NonCon Report

When I got back from NonCon, I sent a rather long e-mail out to all my friends asking how it went. So now all I have to do is edit that e-mail a little bit, and I have today's rant! Ah, laziness.

OK, here in about Chronological order is how my trip to NonCon went.

My cousin arrives, and we meet "Nuriko", AKA the person responsible for THIS, AKA a total stranger, and drive to New York. Along the way we listen to random selections off the Official Big Ball Of Nerd Music which he has in the form of a 12 disc CD changer in the car. Classical, Utena, 80s, Trigun, etc. etc. etc. Along the way we were pulled over by a police detective who gave us a 10 minute lecture on proper driving etiquette since we accidentally cut him off. As my cousin pointed out, he could have just beeped his horn. Along the way we stopped at a Taco Bell and I drank 2 liters of Mountain Dew Code Red.

Then we arrived at Vassar College, built by an evidently STARK RAVING MAD ARCHITECT. You know that description of the homes of the Lords of Chaos from Amber? Where they just randomly patch together various small chunks of dimensions in a jarring fashion? That's what it looked like. For example:

MAIN HALL
You are in the Main Hall. The ceiling is composed of several hinged sections which looks like an accordion. You get the impression it is designed to open allowing a Voltron Lion access to the room. To the east there is a row of windows looking out on a courtyard with a large tree under an open sky.
> go east
EAST CORRIDOR
You are standing on a raised walkway inside a larger room with a simple ceiling filled with sunlights. Below you is a food court. A hallway curves around to the northwest.
> nw
NORTH CORRIDOR
You are standing in a hallway lined with beige columns and fancy paintings...

Starting to get the idea? Other features of Vassar include: The Zombie Sniping Balcony: In the infamous main room, if you look up, you see a door at a level that would put it on the 3rd floor, but there is no 3rd floor. This door leads onto a tiny little balcony that looks out over the room. There's only 2 things these exist for. Giving speeches to the rebelling peasants, and shooting all the zombies in the room. In fact, while it's all eclectic and chaotic, there isn't a single location on campus that doesn't look REALLY at home in a Resident Evil game. Oh, and then there's The World's Longest Free Standing Tree Branch. That title doesn't come from me either, that's from the Guiness Book of World Records. You can walk into this branch despite being well over SEVEN METERS from the attached tree. And you probably will too, since it dangled down over the sidewalk far from ANY trees. Oh, and then there's the Hidden Bathrooms. Each building has just ONE, they aren't labelled in any way, and they're all hidden in hard to find places like behind a fake wall, or in the secret floor between floor 1 and the basement. I'm not kidding. Oh, and then there's how on the outside, every building looked like a castle, except the one that looked like an evil warlord's command center.

The other thing about Vassar: Everyone there is a Mac user. Everyone. Gave me this whole "Be this Valhalla?" feeling.

Anyway, we arrived late on Friday, so we missed all the cool stuff that day. Most of the con-goers hadn't shown up yet, or most guests, so it was just a few guests, the staff, and the Phantom Con Goers. Once, I walked into a room with about 20 people briefly. After this, these people DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY, never to be seen again. There was also a complete lack of teachers, janitors, cooks, security, or students ANYWHERE. It was like a ghost college. So everyone present got together in one room and played cool Steve Jackson games (with an official representitive of said company at that) until the wee hours of the morning. Highlights:
Chez Geek: You get a job at random which gives you X free time(actions) and X income (money you can spend per turn), living in the same building along with some random bonuses. Using these resources, everyone races to hit their personal slack goal (which is really high for the boring high paying jobs). You can buy books and anime and RPGs, invite over friends to play them with you, invite people to other people's rooms to eat all their food and monopolize their computers, sleep, and of course party loud enough to wake everyone else up. This was the only game I ever won the whole con, but every time we played, I won before anyone else ever got rolling. Proof that I am the Master of Relaxation!
Munchkin: A disturbingly accurate card game simulation of a generic dungeon crawl. Whoever gets to level 10 first wins. High point of the game:
I manage to get both the Gentlemen's Club (+3, which is good, but only male players or gender changed female players may use it) and the Broad Sword (guess) equipped at the same time. I still lost though.

Then we all went back to the main room, started watching Lupin, and most people fell asleep. Various food was being passed around the room, so I ate some of everything. Ahh, chips! *CRUNCH!* Ahh, Gummi Bears! *CHEW* Ah, Raisenettes! *CRUNCH!*

... crunch?

