orrynemrys

Love in the Hands of Children

For as long as I can remember, romance has comprised some part of every contiguous entertainment experience that has spoken to me. While certainly the values and nature of attraction and fulfillment changed as I grew older – as did my expectations in the nuances of my entertainment selections – romantic idealism has been with me from my earliest television and movie experiences. From amorous cartoon characters floating off the ground with a single kiss to reticent movie couples surrendering to mutual attraction that’s been beating them around the head and shoulders for an hour of on-screen hijinks, love has been a theme of so much quality family entertainment throughout my life – and for a generation or two prior!

Ted Danson playing the “Long” game in *Cheers* (1982-1993).

And I grew up in the 80s. We were a cable family, and my parents really didn’t censor what my brother and I consumed (until they thought it would be too scary, but that’s another blog), so it wasn’t just classic musicals and Saturday morning cartoons that taught us the intricacies of romance. I followed Steve Guttenberg through his Police Academy misadventures (complete with boobies!!), Tom Hanks mackin’ on a mermaid, and Molly Ringwald waltzing her way through one John Hughes flick after another. I fell in love with Princess Buttercup and watched nobody put Baby in a corner. And I subconsciously took notes from Sam and Diane’s toxic 80s relationship.

But while I figured out pretty early on that I longed for a romantic experience in my life – that perfect poetry of true love and whatever came with it – so many of the variables were beyond my reach. Let’s take Ghostbusters, for example.

1984 was a big year in entertainment, and particularly for me. I was 8 or 9 years old. It was the year of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (damsel in distress, anyone?), The Last Starfighter (save the galaxy, get the girl!), Revenge of the Nerds (talk about cringe!), Purple Rain (um… wow), Dreamscape (man, did I want to have sex on a train – whatever that was!), and The Terminator (no way I could get the whole we’re-all-gonna-die-so-please-do-me-now vibe, but it was something). It was also the year that Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddmore saved New York, and – you guessed it – Venkman got the girl.

Dennis Quaid invading Kate Capshaw’s dreams for some on-brand, low-key
nonconsensual lip-lockage in *Dreamscape* (1984).

Now it’s important to note that these were not movies about romance… it was just part of the package. Like it’s part of life. By this point in my youth, I had received the message loud and clear. But you also have to understand how we associate information with strong emotional experiences – and a movie like Ghostbusters had grabbed my imagination and refused to give ground. I was enthralled. And again… saved the day, got the girl. That’s the perfect ending, right!?

But as a boy there was one really harsh lesson life couldn’t communicate with any clarity. And that was the lesson of Ghostbusters II.

No… not that lesson.

Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver celebrating marshmallowpocalypse in *Ghostbusters* (1984).

A few years later, the anticipated sequel rolls around, and one glaring issue leapt from the screen with malice aforethought. After all that amazingness that culminated in the joyous finale of the first movie, Peter Venkman and Dana Barrett were no longer together.

While intellectually I knew that this was a thing – my own parents had even undergone a brief separation in the intervening years – it still felt like a betrayal. I couldn’t wrap my head around the central question of why. What had Venkman done to lose the girl?

You get that?! What had Venkman done? In the context of the story laid out in the film – and likely corrupted by my parents’ experience – I got that he’d been responsible. That his romance hadn’t been eternal, and that it was somehow his fault. And realistically, this was a theme that played out in a lot of similar tales in the entertainment world (particularly with any degree of confirmation bias); relationships were typically shattered by the irresponsible or outright treasonous behavior of the male counterpart. Like… if she was the prize for saving the day, then you had to deserve her to keep her.

Note that there’s a lot of uncomfortable constructs in that paragraph, much of it seeded by the hypermasculine bullshittery of the era: treating a partner like a trophy, absolving one person of responsibility in a failing relationship, and doubling down on archaic gender norms that sorely needed more disruption in the entertainment world at the time. But again, the lessons for a young man were driven home with abandon.

