GenCon/JadeCon

Another fun and exhausting day.

We hit the floor of GenCon this morning and covered almost all of it (we may go back tomorrow to finish it off). Bought lots of GURPS books (they were only $5 and we didn't own them already, how could we resist?), some Dork Tower books, the Dork Tower board game, and a really cool dagger.

And then, we got to meet and get autographs from Dean Haglund and Ron Glass!! Dean Haglund was pushing his comedy show pretty hard, but seemed like a fairly nice guy... but Ron Glass was chatty and was having a very hard time not spoiling people around us for "Serenity." (And no, we weren't trying to trip him up or anything, in fact, he started to blurt stuff out and stopped himself when he realized his handler/assistant was cringing back from potential spoilerness. Heh.)

Had one fun and very odd thing happen out on the convention floor, that I'm way too exhausted currently to write about it in a way it deserves... and I'm only mentioning it vaguely now so that I'll remember to write it later.

The fun and very odd thing that happened yesterday

GenCon is huge. REALLY huge. So I'm always a bit amazed when I actually manage to run into people I know while walking around on the convention floor (and I'm talking about folks who are also here for JadeCon, so I even already know they're around).

Well, yesterday when rackham and I were leaving the main floor in search of an ATM, I heard someone call my real first name from not far away. The odd thing is that I even noticed it... I don't generally respond to that name anymore, unless I'm in an appropriate venue (e.g. visiting my dad, since he's pretty much the only person who still uses it). Then I heard, even louder, "Fenchurch?" So I turned... and it was a friend I haven't seen since my first year of college! He had still been in high school at the time, and I honestly don't think I would have recognized him now if I'd just seen him on the street... but apparently, I still look enough like I did back then!

It was just absolutely wild... he actually lives in Seattle! And yet, we still managed to bump into each other in Indianapolis in the chaos that is GenCon (he's working in a booth at the convention and had seen us walk by and chased us down). It's just too, too weird. We couldn't chat too long (since he was working), but we exchanged phone numbers and email addresses and caught up a little bit on a mutual friend and he told me a bit about what his parents were up to (I'd actually met his dad first, at the Doctor Who fan club in Spokane back in the mid-80s, and he's someone I would definitely count as an old friend, as well).

What a blast from the past! Hard to believe it's been around 17 years or so since we'd last seen each other!