…

OK, yeah, I’m a bit too long-winded for that.  So, rough summary, in bullet-point format:

• Attendance for 6Pi-Con was way down, which is understandable considering that Hurricane Irene was projected to pass right over the hotel.  So the con felt a bit lonely at times, but overall the con staff and the hotel did a heroic job of adapting to the situation.  They even organized a track of programming for after the con officially ended on Sunday, in case people ended up trapped in Enfield.
• Probably the highlights of my weekend were attending the two workshops run by the music guests of honor, Heather Dale and Ben Deschamps, as well as their concert on Saturday.  Ben did a workshop on guitar technique on Saturday morning, and Heather did a performance workshop on Sunday morning.  Heather and Ben are both lovely people and awesome musicians, and it was great to meet and hear them.  Also, Ben absolutely saved our asses on Sunday.  More on that later.
• Sandry and I ran Time Travel Review Board on Friday night.  While the turnout was small, the game went pretty well, I thought.  I hadn’t previously imagined it was possible to run this game with 6 players, and while much of the content of the game doesn’t come out that way, the game still works reasonably well and is a pretty similar game to the way it runs with a full cast.
• I attempted to play in Kat, Josh & Allan’s new vampire LARP on Friday night, but they didn’t meet their minimum.  It looks like a fun game, though, and I hope they end up running at Intercon or Festival.
• I sat on four panels!  LARP 101 was extremely well-attended, and was, IMO, the best LARP 101 panel I’ve seen at Pi-Con (and the third one I’ve been on at Pi-Con).  Filk 101 was a lot of fun, and while I felt like a bit of an amateur on the panel (especially considering that Heather Dale was in the audience!), the discussion was lively and we even played a few songs.  SMOF 101: Intro to Conrunning was a good panel, but I felt a bit superfluous sitting next to Michael and Jeff, who really could have done the panel on their own.  My last panel was Borderline Sci-Fi, which I moderated.  I honestly did not think I did a great job with this one; the panelists were two professional authors and I think I asked some good questions and some stupid questions.
• On Saturday night, Conor and I hosted the Intercon L party!  This was pretty much the typical Intercon party we’ve always tried to run at Pi-Con, which is to say, a chill hangout zone with snacks, Intercones and without a lot of pressure to come to Intercon.  If anyone’s curious, this year’s flavors were Blue Raspberry, Orange-Pineapple, and Mudslide.
• I was theoretically one of the leaders of the Bawdy Song Circle, but truthfully that thing doesn’t need a lot of leading.  I was sad to have to leave it halfway through to go back to hosting the Intercon party.
• Finally, we had the Stranger Ways 2.0 concert on Sunday.  We were a man down on this one, since due to a confluence of the weather and his wife being very pregnant, our bassist Jon couldn’t make it.  Fortunately, music guest of honor and god amongst men Ben Deschamps saved our asses, filling in on guitar during La Llorona (which in its SW2.0 arrangement is a bass-driven song).  The concert was a lot of fun to play, and while it would have been nice to have had the bass, I think we sounded pretty good nonetheless.  Harold Stein recorded audio of it, so I’m hoping to get that posted for y’all to hear soon.

The weekend before last, I attended Wyrd Con One, the first all-LARP convention on the West Coast.  Joining me in my travels was fellow Alleger Greer Hauptman.

Wyrd Con was at once familiar and strange.  It was a larger convention than any Intercon in history.  It was a more diverse LARP convention than any I’ve ever heard of.  It was fun, instructive, frustrating, and fascinating.  Above all, it was, well, weird.

The con itself

Wyrd Con was held at the Hilton in Costa Mesa, California.  This is in Orange County, which for those (like myself) not very familiar with California, is a famously well-off area southeast of Los Angeles.  The Costa Mesa Hilton is a nice convention-center hotel, situated within a gigantic swath of suburban sprawl.

Wyrd Con was big.  The figure I heard was 318 attendees.  This makes it, much to my chagrin, the largest LARP convention ever held in North America.  Well, we’ll just have to beat them next year…

Intercon bills itself as a “multi-genre LARP convention,” but Wyrd Con absolutely puts Intercon to shame in that department.  Wyrd Con is extremely diverse in the LARPers it attracts: there were plenty of boffer-style players from all literary genres; White Wolf groups; Call of Cthulhu folks; theatre-style teams coming from LA, the United Kingdom, the Nordic countries, and (natch) New England; and there were LARPs I’m not even 100% sure how to categorize.

Wyrd Con had a very well-stocked vendors room.  What was most impressive to me, coming from Intercon, was that seemingly every vendor there was LARP-related.  In practice this meant they were mostly selling garb, props, and boffer weaponry.  As one might expect, most of the stuff on display was from the fantasy and steampunk genres.

