Society for Aesthetic Deletions

Wednesday

Everything went smoothly for departure, with really no trouble at all. A lot of waiting, as the bus schedule and our flight schedule were too close for comfort, so we took an earlier bus which gave us a lot of time to wait. Fortunately, we were in U.S. Air's terminal, and at the end of that terminal, there is a Legal Seafood. So we had a nice lunch before our flight, which was actually earlier than the time shown when we originally purchased the e-tickets. You'd think Travelocity would have let us know about this, hmm? I think it was about 40 minutes earlier, but that meant for less time waiting.

The plane was small, a U.S. Air Express, with two seats on one side and one seat on the other, which was odd. Not the smallest plane I've ever been in, but the smallest for such a long flight.

I listed to Eddie Izzard's first three CDs on my iPod during the trip (bus, wait at airport, flight), and managed to get to the end of each. I also read some of the romance novel I brought, but put it aside as the sex scene was coming up. Being on a plane while listening to Eddie Izzard is just not the place for that! I pulled out American Gods to start in on instead, but didn't get past the first page, as we were landing very shortly.

We hired a "shared car" to take us to the hotel from the airport, since that's sort of what we did in Milwaukee. But we realized that a cab would be the same expense, and resolved to take one of those from the hotel back when we left.

Hotel check in went well, and we bought what we thought was only one day of internet access. Turns out they kept charging us, and we thought we didn't have it anymore, so didn't TRY to use it beyond the first day. Ah well, live and learn.

However, we could only use Lou's laptop, as it must have done a MAC address detection or something; when I tried to plug in to use my laptop on Thursday morning, it told me I couldn't; the connection was already in use.

Wednesday late afternoon, after getting our prereg badges and such, we walked down to the mall and did a walkthrough. Couldn't find a drugstore in it, much to my surprise. I wanted to get a few things, and see if they had some water, since we had a small refrigerator in the hotel room, much to our (pleasant) surprise, but we were out of luck. We did find the food court, and just at the edge was a Johnny Rockets. There are two of these in Providence; one in the Mall and one right on Thayer Street (which is like in the middle of Brown's campus, and THE place to hang out if you're a college kid or a wanna-be college kid). I've been to the one on Thayer twice now, and told Lou that he had to try it.

He loved it. It may have been the travel and lack of food talking, but he said it was the best burger he'd ever had. And they had given us some nickels for the jukebox too, which is always fun.

We did a bit more wandering around, but headed back to the hotel soon, because he had an 8:00 game the next morning, while my first event was at 10:00.

Thursday

Even by the bright light of morning, the convention center itself still looked HUGE as we saw it outside our hotel room and to the left. A parking garage greeted us directly outside our hotel room, with a further view of the river and the western part of the city. Very flat. I keep forgetting that we're in the midwest until I see how flat it is.

Freshly cleaned up, we went off to find breakfast together. The Marriott had a buffet which was very good, and we had that almost every morning, though unlike at Embassy Suites, it was not included in the price of the room.

Lou wandered off to his game, and I had some time to kill. I headed back to the room, surfed the web a bit as mentioned on Wednesday, and then headed out for my 10:00 game, called A Knight's Trail. It was a new system, The Ancient Lands RPG, and it sounded interesting from the description. I found a table full of players waiting, and no GM.

We waited. And waited. Another table nearby had a Champions game starting and only a player, so he was looking for more. Now there are two reasons why I didn't go join that game: 1) I had another game at 12:30, and his game was a 4 hour game slot, and 2) You couldn't PAY me to play Champions. Others love it just fine, but Hero System is not for me in many, many ways, for many, many reasons. And believe me, you won't ever convince me otherwise.

So one woman from our group was going to be headed there, and the rest of us got annoyed. The other woman at the table was pissed off enough to head to the Dealers Room (hereafter listed as DR) to find the company's booth and find out what was up. The DR opens at 10:00 every day, so they should have been there. The first woman had asked the Hall Monitor about the game, and he had said to give the GM 15 minutes to show.

