“I know someones happy with what I’ve been doing – but not who – and thus not what it is that is pleasing nor what I should be doing more of.”

I agree – most of my family back two generations went to the US – by the numbers, I’m actually one of the tiny Irish offshoot of a large American family. They weren’t imagining they would be coming back much or ever unless they prospered on arrival. Are we too squeamish these days? Wasn’t too long ago that things were considered worth the price of human lives – are only wars worth it now? Where are the rocket ship test pilots, for instance.

Would you take a one way ticket to Mars as a colony pioneer?

My point? It means that I shall be coming home on vacation shortly – London 24th- Xth*, Dublin Xth to 29th, Paris 29th – 1st, Houston TX 1st – Yth**, Los Angeles from Y+1 – 10th.

Important dates: 28th; 1930 onwards at the Bull and Castle, Dublin – y’all come.

* X is yet to be determined, probably the 26th, but I might push it another day if theres good reason.
** Y is dependant on the Houston Posse, there were mutterings of plans and Austin, so whenever thats all done I’m going to get on a train and 36 hours later I should be in LA.

Instead, you can have a written account.

The convention this year had several surreal elements to it. The first one was the Friday night was better attended than before. I have to say that I was impressed with the numbers. People came down and played in the LARP, and we were introduced to the fact that Doom had taken the lead of a platoon of L5R-playing Germans, who he led through the con and straight into the Sudetenland.

The LARPs seemed to run fairly consistently well. I heard good things about the Fan & Sabre, including the fact that the whole LARP were dancing in a courtly fashion, which must have been quite the scene.

We had at least 4 tables for tabletops for each event. There is a definite correlation between having BRO as your RPG dude and good RPG attendance. It’s been shown at Gaelcon and Leprecon now. A Kudo each to him & Siskington.

The Guest for the Con was Richard Borg, creator of Memoir ‘44. I have to say, Richard proved a superlative guest. He added a friendly, avuncular quality. Richard was very eager and joined in games, told interesting stories, and even spent some time playing with the two baby con attendees this year. I had the honour of victory over him in the inaugural Battle of Hoth, under Rebel Alliance General Honan’s direction. The real heroes of Hoth were Princess Organa, and her unit composed of elements from the Echo Base Reserve Fizz Band, Woodwind section. Led by Senator Organa, the Bith managed not only to inflict critical damage to an AT-At, but drive the 20 metre tall walker back across the open, snowy battlefield. Though none of the Bith survived a second engagement with the Imperial Walker, another unit under my command delivered the killer blow after Gorman made me re-roll my victorious grenade result.

2009 will live as a year of infamy for another reason. This year, Le Mysterieux Table Cinq de Monté Cristo was defeated by Sample Number Nine. I am still in considerable shock, but suffice to say that we will be back next year, with a fully armed and armoured battle station.

The staff and committee this year were awesome. The Con went off with surprising ease, and all the good numbers (attendees, kotei, players at games) were up. We even had free pizza from Just-Eat, which rocked.

The closing ceremony was fun. Noodle instigated Order 66, which left the committee a smoking ruin of nerf-clustered corpses. We also had a short slide show to remember icecream by. I will leave that below for your perusal.

Closing

This weekend at GenCon, no fewer than seven people gave me the now instantly recognizable wide-eyed look and said, “You look so familiar,” including one man dressed impressively in a feathered hat and full-length cloak who was too busy looking impressive to stop walking and talk to me beyond that sentence. I didn’t expect any of those people to actually know me.

The jaw-dropping moment of truth happened Saturday morning as I was waiting outside my hotel to either be picked up by the airport shuttle (transportation was complicated) or split a cab fare with a fellow gamer who was also waiting outside. A couple exited the hotel and looked at us. They offered us both a lift, as they’d rented a car, and we headed to the parking lot. On the way, the question came up and I launched into my stock answer involving genetics and blank features. “Unless you gamed in DC…or live in LA…” I ended, trailing off.

“Yeah, I live in LA.”

“Really? What part?”

The conversation spiralled this way until we determined that this stranger works in my building, one floor upstairs from me. Indeed, I looked familiar because he’d seen me in stairwells and at the adjacent coffee shop. The other passenger listened with the quiet amazement only possible when you’re up too early to create a more verbose response to astonishing phenomena. Not only did this person work upstairs from me, but he plays D&D (probably 4th ed.) and is looking to add another person or two to the game.

This neatly solves the question of how I will get my gaming fix between now and when I graduate, which is increasingly likely to happen in March.

The one very important point to keep in mind is that the metro system is *incredibly* hot – the carriages are air-conditioned and dump heat into badly ventilated tunnels. Even if the carriages are ok, the platforms are like an oven in the smaller stations and uncomfortable. If you can arrange your trip to just use the main stations (Grand central, Penn, Union Square etc.) you’ll be more comfortable.

I stayed in the Pod Hotel 230 E 51st Street which I found fantastic – the rooms are not big, but clean, comfortable and very central. I liked it a lot and it was good value. Here are reviews for other points of view. The Pod Hotel New York (230 E 51st Street, (212) 355-0300)

Right next door there is a delicious sushi-sashimi place (Tanaka’s, 222 E 51st St) but you may not want to come to America and eat Japanese…

Icons – you have to see the Chrysler Building and the Statue of Liberty. The Chrysler building is the best-looking of the Art Deco skyscrapers, better than the Empire State building. The Statue of Liberty is just the symbol of everything that’s great about the US. There is also a beach/themepark/aquarium out at Coney Island (just take the D, F trains out to the end) – its a fantastic beach, almost empty in case you want to be able to say you went swimming in New York :)

Museums – I would recommend the Natural History Museum on the West side of Central Park for a great collection of dionsaurs and other critters, then take a nice stroll through Central park to the Metropolitan museum on the East side. Highlights of the Met museum are the reassembled Egyptian Temple and the fantastic Roman relics.

