photo saturday: avcon 2018

Okay, it's been a couple of weeks... there's quite a bit to get to.

To start off, I'm sick currently, or at least in the beginning stages of same, so honestly, I can't be bothered with anything right now. But it's been two weeks, so we're doing this.

First up, the Sunday after my last post I spent about four hours cleaning the house for my rental inspection. I tidied, I mopped, I moved furniture around.

Monday comes, I skedaddled out of the house before 10am when they were supposed to arrive, went to the library to prep some DnD modules, then got a call at 11:30 (half an hour before the end of the inspection window) telling me that sorry, the inspection person had had an emergency and they were cancelling. Spent the last week and a half keeping the apartment in an approximate state of readiness, then get an email that said it'll be this coming Tuesday.

And of course, now I'm sick, and I hate doing any kind of cleaning up when I'm sick. Fuck this and all this bullshit.

Also, I did last week's shopping on Friday morning, since I was going to be busy all weekend. I may have gotten a little over excited and bought too much stuff at the supermarket.

There's a sizeable chunk of DnD related news... most of it revolving around AVCon (hence the photos), but more on that in a hot minute.

I played my usual games, although I had a character who died died (since death is seldom completely permanent in lower levels of AL) the week before last... well, she technically committed suicide/sacrificed herself to save her companions (I know, but it was a somewhat heavy couple of minutes). I now have a replacement character who will fill in until we get around finding the NPC who can raise her from the dead.

I also ran the first ever game for one of the managers of the games store on Thursday just so he could see what this DnD was all about. He seemed to have a good time, which is the main thing.

My DnDniversary was also that week. One year since I walked through the door of Greenlight Comics to play for the first time. It seems so weird that it's only been a year.

Then there was AVCon. I was, obviously, part of the tabletop/RPG/DnD area, and picked up my staff shirt and pass on Friday afternoon... while walking away I looked down at the things I was carrying and said, aloud, "What the fuck even is my life right now?"... I mean 12 months after starting DnD, I'm not only running games, but I'm running games at a major convention and I have a teeshirt that says "STAFF" on the back. What even is my life indeed.

I ran essentially three and a half games over the two days. Almost entirely for new players, and in a couple of those situations more than half the players at my table were either under 18 or under 15 (I now understand why the award for doing that refers to a saint of the god of endurance). I also ran a module I've now run 5 times, so other than monster stats and the occasional check for certain effects, I didn't really look at the module at all. Which was nice, I got to embellish a bunch of stuff.

I did seem to be the "and also" table more than a few times. Or at least it felt that way during the big epic game on Sunday when I had a table of 6 all leave me after about an hour and replaced them with a guy and his young son and one of the other DMs.

Otherwise AVCon was okay. I got a bit of a wander in on Saturday afternoon, and then another on Sunday morning, I also got to hang out at the cosplay competition on Saturday (which is where the two photos above were taken), chat with the lovely man at the Level Up Dice stall (who treated me like we'd known each other for 10 years or something... I don't know if that's just him, or if it was because I told him I was a big fan of the DnD online stream show that they sponsor, but it was amazing either way), stalked a few cosplayers (in a non-creepy way in order to take photos).

Then on Sunday we went and chatted with the lovely lady at the LARP (Live Action Role Play... essentially DnD, but standing up and running around in the world somewhere) stall for a good quarter of an hour before heading back up to the tabletop area and two of the three of us having a table's worth of players flung at us not long after we returned.

I also thought, yeah, I'll be at the Con until about 5:30, come home, my evening is my own. Not so much.

I ended up going out for dinner afterwards, on Saturday with a girl I didn't know all that well, and we had a great time and hung out for about 4 hours... when on Sunday a group of about 7 of us all headed out to debrief and chat and just wind down a little. I got home at 11pm and midnight respectively. And the only reason I left at midnight was that that was my last bus.

I'm not sure I'm going to repeat the AVCon experience, but it was definitely something to add to the bucket list in order to check off and one I enjoyed, but yeah, not sure it's for me. But we'll see. I am going to step back from the upcoming Con in September though, not only to give someone else a go, but I am currently, what is the phrase, financially insolvent, so yeah.

This week I had Haircut Day, Chiro Day and found it very hard to add up four very small numbers on Monday night after AVCon. Seriously, adding the results of four four sided dice should not be that hard.

Haircut Day was the hairdressing equivalent of "second verse, same as the first". So nothing changed there. I got a call earlier in the week saying my usual chiro wasn't available on Friday so I went to the other one on staff instead. Which is always a different experience, but okay.

Yesterday and today were the two days that this stupid cold/flu/petri dish of gross really hit me. Not a fan.

Today we did the shopping thing, I basically bought the makings for chicken soup and not much else, because of course.

Then we went into the city because Ma wanted to go to Dymocks. Which we did... then we wandered briefly, then we gave up and came back here. Then she left.

Now I'm trying to decide whether going and laying down is a good idea while having a stuffed up nose.

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