15 minutes later, the woman who had gone to the DR had not returned, and I was only unhappy at this point. I went out to the Hall Monitor, slapped down my ticket and said "The GM didn't show." The HM was not expecting my slightly bitter (okay, maybe more than bitter) vitriol, and then another person with him spoke up. And this is when I got Really. Frelling. Pissed. Off.

The other guy who was there with the HM went, "Oh yeah, the GM told me that he was having problems, and that all players were to go to the booth in the DR and tell the guy there that we'd showed up for the game." The dealer was still going to have the raffle for the free game, you see.

Of course, this made me mad for a few reasons. Maybe the guy next to the HM had just arrived, and didn't know that a group of players were waiting for this information...but I don't think so. Maybe it slipped his mind - more likely. Still, unhappy me. At that point, I wasn't even going to go to the booth, but then it got worse.

The woman who had gone to the booth showed back up. The guy at the booth basically said, "Yeah, well, something came up, and well, uh...we're still going to have the raffle for the free game, and ..." She was more upset than I was, and told the dealer so, in no uncertain terms. Now, I know that their booth needed to be tended. It was obvious that someone wasn't there, something got left behind, but offering half-assed excuses and not really sounding apologetic about it made none of us happy. I went and got back my $1.50 refund (I was NOT going to wait in the huge lines for generic tickets...what idiot thought THAT up? Plus, you couldn't get them in pre-reg, which hadn't been done before. Stupid.), and then hit the DR.

The room was absolufrellinglutely huge. We found out later that they had more than 40 more dealers than the previous year in what was probably twice as much space as Milwaukee, or close to it. Upper Deck had a HUGE freaking booth area that was mostly open space, bigger than WotC's, which has traditionally been the largest (no TSR castle this year, folks!). I didn't have a ton of time, so I wandered a bit, spotted some t-shirts I wanted to have, but refrained from buying most of them. Oh, and I also got a GenCon lanyard to hold my badge by asking at the info booth where the souvenir booth was - turns out they'd put it into a huge room unto itself. I did NOT end up buying the t-shirt with this quote on it, but I wish I had:

"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

I did buy matching shirts for Anne, Kate (my boss) and myself. These said on them:

Well-behaved women rarely make history. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Before too long, it was time for a brief lunch before the 12:30 game.

There was a food court just outside of one of the DR entrances, actually right at the entrance from our hotel. They had four booths and the food there was rather good, if a bit pricey, of course.

12:30 was the WitchCraft game, the same game that Lou had scheduled for Sunday, so I got a chance to play it before him. It was a lot of fun, and we had a huge group - two more than scheduled, which made it 8. But for the most part, it was fun and the GM was really good. I played a half-demon (basically one of the normal templates from the game, tweaked so the background made her a half-demon, when it really meant nothing in game-terms) and named her Paige. The scenario was a basic: find out how your mentor died/who murdered him, etc.

Met up with Lou after that, I think. Had dinner at some point; don't recall where. I think we headed back to the room for a bit and hung out, and then both headed to our Jadeclaw game. Lou and I usually manage to play one game together (we have very different game tastes when it comes to conventions, usually), but this time we had three. Jadeclaw was fun - he tweaked the rules and played a Bear thug who was the best wrestler, EVER. I played a Rat spy/scribe, very sneaky. We had a few more people than we should have, especially with us having only one Jadeclaw game book (we had three Ironclaw books), and we had to create our own characters. But it was a decent demo game, which was made more interesting because two of the characters had fast-talk and made excellent rolls to fool the bad guys, including the Governor of our territory who was doing Bad Things. I was one of those who had fast-talk, and the one who gave the Governor pause. Or paws, as the case may be, as he was a Tiger.

Ha. I slay me.

That let out at 11:00-ish, as it started at 7:00, so we headed back to the room to crash. Friday was our early morning, as he had an 8:00 game on Friday and I had an 8:00 seminar, so we packed it in early.