Carpeting Dragon*Con

The old carpet at the Atlanta Marriott — which unfortunately was replaced with something much more boring — has become a big part of the legend of Dragon*Con. (It also appeals to me mathematically, of course.)

Many Dragon*Con costumes and related things still invoke the old carpet.

Here is an article (to which I can't get full access) that appears to be about carpet-related costumes more generally (though the front picture is one from Dragon*Con).

Awesome Elevator Ride (with Sesame Street 'Yip' Aliens)

I have been enjoying the various Dragon*Con pictures (with great costumes) that I have seen on Facebook, but this video especially makes me wish I could have made it to Dragon*Con this year!

Update (9/04/16): A high-res version has now been posted on YouTube.

Carpet Camouflage and its Unintended Consequences

Perhaps the most awesome costume at Dragon Con this year were from the people who dressed up in camouflage based on the carpet pattern at the Marriott Marquis hotel. I didn't see it in person, but I remember first seeing the picture on Facebook while I was at Dragon Con. It's the best costume from there that I have seen. Unfortunately, the company that made that carpet is being lame: it threatened the cosplayers with legal action after they started selling the costumes online after many people requested that. (You can also see the canonical picture of the carpet camouflage in that article.)

(Tip of the cap to someone who posted on one of the Dragon Con Facebook pages.)

Pinky and The Brain Read "Who's On First"

I didn't catch this while I was at Dragon Con, but it turns out that there was a performance of "Who's on First" in the voices of Pinky and The Brain.

(Tip of the cap to somebody who does Facebook postings for Dragon Con.)

Pictures From Dragon Con 2013

I have now uploaded a batch of pictures from Dragon Con. I will post more pictures later...

What Happens in Atlanta Stays in Atlanta (2013 Edition)

I am off on a trip to several places on the east coast of the US. My first stop is Atlanta, where I will be giving a talk in Georgia Tech's math department and then going to Dragon Con for some geekery and gaming (and geekery and fantasy ... and yet more geekery).

Pictures from Dragon*Con 2010

I took lots of pictures, and I have posted a decent subset of those pictures.

Here is part 1.

Here is part 2.

Dragon*Con: Day 3.5

On my last half day at Dragon*Con, I took some pictures, listened to some live music, visited the art gallery again, and bought some art.

Now back to our regular programming...

(I'll post pictures within a few days or so.)

Dragon*Con: Day 3

Today was filled with both pictures (of course) and gaming. Among my pictures includes a picture with the Flying Spaghetti Monster... on a day when I happened to be wearing my FSM shirt (and I had no idea that somebody was dressed up as the FSM). Oh, and I was touched by her noodly appendage, as you will see when I post the picture.

I played a 3rd edition Legends of Five Rings adventure today (and given that many of the rules in 3rd and 4th editions are apparently pretty compatible, this provides me with a nice head start for learning the system). I have a copy of the 4th edition in hand now---I bought it this morning (and cancelled my order through Amazon, as they have been out of stock ever since I ordered this more than a month ago)---and I am looking forward to playing more games in the system. I then played another "Into the Nexus" adventure (using modified 3.5 D & D), and that again wasn't horribly fun, so I am going to give up on that group of DMs. I had traded my 10pm-2am ticket to a neat-sounding game for one of the other two (and then bought an additional slot for the second), as I just didn't feel like I would have the stamina for that. I also didn't want to take a cab instead of the metro back to the hotel, and I really need to be functional tomorrow to work on mu Powerpoint slides after Dragon*Con is over.

That's about it for today.

Dragon*Con: Day 2

Yesterday really wiped me out, so I decided to be lower-key today.

