tigertoy

It's OVFF time! If any of the three people who read this care, I will have EFRC calendars available as usual; if you tell me now you want one, I'll make a point of finding you at the con.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone, hearing lots of music, as many hugs as possible, and painful choices for the Pegasus awards!

I'm home in one piece from Windycon. Sorry I couldn't stay for more of the dead dog but as tired as I am now, I would not want to still be on the road for sure!

If I try to tell myself I'm supposed to write a con report now then I'll never post anything. The one thing I do want to make a permanent record of was dinner on Saturday night. Place in Glen Ellyn, so like a 10 minute drive from the Windycon hotel, called Hokkai. All you can eat sushi, including simple and fancy maki and a good selection of nigiri, plus appetizers. Very tasty and quite reasonably priced at $21.49 a head.

Winter War was this weekend (well, it's still going on, but I won't be there tomorrow because I'll be at EFRC). I never got around to either submitting events or preregistering, but I played in 3 events. Dominion, which I should have been running (the person running it did not know the game well and arbitrarily said that he would be doing some things different from the rules). He was running with only Adventures cards, which isn't a good idea -- Adventures cards are a little broken, especially when they're all together. I won the first game despite my luck making the cards I had underperform. The second game had Port as the only path to extra actions, and my bad luck meant that I only got to buy one pair before they sold out. We played a third game which was remarkable because all of the actions game extra actions, so Port (which was there again) was only good, not great, and Coin of the Realm, which is huge in games where extra actions matter, was a dud.

The next event was a double, Suburbia and Castles of Mad King Ludwig. I hadn't actually played Suburbia before, and I was struggling a bit, because despite trying as hard as I could to boost my income, I didn't have any money for a long time. Turns out that even though they don't give income every turn, lakes are a better plan than they seemed, and Homeowner's Association (which I didn't get) is kinda broken. I finally got something rolling when I got a Stadium and started racking up my reputation, but I still didn't win. Then we played Castles, which I'd played once before, but we ran out of time, when they closed the room we had probably another half hour to go. I did all right but not awesome. I'd play either of these games again but I don't feel the urge to run out and buy them.

This afternoon, I played a game I had not heard of before, although I guess it's a couple of years old, called Keyflower. The name turns out to be a mashup of "key", because it's part of a series of Key games, and "Mayflower". The theme is that we're building settlements in the new world. It's a worker placement, resource management game, so familiar themes but a bit different from anything I'd seen before, and it definitely seems to have replay value, but I don't recall ever seeing it on my local game stores' shelves. I concentrated on having a lot of meeples, upgrading my tiles, and taking other points as they came along, and won the game, but I don't know if I actually played well.

So I am safely home from MFF. It was a fun weekend, but a lot less fun than it could have been for me. The convention has just gotten too big. It started sometime last Spring when I learned that the Hyatt was already sold out, before I'd learned that the room block was open. So it was the first year that I've been in someone else's room, and because they didn't want to stay over Sunday night, I didn't either. We ended up in the Hyatt Thursday night and then at the Hilton Friday and Saturday, which meant (a) having to move hotels, (b) having to figure out where to park for Friday and Saturday, and (c) having the room very inconveniently far from the con.

We left town on Thursday at 4, picking up the fourth passenger at Parkland on the way out of town. The trip to the hotel was uneventful. I went to make myself a sandwich and discovered that I'd forgotten my mustard, which made my dinner much less appealing. I picked up my badge and signed up as a gopher. I went to the Art Show, thinking I would be helping to set up, to find that they were packing up for the evening. So I went back to ops and asked where I could help set up, and they sent me to Con Suite, where I did things for 15 minutes, and then spent most of the rest of an hour waiting for someone in charge to tell me what I needed to do, and then they said they were done for the evening. I decided I was through volunteering for the evening and went to the game room, where I played a couple of games of magic before they closed the room at midnight.

Friday, we managed to check in early at the Hilton, so we were able to move our stuff directly from one room to the other. We went to the Fashion Mall food court for lunch, and I snagged a handful of mustard packets from the pretzel stand (I bought some cinnamon pretzel bits, so I wasn't just mooching) so I could make edible sandwiches. I moved the car into the convention center parking across the driveway from the Hyatt parking. I hit the dealer's and got a couple of books and a couple of shirts. Went to the concert, which was headlined by Amadhia, backed up by Fox Amoore and Pepper Coyote. I liked the music, despite the make-your-ears-bleed volume which was not appropriate to their music. Other than that, I hung around in the game room a lot.

Saturday, I watched the fursuit parade, checked out the art show, which is shrinking in size and awesomeness even as the rest of the con grows -- it seems like art shows are just not working as ways for artists to reach their audience, even in the furry fandom where art is huge. I texted a few people about dinner but couldn't find any takers. Was planning to hit the Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind show, when Sci texted me that he was planning to see the Pepper Coyote and Fox Amoore concert at the same time which I'd missed on the schedule. I'm glad I went, because Pepper hadn't impressed me in the Friday concert, but Saturday he got to show off some beatboxing and looping skills. I wandered around the convention area a lot, wondering why I found so few people I knew, and spent some more hours in the game room. Ended the night by stopping by the dance to see what it was like -- the light show was impressive and and the big ballroom was moderately full of furs, mostly at least kind of dancing, but I was weighed down by my backpack and not much in the mood to do what dancing I do.

Sunday, got up in time to shower and leave the room at noon, then watched the dance competition, and we headed home.

