Did I say I was an unapologetic geek? My wife, Amber, offered our son to a dragon at GenCon!
It’s that time of the year again, when all the good little gamers gather in Indianapolis to explores the exhibitor’s booths and discover treasures, new and old. I speak, of course, of Gen Con Indianapolis, the “Best Four Days in Gaming.”
If you recall from last year’s report (see Gen Con 2010 Reflections if you don’t recall), I had a lot of fun last year, mostly because I now have a family to take and with whom I could share the experience.
They also prove useful bait for dragons. (Just kidding. No infants were harmed in the making of this blog!)
Today, however, was all about me. I trekked into Indianapolis to experience the first day of the convention on my own, basically blasting through the Exhibit Hall and trying to look at every booth to find if there was anything interesting for me to report back on. …
There are two incredible things in this picture, and they aren't the outfits
I live in L.A., Tinseltown, Hollywood, the City of Dreams, and you’d think that being here would overwhelm me with fantasy, but in reality it’s never that way. Sure, now and then you’re someplace ordinary and run into a ‘star’, but seeing the reality of that always seems a letdown as well.
I think that’s why having an office next to Ryan Harvey is so special, because he’s even more a Peter Pan than I am, and his creative vision is always spilling out into the reception area. Kandline, or Kandy as I call her, helps too, her ‘I’m going to make it’ and goth-prep style always bringing a smile to my face when I roll in late from a long line at Starbucks.
Still, I live a pretty mundane life if you don’t include trips on the BG Zeppelin. I have a wife, a son, and bills to pay just like most folk in the world, but there are those moments in time when even I dream about what could have been if time worked a bit differently.
What do I mean? Well, I’m talking about those crazy kids today and their ‘Cosplay’. You see, I’m a Halloween junky, like last year I dressed up in full costume each Friday of October to pick up my son from pre-school. That being said, however, I end my persona-swaps after All Hallows’ Eve, but if life were different, if I were younger, and if Cosplay had existed in 1990 I’m pretty sure my life would have been drastically different.
Think back. Stretch your minds back. It’s Saturday, July 16th. Where are you? Sipping ice tea on your veranda while the dog pants at your feet and the cicadas whine and the barbecue sizzles — and it’s a summery summertime stretch of summeriness — and you’ve even remembered to put on your sunblock? GOOD FOR YOU!
Me, I hardly saw the sun that weekend. I was in the Boston Merriot Burlington, where the air conditioning was fierce and the convention programming intense!
Julia Rios Makes Every Hotel Room a Castle!
In the morning, Erik Amundsen and Patty Templeton and I stole away to Panera Bread, to consume an inexpensive breakfast of sandwiches and rubbery room-temperature soufflés. I was back to the hotel in time for my 11 o’ clock interview with Julia Rios.
Ha.
An interview!!!
That makes me sound VERY POSH AND IMPORTANT, doesn’t it? Only it wasn’t like that, really, because the interview was recorded as a podcast for Broad Universe (called “The Broad Pod“), and it was to involve me and Gwynne Garfinkleand Mary Robinette Kowal, and if you think that I’M the posh and important one in that group, then I don’t know which current affairs rack you’ve been hanging your hats on lately, misters and mistresses!
The thought that preoccupies me is, “How the heck am I going to find enough pictures to go with this post?”
Unlike that one time when we crashed a Zeppelin into Madison, we did not document our epic journey across America with anything so practical as a camera. No!
Instead, we marked the miles in the bellowing of bawdy (need I say, alternate?) lyrics to “There’s a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Liza,” the scrawling of character notes, place names and plot devices for a story about a stolen moon, the counting of times the word “Beloit” was mentioned in the back seat (Brendan Detzner being an alum and S. Brackett Robertson, or “Brackett,” a current student), in Billy Joel sing-alongs and idle speculations about the nature of certain malevolently leaning shacks in Guilderland, New York.
The B-Train. (AKA, writer Brendan Detzner)
“Meth shed?” Patty postulated.
“Cannibals?” I countered.
“CANNIBAL METH SHEDS!” we roared together, with, perhaps, more delighted gusto than was strictly necessary.
“So… Do the cannibals eat the meth heads?” Brendan asked. “Or are the cannibals themselves meth heads?”
The conversation went on. I will not trouble you with further details. By this time we had been driving approximately ten hours and still had nine to go.
Fresh from their final exams and smelling strongly of AXE body spray, the new batch of summer interns creeps tentatively down the stone steps into the underground offices of Goth Chick News.After orientation, which in this case includes a thorough hosing off, they are scurrying around collecting information for their first assignment.
Akin to the pleasure of taking the Margarita salt out from its long winter storage is the joy of taking on twice as many interns as necessary and making them fight each other to the death in their first week, to remain one of the chosen few.
“Bring me pop horror culture!” I shout; frothy frozen cocktail in one hand and riding crop in the other.“And make sure it’s fresh!We’re not running some crappy Ryan-Seacrest-production here!”
C.S.E. Cooney laughs maniacally from the corner and asks if she can have a go with the riding crop.
Summer is definitely in the air at Black Gate headquarters.
