps 20 people. Word of mouth must have gotten around this year, because the place was packed full this time. There were at least 150 people at his show this year and even he was amazed. Anyway, for those who don't know, Luke Ski is a comedy singer who is to gaming, sci fi and geekdom what Weird Al is to popular music. Indeed, Luke is extremely popular on the Dr. Demento Show, the radio show where Weird Al first came to fame. Luke sings parody songs (and often raps) about hyper-popular geek topics, such as Star Wars, D&D, Star Trek, Firefly and so on. I bought his newest CD last year and loved it and was greatly anticipating seeing him again this year. He did not disappoint. He closed his show with the awesome "Grease Wars," a medley of songs from Grease, reworded to summarize the first Star Wars film ("It's Obi-wan that I want! Ooh, ooh ooh!") which brought down the house.
Luke hamming it up in his new song "I Love You, Tivo:"
Luke dressed as a Ferengi for his rendition of "One Night in Quark's Bar," set to the tune of "One Night in Bangkok:"
Luke had a booth where he was selling his CDs and his new DVD (which I bought, of course) down on the convention floor as well. I stopped by on Friday before the show and said hello to him and shook hands with him. He posed for this picture for me:
He was really cool, just a totally normal, unprepossessing guy.
Emily and Rob made liberal use of the proximity of many bars while we were there, going out almost every night. I don't know how they had the energy after all the walking and gawking we did during the day. I usually crashed by about 3am each night, which sounds extreme, but trust me, compared to the hustle and bustle of the con, that's light weight.
Saturday morning, Emily and I went to an event which we attended last year and were determined to see again: Hickman's Killer Breakfast. Tracy Hickman is a fantasy author who co-wrote the famous Dragonlance series as well as several others. He's not that great, just your typical fantasy fluff genre fiction, but he's something of a celebrity in the gaming industry. Every year at GenCon, he hosts this show where he pretends to run the biggest D&D game ever. He brings audience members up on stage and demands to know how their "characters" got there. If a person's answer is too silly or uncreative or if Tracy just plain feels like it, he immediately "kills" the character and the person has to get up and make room for someone else. The object of the show is to "stay alive" as long as possible, while Tracy leads the madcap adventure from one spontaneous locale to another. Tracy can be bribed with candy and sweets, and also by extremely creative or clever exploits. People often come prepared not only with what they are going to say, but with boxes of donuts or bags of M&M's. This year, however, one guy came a lot more prepared than that. Just when Tracy was about to kill his character off, he reached under the table and pulled out a LIFE-SIZE, FULL COLOR CARDBOARD CUT OUT OF HIMSELF. He called it his "mirror image" and then held up giant word bubbles next to the cutout's head that said things like "Pick on somebody our own dimension!" This nearly stopped the show; Tracy almost had to sit down he was laughing so hard. So, inevitably the player got killed but Tracy kept the cardboard cutout on stage for the rest of the show. It was a blast. Here are a few pictures:
Here's the cardboard cutout guy. That's the real guy behind it, holding up the word bubbles. Amazing:
Here's Tracy's reaction (and yes, that's a toy double-bladed lightsaber he's holding):
After that, we went to a couple of seminars hosted by the senior staff of Dungeon magazine, the publication which publishes adventure modules for D&D each month. It's the magazine I'm running my current campaign out of. Rob is on friendly terms with most of the staff as he talks to them on their messageboards and on Wikipedia a lot. The seminars were about how to get stuff submitted and published through them and about the previous, current and future adventure paths they've published. The seminars were highly informative and it was great sitting in a casual atmosphere with the guys who, by and large, make my D&D game possible.
Saturday night there was another Luke Ski show, but this one featured two other artists in what was titled the "Comedy Music Showcase." The two other "bands" (which each consisted of just one guy) were Worm Quartet and Sudden Death. Both were good although not nearly as good as Luke. Sudden Death is a rapper who raps about the hell that is IT, email spam and mind-numbing business meetings. Worm Quartet is sort of a synth-punk style where the guy sings about the travails of being a geek (including what I thought was a surprisingly heartfelt song called "I'm Not a Girl," about constantly being confused as a woman simply because he has long hair and man-boobs). Luke came on last and did a few numbers with the other guys. He also debuted a new song, a take-off on those ego songs you often hear rappers sing about where they crow about their success and their rise to fame. Luke came out in an orange pimp coat, a hat and a cane, with two cheerleader dancers on stage with him. It was a riot. Here he is, keeping the pimp hand strong:
The rest of the con was a blur. There were so many great costumes. I took a few pictures of the coolest ones but this hardly does the full tally of them justice by a long shot.