I again got tons of cool pictures, which I will post once I get back to North Carolina. I made sure to eat breakfast (unusual for me) because I was too tired to have dinner last night, and that definitely helped. I then split time between the art exhibit and some of the 30-minute mini-concerts---where I could sit down, listen to some cool music, and take pictures. I bought a t-shirt in the art gallery from the artist who I believe is responsible for 'Houses and Humans'. (For that matter, I recognized a couple of artists from signatures amidst pictures on covers of D & D novels and also pictures in D & D game products.) The picture shows a dragon on top of a crushed house, roasting a chicken and sipping some tea. How very English! I want to buy a picture to hang on my wall in my flat, and the problems is that there are so many cool things that I don't know what one or two things to get. And there's part of the art gallery at which I haven't even looked yet! I'll do that tomorrow. (I also want to head back to the dealers and exhibiters halls, but that might not happen until Monday.)

Then I had lunch with a friend (who came down for 2 days of Dragon*Con) [+ his wife] who was a fellow math postdoc at Georgia Tech but with whom I also overlapped a year at Caltech. After that, I wandered a bit and decided to get in line early for the Firefly panel with 4 alums of the show. (I have a nice picture of the panelists---did I ever mention that I like my camera's zoom feature?) I figured that I could get good pictures of passersby while waiting in line, so I occupied my time that way. The line ended up being outside much of the time, but thankfully the breeze was nice, I never ran out of photo ops, and only one person who walked by told us that it was not too late to turn away from evil. The panel itself was meh, though it had a couple of shining moments and the stars certainly have an excellent rapport with each other. After the panel, I played in a 3.5-ish D & D game (it was heavily modified, including the magic system---but for 4 hour sessions at cons, this helps quite a bit) based loosely on a part of the first book in the Death Gate Cycle. It's too bad we were in the Air realm; the first book was painful to read, but it was necessary because it set up all of the other stuff. In truth, though, very few aspects of that world were overly relevant to the game. The event was team run by 3 DMs, and a huge group was split into 3 groups of 9-10 people each, and each group was assigned a different mission---so in essence three different games were going on simultaneously (though if one group wreaked havoc, others could use it to their advantage). This is way too many people per DM, in my opinion, and our group included 2 small children who were often bored/distracted and went on side quests. (And in one case, needed in game to be prevented from destroying any chance of success in the mission---a little bit of magic from my character did the trick and resulted in profuse thanks from every adult at the table, especially the boy's mother.) It was a bit of a challenging real-life scenario in which to game, and the huge amount of background noise in the room didn't help, but we made it through and most people seemed to have fun, so things worked out well in the end. (I was often very frustrated, but I strongly suspect that the 9 people around the table and horrible background noise were much larger factors than the children occasionally needing to be reigned in.)

Then I went back home, and here I am.

Dragon*Con: Day 1

I am exhausted, and today was only the first day. I was back in my hotel room at 7pm---much earlier than I was planning---because of how tired I am, and I am better of conserving strength for the next 2.5 days. This is one reason it's nice to have a room in one of the nearby hotels instead of a few metro stops away, as then it's easier to crash for a couple of hours and then come back for more on the same day. Alas.

I got up at 6:30 am and was at the registration just after 8am. (It would have been a bit earlier, but I got slightly lost. Things are split in 4 different hotels this year, and things were only in 2 different hotels the last time (2004) that I attended Dragon*Con. I then spent about 2.5 hours in line, though I was occasionally able to get pictures of people in interesting costumes. (I took a ton of cool pictures today, as expected. People-watching the plethora of people in costumes and taking pictures of them---and in this type of thing, they are very good sports about it; it's really rather nice---is one of my favorite parts of the Dragon*Con (and similar events).

