Richard has really been into the Beatles lately – listening to their music, watching their movies, even watching the cheesy old Beatles cartoons. So, this morning I popped in this movie…

This is the third and final recap of my Labor Day Weekend TCEP recap; previous entries cover Saturday and Sunday.

I arrived at the Holiday Inn first thing in the morning (9 AM), and found hardly anyone else up yet (and those who were up were eating breakfast). So, I set up my laptop and checked my email over the free WiFi until someone came along and challenged me to yet another game of which I'd never heard before, Dominion Intrigue. We jumped right in, and I picked up the rules and strategy fairly quickly as we played. Had we played a second game, I'm sure I would have done much better – Odds are, though, that it'll be at least a year before I play it again, giving me time for forget the important bits and requiring me to get up to speed whilst playing all over again. Fun, in any case.

I had signed up for the Car Wars/Battle Cattle card game tournament that was scheduled for later on in the morning (11 AM?) as I had really enjoyed that game last year. Unfortunately, it never happened – and since I was waiting for the game that never materialized, I passed up the chance to try to jump into one of the other games that was starting… Games like Munchkin Quest (I have all of the regular Munchkin games, but I've never played the board game variant) or another round of Arkham Horror (this time with the Innsmouth Expansion). By this point Ironkite had arrived; and I managed to find a quick and easy game lying around that I remembered, that I'd have no trouble explaining to Ironkite, and that wouldn't last long in case Car Wars (or something else we both wanted to play) materialized: Plague & Pestilence. We played a couple of games of that; Ironkite could have won the second game (by being the only survivor) but instead went for a mutual loss (none of us had any survivors, similar to one of the Nuclear War games we'd played the day before) because it was funnier.

After we all had to clear out before 3 PM, some people went to Denny's or some other eatery to hang out. I talked to Ironkite for a little while in the parking lot, and then headed straight home. First, I was tired; and second, Q had called me an hour or so earlier and told me that Richard had been punished and sent to his room, not to be allowed back out until I got home. I didn't think it would be fair to dawdle and leave him in there all afternoon (even though he's got a TV/VCR and game system and more other stuff than I ever had at that age if I was sent to my room!)

( Addenda )

I was tempted to join a D&D game (the original AD&D rules from the 80s, the last time I played the game) for nostalgia purposes; but it wouldn't have fit into my schedule (with the couple of things I'd signed up for in advance). Pity, because I still have some of the original polyhedral dice which I bought back in 1982-ish, although I sold or gave away all of the rule books (including a first edition Deities and Demigods with the Cthulhu Mythos!) when I gave up on the game a few years later. Also, in reference to this conversation with jefF, I looked up all of the boardgamegeek.com URLs in advance before writing this entry. Finally, to SethCohen, you were trying to explain my default strategy to someone at some point – I made an attempt near the end of my recap from last year (in the Car Wars/Battle Cattle section).

Already looking forward to next year.

Part one of my Labor Day Weekend TCEP recap (Saturday) is here.

I got to the Holiday Inn earlier on Sunday (just before noon) than I had on Saturday. The first game I played was Le Havre, with (among other people) Karl Musser and Seth Cohen. It was a big, complex game with a variety of resources, buildings, transactions, card, tokens … I had to make sure that "Le Havre" wasn't French for "Die Macher", one of the games I played last year. It was fun and I was doing well (not by any means fated to win, mind you; that was reserved for one of the two people who had played before), but I was unable to see it through to the end. After about 2½ hours, I had to leave for another event for which I'd signed up previously – a murder mystery. About twenty people were given identities (I was Katie Jones, a girl from West Virginia who'd been turned into a vampire while debauching in New Orleans), background information, and clues which they had to pass around and share so that we could determine who the murderer was. (Aurienne was playing a character, but not competing; she's been through it before and knew who the guilty party was.) I didn't figure out who the culprit was; few people did. (One of the people who did figure it out was the culprit. You would hope that they'd know.)

