Friday | Fri/Sat | Saturday | Sunday
The natural thought for how to kill a Friday night now that Sarah and I were off the schedule was to check out the mixer. Problem was we were both a little beat: Sarah spent most of the day running dispatch in the staff room and juggling volunteers. Due to this, the high-speed techno going on inside wasn't exactly appetizing.
But that's what room parties are for.
Friday Night / Saturday
Afternoon
Game On
Didn't stop Langland from getting down.
For the record, we had three DJs playing sets, and one of them did play some great geek tunes. Bob (getting sick of calling him "the con chair" all the time) made a point to burn him some anime songs to use when he was taking requests Saturday night. None of that changed the fact that we preferred something that involved sitting.
Enticed by the promise of free root beer and a trivia game, we swung by Anime Milwaukee's party, but were too late to get on a team for the game. Milwaukee's definitely doing a much better job promoting their con, and is scrounging up some solid guests including Vic Mignogna. Depending on the room situation, that might end up being a three-day excursion for me yet.
Then came the No Brand party and wouldn't you know it? We're playing Apples to Apples for the fourth straight convention.
The single most stunning moment in the game came with the infamous Touchy-Feely card. At both No Brand and Iowa, Evan beat out a handful of hilarious red apple cards and won with Going to Grandma's. We considered the Touchy-Grandma combination nigh unstoppable (save, of course, for Helen Keller).
Until now.
I actually deliberated for a long time, but although Going to Grandma's was played, my choice defeated it. Presenting... Noisy Neighbors.
(The other card I was torn between, which that round's decider assured me also would have won? Lollipops.)
Our participation in the game halted with a visitor... none other than Whitewater Nick.
Wait... sorry, this is Nick Izumi as Doctor Who.
We also got a visit from No Brand Nick!
Whoops... Izumi again. This time someone attempting to start something called a Geek Cult gets a lecture from the Doctor, who knows a thing or two about cults.
Despite the lack of photographic evidence, we did assemble all three Nicks in one evening- Whitewater Nick (now living in Madison), Nick Izumi (not actually his last name) and No Brand Nick (now going to pretty much all the same cons I do). Methinks it's time to switch them to Nick F, Nick I. and Nick K. permanently.
After Nicking ourselves out, we went to bed at the reasonably early hour of one.
Ah... Lain's bear pajamas. I have no idea if this is a cosplay of it, Pedobear or just some lazy furry outfit, but I'm sticking with Lain.
Oh look, it's Nick I. running a 9:00 am Gundam panel. He looks... awake.
Ulterior motive for the picture: that's my marker board. Since I was on staff, I didn't need the services of my diva of a con bag (now with two Steam Century medals). For balance, we lavish attention on some other inanimate possession. The bag is so jealous.
First up Saturday was a Masquerade orientation meeting between the organizer, the judges, the judges' number cruncher and me. Knowing my affinity for cosplay, you might ask what the hell I'm doing on this committee. Turns out I'm Master of Ceremonies. Awesome.
As for my credentials... well, let's just get the suspense over with:
America... WTF? Sarah whipped this sucker up to compliment her Seychelles outfit. Not that Seychelles and America have any sort of special international relationship; she's more or less caught in a love triangle between England and France, who are fighting over her not so much because they like her, but because they like to fight each other despite technically being allies (next time on As The World Turns...). Of course, after watching more of Hetalia, I would have rather taken Estonia. I've had an affinity for those poor little Baltics ever since I got fanmail from someone in Latvia.
Best part about America, however, is that by taking off the jacket, I'm left with shirtsleeves and a tie, which is perfect for MC duty. Which brings us back to the orientation session, where we all introduce ourselves to the participants that woke up on time.
Had one of those "holy crap it's ___!" moments with Elphaba here. It's a great enough moment when it's an anime nobody ever cosplays; musical theatre is a whole 'nother dimension. Now that we've had a Wicked cosplayer, I'm holding out to see more of my favorite musical characters like Trekkie Monster, Mdme. Thenardier and Judas.
Next up... DDR tournament!
See, lose the jacket and poof! Ready for professionalism.
Thanks to some last-minute entries, the number of participants swelled to ten. After a qualifier to get it down to eight, we started the single elimination bracket, which by a bizarre coincidence was seeded with all the guys on the top half of the bracket and all the girls on the bottom. The only real hiccup was in the second match, where the first player picked an incredibly difficult song to psyche out his opponent. He won. Then his opponent picked an equally difficult song (Healing Vision Angelic Mix) to counter... and won. That meant a tie-breaker. Both of these fierce competitors were practically dead. Third was my choice, so we settled on a song that was tournament quality but decidedly easier to settle a winner. Then the loser lurched over the garbage can and threw up. Lovely.
Thanks to a quick response from myself, Chief and current room assistant DemonikDerek, we made sure the guy was fine and the garbage removed from the room without incident (thanks a bunch, guys!). The rest of the tournament continued without much incident until after the second semifinal.
Since we had a prize for third place, we needed a repechage match to give a prize away. Rather than force the exhausted girl who had lost the second semi with a guy nice and fresh after getting spanked earlier, we needed to kill time. The girl who won the second semi was doing so in full Russia cosplay (how or why... I won't ask). I was cosplaying America... and had her score from the previous song. Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?
(I think so, Brain, but why would you play DDR in a leather jacket just to restart the Cold War?)
I wanted her to take a picture of me doing this in full cosplay, but she instead took a picture of the results screen. Still, considering I haven't played DDR in months and had never heard of this song before I'm kinda proud of this result so I'll keep it up.
Per tournament rules, we combine Marvelous and Perfects. America defeated Russia 278-277. I believe in miracles.
The final conflict! Steve won round one by ten steps; Vienna (Russia) won round two by six steps. The tie-breaker was decided by a completely random song that neither of the two had ever played before. It was perfect. Steve won round three with a more decisive margin, but it was still a good tournament.
Although my staff duties prevented me from playing Steam Century that weekend, I ducked into one of the clue rooms in between things to see one of their set-ups. It involving taking a lantern into a dark room and walking along a rickety balance beam to retrieve a spider from inside a tunnel.
I really wish I could have played Steam Century. After the tournament, I used a delivery quest as an excuse to head to the HMS Badger and pet the cat.
Since I didn't know how long the DDR tournament would take, I kept my afternoon open. Arriving back at 1:00, it was time to chill, get some ramune in the vendor room and do some random internal work- updating volunteer schedules, tidying up the staff room, scrambling to find a missing button maker so we could reward survivors of the Iron Butt Challenge (a marathon of three godawful sci-fi B-movies)... stuff like that.
When this sucker pulled in front of the hotel, we wondered if our guest relations team was going a little bit over budget for Kyle Hebert.
Somewhere in all this, I cruised the dealer's room, picked up a t-shirt and took a shower. Whatever.
Yes! Exactly! Time for some Masquerade action.