Diabolik's Take on Dreamation

So I am sitting here as Rich goes to get some tacos to feed our bellies, and I wanted to share my feelings on the con so far.

I like this hotel a little better than the last Dreamation, but I still prefer the Hilton in East Brunswick just because of it's layout.

This hotel has an odd layout so it is cool, but much more spread out than I would like. I enjoyed popping in and out of rooms and seeing what was going on at any given time, here I have to travel around half the hotel just to get to the wargaming areas.

Aside from that, there is a movie theatre in the hotel basically. It seems that the hotel is connected to a building complex that has a Kiddie Academy and the Theatre and other stuff.

As for Thursday, I was disappointed by the lack of a Mafia LARP and the chance to talk to Tony D. As of right now Tony isn't even at the con yet, but he is scheduled to be here for a module at 2pm. His LARP is scheduled for Sunday at 10am. Rich and I set up and shot a 25 minute opening segment for the show and he and I edited it last night and it should be squared away and on the site and Itunes and YouTube soon. I really enjoyed shooting that segment. It was the first time since the reorganization of Bacon Ice Cream that we have covered a bigger convention and I liked not being super serious. I was always trying to be serious and professional, and now I say fuck it, this is me and deal with it. Plus I think it makes better content. We decided to go check out Dave Simpson's game Blood & Leather which I demoed back at last Dreamation. Played it twice and got the hang of it, pointed out s few little issues with it, but otherwise it is a good game.

Friday I was supposed to help run the MosterPocalypse demo for Dark Tower Games here at the con because I am a Press Ganger for Privateer Press. I was supposed to be here at 9am for it, but we learned that the hotel was not going to have internet access available, and we were told that it was $11 a minute (which we assumed was an hour, but we were told minute). This meant that I could not take the exam that I had to finish before 11pm on Friday would not be able to be done at the hotel. I tried to get up super early after we got back to the house at 3:30am and that didn't happen. I must have turned off the alarm without realizing it.

So Rich woke me up at 8:30ish and I got prepped and then took the exam. I got a 68 and I am rather pissed at myself for screwing it up, but hopefully I can pull that grade up. Anyway....

We got here after fixing our feedburner feeds which were screwing up the Grazr feeds, and fixing my Twitter account and just getting some stuff squared away. we got to the con a little after 4, chilled with some of the guys (I have to say that I am missing Eric from Asmodee) and then started editing footage. I was wandering around and I noticed Kate's super cute hair and wanted to investigate and it turned out the Jon from Firestorm Ink was running his Battle of the Bands LARP for CyberGen. He asked if I wanted to help, and as I offered at last Dreamation because, while Jon is a talented motherfucker, he can't juggle all the hats and get everything done. He asked me to be the company spokesman and try to get some of the bands to drop out of the competition.

I actively did everything I could to manipulate the bands to do what I needed them to do, and in the end I ended up charging one female band member with stalking the guitarist of the House Band, having a different band thinking that the other members of the band poisoned one of the members, and got one of the bands disqualified for tampering with the electronics of the show. It was a ton of fun to help out, especially for someone like Jon who appreciated it and also gave me the opportunity to do whatever I wanted to do.

After finishing the larp I headed back to the booth and Rich started playing Street Fighter 4 while I sat down and edited the footage I shot of the FoodMachine tournament and by the time I coouldn't see anymore I was nearly done, just looking for some internet to finish it up and it will be posted.

So Rich and I flipped a coin and decided to spend the night behind the booth rather than packing everything up and heading to the house. It went pretty well, I caught about 3 hours of sleep and woke up to run the Mosterpocalypse Demo at 9am. No one showed up. I spent a bunch more time taking pictures and talking to friends and just generally fucking around. Played a little SF4, wrote this blog post, talked to Jon about his new Facebook App. Aside from that I am sitting here waiting for tacos to arrive, taking in the atmosphere, and anticipating the soon to come debauchery of Wicked Faire.

More to come later.

DIABOLIK