Lunacon, Saturday!

[mneme]

Saturday, I got up around 10:30-11, and after a shower and a snack in the con suite (conveniently across from the room), made a quick survey of the Dealer's Room (where I picked up copies of A Business of Ferrets (which apparently, Meisha Merlin had to narrowly avoid selling 3000 copies to Pet Smart, who thought it was about business and ferrets, not street urchins and politics), and Parlament of Owls, its sequel (as a sideways way of buying copies for nrivkis, who borrowed the books from me (or rather, had them pressed apon her, though she didn't protest too much) last summer or fall.
Then I hit the game room. A few hours later, I had learned Show Biz Shuffle and Attica from Perrianne, and gotten a bit of play with the upcoming Early American Chrononauts with Zev.

After all this gaming, I saw badgerthorazine in the hall moping a bit over not having a camera, so I lent her my Canon S40 for Saturday -- it's not like I use it much anyway. Then I saw I was feeling a mite peckish, so I went to the Con Suite for a snack. And entered pretty much at the exact time Esther Freisner and Susan Schwartz began their schtick. This time,the schtick consisted primarily of the CyberPrep (for the preppies who will inherit the earth after the Cyberpunks have worked all the bugs out, plus encouraging pink and green and sweetness and light) 10th aniversary, plus snacks encouraging the '07 Japan worldcon bid (yum -- tea made with brown rice and lechee and mango jellies), followed by Esther performing cheeblemancy. Throughout most of the schtick, I had the pleasue of rubbing debkitty's back, which was nice, and afterwards, had lots of conversation in the con suite, with her, with someone from Canada, with marcmagus, with Marc Drexler, with enegim, Eyal Moses, storychaser and various others. A longish while later, I was still (again?) hungry, so I tried to organize a dinner misssion of sorts...with some success in getting interested people talking about it, and absolutely -no- success in coming to agreement on a resturant worth leaving the hotel for. Eventually, marcmagus, debkitty, and I gave up and headed for the hotel resturant.
On the way, we ran into moviebear. Remember moviebear? Apparently, Spam agreed to go with her 6 hours prior, and they'd just arrived. Naturally, I pounced her and "dragged" her to dinner, which was fun, if -amazingly- non-atkins-safe.
After dinner, we played a lot of zendo. I started off with a tricky but not that hard rule (flat pieces = standing pieces), but pushed it into "too hard" by going with a default=antagonistic mastering style (ie, my white koan had three wierds), and by not starting off with the standard terminology survey (I hit it mid-game, but that's less than ideal, since several not inexperienced players had issues seeing the 3wierd koan as wierd). Eventually (after losing a couple of players :( ), I relaxed my mastering style (with the agreement of the player group), and they reached enlightenment shortly after. We then played more Zendo, which was fun -- I even won "pips mod 3 = 0" on the second round, which was both a surprisingly well-mastered rule by a newish player and, well, a fair bit of speed on my part (and not a wild guess -- the white koans had 2 queens or a drone and a pawn, and I'd just nearly ruled out color).
After, Pooh and I went to filking (Marc had made it too filking on his own, I think). Filking happened, and it was good -- I even got a request to do X-libris, which was fun, and in the middle of filking, JV pulled me out to give me my top hat, which I left at a Lunacon 4+ years ago and haven't seen since! It goes very well with my leather trenchcoat, too. My voice started giving out early (3 or four), but in general, filking happened, and it was good (a bit too chitter-chatterry, but I noticed a concious effort to pull things back to filking on most participants' parts). Eventually, things turned to genreal chatter (as seems traditional at some point in the night -- not sure why), I turned things back to filking for a while by using Carrot Juice is Murder's ever-changing intro as a tool to cut through the general conversation and turn things back to filking. Eventually, though, dawn broke, and we, the final survivers (um. storychaser, her sister whose name I'm blanking on, and a few others) decided that the big bright light past 6AM meant that dawn had broke, and closed the filk.
However, Sue Cochran's Guitar was left in the filkroom (intentionally, it seems) so storychaser's sister grabbed it to bring to my room, in front of which the three of us chatted for a good long while before I went to bed.

Comments

[nosebeepbear.livejournal.com]

Amazingly non-Atkins safe is *still* an understatement. A buffet with only one meat dish, and that with BBQ sauce which almost certainly had sugar in it. I'd been bad for 3 weeks anyway, so I gave up. I'm officially taking care of myself again as of yesterday (mostly thanks to cptsevern, but that's another story).

A white koan of 3 weirds shouldn't have thrown me as much as it did. I'm blaming the long drive, which is your fault anyway. That's my story and I'm sticking to it! :P

[mneme]

Point. Sugar or flour, probably. I think the only things Atkins safe on that menu were hard boiled eggs and a few of the salad items. *sigh*

I think it was a groupthink thing, really -- people gave up on non-wierd koans really early, which stopped them from finding the simple examples of the rule. I mean, I suppose the Perfect Zendo Student should be able to guess any rule with any group, but it doesn't always work that way.

[marcmagus]

I think I got stuck on weird a little too early, and missed the thought the weird is also neither flat nor upright (it got said at least twenty times, I even said it, but it didn't filter into relevance) until you gave the helpful example and I got a few minutes to digest its implications.

I agree, groupthink, for one reason or another. That or just an overall inexperienced group of students, leading to plays that weren't as purposeful as they could be.

[debkitty.livejournal.com]

I also think that playing with inexperienced people who haven't quite wrapped their (our) heads around the concept of what weird is makes it a bit more difficult. Non-weird koans (versus weird koans) might happen less often when the players don't realize there is such a thing. Personally, I was just trying to put things together that looked different than anything previously played. I could get an idea of what would and wouldn't have the Buddha nature based on which koans on the table it most resembled, so I did well on the mondos, but otherwise I had no idea and not enough information upon which to base a clue.

[mneme]

Yep. I think, fairly clearly, that the big mistake there wasn't actually my mastering style (though it didn't help, and it caused the game to drag longer than it would have), but that I chose an axis which the new players were unfamiliar with, which combined with the lack of intro/explaination, made things hard -- had I been running an equally hard, but more obvious red=blue, or small=large, people would have been on a much more equal footing.

[selki.livejournal.com]

the upcoming Early American Chrononauts

Ooh!

Badger

[debkitty.livejournal.com]

If we are talking about the same Badger, namely, the one who lives in Massachusetts and is dating Jeremy, I believe she has a live-journal. Check my friends list.

Re: Badger

[mneme]

Thanks! Added.

Re: Badger

[debkitty.livejournal.com]

My pleasure. Besides, call it payback for the friend I have added courtesy of you. :)

Carry me back to old hotel room

[suecochran.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did leave my guitar intentionally in the filkroom. Quite often I've had a room really far away from filking, and (although not in the past few years) had not only my filk stuff to bring back to the room but also a Matthew to carry, and I got into the habit of stowing my filkbooks and guitar underneath tables in the filkrooms if I knew they were going to be used for filking the next day. I know it's taking a chance, but really the guitar isn't worth so much to me that I'd be unduly upset if it were to be nipped. I try to take more care with the filkbooks though, they would be much harder to replace. And I do have them in a suitcase with wheels which makes them easier to deal with than the guitar is when I'm tired. It's hard to walk long distances for me anyway due to the neuropathy in my feet. And the rooms at the Escher Hilton can be a VERY long walk away! I keep meaning to do something about getting a steel string guitar to replace the nylon string acoustic that I've currently got. In any case, thank you for looking out for the guitar and returning it to me via Nancy L.