You see a lot of Gandalfs or Gandfal-knockoffs running around these things, but this guy got big props for having a real beard. The pipe was a nice touch too.
These guys were at the Con last year and I cursed the fact that I never got their picture. Fortunately they were back in full regalia this year. You can't tell because of the lighting but their proton packs and accessories had working lights and everything:
Emily made a Renaissance dress for herself and wore it on Thursday night but I neglected to get a picture of it. Next time I seer her, I'll get one of her in it and post it.
This is Cardhalla, a place where people could bring their old, useless Magic cards and the like to build a city's worth of card houses. Then, on Saturday night, they allowed people to come up and chuck spare change at the cards to demolish the entire thing. All the loose change went to charity. I didn't see it demolished but it was pretty impressive while standing. That's only about a third of what was actually there:
My friends just about wore themselves out with their late-night galavanting. I got the most rest of any of us, although I only got about 5 or 6 hours of sleep each night. I wore good shoes this year so my feet did not suffer anywhere near as bad as they did last year. Still, I developed a blister on my right fourth toe which I popped, but it still hurt like hell from Friday on. I'm sure I lost some weight; my stomach feels a little tighter and my pants fit a little looser, and I wasn't quite as squeezed in the front seat of my car on the way home. I'm planning on changing a few eating habits now to spring off this modest gain (or loss, as it were).
It'll take me quite a while to sort through my various souvenirs and freebies. It was sad to say goodbye to the Con this morning, but I think I got my fill. It's so life-affirming to go to a place where everyone there more or less "gets" you. So many geeks out in the world feel alone and misunderstood, and being at GenCon somehow makes it all worth it. Somewhere, out there in the wide world, there are thousands of people whose interests go as deeply obscure as yours do. Somewhere out there, other people laugh at the same nerdy jokes you do. Being a geek isn't a denial of "real life." These people take this stuff dead seriously, and love it with the same passion that other people love more traditional hobbies, or even jobs and careers. Gaming is not a casual throwaway pursuit that people do because they're bored; it's a fulfilling and powerful form of self-expression that, because of its obscurity and just plain old stereotyping, isn't respected the in the ways it deserves. GenCon is a place to remind ourselves each year that we are not alone, that our little slice of the counterculture is indeed our own and is not going away.
I can't wait for next year.
It was four days of gaming and geeks, walking and debauchery. It flew by so fast, but every minute felt alive. Rob, Emily and I set out from IUS around 8:45 and got to our hotel around 10:30. Check-in wasn't until 4pm so we had to kill the rest of the afternoon. That was hardly a problem. We parked and headed out to the convention center. This year, I didn't lug my backpack full of books and my toolbox full of minis with me like I did last year, an act of foolishness that cost me dearly later on in the first day. No, this time I took only my camera, and it was a smart move.
The convention floor looked about the same as last year. Thousands of people milling around, moving from booth to booth, buying, selling, gawking. It's not a place for the agoraphobic or people with crowd anxiety. WOTC dominated the center of the convention floor with a massive exhibition booth over which hung a 50-foot wide banner of a red dragon spouting flames. It was sweet, but I couldn't get a good picture of it because of the sheer size of it.