It was disenchanting, to say the least. It set a lot of expectations. Not just for young boys, but girls as well. Was the first 50 years of TV and its attendant cinematic offerings determined to reinforce gender stereotypes? Well… yes. In a way. Producers and filmmakers made stories based on what they knew. Even Star Wars with its one tough female protagonist started as a damsel-in-distress situation; George had started his personal journey with Flash Gordon and similar offerings, where the scantily-clad girl was always a pawn in the hero’s story. The viewing public wanted men to be men, women to be beautiful and demure, and they wanted their children to enjoy the same.

Carrie Fisher representing the feminine ideal in need of rescue in *Star Wars* (1977)

But my principal question is this: does youth-centered and family-friendly programming still carry the same messaging? Do our kids and grandkids fall in love as the characters do in their favorite shows? I know that we’ve come a long way toward dispelling the gender norms of yesteryear, but are our kids learning the right lessons? Do they even have so much romance in their stories? I genuinely don’t know.

From *The Transformers S2.E34: The Girl Who Loved Powerglide* (1985)

And yes, I know a lot of the shows I mentioned above weren’t meant for kids, but I don’t think that invalidates the experience of those that were. Even the second season of the Transformers cartoon had an episode with a girl falling in love with the Autobot that saved her life. And of course, I’m not referring to programming aimed at very young children; I don’t expect romantic messaging from Dora the Explorer or Dinosaur Train any more than we had in Sesame Street or The Electic Company.

My kids are largely past this age, and like my parents we don’t censor (but we’ve always tried to keep open communication going), so it’s something of an academic question to me, but I’m genuinely curious whether the urge for romance still thrives in the hearts of today’s youth.

More Than a Metaphor

Last week my family made the fateful journey back to the Great Plains. It is difficult not to feel like we’re retreating from the mountain home we had come to love, taking a huge step backward in life to the confines of our stormy homeland. And stormy it is – in Colorado Springs, while the occasionally snowfall meanders by, we are no longer accustomed to the moody bouts of rain and stormclouds that hover above the Kansas skyline. Where we landed in Manhattan it has now been raining for nearly 48 hours. Not storming for the most part, just persistent dribbling that comes and goes and leaves everything basically damp.

While Kansas boasts some lovely vistas and incredibly beautiful sunsets – and a night of rolling thunder across the prairie can be a comfort and sometimes electrifying (pun intended) – this gloom in particular seems to punctuate our move with an almost sinister intent. The drizzle coalescing on the window pane seems hell bent on sapping our will. And while the morrow may bring some modicum of sunlight, I know that we shall not see it this day.

We are moved. At this moment, my desk is one of the few places in the house that isn’t crowded by boxes waiting for their turn in The Unpackening. I have never loved moving – beyond the occasional bit of excitement in the adventure of landing in a new house and figuring out how to arrange your day-to-day life inside its rigid confines – and as I get older it becomes more and more challenging. We had to hire help this time to load and unload the truck, and the unload only managed about 75% of the inventory before I simply ran out of money. They did that much in 2 hours; it took us around 24 hours to vacate the remainder.

It’s sobering, to say the least.

But we are moved, our belongings safely ensconced at our new residence. We’ve set up shop a stone’s throw (well, if you’re a hill giant, at least) from our dear friends (read as “chosen family”) Jason and Julie, so at least we’ve had a safe haven amidst the madness. (Though they have a 9-week-old Pyrenees puppy, so safe may be a bit of an exaggeration…) And we know that the gloom will pass.

After all, this is Kansas; don’t like the weather? Just wait a minute.

Echoes

One month ago today, I heaved a big sigh of relief. After a difficult season of somewhat abbreviated paychecks, family health issues, a great time at the Wichita convention that cost us a chunk out of pocket to attend… our finances were finally moving the right direction. While we were heading into the holidays with a very limited budget, bills were being paid and we had a little breathing room. When Christmas weekend rolled around, my wife Jonikka and made the trek back to Kansas to spend the holiday with friends and family. We lingered for a time, ringing in the new year with camaraderie and a sense of relative contentment.

When we were on our way home on January 4th, we received the call. My wife’s contract with her employer – which should have given us another six months of rebuilding and finally being able to put money away – had been terminated. We were officially adrift, fluid enough to make it through the end of the month.