The combination of my room being a half-mile walk from the con and my having packed much more than I should in the backpack I wanted to carry with me really weighed me down. I definitely shouldn't have brought Dominion with me -- it's just too much of an anchor. Of course, even if I'd been in the main hotel, if I'd been stuck on a high floor, my room would have been almost as inaccessible, because they were running elevator control -- MFF attendees could only get on the elevator on the main floor, which meant that the traffic jam around the escalators was even more phenomenal than last year -- and you had to line up and wait to get on. If I go next year -- which, for the first time ever I'm not completely sure I will -- I will really want to have a room in the Hyatt on a walkable floor. And I want to tell myself now that having a good con experience will depend on having some things planned in advance, because the con has gotten too big to just bump into people I know and tag along with them.

Safely home from Windycon. There was a lot of music. Wall to wall concerts from Friday at 8 until Sunday at 2, the only gap being Saturday evening. They need the stage for the masquerade. Enough of the concerts were ones I wanted to hear that I didn't get to any other programming (even though there was a fair bit of programming I would have attended if I'd been idle, and a few things I really didn't want to miss). I did manage a turn through the art show. It was cool to see the Eisenstein collection, and there were some good pieces, but certainly not the amount of stuff that we used to see in the Windycon art show a few years ago. (One of the panels I didn't make it to discussed this trend and the future of art shows.) I made it to open filk Friday, with very few other people, and ran out of steam early. Went to dinner at a place called Dao Sushi and Thai, where I had a decent red curry. My table mates let me have a bite of one of their super fancy maki rolls; I can't recall what was in it but it was amazing. Expensive, though. We got back to the hotel a bit before 9 and the music was getting started, so I skipped the parties completely. The filk was good until I packed it in around 1:30 because I had to get up at 10 to get stuff out of the room before the concerts began at 11. This is about where the bad part of the con started for me, because I just couldn't get to sleep. It was around 5 when I broke out the occasional-use extra sleeping medication (I was tired enough that I didn't remember it before then, but didn't sleep). My poor sleep had me enjoying Sunday less than I would have, but there was some good music. I got a couple of songs in in the dead dog circle, but I realized that if I stayed very long, I would probably not be able to make it home.

Safely home from Capricon. I had a good time, got some badly needed emotional recharge, and am frustrated it ended so soon. I spent most of my con in concerts (between the Cafe and main stage), which meant that I was getting concerted out by the time the main event concerts came around Saturday night, with Cheshire Moon giving a great show opening for Alexander James Adams, who is still fabulous. I also made it to open filk both nights and carried my weight in the circles without (I think) being a filk hog.

I didn't make it to any regular programming, even though there was some I kind of wanted to get to, because there was so much music I wanted to hear. Since not being able to do all the things at the con that you'd want to isn't actually a complaint, the main things that were less than perfect were the horrible hotel air (seriously, hotel air is always so dry it's corrosive, but it seemed worse than usual -- is it just me?), and the fact that the parking lot was so jammed that we didn't dare leave on Saturday, so I didn't get to have Pita Inn. The con didn't seem to have more attendees than usual, and although there was a lot of snow around, I don't think snow piles were actually taking up more than a handful of parking spaces. I think the problem was that Valentine's Day was Saturday -- I think there were more mundanes than usual staying in the hotel, and there were certainly a lot of people coming to Saranello's.

I'm sure there were problems at the con that were actually con related, but the concom and staff handled them smoothly enough that I never noticed. Everything seemed to run very well. Kudos especially to the filk and cafe people who put together the parts I was at (and made them so all encompassing that I didn't get to much else).

Safely home from Windycon, despite the efforts of the weather, which turned nasty right about the Main Line Station rest area on 57. Two weeks before Thanksgiving is too damn early to have to worry about snow.

The only time I spent more than a few minutes not happy with how I was using the time was the time I was lying in bed tossing and turning and not sleeping, which I don't feel I can blame the con for. There were too many concerts -- I got to 6 but still missed several I either know I would have enjoyed or was curious to find out. Open filk was nice both nights, though more sparsely attended Saturday than I expected. I had to bow out earlier than I wanted Saturday because I was just too tired, but I know I made at least a couple of people happy, so I count the filking a success even though I felt the pain of being out of practice.

Thanks to everyone who offered support and hugs.

Got back from Capricon an hour or so ago. A fair bit of music, a little gaming, went to one panel, saw a bunch of people. Wasn't organized, didn't have a plan for dinner, didn't end up going to eat with anyone. Friday dinner was a sandwich in the room. Saturday, birder2 and I both wanted something else, but we didn't find anyone to go to eat with. We thought we'd try to get something delivered but it turned out the wait was going to be 2 hours. The weather was awful and the parking lot was full so we didn't want to give up our parking space, so we tried to go to the hotel restaurant. They were mobbed and had a 1.5 hour wait for a table for 2, so we ended up getting takeout from the hotel restaurant Saranello's. Which at least wasn't another sandwich. They're pretty good but pretty pricey. almeda did not want to wait until 11 to filk so started a renegade hallway filk, where I had a great time until we moved into the mail room around midnight, where there was more filk for an hour and a half or so. Then had to get up too early this morning, but somehow managed it, and had a good time at Toast and Jam. I played my guitar more in the past 24 hours than I had in the past month -- and that included GAFilk. It was good, but my hands hurt.

Safely home from OVFF. I've been very depressed lately, so I came in not really emotionally ready for a con (to say nothing of musically). It helped to spend the weekend with friends. It didn't help to get the news on Saturday that my uncle passed away suddenly.

I'm not going to write a long post, because if I try to do that, I'll never post anything at all.

Just a quick note that I've made it safely home from FCN, as far as my mom's place at least. The con was fun. I'm tired. I might manage to say something more substantial but not right now.