I bought a few things, nothing terribly exciting. I demoed some games, mostly to win prizes. WOTC has a deal where you can demo their products (by playing a 5 to 10 minute instruction session on a particular game, such as D&D minis or Axis and Allies) and then get a mark saying you did so. If you do two or more demos, you can then go up to this booth and roll a basketball-sized d20 and add the number of demos you played to the roll. Depending on what you roll, you can win a prize. The higher you roll, the better stuff you can get. Even if you got a really low roll, you could get a paltry prize, like a pack of Magic cards or a T-shirt, but if you rolled high you could win a hardcover D&D book. I demoed three games (that was about all I could stand in the heat and the noise) and stood in line to roll the die. There was one book I was very interested in getting (Hordes of the Abyss) and hoped like hell I could roll high enough. So, I rolled the big die and got a 17 (a guy standing nearby actually bumped it just as it stopped to rest and turned it over to a 10, but the WOTC official let me keep the 17) for a total of 20. That won me a book! But, sadly, the book I wanted was all out. All that was left was Eberron and Forgotten Realms crap (which ought to tell WOTC something about those products). Eventually I did manage to find a book called the Red Hand of Doom, which is a mini-campaign taking players from level 6 to 12. It's actually pretty cool and I'm very happy with it, although I would have much preferred Hordes of the Abyss.
After we had our fill of the con floor, we headed back to our hotel around 3:30, thinking surely they would let us check in a bit early. But nothing's ever that simple. Our hotel was brand new; it opened August 1st. In fact, that was pretty much the only thing that let us get a room there, since it had only been added to the GenCon hotel list a few weeks before we got our reservation. As such, they were still working the kinks out. Apparently they hadn't gotten all the rooms cleaned and readied for that day's check-ins, so we ended up having to wait until 5pm to finally get into our room. We sat in the hotel's lobby all that time. We were all exhausted from the walking we'd done, not to mention having been up since 7 or earlier. Here are some pics of us sitting around in our boredom as we waited:
Emily (I screwed up the focus on this picture so it came out all blurry...Sorry Em >.<):
Rob "Bastard" (yes, that's people call him, and he likes it):
Me, doing an extreme close-up self portrait:
Our room, when we finally got into it, was wonderful. It was huge; I don't know square footage, but this thing was as big as some apartments or condos I've seen. It had a sectional sofa with a pullout bed, a full kitchen (range, oven, microwave, full-sized refrigerator, dishwasher, cabinets), two queen-size beds, a large closet, a huge bathroom, two tables with chairs, two widescreen plasma TVs, a chest of drawers, and more. I've seldom seen such a nice hotel room. We had way more space than we needed and it was a pity no one else came to help us split the cost a little more. Here are some pics:
The kitchen and living area. The sofa was just to the left of the frame. Emily slept on it every night:
The beds:
The bathroom (the huge bathtub/shower was just to the right of the frame):
This year, I elected not to register for many official events, since they're a pain to get into, and they cost money. Last year I went to several but had much more fun with the open gaming over in the Hyatt. I ended up registering for only for three events: two Lord of the Rings RPG games and Hickman's Killer Breakfast. More on that later. The games were very much on my "want to do" list because I am/was planning to run a LOTR RPG campaign of my own eventually, but the rules kinda suck and I was hoping to see someone else run it before I jumped in fully. So I went to the first scheduled game on Friday and found myself at a table with a middle-aged couple. We waited and waited and waited but the GM never showed up. This happens more than you might think, and fortunately they allow you to get your money back in that event. The other game I had registered for was with the same GM, so I decided to cancel that one too. The official that gave me the refund said this particular GM hadn't shown up at all and that his had happened to numerous people already during the con. I was bummed that I didn't get to play the game and do some field research on it, but at least I got my money back.
The Indianpolis Convention Center is a huge building and it's surrounded by more huge buildings. But the city planners of downtown Indy were smart because they built a network of skywalks and crosstubes between most of the big downtown attractions. This makes getting around much easier. The convention center links up with a big mall, and is kind of a convenient through-way for convention traffic, instead of winding around the buildings outside. Also, the mall has a food court which feeds a huge portion of the convention attendees. While mall food court prices are hardly cheap, compared to the food they have on-hand in the convention center itself, it's a real deal. We spent a lot of time walking through the mall to get where we were going. Where our hotel was located, we ended up cutting through Nordstrom's every time we went in, which amused me because the staff of such a hoity toity store like Nordstrom's must not have known what hit them: masses of often unwashed, style-challeneged geeks striding through the designer clothes and costume jewelry. Suck it, rich bitches.