Concurrent with Wyrd Con was the 2010 LARP Summit.  This was two simultaneous tracks of panels, workshops, and talks on various aspects of LARP.  It was pretty similar in content to Intercon’s Pre-Convention (nee Thursday Thing), but unlike at Intercon, the Summit was run simultaneous to the rest of the convention.  In addition to the events themselves, the LARP Summit produced a book, which you can read online.  (I wrote one of the essays in it.)

Intercon uses the con suite as a socialization space.  Instead of that, Wyrd Con had an area called the Tavern, which had a bar serving beer, wine, and cocktails.  They also had a stage for live musicians, who were scheduled for most of the con.  In theory I like this idea a lot, but in practice the sound system the musicians were using was way too loud for the space and made it difficult to socialize, so people mostly ended up hanging out in hallways.

I found registration at Wyrd Con a bit confusing.  They had an online pre-registration system for events at the con, similar to Intercon, but I found it somewhat difficult to use, and in addition, people receiving free admission to the con for running games there (like me and Greer) had to pay extra to pre-register for games.  At the con itself, you could pick up one of a limited quantity of event tickets, which were meant to be handed in at the event door.  But Greer and I didn’t find out about the ticket system until Saturday, so we missed getting into some games and ended up waitlisting a bunch.

The play-by-play

Friday

• Greer and I arrived a little bit late to the con (having come in on the Greyhound from San Francisco).  We checked into our room after some confusion at the desk.
• We checked into the con and got our extremely nice metal convention badges!  Yay!
• We noticed that there was a game called Casino Arcana running soon, organized by our buddies at Enigma Live Game Labs, so we decided to go check it out.  But the game was full when we got there.  We decided to wait around and see if anyone didn’t show up.  One person didn’t, so Greer got to play.  I decided to go check out the panels.
• I walked in halfway through a panel called LARP and Performance Art – A Crossroads.  This was a presentation by Brody Condon, an American artist with a background in performance art, and Bjarke Pedersen, a Dutch LARP designer who is the incoming chair of Knutepunkt.  This was a really fascinating look at some of the LARPs they have collaborated on over the past few years as well as their frightening and awesome-looking current project.
• After the panel, the presenters and most of the audience went to get some drinks from the Tavern and talk about the state of LARP in various geographical areas from which we all came.
• Eventually I had to set up for our 2:00 AM (!!!) run of 10 Bad LARPs: Remix! I wasn’t incredibly optimistic about getting players for this due to the time, but it turned out we were fine.  This was probably our most violent run of 10 Bad LARPs to date (and that’s really saying something).  Tons of delirious, half-drunken fun was had by all.

Saturday

• Woke up at 8:00 AM.  Ugh.  Felt hung over.  That turned out to be perfect for…
• Rock Band Murder Mystery! Greer and I got in off the waitlist for this Enigma game.  This was what we in New England call a “WYSIWYG” game, or what the Nordic LARPers call a “360 degree” game, meaning that everything in the game space is diagetically real.  The couch is a real couch, the panties draped over the nightstand are real panties draped over the nightstand, the bowl of M&Ms with all the green ones removed is a real…

  I played the band manager, Shannon.  This was a fun role that I really got into.  The game itself was a perfectly decent murder mystery, perhaps a bit unevenly plotted in places, but solidly designed.  What really made the experience special was the immersiveness – everything felt marvelously real.

• We caught the tail end of Lunch with the Queen.  This was the aforementioned LARP I wasn’t 100% sure how to categorize.  It was an unplotted, free-conversation, in-character event without pregenerated characters.  When we walked in it felt like a fairly serious, SCA-style affair, mostly centered around being in the persona of a medieval character, but the players actually joked around quite a bit.  We asked them about it afterwards and they told us that the tone of their events varies a lot depending on how people are feeling – sometimes it’s really serious and sometimes really silly.
• I watched the panel about The US Military’s LARP, which was about Fort Irwin’s training simulation, a gigantic, extremely realistic simulacrum of an Iraqi town.  A guest speaker from the Army came and gave a brief talk, then showed us part of a documentary about the site, and took questions from the audience.  It was really fascinating, and I’d love to take a tour there at some point.
• I sat on the panel about The Art of LARP, moderated by Aaron Vanek.  We talked about whether or not LARP can be classified as an art form, and what the benefits to thinking of it as one might be.  I had attended a similar panel by Aaron at Intercon J and had high hopes for this one, but I don’t think it went over as well with the Wyrd Con audience as it had at Intercon.
• I attended the talk by Bjarke on Twelve Nordic LARPs that everyone should know about.  This wasn’t simply a rundown of twelve important games as I had expected, but rather a look at the various styles of LARP in Nordic countries using these games as a means to illustrate them.  General impression: wow, Nordic LARPs are way more intense than American ones.  I need to go to Knutepunkt.
• After dinner, Greer and I set up for Welcome to Scearbridge University.  This game was way under-registered: we only ever had about half of the minimum number of players we needed to run the game.  So I had cunningly printed out a backup game as well, with the intention of probably running it instead.  That’s how we ended up running The Trial.  It went quite well, I thought.  Greer did some excellent out-in-the-hallway recruiting, so we were able to run only a few players short of full, and we had one of the more nuanced outcomes I’ve seen in that game.
• After the game, con chair Ira Ham showed up and talked with me and the remaining players for awhile.  It was really interesting to meet Ira and get to hear about the process of putting Wyrd Con together.