As often happens in our lives – so much so that it’s virtually a meme in our family – disaster accompanied opportunity. Just a few hours before receiving the call, a close friend had heard us waxing on about how much further my wife’s salary would stretch if we moved back to Kansas, and my sister-in-law had proposed that a new medication on the market might very well be the solution to Jonikka’s lower-altitude health concerns. Said friend offered to procure us a home, paying a rent that is only a fraction of our current commitment in Colorado Springs.

So with hearts a bit heavy, we prepare to bid farewell to our mountain home, with every intention of returning some day soon. The boxes are already starting to pile up around me as a write this, capturing the contents of our apartment with efficient cardboard sterility. We have two weeks to pack and clean, load our belongings into our cars and a massive uHaul, and make the voyage back to Kansas. Our coffers are dwindling. The cost of the move is staggering. Jonikka continues to look for work as I do my best to bring in a comparatively paltry sum. Our debts, while not insurmountable, are burdensome, and supporting a family of four beyond the next few weeks with our current resources is, in a word, unrealistic.

Invariably, things will work out. We have a seriously uncanny way of emerging from hardship with surprisingly few scars. That doesn’t make the interim any easier, of course, and while I want to be hopeful… well, it bleeds the energy right out of you.

A month ago, when I was heaving that sigh, I was staring at the arbitrary start of the new year with aspiration and a bit of hope. 2024 would be the year I finished the next book. I had plans for my podcasts and my Patreon supporters, and I was thinking about heading to Kickstarter with another gaming project. I was lining out ways to address the damage to our credit in the wake of the Pandemic, and we were starting to talk about buying a car and working toward a house.

That phone call was a serious kick in the teeth.

But we have each other. We have amazing friends and family that have helped where they can. We have games that bring us joy, and my projects – while on a temporary hold – continue to tantalize me with their possibilities. I am optimistic about the next adventure, no matter the hardship, because perseverance is inevitably the greatest tool in our collective utility belt.

And there’s one other thing I want to acknowledge. Over the years, my wife and I have striven to be the kind of friends who help anyone we can. We’ve opened our home and our pantry, our wallets when we could – sometimes even when we couldn’t – and the karmic elevation of that devotion to showing love and respect to those around us is paying off in dividends. It’s not a reward for good behavior – the reward, conspicuously enough, was caring for others – but rather a reminder that your kindness and compassion has a way of being revisited upon you when the need is there.

Good morrow, friends. Wherever you are, we’ll see you soon.

We’re All Part of a Neverending Story…

My friends and I from Exposition Street were discussing the tonal shift between The Neverending Story and its sequel, released some six years later with a completely different cast and crew. While I am typically very much a champion of most films, much to the amusement of my fellow podcasters, I know that this particular switch up was one that I responded to very poorly.

The movie was released in the US in summer of 1984. I was eight years old, and it was one of the singularly most influential events of my childhood. I was absolutely absorbed by the world presented in the film and the concept that it connected to me in my seat at the theater just as potently as it connected young Bastian to the realm he was reading about.

I read the book a few years later. It was originally published by German author Michael Ende in 1979, and I never saw a copy until a middle school librarian pointed it out to me. The hardback was cleverly printed in different colors to differentiate the reader’s narrative from Bastian’s narrative and the narrative of the novel he was experiencing in the story. It was trippy, to say the least.

I remember being drawn in but unable to wrap my ahead around key differences between book and movie. I was already old enough to understand that, in the way of these things, conventional wisdom provided that “the book was better.” I mean, that’s the way it’s supposed to work, right? But there were definitely things they did in the movie that worked better for the story, including changes like the English translation “Fantastica” to “Fantasia”, for example, or the original visualization of the Ivory Tower as a sort of swirly ice cream looking structure.

There were also a lot of things that they left out when they made the film. That happens. And most notably, the movie ended about half way through the book. So when they announced a sequel in 1990 called “The Next Chapter”, I definitely had expectations.

It wasn’t what I wanted. The new vision combined with a thinner budget and weird conglomeration of elements from the book and the first movie made me dizzy, and I didn’t want a new Bastian and a new Atreyu and a different Mr. Bux and all that. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. We have a whole movie podcast where we get into the weeds on that kinda stuff.