I then headed off to pick up my gaming tickets that I bought a while back and then to enter my pseudodragon monk (named "Quasi", of course) in the Cheesegrinder, which is a deadly survival dungeon that is (obviously) very cheesy, has lots of character death, and encourages cheesiness and min/maxing skills by the players. Some of the dungeon rooms are also rather clever, though Quasi had some trouble with the very first room, which was called "Rock You Like a Hurricane". D'oh! (One of the people running the show made sure that that song was playing once we started the room.) Quasi is tiny, so he was absolutely useless in that room. In fact, he successfully passed 3 rooms and failed 1 (the party couldn't handle "Rock You Like a Hurricane", and it was mathematically impossible for Quasi to harm the huge elementals in the room, so he just tried to hunker down and prevent the hurricane from smashing him into the walls) without ever getting a chance to make a single attack! I wanted to use my spring attack and DC 23 poison sting. :) Quasi was maxed for saves, armor class, and immunities, but unfortunately he was incapable of doing anything more than a trivial amount of damage. (As a tiny creature, the physical damage---which was just about all he could do---gets really lessened. Quasi was built to be hard to kill but not to be able to dish out damage.) Unfortunately, Quasi wasn't immune to petrification (but was immune to many other things), so when the party entered the room with 4 medusas riding 4 basilisks, there was some trouble when he had to make 8 saves in the surprise round. I could only fail on a 1 because of my massive fortitude save, but unfortunately my d20s did their usual bit and got me one. One of the party members could have turned stone to flesh before it was too late, but he decided to cure light wounds on himself instead. That's ok---I was hungry and had already been playing for 3 hours. The Cheesegrinder is better organized than it used to be (granted, I don't know which year from 2005-2010 this happened) and the trophies they give out are much fancier. Quasi is a contender for the "WTF Award", which is given to the character that the DMs deem the strangest. He's not really a contender for anything else, but there is actually a chance that I'll end up in the Tournament of Champions this year (just like in 2004).

I know that for years I have been bragging about my award-winning pixie from the 2004 Cheesegrinder, when I lasted something like 11 rooms (taking about 11 or so hours) and then finished 2nd overall in the tournament of champions. Well, it turns out that after I demonstrated how broken pixies can be with that character, they were retired from PC choices because of me. The guy who runs the game specifically remembered both my character and me because of this. Score! As it mentions on the website, it is considered a nice player accomplishment when one is able to do that within the rules. And, of course, then such characters get retired, so one has to find another way to do it. (I wouldn't want to play the same character twice anyway.) Anyway, I have always really enjoyed the Cheesegrinder! I do realize it's not for everybody.

After I ate (and took pictures as I went along doing things all day, of course), I walked into the Walk of Fame a bit. There one could get autographs or even get one's picture taken with people---including several I'd be interested in---but one has to pay a nontrivial amount. (Among the ones there today, the cheapest of people I'd be interested in getting an autograph from was $25, but it's not worth it to me to pay that much for an impersonal autograph or to get my picture taken with someone. I'd rather just take pictures of people in costume. However, I will walk through again at other times just to see who is there. I am tempted to stand in a line if it's short just to say 'hi' even if I can't do anything else.)

I then went to both the dealer and exhibitor halls. I can't tell the difference between the two, but there was lots of cool stuff in both. (I'll want to go to at least the second of these again because I was very tired towards the end, and there are several booths at which I'd like to take closer looks.) The people selling ironic t-shirts kept complimenting me on the "Enjoy Crack" shirt I was wearing (actually, several others did as well). The only shirt I bought was the 2010 official Dragon*Con shirt, which is a nice blue tie-dye shirt. I bought several sweet new d20 dice (which I was planning anyway), and I also bought a d30 and a d16. Several of the booths had some really cool stuffed animals and others were from artists---I want to look at both of these types of booths more tomorrow---and one of the booths was by an indie retailer who makes her own stuffed animals, sculptures and other things. And she had a stuffed animal with which I absolutely fell in love---this is a gorgeous handmade stuffed phoenix for which I paid more money than a sane person would be for a stuffed animal. But it's *awesome*, and I can't wait to show it off! I have it packed up in a way to survive my trips back to North Carolina and then to Oxford, but I'll take a picture of it once I am back. This is the second most that I have ever paid for a stuffed animal, and the one for which I paid the most I bought on November 8th, 1986.

Plans tomorrow include the art gallery, a 3.5 D & D game from 6-10pm, more pictures (including finding a nice place to chill out and take pictures), and otherwise we'll see. Maybe I'll even go to one of the panels, which I have never actually done at Dragon*Con before.