Sunday

• I went to the Enigma Live Game Labs brunch, where I got to talk to a bunch of cool people, including Larry Niven.  Yes, that one.  Also, I got to have some awesome in-depth discussions about LARPs past and present with two of the Brits who had signed up for Scearbridge: Hanbury Hampden-Turner and Rachael England.  Turns out they ran two games at Wyrd Con which I had managed to totally miss.  Suck!
• Greer and I were invited out to a dead dog by Fei Leung, a local LARPer who had jumped in at the last minute to fill a really important role in The Trial.  There, we got to meet some of the southern California scene, who are a really cool bunch and really welcomed us in.
• Then we went back to the hotel.  I fell asleep pretty much immediately and involuntarily.  Greer watched the Criminal Minds marathon.

Monday

• Woke up early and got my rental car.  Went back to the hotel and checked out.
• Greer and I drove to Six Flags Magic Mountain!  Woohoo!

  I realize my roller coaster geekery doesn’t really belong in a LARP con report, but I will just say that Goliath and X2 are fucking amazing, and if you’re ever north of LA and have the time, you really must go check them out.

So that was Wyrd Con.

It was fun.  It was definitely worthwhile.

Will I go back next year?  Quite possibly.  Will you come with me?

I had privately resolved at New Year’s to get more exercise, but joining a gym hadn’t really helped much.  I felt healthier, but I didn’t get to the gym as much as I would have liked to, and I hated doing it.  I had recently read The Hacker’s Diet by John Walker, which had given me hope that really transformative dieting – the kind where you go on it until you’re not overweight anymore – was even possible, and some ideas about how to do it.  I downloaded a calorie-tracking iPhone application and started counting everything I ate.

Much to my surprise, calorie counting actually worked.  It worked so well that since last Passover, I have lost 45 pounds.

Unfortunately, February-April is convention season.  My diet has gone somewhat by the wayside and I’ve gained back 5 of those.  That’s why I’m announcing here publicly: I am renewing my Passover resolution. Over the last year I did pretty well, but the work is not yet done.

This is going to be a long engagement – no wedding date yet, and no plans to set one for quite some time.  Since Vik is in school, and has absolutely no free time to be planning a wedding, we figured it would be best to wait on this one.

I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s reached out to me during my unemployment.  Y’all are the best group of friends I could wish for.  Seriously.

There is — probably — at least one person on your friends list that wants to f*ck the hell out of you.

Soooo . . . let’s play the game everyone loves, F*ck or Pass!

The rules, they are simple.

If you want to f*ck the person who posts this, send him or her a reply saying “I’d f*ck you.” (Or however you’d want to say it… please, feel free to embellish! Creativity may be rewarded!)

(This is, of course, a totally imaginary game that does not take into account current relationships.)

Then, marvel at the replies! Comments are screened.

In exchange, you have to are encouraged to post this in your journal.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really, really bad idea?  Do you really want to know this information?  This is the kind of stuff that causes friendship-breaking tensions between people.

So please, people, if you want to have sex, fellatio, BDSM, or anything else of the sort with me – wait for an appropriate moment and then perhaps tell me.  It’s not because I don’t like you or don’t want to have sex with you – I just don’t want to ruin a perfectly good friendship by making things weird between us.

And the same goes for people who have posted this on your blog: don’t assume I don’t want to have sex with you just because I haven’t responded.

Comments are disabled for this post just in case anyone feels like ignoring my sage advice…

I think the ticket was something like $45, but I’ll have to check it once I get home. Any takers?

(Jim’s Big Ego, for those who haven’t already heard me yammer on and on about them, is one of my favorite pop/folk bands. Their web site has a lot of songs you can check out.)

We’re going to be renting a condo in Bridle Cross Estates, a fairly new development on the outskirts of town.  Here’s a picture:

That’s not a faked picture; our street really does look like that.

So yeah, come visit us (once we live there)!  It’s a really, really nice place.  And Fitchburg isn’t as far away as you think.  Seriously, I tried the commute this morning: door-to-door, it’s about 50 minutes from Somerville in no traffic, and 1 hour 10 minutes in traffic.

* OK, so Fitchburg itself isn’t really that lovely.  But just outside of Fitchburg there are some pretty nice neighborhoods, and this is one of them.