The central message of the The Neverending Story was that allowing banality and despair to take root in the world around us diminished the power of our collective hopes and dreams. Sure there’s a powerful allegory about childhood and growing up in that, and Bastian was struggling with grief and loss, but after absorbing that message as a child I became a writer, a game master, a musician and an entertainer. I became someone intent on using my power to bring joy and share the experience of life with my fellow persons. I became someone who saw the potential in everything, loved things created by people on their own merit.

I am a terrible critic. I try, but sometimes I am just so overtaken by the magic of creativity and human ingenuity in sharing a vision with others… I love books. And movies. And music. And art. And poetry. And dance. And. And. And. It makes me kinda the object of friendly ridicule by my friends and fellow podcasters, but I have a hard time trashing much of anything. I am constantly trying to convince them of the awesomeness of damn near everything.

Sure, there are exceptions… art is subjective, after all.

So who knows… maybe I should give The Next Chapter another chance.

“I Need to Do More of That”

My friend Jason calls this “a dark incantation that guarantees that I will 100% not do more of that.” Cynical, perhaps, but not inaccurate. It’s like a doomseeker circuit that’s always present in our psyche. We clearly have the power to recognize values that lie outside of our everyday behavior, but change is freakin’ hard. Even with little things.

Lately I’ve been buried. TsunamiCon is looming like it’s namesake against the horizon, an inescapable storm that requires a shit-ton of preparation. It’s a storm I know well; the preparations are rote, carved into the soft tissue of my brain and fueled with caffeine and determination. It’s worth it, of course, but it’s a solitary pursuit. Particularly since I moved 8 hours away from my support system. I navigate those currents with a deft hand, but the hand still grows weary.

I have other pursuits, of course, but many of them grow stale during this part of the year. At least once a week, I open my manuscript for the sequel to Shadow of the Spire and stare at the page. I pick up my guitar for a few minutes nearly every day, but I’m not writing anything new. About the only creative outlet I navigate successfully every week is prepping and running tabletop RPGs for me friends. Admittedly, that’s something I’ve done nearly every week for almost 40 years, so it’s kinda like breathing. I couldn’t shut that part of my brain off if I wanted to.

Creative endeavors can be heavily affected by exhaustion or depression. It is remarkably difficult to find the energy and inspiration to conjure new ideas and expressions from the ether when your brain just wants to curl up in a corner and ignore the world, and if you are a creative by nature then this failure perpetuates a cycle of failures that makes it even harder the next time. It’s a death spiral that can’t be easily abandoned, and even small bursts of creative expression have little effect on the overall conundrum.

So what we have is little things. Tiny behavioral efforts that may not feel like much but break away from your S.O.P. And they don’t have to be the same things… you have to avoid pressuring yourself to meet an impossible standard. It’s like cleaning out your closet or wiping down the kitchen counter suddenly becoming a New Years resolution. Do it once and be happy, then look for other opportunities to break the cycle. And if you can find a way to hook into something that inspires you, ride the high and see if you can create a new pattern of behavior. But keep it small. Don’t punish yourself if its falls flat… it’s a little thing, not an impingement on your character.

I had said to my friends: “Actually find blogging very therapeutic. I need to do more of that.” So here I am. Keeping it small.

Here’s a picture of my cat.

Dystopia

My friend Vanessa just shared this with our friend group, with the caption “I feel like this is the dystopia genre as a whole.” I laughed. It’s kinda true.

Then I realized something that tasted weird about that statement: the idea of “dystopia” as a genre.

Dystopian fiction has its roots in the very underpinnings of utopian science fiction. In the early era of sci-fi literature, authors imagined the future as an idealized state managed by political and social structures that reflected the author’s ethos. Dystopian evocations naturally portrayed the opposite, often with very cynical or subversive undertones. While utopian concepts celebrated mankind’s ability to transcend petty differences and transform their world into a realm of enlightenment, dystopian tales revealed the soft white underbelly of utopias built on corrupt and dangerous supports.