Coffee shops – I went looking for the best coffee places in New York and according to the internet they are apparently:
Abraço – 86 East 7th Street,
Gimme Coffee – 228 Mott St
Ninth Street Espresso – 700 E 9th St

These are indeed good – I would recommend taking Abraco and Ninth St. Expresso as part of days shopping around the East village – it is definitely where I saw all the little fashion shops – between 5th Ave and Avenue A – and then down into the Lower East Side. There is one big vintage place called Screaming Mimi’s (382 Lafayette Street) that had lots of stuff. For other cafe’s and the like – “Bon Pain” is a good chain and there are a few of them.

So – a day for the museums, a day shopping in the East Village/Lower East Side, I went to Coney Island one day and spent another just walking around mid-town along Broadway – if you have more time, I am sure you will come up with other creative things to do.

Bars and Clubs, alas, I am less use because my cousin brought me around and apart from ‘there is a good bar somewhere around 23rd Street, 3rd Avenue’ I can’t remember any detail. Anyone care to add to this?

I will definitely be at The Dead Flags Single Launch in the day time – and my major head-ache now is whether or not to take up an invitation to The Tassel Club (perhaps NSFW?) that evening… it looks like great fun… but will *not* be in keeping with ‘being around, drinks for to be had with’.

Sunday is the transportation to Waterford for Monday, the wedding, trip for the reason of.

Time I do not have much of. (26 days to departure)

And she never did, though dozens more guys and girls came and went.

I got a taster of the high octane party life while I was there, piggy-backing on my cousins usual weekend fun. Bars in the city full of guys and girls who are friendly and easy on the eye and weekends were spent in the house down by the beach on the New Jersey coast. I doubt I could hack the pace over any sort of medium to long-term but it was great to dip in. Everyone was just so *friendly*.

And fit, thats another thing I really don’t think I could hack in the long run – work serious hours, then some how cram in a fair-to-scary fitness regime to stay in party-going shape… and then go party, sleep, wake, do it all again? Yikes.

But lots of fun, really, really nice people – and topped by one of cousins coworkers saying in the bar “wait, so [cousin] is really Irish? I thought he was making that up.” when he found out who I was.

Seriously, I thought New Yorkers were supposed to be a prickly, irascible lot? Even in the 100 Farenheit metro stations people were laid back. Compared to this, Paddington Underground is an am-dram remake of ‘Thunderdome’.

Good times, and cheap too.

(34 Days to Nigeria.)

Ok – I go and scour my laptop and mp3 player and make sure I’ve only got mp3’s I’ve ripped off CD’s I own – lets say I go super paranoid and don’t include CD’s that were given to me by other people who bought then, or which I’ve passed on to others afterwards. Lets say I don’t have any up and coming artists who’s work doesn’t have CD’s that I’ve only got as podcasts, free downloads, mixtapes or whatever. Lets say I leave out anything like mashups that might samples stuff (even under fair use grounds).

So now I have a laptop with a couple of gigs of squeaky clean music, and Ipod ditto and a phone that is capable of playing mp3s (even though I never use it as such for battery longevity reasons). Three pieces of tech I could reasonably be expected to have on me going through an international border, and now all must be searched, potentially seized. I arrive at the border of CopyrightLand because I’m on holidays, or I’ve been sent there on a business trip and frankly can’t survive long flights without music (and from August, every flight to anywhere will be a long flight).

And so, up I pitch – and the guy/gal takes my stuff, checks them, finds they contain a very large quantity of music… and…? Then what, he says are they legit, I say yes, whether I have all the CD’s hermetically preserved back home or whether I’ve pirated the lot by streaming through someone elses WiFi connection (for extra illegalocity). So, customs guy has me, a bunch of devices and a pile of music… and what does he do? How can I prove that I legitimately walked the tightrope of fair-use rights and am infringing no copyrights with whats on my machines? Will he just default confiscate everything to be sure? I’m sure if its anything like every other border security thing, we, Jo(e) Q Citizen will have zero recourse if they do – therefore border security is incentivised to just take everything, ‘just in case’, because they will get in no trouble for erring on the side of caution, but may get yelled at if they let the guys from the Pirates Bay through on the wave.

I’m hoping the sheer unenforceability of it will make this less of a legalistic horror but I’m not certain. The EU has a decent (relatively speaking) track record of dealing with the more lunatic copyright infringement stuff but with *everyone* else on board for this I worry.

Mainly, I worry because even if the EU stays out, it makes transatlantic flight *even* more of a fucking hassle – because as soon as TSA decides to look at you, you can be dissappeared, and where previously as a white, working age Anglophone I was minimally worried, if ‘ipod’ and ‘laptop’ turn into red flags then thats me square in their sights – and while I could easily create a ‘travel only’ ipod which is entirely kosher and above board it still doesn’t answer the basic question of how the hell do I *prove* its entirely legit and above board if they stop me?

And in fairness, I have been present at spontaneous outbreaks of song at parties and I know what pubs to go to for a fairly high chance of by-locals-for-locals trad music in Sligo – but is it that simple? Is real Ireland the place where the traditions are the same as our grandparents time? Is it where the live music tradition has been turned into the band scene with everyone jammed into places like Whelans in Dublin or McGarrigles in Sligo?

I can see why it might be hard to tell whats really real when Irish pubs are sold in boxes so I throw it open to the floor – is there such a thing as ‘real Ireland’ or is whatevers there, be it Brazilians in Gort or superpubs a la globalisation, by definition real since thats what *is* there?