Arisia Tales, Vol. I: The Geeks Have Landed

(Too much Arisia stuff in my head to be done away with in one post. I have some time today and in the near future, so allow me to sprawl this thing out a bit...)

The trip out to Boston of Friday was so uneventful it made me nervous. rafaela and I arrived at the Hyatt Cambridge at four, only an hour into check-in time, but the garage was already so damned full that we had to park the rental car on the highest level, which would come back to haunt us when (a) issendai called to ask if I could give her a ride after her radiator exploded, and I had to pass on the front desk's message that we wouldn't be able to get back into the garage at all; and (b) we finally left on Monday, after the discovery that rental places don't tend to leave snow brushes in the trunk.

That dispensed with, though, we quickly began my favorite part of Arisia Fridays: running into every last human being you know in the lobby, and serially hugging them. I'm not even going to attempt to name everyone I saw, because that would lead to failure and brain lesions, but I must pass on the moment that defined the Con for me within an hour of our arrival:

I had located daev in the Kafkaesque registration line, and he and I were chatting after he'd picked up his badge. Dave is an old college friend from Illinois who had been to Arisia in '06 while attending enegim's wedding, and we'd been trying to get him to come back. This was the year at last, and he was already buzzing about it. "The thing I love about Arisia," he said, "is that I feel like I'm among my own people."

"Yes, exactly," I said, and mock-announced rather too loudly, "Gather around, people!"

Immediately, two girls passing by in semi-gothy vampire costumery came running. "What? What?" I apologized, stammered a bit, said that I wasn't really trying to gather people around, and they cheerfully bounced away.

Dave watched them go, eyebrow in a curious arch. "Did you actually know either of those girls?"

"No."

His grin was wider than the lobby itself. "THAT," he said, "is why I love Arisia."

Yep. We'd arrived.

Arisia Tales, Vol. II: Do the BIM

I had all sorts of grand plans for Arisia that I ended up scrapping. I'd wanted, for example, to set up an Arisia Prosperity Box—a small box filled with various gewgaws like buttons and BPAL imps and little toys and stuff, with a sign on it saying, "If you want anything in here, feel free to take it, but you must replace it with something someone else might like to have. Then pass this box on to someone else." Didn't happen due to pre-Con time-suck, although I may dust the idea off next year.

The one plan that did pan out, though, was the BIM marks. A BIM mark, for those just tuning in, is a reference to the cinematic masterpiece (for some values of "masterpiece") The Apple. It's basically a small, shiny triangular sticker worn by citizens of THE FUTURE (i.e. 1994) to show their solidarity with Boogalow International Music. No, it doesn't make sense. No, neither does the rest of the movie. You can see the general effect in some pictures here.

Well. I popped into the local fabrics and crafts store last week, and made off with several sheets of prismatic sticker paper from their scrapbooking section (on sale!), which I snipped into a bunch of little equilateral trangles. The plan was to distribute them at Arisia to anyone who didn't duck fast enough, and see what happened.

The results: Only a few people wore them on their person. wired_lizard was brave enough to wear it on her face as is proper, as did ultra_lilac, I think; one person wore it on her hand, and one or two went the cleavage route, which was quite fetching. Some people refused to accept the mark altogether—mostly folks who had seen the movie who weren't ultra_lilac (who not only loved it but pulled me aside on Sunday to compare notes on other movies that need watchin'). But plenty of BIM marks got handed out and ended up in various and sundry places of interest, such as:
* a Con badge or two
* Mr. Grabby the Squid (more on him later)
* The Official Replacement Balloon of shadesong's party (ditto)

Lessons learned:
1) Don't use scrapbooking-grade sticker paper for skin-contact purposes. Folks found out damned quickly that the stuff itches like whoa.
2) Under ideal conditions, BIM marks do, indeed, migrate. [/cryptic]
3) Do not underestimate the power of the BIM.
4) yuki_onna's Palimpsest temporary tattoos are way cooler.

By the way, I've got some of that sticker paper left. Anybody want one?

