Gen Con 07 Come and Gone

I've been going to GenCon since around 1994 or so. For the first 8 years of going, I'd toil my way up to Milwaukee with my "retailer" badge in hand, arrive at the con with a driving-induced migraine, stay one or two nights at the cheapest motel I could find, eat at Karl Ratzche's, look at all the new stuff my customers would be demanding in the coming months, and then head back home, exhausted but feeling very professional. One year I went with my then-boyfriend; we went on impulse, and hadn't reserved a hotel room. Tried to drive back the same night, and realized we were risking death around 11 pm, only to find that all the hotels in eastern Wisconsin were booked due to some boat and travel show that same weekend. We ended up in a seedy Bates-motel clone in Racine, which was not exactly conducive to romance; we broke up not long after, but remain friends. A number of years later, I went with my then-girlfriend, who completely won my heart by not only allowing, but ENCOURAGING me to stop at the "Mars Cheese Castle" on the way home. (It was not, alas, an actual castle made of cheese.) The year after that, we'd broken up and I ran into her and her new boyfriend on the dealer floor, which prompted an emotional crisis of epic proportions, by my standards. Still, I weathered it, and kept going to Gencon. The first guy I ever really dated styles himself as the "Keeper of Ancient Gencon Lore;" he was a guest of honor this year, which goes to show you that if you carve your niche with a deep enough chisel, eventually people will sit up and take notice. He introduced me to the mystique of GenCon back in 1987 with tales of the SafeHouse and Cthulhu for president rallies. Needless to say, I'm always predisposed to like GenCon.

Now, all that said, I must say that this year had some great stuff, and some less great stuff than my usual experience. It certainly beat the hell out of the past two years in which I worked at the Croc Booth for 8+ hours each day from Weds - Sunday. I love Croc, and I love working in their booth, and yet it's so exhausting to be "on" for the entirety of the Dealer Room hours that I ended up not enjoying anything about the con even after it closed down. So in a nutshell, here's the cool stuff about this year's Gencon:
1) Working at the Croc booth for less! I still got to see some of our far-flung staff and fans, and that was awesome--yet so much less stressful than last year.
2) Getting a chance to actually do some of the puzzles; I loved the puzzle hunt 3 years ago, and then once I started working for Croc it was all over. This year I got to do about 8 of them, not as many as I'dve liked, but still fun and was joined variously by Andy, Karen, Martin, Michelle, Carl, and Rat Girl.
3) Jane, Steve and Joe coming to the con for the day. I gather it was not entirely what they'd expected, :) but I'm glad they came and it was great to see them, as well as Rob and Ian at dinner on Saturday.
4) True Dungeon, while disappointing in the final two rooms, was still a lot of fun and had corrected some of the annoying things from the last couple years. It's like they fix the things that bug me, but come up with new annoying things each year to make up for it. (Basically, we had a bitchy GM in room 7 who told us not to touch any of the props on pain of death--despite the fact that we were one of the very last groups to go through all weekend so it shouldn't have mattered much--and of course the only way to solve the puzzle was to handle the props. I'm planning on complaining about her. And then the final room puzzle was just dumb, too many red herrings and then the solution was way stupid. But overall still a lot of fun to do.)
5) LARPing with Rat Girl and her sister; we did one Firefly LARP which was fun--Andy was at that one too, I had minor complaints about it but it was overall fun--and then a 7th Sea pirate LARP which was way too crowded and complicated, but entertaining for a while. I like LARPing at cons just fine, but next year I may do Nascrag instead.
6) I did NOT spend an asston of money this year! Last year I bought a bunch of stuff, and traded Croc minis for even more stuff (wooo! boffer weapons!!) but this year I bought the Cthulhu movie, a Cthulhu book, a couple of dice, and a t-shirt. Hooray for getting off easy! (relative to my usual loot aquisition, that is.)
So, overall a good con, and I'm already looking forward to next year!