In the Hyatt hotel, con attendees could take part in open gaming, that is, free games that didn't require any kind of registration. Instead, you could walk up to a table, ask if the group there needed a player, and sit right down. It was very casual and fun, and it was all held in the foyer of the Hyatt, which has to be one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever been inside. We gamed in the Hyatt every night with a group of Rob's friends who were staying in another hotel. I ran one night, and it was pretty fun, but we usually didn't get started till 8 or 9pm and by then, everyone was usually wiped out. The Hyatt is also unique in that it has several fast food restaurants on its first floor (a McDonald's, a pizza place and a Subway), which makes it damn convenient to just run down and grab some food. The Hyatt also hosted most of the non-gaming events I went to, which I'll talk about in a bit. First, here are some pictures of the inside of the Hyatt:
These are the main elevators. The bluish stuff at the base is actually water: the structure is a really cool fountain that continuously pours sheets of water down over the tiles like a waterfall.
This is immediately above the previous picture, as an elevator rises up to the residential floors. I couldn't even get the whole height of it in a single shot without lying down on the floor.
This is 180 degrees behind the previous picture, looking up into the hotel (as you can see, it's wide open in the center, thus allowing these shots). I imagine the rooms up near the center are the penthouses and super-expensive suites:
This is overlooking one of the open gaming areas. On Saturday night we played at the table on the left in the foreground:
Friday night we went to see The Great Luke Ski in concert. I was introduced to Luke Ski last year at GenCon, where I saw him perform live, before a crowd of perhaps 20 people. Word of mouth must have gotten around this year, because the place was packed full this time. There were at least 150 people at his show this year and even he was amazed. Anyway, for those who don't know, Luke Ski is a comedy singer who is to gaming, sci fi and geekdom what Weird Al is to popular music. Indeed, Luke is extremely popular on the Dr. Demento Show, the radio show where Weird Al first came to fame. Luke sings parody songs (and often raps) about hyper-popular geek topics, such as Star Wars, D&D, Star Trek, Firefly and so on. I bought his newest CD last year and loved it and was greatly anticipating seeing him again this year. He did not disappoint. He closed his show with the awesome "Grease Wars," a medley of songs from Grease, reworded to summarize the first Star Wars film ("It's Obi-wan that I want! Ooh, ooh ooh!") which brought down the house.
Luke hamming it up in his new song "I Love You, Tivo:"
Luke dressed as a Ferengi for his rendition of "One Night in Quark's Bar," set to the tune of "One Night in Bangkok:"
Luke had a booth where he was selling his CDs and his new DVD (which I bought, of course) down on the convention floor as well. I stopped by on Friday before the show and said hello to him and shook hands with him. He posed for this picture for me:
He was really cool, just a totally normal, unprepossessing guy.
Emily and Rob made liberal use of the proximity of many bars while we were there, going out almost every night. I don't know how they had the energy after all the walking and gawking we did during the day. I usually crashed by about 3am each night, which sounds extreme, but trust me, compared to the hustle and bustle of the con, that's light weight.
Saturday morning, Emily and I went to an event which we attended last year and were determined to see again: Hickman's Killer Breakfast. Tracy Hickman is a fantasy author who co-wrote the famous Dragonlance series as well as several others. He's not that great, just your typical fantasy fluff genre fiction, but he's something of a celebrity in the gaming industry. Every year at GenCon, he hosts this show where he pretends to run the biggest D&D game ever. He brings audience members up on stage and demands to know how their "characters" got there. If a person's answer is too silly or uncreative or if Tracy just plain feels like it, he immediately "kills" the character and the person has to get up and make room for someone else. The object of the show is to "stay alive" as long as possible, while Tracy leads the madcap adventure from one spontaneous locale to another. Tracy can be bribed with candy and sweets, and also by extremely creative or clever exploits. People often come prepared not only with what they are going to say, but with boxes of donuts or bags of M&M's. This year, however, one guy came a lot more prepared than that. Just when Tracy was about to kill his character off, he reached under the table and pulled out a LIFE-SIZE, FULL COLOR CARDBOARD CUT OUT OF HIMSELF. He called it his "mirror image" and then held up giant word bubbles next to the cutout's head that said things like "Pick on somebody our own dimension!" This nearly stopped the show; Tracy almost had to sit down he was laughing so hard. So, inevitably the player got killed but Tracy kept the cardboard cutout on stage for the rest of the show. It was a blast. Here are a few pictures:
Here's the cardboard cutout guy. That's the real guy behind it, holding up the word bubbles. Amazing:
Here's Tracy's reaction (and yes, that's a toy double-bladed lightsaber he's holding):
After that, we went to a couple of seminars hosted by the senior staff of Dungeon magazine, the publication which publishes adventure modules for D&D each month. It's the magazine I'm running my current campaign out of. Rob is on friendly terms with most of the staff as he talks to them on their messageboards and on Wikipedia a lot. The seminars were about how to get stuff submitted and published through them and about the previous, current and future adventure paths they've published. The seminars were highly informative and it was great sitting in a casual atmosphere with the guys who, by and large, make my D&D game possible.