Needless to say, the latter evaluation is an outgrowth of the former and has become far more commonplace today. Which takes me back to the very foundation of the concept. Expressions of dystopia – corrupt power centers, inherent moral decay, the illusion of equality, and warnings about the trajectory of our social order – now pervade so many levels of modern entertainment. While initially developed as a means to provoke deep thought regarding the potential future of mankind, dystopias have now become an acceptable standard by which we measure the present. Even those of us who expound on a frightening look at the future we may very well be hurtling toward at terrifying speeds generally accept that our priority is to adapt and survive, that systemic change is a complete fantasy.

**Eloi** Yvette Mimieux off to be the **Morlock**‘s supper.
From *The Time Machine* (1960).

If you think about it, that is the polar opposite of the point of dystopian fiction.

I would propose that relegating dystopian fiction to “genre” status – which it certainly is! – marginalizes the art form. When it becomes passe and overwrought, we don’t actually see ourselves in the narrative. Sure, we see the extension of our society by proxy, but less as a thought experiment and more as a pickling kettle. We soak up science fiction and judge the story more than the premise. After all, we’ve seen nearly every plot structure and character evolution mulched over and again; the premise is either too far removed from the currency of everyday life or a foregone conclusion.

I grew up loving Star Trek. Roddenberry’s vision of the future of humanity was purely utopian. We lived in a world of peace and plenty. We had fought our wars and come out the other side stronger and ready to expand our personal horizons. We made giant space vessels for purposes of science and exploration. When we fought it was with violent cultures that had yet to achieve a similar state of enlightenment. As the franchise advanced the clock further, however, into the era of grunge music and the Gulf War, we saw increasing stories of subversion and human failing. The levers of power would fall into the wrong hands, and well-written episodes would often raise ethical questions with no clean answer.

Cpt. Benjamin Sisko investigates a coup attempt involving several Star Fleet officers.
From *Deep Space Nine* ssn4 episode “Paradise Lost”.

While Star Trek routinely held us to a higher standard from the very start – a position that has admittedly wobbled quite a bit from one entrant to the next – the lessons are now less visible to younger fans who no longer see the franchise’s alien warmongers, social stressors, profiteering, terrorism and intrigue reflected in today’s society. At best it starts to feel like an informed plot point we’ve seen a million times before, at worst it’s virtually satire.

And to my previous point… we are so inundated with dystopian story beats today that we no longer find as much value in entertainments that don’t have them. Corruption, manipulation, and inequality are part of our world, and stories that don’t reflect that are just unrealistic. I host a podcast where we talk about our favorite movies, and while sometimes we range into discussion about the implications of a filmmaker’s vision, our conversation typically rounds the maypole on performance, visual effects, and story choices that are made to move it along. I mean… why focus on the dystopia. That’s just normative.

We understand the inherent risk of the surveillance state recommended by George Orwell’s writings and the elements of social control we’re rebelling against in A Clockwork Orange and Hunger Games. We get the threat of totalitarian governments a la Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or even Lois Lowry’s The Giver. We get it. And we rate it for it’s entertainment value.

Because crying ourselves to sleep at night f’ing sucks.

So, yeah. Dystopia is a genre.

The Citadel

I get a strange sort of exuberance upon first entering a shopping mall. I’m not entirely sure why. They somehow seem like a relic of a bygone age, indicative of a childhood spent living in small town America where the mall was a symbol of the big city and all the shopping opportunities that we didn’t have; an idiom made honestly more confusing because malls offer very little specific shopping interests for me, which I’m sure was just as true when I was a kid. But what they did offer – bookstores, music stores, arcades, and so forth – felt like a trip to f’ing Disneyland.

Admittedly, it’s a fleeting sensation.

Today I am visiting the Citadel Mall in Colorado Springs. I’m alone on my excursion; my lady wife doesn’t particularly care for buildings with people in them, and my kids demonstrated markedly little interest in shopping in meatspace. And to be fair, the exterior of this shopping complex promises little innovation for the excursion to follow.

One place that does still retain some of the magic for me, however, is the almighty food court. And this one is quite simply gorgeous. And immediately accessible to the outside! Like somehow the mall knows that the food court is what’s going to bring people in the door. And frankly, on a Sunday afternoon, it’s the only area of the parking lot with much in the way of business.

