CoffeeBear.net

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”.