After that, I went back home and picked up Richard. I thought he'd enjoy seeing the Chaos Machine that was set up in one of the rooms (and I was right). It had a framework with various tracks, tubes, trampolines, and other things beginning with "T" through with balls rolled and bounced from the top to the bottom, and then were brought back up to the top again via vertical conveyor belts on each end. (Seth took the above picture with his cell phone, as I still haven't replaced my lost camera.) While he was watching the Chaos Machine and/or distracted by snack food (carrots, cheese, bread, grapes; I kept him from noticing the M&Ms and other junk food), I played a couple more games nearby: Qwirkle Cubes with Stevemb and Starmalachite (the second of only two games I won all weekend – you don't go to an event like this unless you play for fun, not because you need to win) and then another round of Nuclear War (not only did we all lose, by losing all of our people, but I managed to destroy the Earth itself by rolling a critical whilst detonating the huge 100 megaton warhead as my doomsday device). After that, I brought Richard home and nabbed some real food before returning.

Finally, the night was ended by a couple of longer games, Civilization: the Card Game (based upon the Sid Meier computer games) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in which I had a rare turn playing on the Scooby team – I was Xander and Oz). Civilization was good, and I came pretty close to winning (I was ahead for a good chunk of the game); it's made me want to play the computer game again (I've only played the original version). It this point, it was approaching 2 AM and too late to start another game, so I went home and collapsed.

( Addendum )

TCEP started on Friday night last weekend, but I didn't make it there until early Saturday afternoon. (I spent the morning with Richard, keeping him away from Q until she woke up on her own – otherwise, he would have woken her up hours before she was ready to get up.) Several games were in play when I got there, so I had to wait for one of them to end so that I could jump into the next game that began. I wasn't waiting long before Aurienne and Ironkite showed up, so we talked for a little bit before we got our chance to jump into a game of Arkham Horror. Arkham Horror, as the name should imply, is based upon the HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. It's a cooperative game, in that all of the players are working together to prevent a Great Old One from getting loose on Earth and wiping out humanity – either everybody wins, or everybody loses. This was specifically meant to be a game for beginners, but a couple of us (including me) had played the game twenty years ago or so, so we were effectively beginners; between the constant rule-checking and explanations, and the fact that there were eight players, this game took a while. After about 2½ hours I had to leave to give Dyingwhisper a ride to a Metro station – I got back just in time to rejoin the game and participate in the final victory. Yes, we won, and pretty handily (if slowly) with eight players; most of the other games of Arkham Horror I saw last weekend limited participation to six or less.

After that, a lot of people left for the Outback restaurant in the hotel for dinner (it was such a big group that it took a couple of hours for them all to get back) and the rest of us hung out talking and/or playing quick and easy games waiting for the crowd to return. I played the Monty Python version of Fluxx, which had undergone a couple of rule changes since the older versions of the game that I own, but was still fun with all of the Python references in it (and more made by the players). We also played Nuclear War, another game I haven't seen since I was in college twenty years ago – sort of black humor for people who were living in the Cold War. Once the crowds finally returned, we tried to get another game of Arkham Horror going; but there were too many people who wanted to play which contradicted the desire to keep the number of players down. We split off into two groups (since there were two copies of the game) and people went back and forth arguing for a while over which version to play and how many people could play and "I don't want to play with this person" until the group I ended up being in started a game of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Wikipedia has entries for Buffy RPGs and video games, but not the board game which we played.) Along with Aurienne and Ironkite, Stevemb and Starmalachite played the four members of the Scooby Game while I played the Big Bad (a role I seem to end up typecase into most of the time the game is played). Well, I managed to kill Willow and turn Xander into a vampire, but in the end, I was defeated by those meddling kids. At this point, it was sometime past midnight; and even though the gaming wasn't schedule to end until 3 AM, I went home to collapse.

"This lego car is what I need for my plans." -Richard

We're not sure where he got it from, but he's made several references to his "plans" over the last week or so.

Ah well, it could be worse. He could have schemes.

Yesterday, we went to Artomatic in Washington DC (running May 29 through July 5), and the best exhibits there by far were the Peeps Diorama Contest entries. I took pictures of almost all of them( under the cut. )

(Crossposted to randompictures.)