A walk around the most accessible section of the mall from this location reveals numerous staples like Hot Topic, Spencer’s, Claire’s, Bath & Body Works, a bulk candy store, and a Game Stop. Happily, I also found an arcade tucked behind the stair! It wasn’t a particularly fabulous selection of games, but it still conjured pleasant memories of a youth spent plunking quarters into machines and wasting hours with my friends.

I picked up some candy – they had a small variety of sugar free offerings, but nothing to write home about – and grabbed a couple of pretzel dogs on my way out, my curiosity largely sated. I kept my visit short so that there would be plenty of new things to see if I swing by again sometime.

Ultimately, that initial enthusiasm dims very quickly without willing it to stay alive. Shopping malls are fairly banal, and while I long to see the shine beneath the surface, I know very well that I’m looking at the possibility of it all from the perspective of a boy who had very little to compare it to in life. During the course of my adult life, malls have held little more than nostalgia for me, and while living in the city I very rarely partook. We had a small town mall where I spent my early adult life in Dodge City, and it was home to our town’s biggest movie theater and only arcade. But it wasn’t big enough to support a food court, so it didn’t count.

Although there was a steak house there for a while where my band would rock the proverbial house, set up on a stage in the mall corridor facing the restaurant. That was pretty dope.

I’ll talk a little bit about some of the other, more interesting shopping experiences offered by the Springs when I have some time.

Stories are Signposts

I first met Kevin in 2006. He was a dear friend of my future wife’s and lived with her in this old Victorian place just left of downtown Wichita. He was actually in the process of buying the place – not because he was driven to own a home, precisely, but because Miss Jonikka had fallen in love with the house when her Ex purchased it. Now the relationship that secured the domicile was in its death throws, and Kevin knew that staying there would keep a roof over their heads and make Jonikka happy.

Sadly, the house that Jonikka truly loved wasn’t the one they lived in, but what it was capable of being… But that is definitely a different story.

What’s notable is that this kind of passion for simple joys was something that drove Kevin in many of his endeavors. He had much of the depth and wisdom that comes with age, but tempered with childlike wonder and a playfulness that left little question in my mind how he had become such an important part of Miss Jonikka’s life. He could go from prattling on about his favorite childhood television serial or comic book hero to stunningly deep philosophical meanderings without ever stopping for gas along the way. He loved to explore ethos and pathos of the stories that shaped our lives, and he penned a blog that dove head first into the way stories affected our lives over the generations with themes that appeared again and again in different cultures, era, and mythologies.

Kevin was a multicultural enthusiast who loved to see people celebrated for who they are. He saw a bit of the world when he was younger and even married a lady from China. They had four children, and he would often share stories of their youth; he clearly loved being a father. He also shared stories of his time in the Navy, likely watching the skies as much for changes in the weather as for signs of UFO activity. He would teach a course on UFO sightings and the possibility of other life in the universe on Tuesday, and then another debunking extraterrestrial testimony on Wednesday – and he reveled in the paradox. Kevin was someone who sought to penetrate the illusions and lay bare the truth of men, but still saw beauty in both the illusions and the truths.

Kevin was 61 years young when my son was born in 2008, and I think the only reason I didn’t recognize the radical metamorphosis Gabriel brought into his life was because I was busy contending with my own. He became a caretaker, then an earnest playmate. In many ways I had never been a child – I’d been so intellectual and introspective as a kid that I didn’t really connect with my peers, and my only real playmate was my younger brother. Conversely, in many ways Kevin had elected to hold on to the child inside, and now he finally had a way to indulge in it. He shared his passions with Gabriel, and celebrated his passions in return. He bought the kid about 17,000 dinosaur toys over the years, and even as Gabriel grew into a preteen and later a teenager they spoke almost every day. They would tell stories together, make up fanciful worlds and heroic adventures…

*Ahem* Not unlike, well….

Strangely, I was never jealous of their connection. Perhaps because I couldn’t have been that person in my son’s life, and I was just truly overjoyed that somebody else was. I know Gabriel and I would find a balance of our own – and we have. He’s a remarkably loving and compassionate child, thanks in no small part to his best friend.