Saturday night there was another Luke Ski show, but this one featured two other artists in what was titled the "Comedy Music Showcase." The two other "bands" (which each consisted of just one guy) were Worm Quartet and Sudden Death. Both were good although not nearly as good as Luke. Sudden Death is a rapper who raps about the hell that is IT, email spam and mind-numbing business meetings. Worm Quartet is sort of a synth-punk style where the guy sings about the travails of being a geek (including what I thought was a surprisingly heartfelt song called "I'm Not a Girl," about constantly being confused as a woman simply because he has long hair and man-boobs). Luke came on last and did a few numbers with the other guys. He also debuted a new song, a take-off on those ego songs you often hear rappers sing about where they crow about their success and their rise to fame. Luke came out in an orange pimp coat, a hat and a cane, with two cheerleader dancers on stage with him. It was a riot. Here he is, keeping the pimp hand strong:
The rest of the con was a blur. There were so many great costumes. I took a few pictures of the coolest ones but this hardly does the full tally of them justice by a long shot.
You see a lot of Gandalfs or Gandfal-knockoffs running around these things, but this guy got big props for having a real beard. The pipe was a nice touch too.
These guys were at the Con last year and I cursed the fact that I never got their picture. Fortunately they were back in full regalia this year. You can't tell because of the lighting but their proton packs and accessories had working lights and everything:
Emily made a Renaissance dress for herself and wore it on Thursday night but I neglected to get a picture of it. Next time I seer her, I'll get one of her in it and post it.
This is Cardhalla, a place where people could bring their old, useless Magic cards and the like to build a city's worth of card houses. Then, on Saturday night, they allowed people to come up and chuck spare change at the cards to demolish the entire thing. All the loose change went to charity. I didn't see it demolished but it was pretty impressive while standing. That's only about a third of what was actually there:
My friends just about wore themselves out with their late-night galavanting. I got the most rest of any of us, although I only got about 5 or 6 hours of sleep each night. I wore good shoes this year so my feet did not suffer anywhere near as bad as they did last year. Still, I developed a blister on my right fourth toe which I popped, but it still hurt like hell from Friday on. I'm sure I lost some weight; my stomach feels a little tighter and my pants fit a little looser, and I wasn't quite as squeezed in the front seat of my car on the way home. I'm planning on changing a few eating habits now to spring off this modest gain (or loss, as it were).
It'll take me quite a while to sort through my various souvenirs and freebies. It was sad to say goodbye to the Con this morning, but I think I got my fill. It's so life-affirming to go to a place where everyone there more or less "gets" you. So many geeks out in the world feel alone and misunderstood, and being at GenCon somehow makes it all worth it. Somewhere, out there in the wide world, there are thousands of people whose interests go as deeply obscure as yours do. Somewhere out there, other people laugh at the same nerdy jokes you do. Being a geek isn't a denial of "real life." These people take this stuff dead seriously, and love it with the same passion that other people love more traditional hobbies, or even jobs and careers. Gaming is not a casual throwaway pursuit that people do because they're bored; it's a fulfilling and powerful form of self-expression that, because of its obscurity and just plain old stereotyping, isn't respected the in the ways it deserves. GenCon is a place to remind ourselves each year that we are not alone, that our little slice of the counterculture is indeed our own and is not going away.
I can't wait for next year.