Arisia Tales, Vol. III: The New Economy

Arisia is our one annual splurge, bankrolled every year through Christmas and birthday money from my parents which they've specifically sent for the purpose of applying to the hotel. That said, money was still unsurprisingly tight this year, so we ended up doing things on the cheap, i.e. staying the hell away from Dealer's Row. Amazingly, we actually succeeded on that count, aside from the small bagful of buttons from Nancy's that we'd budgeted for ourselves. We were so successful, in fact, that we were able to throw a twenty back into our Bucket o' Fun, the pail we throw loose change and the occasional buck into, reserved for Cons, nights out and other recreational purposes.

Hindsight is always 20/20, to be sure, but I do wish I'd known certain things which might have been helpful in the finances department. felisdemens had arrived at Arisia under the influence of antibiotics, and within a day or two the Cipro had begun pimp-slapping her in the form of a case of the Creeping Blurghh, which sadly sent her to bed early one night. She was still not-too-successfully convalescing the next morning, and I was keeping her company in the lobby Niche, a spot which would become much more important as the Con wore on. < /foreshadowing > Overcome by inertia and abject misery, she made a comment that maybe, instead of engaging in Con Activities, she should just hold up a sign letting people poke her with a stick for a dollar and let the world come to her.

It just so happened that I had a Sharpie and scrap paper on hand:



The sign had to be changed because we lacked a stick. We did not, however, lack a squid. The adorable li'l cephalopod pictured above was a gift to felisdemens from a friend—one, it turned out, that had been used by other friends for flagellation purposes earlier that weekend (Reason #1407 Why I Love My Friends). She promptly named him Mr. Grabby, and he just as promptly became a prime conversation starter. (Random Guy in Stairwell: "Are you transporting a cephalopod?" Felis: "No, I'm just happy to see you.")

What did we learn from this? Dang bupkis, frankly, except for the probably guessable fact that offering Con strangers the opportunity to poke you with a squid will indeed get you attention.

Oh, and she made five bucks.

Arisia Tales, Vol. IV: Freedom!

There's something about the wee hours of the last night of Arisia that sucks out the very last vestiges of rational thought out of pretty much everyone. In 2008, this led to eustaciavye and me adopting a bundle of red and black balloons by the name of Fird. Which someone promptly ate. You see the problem here.

This year, though, it all started when mianathema, ultra_lilac, felisdemens and I, still buzzing from shadesong's party, landed in the niche, a little brickwork indentation in the Hyatt lobby, facing the elevators. It was a spot where much general hanging-out takes place—the now-famous squid-poking incident happened there—and as Sunday waned we found ourselves tucked into the corner with nothing to do.

So naturally, we seceded from the Union.

First step in creating the Grand Duchy of Niche (so called because it's fun to say "duchy") was establishing our national borders, a process that involved stealing a velvet rope and two brass posts, and assurances from the Arisia Information Desk that they would disavow any knowledge of our goings-on. From there we created a flag, with a central squid drawn by felisdemens and peripheral BIM mark and other sundries by ultra_lilac, and drafted a national motto—"Voyeurism! Separatism! And a chair!"—which we proceeded to shout at random passers-by, frightening one poor lad so much that he veered a full 45 degrees to avoid us. Once we'd named Felis as our designated dictator (because she had the best mustache), we were in business.

Soon we were joined by eustaciavye and ringoffire75, and then daev and rafaela, and once we had assigned titles to everyone we began earnestly building our armed forces, with me (i.e. the only Quaker in the room) in charge. Early experimentation with pen missiles failed, mostly because we only had two, which meant I had to go hop the velvet rope and bring them back every time we used them. Luckily, the ever-more-complicit Information Desk supplied us with paper for making airplanes, which all seemed to have the very bad habit of smacking our fearless dictator square in the false mustache no matter what we were aiming at. Our navy, however, was much less successful because no one could fold a boat; mianathema's best attempt would have been a fine battleship, provided that the enemy was planning to stroll up to the side of the boat long enough for the sailors inside to beat them with sticks.

The Grand Duchy of Niche was a great success, in that we were laughing hard enough to induce an asthma attack, but the reality soon sank in that once one had entered Niche, there really wasn't all that much to do, aside from yelling, "Voyeurism! Separatism! And a chair!" at people. Alas, all things must come to an end, and we finally disbanded with the realization that we had basically gone from sitting around and doing nothing to sitting around and doing nothing behind a velvet rope. That, and our Grand Duchy didn't have a bathroom.

Next year, though? We're taking over on Friday. And we're not giving it back.