CoffeeBear.net

Post Flood Update

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

Yup, we’re still here. Just been busy/not felt like writ­ing. Points of inter­est post-flood:

• Drove past a hot air bal­loon that had landed on the side of the rode while com­ing back from a friend’s house.
• Two days later drove under a mas­sive light­ning storm com­ing back from the same friend’s house.¹
• Tried tak­ing some end-of/post-flood pic­tures around town, but did not want to cause any prob­lems for those work­ing in the affected areas. So pic­tures were all taken from the car while dri­ving through the affected areas and they all pretty much sucked or at best were no bet­ter than the dozens of other drive-by pho­tos already posted to Flickr.
• Gave blood and it left me feel­ing wiped out for days afterwards.
• Attended Con­ver­gence with AWelkin, Bryon, Amabaku & Oyarsa Elen­tari.
  • Had a com­plete blast but also got totally worn out.
  • First night of the con, while leav­ing to go out to get din­ner, I thought I was on the bot­tom step when I was still 1 step up. Walked out, didn’t feel ground under­foot and fell smack down on my ass fold­ing my leg under me and scrap­ing my arm. Ankle got twisted a bit and is still vaguely sore.
  • Ate a lot of good food.
  • Bought my wife a ren-faire style corset. Yum!
  • Saw many good cos­tumes around the con. Even got a few pho­tographed.²
  • Went to a flip-book ani­ma­tion panel and watched the panel-host get rather con­fused by all the adults at the panel. He clearly was expect­ing this to be almost a form of baby-sitting.
  • Drank much good cof­fee & tea at the con’s CoF₂E₂ cabana.
    • Espe­cially liked the Moon over Mada­gas­car tea (Chi­nese Black and Cey­lon teas blended with bits of bour­bon vanilla).
    • Also quite fond of the Eng­lish Toffee/Vanilla Latte they made for me.
  • Watched a stun­ning pre­sen­ta­tion from a local rap­tor center.
  • Attended a panel on GMing which gave me some ideas for a game I want to run.
  • Almost played in a steam­punk LARP, but the intro panel killed my inter­est in it.
    • It was this par­tic­u­lar group’s first year run­ning a LARP.
    • They based the LARP on some sort of “How to Host a Mur­der Mys­tery” thing.
    • They tried to design it to allow play­ers to con­tinue to enjoy the con.
    • Except the play­ers weren’t given any sort of char­ac­ters. You were expected to go around the con search­ing for clues.
    • You could inter­act with the peo­ple run­ning the LARP as the char­ac­ters they were dressed up as or as “norms”. If you tried to inter­act with them in-character, they said they’d respond by inter­act­ing with you based on your cos­tume. I only rarely run around in a cos­tume and didn’t have one for this con, so that pretty much killed my interest.
  • Painted a minia­ture thanks to Reaper’s demo paint­ing. That was fun and some­thing I haven’t tried in sev­eral years.

¹ We were cat-sitting for them.
² Sev­eral I only saw when either I or the cos­tumer were run­ning dif­fer­ent direc­tions and so I didn’t always get pho­tos. *sigh* There was one kid in a really excel­lent TF2 Medic cos­tume. Pho­tos will be posted later, as I have to go through them all and clean them up in GIMP. Espe­cially as my cam­era fritzed a few times and the image turned out all “purple-ly”.

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