FailCon 2014, Day 1 - Everybody arrives in Chicago, aka walking and walking and walking
(Left to right - alliancesjr, sonozakitwins, jasondemotte, jaklocke, phoenix_anew, noelct, skybreak_seeker)
It was an event at least two years in the making. Maybe more. The group of people who were part of made_of_fail_pc network and/or who got to know each other thanks to Made of Fail were going to try to meet up during the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo (C2E2). Since Chicago is centrally located relative to everybody else, and since more than a few of us live in Chicagoland, it seemed like a logical choice.
It wasn't the entire group. cherrymaryberry and sirius20_81 couldn't make it. Neither could Bethany. CC has way more pressing issues to worry about it at the moment (and she did attend a whole other con closer to her home earlier this year). I think westonian was just plain busy. Any visit by ceilidh_ann would've involved a transcontinental flight, and besides, I don't think she's into comics all that much at all - if she was going to fly over there, it would be for a musical or some and such. it would have been fun to talk with mysticowl in Russian and screw with everybody's heads, but, like Ceilidh, she's not into comics much. Ditto RedHeadedGirl. (Edit: Since this post was originally written, RedHeadedGirl has since told me that she wanted to come - she just couldn't afford to). There was talk about rowandoll and his husband, Randy, stopping by, but Rowan got sick. And those are just the ones I know or sort-of-know.
But we still managed to get together more people than ever before, which was quite an accomplishment.
Adam (skybreak_seeker) and Kevin were good friends for a pretty long time, so it was only natural that he would stay at Kevin and Lore's. But all the other out-of-towners decided to share a room at South Loop Hotel - a recently built hotel on the edge of the former site of Harold Ickles Homes public housing development. It was within walking distance from McCormick Place where the convention was held, but because of its location, it was fairly off the radar. Since I actually lived in Chicago city limits and know quite a bit about our fair Windy City, I offered to show them around and generally hang out.
Technically speaking, I knew Noel longer than all of the MoFers - we first met at the March 2011 C2E2, when he was hanging out with Queenanthai, before the Events of April 2011 changed everything. I knew Angie (phoenix_anew) since 2011, when I offered to review her novel, Hinges of Destiny. It was not the kindest review, but thankfully, she never held it against me. I got to know her boyfriend, Jak, over time, mostly through Let's Play livestreams he, Noel and Angie did. JD (jasondemotte), on the other hand, was a bit of an unknown quantity. He and Angie do A Return to the Dreaming, a podcast about Neil Gaiman's iconic Sandman series, and we may have exchanged a few words on Twitter, but I can't say I knew all that much about him.
I haven't seen Angie, Jak or JD in real life before, so yeah - I was a bit nervous.
Originally, I was going to write about FailCon in one post. Then two. Now, I think I'll just do one post for every day. The Sunday one would just have to be much shorter than the others.
Day 1 - April 24, 2014
The South Loop Hotel Delegation arrived on Thursday, April 24. Noel and JD would arrive by plane early in the morning, and Angie and Jak would drive in in the afternoon. Noel and JD would take the Blue Line from O'Hare, we'd meet at Jackson and I'll take them to the hotel. Well, show them how to get to the hotel, anyway.
The idea was that they would meet me on the platform, right where the stairs went down to the transfer tunnel that connects Jackson/Dearborn and Jackson/State stations. But I guess I didn't explain it well enough. Because, the next time I heard from them, they said they were waiting by the Dunkin Donuts.
Which threw me for a loop. There was definitely no Dunkin Donuts on the platform, or at any of the station exits.
"Are you outside?" I texted Noel.
"No, we are still at the terminal," was the reply.
I had to think about it logically. They were still in the station. And since neither of the Blue Line entrances had a Dunkin Donuts, than they would logically have to be near the Jackston/State station's Jackston Street entrance (the Van Buren entrance definitely didn't have a Dunkin Donuts, either). And sure enough, there they were.
I'm pretty sure that "There's no Dunkin Donuts on Jackson" is going to become one of those recurring stream jokes.
Once we had that part figured out, we took the Red Line to Roosevelt station and took the State Street bus to the South Loop Hotel. Everything went fairly smoothly, Noel and JD got checked in, the luggage was dropped off and, after hanging around for a bit, we decided to get lunch.
Now, as everybody reading this should know by now, I love talking about Chicago. I liked giving tours of Chicago. And, as annanov and I have joked, I am my mother's child. I want to show as much as possible, any way possible. So I figured we'd dine at one of the cheaper restaurants on Chinatown Square and I'll show a decent chunk of Chinatown in the process.
Which was not a bad plan. I figured a walk from 26th Street to Archer shouldn';t be that big of a deal. It was only a couple of blocks, right?