In the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, Q was asleep but I was still awake (but tired, and didn't feel like hitting another party) so I put up my picture dumps from Friday and Saturday. (bmajors and berniebrad wanted the Repo! pictures with cosmo ASAP; they got 'em before the con was over). Then, around 7 AM or so, I went out wandering for a while, and met a few people in the lobby waiting for the airport shuttle, and then realized that I had forgotten to take my room key with me. I let Q sleep late before I finally woke her up to let me back in the room. We were already halfway packed, so we didn't have too much to do before checking out. (After we finished Phantom of the Paradise on Saturday, and I was cutting through the parking lot back to our room, I dumped the costumes in my trunk – and we had more POTP costumes than other costumes and clothing combined.) I also packed our preshow stuff up afterwards; we had even brought a folding chair and table with us because it's not like we'd be able to find chairs or tables in the hotel to use. Anyway, by noon Sunday, we were packed and checked out.

( A Few Pictures )

The first part of the con story details, in brief, some of the happenings and goings-on during the days and hours leading up to the Celluloid Jam convention in Cincinnati two weekends ago (15-16 May 2009). Since I've already displayed the pictures that I took on Friday, and I don't want to be repetitive, for this post I'll be mostly  stealing  borrowing pictures that other people took, mixed with a few new ones of my own that haven't been shown yet.

( Lots of Pics Below the Cut! )

Last Week:

I took the entire week off from work, even though we weren't planning to drive to Ohio until Wednesday, because we both had a lot of last minute studying and creating to do before we could leave. Q was still working on costumes up until the time that we left, and I was finishing up animations for the preshow up until the time we left. We ended up accidentally leaving behind at least half a dozen different things which we were supposed to bring with us, including a couple of props and costume pieces (including my Phantom of the Paradise bishop hat) that had to be recreated once we'd reached Ohio. (Another thing keeping us busy was that only one of us could actually work on con stuff at a time, which the other one kept Richard out of their hair.) Anyway, we left Maryland Wednesday morning and drove to Q's parents' house in Cleveland (where Richard would be staying while we were in Cincinnati). While there, Q got her hair cut in order to play Doctor Who on Friday night. (She was originally going to get her hair cut and styled to look like Swan from Phantom of the Paradise and wear a wig for the Doctor; but since she found a very good Swan wig, she did it the other way around.) We also got to hang out with Bob Simon (EuroTour Frank-N-Furter, and guest at the Frankie Goes To Hollywood convention), because he lives in Cleveland when he's not on tour. He and I mostly geeked out about the new Star Trek movie, while each of our partners nodded and tolerated our geekiness. We also spent time with Q's sister and her son (about a year older than Richard; they all just visited us recently. Anyway, first thing Friday morning (15 May 2009) we hit the road (I-71 South) for Cincinnati…

EDIT: One of the other things we forgot (which was requested) was Apples to Apples.

I'm not sure if Richard recognizes the distinction between what's actually on my computer and what I'm accessing over the internet. He frequently asks me to find him pictures on my computer of various things (such as kudus or trains), which I am able to achieve with a quick Google Image Seach. I also use GIS myself when I'm explaining things to him and want to find pictures to go along with the explanation. Of course, not everything you find pictures of on GIS is real.

One of the things I enjoy doing, and do frequently, is alter the lyrics to various songs. I often do this with the songs Richard listens to ad nauseum; unfortunately, he sometimes gets very upset when I don't sing songs right. (Oops. Guess he really chose the wrong Dad.) Recently, I riffed on Raffi's Banana Phone by singing "Godzilla Phone". (It scans.) Richard insisted that I can't sing that because "Godzilla doesn't have a phone." One quick GIS later, and I proved him wrong. (It even looks kind of like my phone – I have a Samsung, but a different model.) Anyway, I am now allowed to talk (or sing) about Godzilla, and his friend "the Bug Monster", on the phone.

Richard loves the song "Godzilla" by Blue Öyster Cult, so I downloaded this video which is uses cute Gojira parody footage from Adventures of Mini-Goddess.

I spent about five minutes this morning changing the colors of this image of one of Richard's 2006 Halloween costumes.