Friday | Fri/Sat | Saturday | Sat/Sun
I desperately needed a shower and Sarah desperately needed food. After achieving the former, we made a quick Subway run to handle the latter. Besides icing down my thumb, the next stop was to check in with Richard and the rest of the room party circuit. Chill Con was reaching its pinnacle.
And yes, I still consider chess, dodgeball and hunting spider gods relaxing.
Saturday Night/Sunday
Velvet Room
Actually, the first person we ran into was Cheesus. Rather than hit the room parties, we returned to our room just to chat with her for a while and get her impression of the con. It was truly chilling.
Then we got a call from Richard. Remember that big Devil Bats room party? Apparently some strange circumstances had come up and he was forced to leave early. Thus me and Langland were in charge. The hell?
Sarah and I rushed to the room to find that Richard and his belongings had completely vanished. All that remained was oodles of food, soda and a very flummoxed Langland. We opened the doors and considered actually trying to do this for a while, especially since Sarah's Wausau friends were playing Apples to Apples nearby. Where there is Apples to Apples, there is a possible room party.
Then we came to our senses. This party was Richard's baby and we didn't want to be tethered to it all night. Running a room party was in direct violation of my Daisho dogma this year. Langland preferred to be free to roam the con and hang with his fellow No Brand staffers, so we agreed to put her down gently. And when we do things gently, we mean declaring a run of the house on any opened soda, chips and hot dogs while splitting up the rest for ourselves.
There are now four colors of Mountain Dew in my fridge- green, red, blue and orange.
Much of it ended up down with the Wausau folk as we played Apples to Apples. We soon realized that this wasn't a great spot for it. The table was small, the lighting was bad (it's an sunroof-fueled atrium), and about fifteen minutes in a bunch of nuts playing a very aggressive zombie LARP barged in and came awfully close to tearing up the place. We decided to move to a hotel room.
Eric is still wearing the death card he got during his adventure in the spider realm. At least he didn't attempt to shoot Arderath with the Nerf gun...
...the way Alex here did. Oh, he ate it hard.
Since it's building up a convention streak that will give the whole Tiffany Grant thing a run for its money, it's safe to say that it's getting a little boring detailing the quirks of each particular Apples to Apples game every con. Especially since this group plays a little more straight-laced than when Evan's involved. They even gave me weird looks when I awarded Brilliant to the Challenger Explosion.
This went on until 3:00 am. By then, we were all beat, especially since I had a panel early Sunday morning.
Interestingly, The Herald never returned Saturday night. We later discovered that he stayed up late too, but figured we had went to bed early and didn't want to wake us, so crashed in the No Brand room. Yes, he does read these recaps, but I haven't pulled too many late nighters as of late, so I suppose that's a fair assumption.
Packing up was very easy for us Sunday morning, which was good as I had a 10:00 panel that morning. We found Herald, gave him a room key so he could get his things out of there, and got to breakfast, eating with Nick F. before the panel.
I say "the panel" because I'm still not entirely sure what it was supposed to be called. It was submitted as Con Veteran's Association, a meeting between four long-time congoers with several stories to tell, based on similar panels at Ohayocon and Detour. That was an awful title for the panel and something equally-awful ended up in the program book. As Events Coordinator for Geek.Kon, I'm making a note that if any panel titles need changing, I'm working with the panelist to turn it into something awesome before changing it on my own.
So here we are- Trae (No Brand co-founder), myself (recapper extraordinaire), Kara Kuro (Daisho staffer and frequent cosplayer/artist) and Cheesus (the one and only Cheesus). And we're all pretending we're awake and happy to have a 10:00 panel on Sunday.
The one consequence of our craptacular timeslot was that we did resort to sharing a microphone. At a normal hour, none of us would have needed one.
Thankfully, we were irresistible enough to draw a good crowd away from the siren song of checking out of the hotel room on time (which both Trae and Kara ducked out early to do at one point).
The panel itself was great. We let the audience dictate which topics we covered. The first question, for example, was about the guests we have met. I mentioned you-know-who and beaning Travis Willingham. There were first experiences, travel incidents, and all sorts of great stories involved. We concluded with our grand finales, because if I'm going to moderate a con experiences panel, I've got to get the sex offender story out there (doubly amusing as Scott was pacing around the hallway outside and had made several friends who were present at the panel).
Thanks to a rotten wireless connection at the hotel, the only thing the laptop was good for was showing off Nick K.'s impromptu L cosplay from Detour.
After the panel, we got the laptop to the car and found Trae, Yushi and Geek.Kon masquerade coordinator Sarah B. talking about conventions in general. I was all about that. So were a lot of other people that happened to wander by that critical hallway of the hotel.
This little summit was fun- discussing various nuances of convention operation, convention relations and stuff. It ended up killing a lot of time too.
While most of the summit ended up running to Perkins, we weren't hungry and instead hit the vendor room for one last trip. A productive one as I found a sweet School Rumble cell phone charm.
Alex found a nice button to commemorate his attempt to bother Arderath. Pissed off any vengeful deities lately?
We ran through artist's alley one more time and ended up in the gaming room to sit for a spell.
...and ended up getting into an epic chess match with Alex. After a few great moves and critical errors on both parts, it ended up as pawns only before I finally fell.
Again, this is somehow relaxing.
That was about it. We said our good byes to assorted friends, most of whom were named Nick. We were completely exhausted, but at the same time, operation Chill Con seemed somehow successful. In celebration, we did the only natural thing...
Reported to our Geek.Kon meeting that night. I assure you that Labor Day weekend next year will definitely not be a time for me to relax.