KEVIN PATRICK BREEN passed away on Friday, April 14, 2023, surrounding by his children and grandchildren and in the company of his best friend. He has touched the lives of my family in ways that will never fade, and he will always be remembered for his passion, his love of life, and the joy he always tried to shoehorn into everybody’s lives – whether they were ready for it or not.

Gen Con 2021 | Denouement

Day Four of my Gen Con experience was a somewhat subdued affair. I had other commitments to attend to – primarily schoolwork, with weekend deadlines that cared not for my extracurriculars – but it also gave me a much-needed opportunity to reflect on the week thus far.

I received more than a few sad glances this weekend from contemporaries who learned that this was my very first Gen Con. Admittedly, I rather expected more, though I can’t be sure it would have significantly altered my plans, such as they were. Many events and features that would have stood out in previous years were absent or compromised this year, often simply because the organizers were not present. In some ways, that really did enhance the feeling that this was just a very large-scale version of what we do at home. There was gaming, vendors, VIGs, demos, cosplayers, more gaming, and even Mikey Mason – though I sadly didn’t get the chance to catch a show or even hang out with the dude.

On the other hand… scale matters. I purchased a few games that I had never seen, perused arts and crafts from dozens of amazing exhibitors, caught up with industry friends like Bruce Cordell, Chris Pramas, and Phil Reed – and made new friends in Tammy and Charles from Monte Cook Games, and Will and Annie at the Steve Jackson booth! – had a chance to game with some gentlemen Peter met at a Kansas City con (who may make it out to TsunamiCon next year), had a chance to sample a few of downtown Indy’s excellent restaurants, and spent a few days hanging out with an old friend whom I haven’t seen in several years (and then only via webcam!). Not to mention, I had a lovely weekend hanging out with Peter, listening to stories and sharing ideas; he harbors a deep and abiding passion for Gen Con – which he shared generously – and was an excellent guide in unfamiliar waters.

On Day Four, I took one last lap through the dealer room, in the final hour it was open. I made a few more purchases – marked down at the very end of the con – and picked up some more gifts for the kids. Peter and I wound down the evening with an excellent cognac and a little of the amazing cheese he drives to the Wichita Costco to procure and turned in early, and now I am restless and awake after only a few hours of sleep. But I’m not really doing much of the driving today, so it’s cool. I’m just ready to be home.

All in all, this has been a really enjoyable weekend with old friends and new, and I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity to visit Indianapolis and my very first Gen Con.

Salut.

Gen Con 2021 | Day Three

Saturday was unsurprisingly the busiest day yet. Though still not thick enough to inhibit traffic, social distancing was a significant challenge in the dealer hall. I dutifully spent some time navigating the shoals and surveying the nearby shores for ports of call and a chance at more booty. I stopped at a few places to chat about their product, get the occasional quick demo, and record conversations with some folks. The crowds were frankly exhausting, however, and I was just as happy to make some final purchases at the Dryad Teas booth and pick up a few enamel pins that had caught my eye, then catch up with Dan for a long overdue podcast.

One of the nice things about having a room at one of the hotels attached to the con was that it was an easy walk to somewhere quiet. Dan and I took some time to organize our thoughts and discuss our Gen Con experience, after which we parted ways – presumably for the last time – and I took a much-needed siesta.

I met Peter for dinner at the Weber Grill. I won’t be gauche enough to post pictures of my food, but I don’t think I’m overstating it to say that I had the best burger of my life. If you’re ever in downtown Indianapolis, do yourself a favor… it was pricey, but an experience all it’s own.

After dinner I realized that I had committed the unforgivable sin of neglecting to grab a selfie with Dan. This was our very first meeting face-to-face after nearly a decade of friendship, and I was devastated until I discovered that he had not yet fled the convention center. I quickly made my way back following dinner, and we relaxed in a quiet corner of the con for another hour or so.

So while I didn’t play any games on Day Three, I collected a good deal of media to share with friends and fans and spent some valuable time enjoying the convention. I don’t know if I’ll even have anything significant to discuss on Day Four, but I’m more than content with my first – and quite possibly but hopefully not, only – trip to Gen Con.