"'... these aren't raisenettes.' Famous last words." - my cousin

As it turns out, the candy I had just munched a huge handful of was in fact, Chocolate Covered Espresso Beans. Now, think how coffee tastes, how espresso is super-coffee, and how you usually grind up coffee and water it down a ton. I ate a whole handful at once, with nothing to water them down. The equivolent of 2 whole pots of coffee, sans water. I am immune to caffeine, but still, That Ain't Healthy.

(Circa 4 AM) More people started passing out, people got paranoid about leaving all the stuff out without anyone to watch it. Around now, the Gummi Bear Incident occurs. Then later, as the assistant con chair starts to pass out, me, my cousin, and "Nuriko" are all brimming with energy, so we vollunteer to watch the room, while playing Robo Rally and Frag (a boardgame that does a frighteningly good job of recreating the experience of playing a doom clone).

The Gummi Bear incident:

Me: "You know... Gummi Bears REALLY encourage violence. I mean, you can only eat them for so long before you start torturing them."

*Insert cheesy sitcom style sort passage of time spinning wipe here.*

In the corner of the official poster for the convention there is now a white Gummi Bear accurately crucified on a cross made from 2 pins. Below it, in very clear writing: "THIS GUMMI BEAR HAS DIED FOR YOUR SINS." Gummi Jesus was there for the entire con, became the unofficial con mascot, and there's probably pictures of him floating around the internet now. (Update: Darn. Not a won. What gives?)

Around 7 AM, everyone starts waking back up, and gravitating towards the free food. We finish our current Frag game and begin to join them. However, the Pain begins.

Bear in mind, the sole contents of my stomach for the last 14 hours or so have been: 2 full liters of Mountain Dew Code Red (Well, probably just 1, since I had a bathroom break between refills), and a large pile of espresso beans. This now began working it's way through a digestive system that seriously didn't want them in it. At one point, I actually thought I had appendicitis due to the sharpness and frequency of the pain.

Then people started showing up, including a pair of old ladies with dogs, who looked like the sort of people who would never in a million years even be in a position to see the existence of anything cool. In other words, they looked a lot like my great aunt. More on them later.

Anyway, after a bit of general socialization, my cousin and I decided we should crash somewhere so we'd be awake when we were expected places that night. So, we entered a mausoleum like dorm building with the heat turned up WAY TOO HIGH, and passed out for 2.5 hours or so. Then we got up any played a game of Fluxx. Fluxx is a rather interesting card game. It has no instructions, because the course of gameplay constantly changes the rules, and all rules will be on cards in play.
There are 4 kinds of cards:
Keeper cards: These have names like "Chocolate" "Peace" "Sun" etc., and say to leave them in play.
Action cards: They have names like "Draw 3 cards, and play 2 of them", and say how to do so in more specific terms for the really dense.
Rule cards: They have names like "Draw 4 cards" "Hand limit 2" "Keeper limit 4" "Play 2 cards per turn" and so forth. They replace any old rule cards they conflict with them. Oh, and there's a hand limit 0, which means on your turn, you draw a card, and play it. Period.
Then there's Goal cards. There's only one in play at a time, and it says what keeper cards you need to win.
The game is about as abstract as they can get. I would have won with Love and Peace, but I didn't think that would actually be a way to win and discarded Love just before drawing that goal. Doh.

I ate a large piece of pizza at one point, this cost me $1.

Spent most of Saturday playing other random games, mostly RPG demos. At one point, I was forced to play an annoying pair of 8 year old twins. I pulled this off flawlessly, and everyone there couldn't look at me without visualizing the olsen twins after. Wow.

Then came the free guest dinner. Lasagna and canoles. Yum!

I also played Warhampster. Take a D&D dungeon crawl. Now get extremely sloppy and lazy and make everyone be an overpowered minmaxer, and make halflings the tallest race. There's also quarterlings. Plus the GM had a couple hampsters on the table to capture theme. Their names were Gandalf and Sauron. Far cooler than most hampster names.

THEN I had to actually go speak on a guest panel to justify my free admission. I missed the first panel I was supposed to speak on, but then so did everyone else, because it was the first event at the con. Game design. The only speaker to show up for it actually told me later a whole 3 people came.

Anyway, the one I didn't miss was "D&D will make you kill your parents" This followed one on various sub-genres of fantasy. And who was in the room for this? Those two old uncool looking ladies with the dogs. As it turns out, they were a fairly famous fantasy author and sister who were heavily into RPGs, and pretty darn cool. I mean, how often do you witness someone 2 or 3 times your age talk about their characters in old Call of Cthulu campaigns? Nobody played the requisite devil's advocate roll that would make the panel name make sense, but it was fun bashing ignorant over-religious squares for an hour.