It was a stormy Sunday morning in Wisconsin. Guests of the Madison Concourse startled awake to the tune of “Hellfire,” from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, floating in from a nearby hotel room.
The voices were tuneful (well, mostly — given the amount of sleep the singers were operating on) and vigorous (especially for that hour of the morning), and, after all, who could resist lines like:
Voice 1: It’s not my fault!
Voice 2: MEA CULPA!
Voice 1: I’m not to blame!
Voice 2: MEA CULPA!
Voice 1: It is the gypsy girl, the witch who sent this flame!
Voice 2: MEA MAXIMA CULPA!
The guests, satisfied that no poor soul was being murdered and flung from a bell tower in a righteous rage — that, after all, it was only Ms. El-Mohtar and myself greeting the morning in our usual way — rolled back over and went to sleep…
The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood woke with much gusto. A puppy pile was had, as was a deliciously free, Con-Suite breakfast. There was a random, rather interruptive child building a trebuchet at the table. Sadly, the trebuchet didn’t work.
[The Critic suggests that you never attempt to give C.S.E. Cooney a banana at breakfast or otherwise. She has a mild anger at bananas.]
Overlord O’Neill went down to the dealers’ room. His Saturday activities included zapping book mites with a nano-taser, shouting to all and any of the merits of Black Gate and entertaining Bradley P. Beaulieu, the author of The Winds of Khalakovo. Yes, dear reader, there were so many authors at WisCon you couldn’t itch your back without knocking one off your shoulder.
O’Neill and Beaulieu
While O’Neill was go-go dancing and having the Drexler-Smalley debate with those that walked by, C.S.E. Cooney and I attended Monsters!, a panel exploring the fascination of anomalous villains, led by David Peterson, P.C. Hodgell, Richard S. Russell and Tuppence.
What is the definition of a monster and how has it changed throughout history? The general consensus was that a monster is that which is unexplainable, unnatural, uncontrollable and has no culture.
Today’s monsters usually cause psychological discomfort, whereas Medieval monsters were more of a spiritual bane.
Extending the question to who can be a monster, the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch were examined. Two continually referenced texts were On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma and The Monstersby Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.
Meanwhile, Katie Redding attended the Human, Cyborg or Just Another Robot? panel that, well, I refuse to talk about. We are not convinced that our Ms. K. is all that she used to be. In fact, we think she is more. There was a mech-hole in her noggin, (think Terminator 2 where they unscrew the back of Arnold’s head) and now she can lift mid-sized sedans and calculate large sums quicker than Rain Man.
There we were, three youngish women, frolicking in the flower garden, drinking tea and entertaining toddlers, when all of a sudden, a shadow moved over the sun.
It was Black Gate’s zeppelin, the Harold Lamb, on the descent.
“Ef!” Ms. Templeton twirled her stealth parasol in alarm. “The Gee-Dee thing’s coming down on the roof!”
“Not my roof!” Ms. Redding shouted, a baby on one stylishly jutted hip and a chaenomeles speciosa (a nasty and ubiquitous shrubbery, recently uprooted by dint of chain and pickup truck from her front garden) brandished high in her free arm.
For myself, I was convinced Ms. Redding was set to hurl the shrub (or, at the very least, the baby) at the Harold Lamb in an effort to knock it off its fatal course. Thankfully, at the last moment, the zeppelin veered, mooring itself between two surviving elms. A rope ladder unfurled. A familiar voice over the loudspeaker boomed down:
“Will the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood please climb aboard?”
Every so often I come across a product so insanely cool that I not only have to own it immediately, but I must also tell you about it so we can share the joy together.
In the past, such life-altering products have included a movie-set-worthy cobweb maker, a blood-like energy drink sold in IV bags and a fairly significant collection of dead things in bell jars.
But it isn’t until today that I can tell you how to fill your house and yard with zombies, ghosts and other creepy stuff for the price of a 1980’s projector bought off eBay and a $35 DVD.
Enter special effects magician Jon Hyers and his virtual 3D horrors.
I came across Jon Hyers at the St. Louis Haunted Attraction Show when, walking by his booth, I noticed several large sewer rats seemingly scurrying in and out from under his display table.
It isn’t very often that I suffer from complete sensory overload, but the Haunted Attractions Show in St. Louis, immediately followed by the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo nearly did me in. It was therefore necessary to retire to the underground offices of Goth Chick News, barricade myself in with the espresso machine, the blender and a bottle of good tequila, and take a few quiet days to absorb everything I had seen.
Black Gate editor and big cheese John O’Neill graciously stood in for my post last Thursday, partially out of sympathy for my over-stimulated state; but mostly because he wanted the blender back.
Now rebooted with sufficient caffeine and marguerites, I am ready to begin telling you more of the amazing events of the last two weeks.
C2E2 takes place in Chicago’s largest convention center, McCormick Place and the event consumed all of one of the largest buildings. Focusing on all manner of artwork, collectibles, music, film and entertainment, it was… well, gi-normous.
Though it will take several weeks of posts to delve into detail on all of the fantastic things I saw, I start as always with a Best of Show overview.