Then I dashed off to the Hellsing showing that started at the same time and ended up answering lots of questions since I'd seen farther than what was here. Such as "Is Integral a guy or a girl? I'll still think he/she is darn hot in either case, but I'm curious." Not that I could GIVE a definite answer there...

I can now though! Girl! Episode 9 of Hellsing is the first, and probably last time I'll ever say FINALLY when a girl's shirt gets ripped open in something.

Then we had to kill half an hour, so we watched the first 3 episodes of Sexy Commando Makado-san. These were 10 minutes long each you see. Anyway, this is one of those REALLY crack-filled shows. For example, at totally random times, everything stops so they can have a Ukelele lesson. These do NOT teach you how to play the Ukelele, or much of anything else, as they are done Geobreeders-ending-theme style. Anyway though, the plot of the show (such as it is) is that the main character has mastered the martial arts style of the Sexy Commando. How this style works is that you do something UNBELIEVABLY WEIRD AND DISTURBING, so your opponent goes into shock and you can just punch'em out. For example, while wearing a bunny costume, unzips fly, out comes a flock of pigeons, while he dances forward in a wiggly fashion. This is one of the less $%@#ed up attacks.

THEN we watched the main attraction: This is Otakudom. An hour long account of what it's like to go to an anime convention someone made by creatively splicing anime clips together and redubbing them. First though it had "previews". X-Men movie set to DBZ, which was fairly amusing, followed by:
Pikachu wearing boxing gloves: "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." <- That one was REALLY funny... and did I mention that these were the audio of the ENTIRE rather long original previews?
Movie itself though: They found a Fushigi Yuugi character that worked well as every variety of anime fan, so that was the primary source, but about 30 series were involved. Anyway, there were some REALLY hilarious moments, but they were mostly visual and need the proper context. You'll see it some day I'm sure.

After that, watched music videos (largely provided by me and my cousin), talked to other game design guest, comparing our RPGs. Next year I should see if he'll publish mine, as he did his quite successfully, and we think along similar lines.

THEN I decided it was time to sleep... however, it was 2 AM, and everyone with a key to the designated Crash Space had already gone to bed. DOH! So, my cousin and I had to sleep in the main hall... unfortunately, while everyone else had gone to bed, the main hall was occupied by the Filk.
I have never heard the term Filk before, but evidently it involves people composing and singing songs about, and I am totally serious, rolling for saving throws, ALL NIGHT LONG. That's actually pretty darn cool, but makes it hard to sleep. Got SOME sleep though.

Then it was Sunday. Did pretty much the same things as Saturday. including the pizza, until about an hour before the con ended. Then everyone wandered, I a little too late, into the Who Would Win In A Fight tournament. Everyone had already entered all the contestants they could think of, and I missed about 1/3 of round 1. The format: Someone pulls 2 characters out of the hat, everyone debates until an agreement can be made on the outcome of the fight (which isn't just X wins or Y wins, there can also be both die, X and Y join forces, or X wins, but not before becoming something else due to something that happens in the fight), survivors carry over to the next round.

Highlights:
Dr. Who vs... Vampire-Harlan Elison! (I missed how he became a vampire sadly)
Silent Bob and Gizmo vs. Hanibal Lecter: The winner was Several Stoned Gremlins.
Batman vs. The Death Star: Batman takes it over because storm trooper masks block enough light to let him pass for Vader.

There was so much arguing we never actually finished, but here's what the contenders boiled down to:
[some guy from Discworld whose name I don't remember] and his luggage. <- I don't know what the deal was with said luggage, but nobody batted an eye first round when it swallowed Cthulu, so it must be rather freaky.
The Tick
Ash (from Army of Darkness)
The Monty Python Foot

Other major contenders included:

The Disc World Turtle, but it fought Rogue and thus both were squished.
The Briefcase (an ordinary briefcase mind you, but people just kept taking it, getting killed, and their killer took it so it carried to the next round, but eventually The Tick ate it).
Team England (See, Dr. Who, Gandalf, James Bond, Tarzan, and a few others just kept meeting and teaming up...).
The One Ring

Overall:
Attendees did exist, but in fairly small numbers and they stuck together in clumps, so I just ended up hanging around with the same group of 15 or so people the whole time, and we had whatever room we were in to ourselves. That sounds like a BAD thing, but in reality, a sparsely populated convention RULES.

Grand total cost for me, including travel, meals, and sleep space: $2.

It was darn fun, and I will definitely go again next year.