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As some of you may recall, on the last full night of Arisia 2009 a handful of us decided to colonize a little indentation in the brickwork of the hotel lobby, and with the help of a stolen velvet rope to delineate our national borders we summarily seceded from the Union. Calling ourselves the Grand Duchy of Niche, our time as a sovereign nation (all 90 minutes of it) were spent laughing our heinies off, throwing paper airplanes at people and shouting our national slogan ad nauseum ("Voyeurism! Separatism! And a chair!"). Good times.
It was always our intention to reclaim the Grand Duchy of Niche for ourselves upon our return this year. To our great delight, we had in the intervening year been upgraded: by gum, we had ourselves a couch.
(From left to right:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mianathema, rafaela, felisdemens, and enderfem.)
Unfortunately, we soon discovered that this apparent blessing was in fact a double-edged sword, as what was once an Albania-like patch of barren woe is now a place where people would actually want to sit—more specifically, people who weren't us. And really, declaring war in a situation like that just seems wrong when your plans consist of sitting around and exchanging movie references. (Assuming you won the war, of course, which is hard when your chief weapons are paper airplanes and sarcasm.)
So we bore the matter stoically, seizing the space whenever we found it empty and turning it into a general meeting point for things like my aforementioned birthday hoopty. At one point we even sent stalwart explorers forth to conquer new culs de sac, establishing Niche's first remote colony, the Principality of Nook, on the second floor near the Con Suite (go, Manifest Destiny, go). This proved even harder to maintain than Niche, however, due to its superior natural resources of four comfy chairs and a table.
Monday, then, when the above photo was taken, was a bittersweet occasion, as we prepared to bid farewell to glorious Niche for the final time, in anticipation of Arisia's move to the Weston Waterfront Hotel next year. We're already talking about creating a New Niche upon our arrival (already dubbed "Niche Prime," because that's how we roll), but it won't be the same. There was some talk of making the Hyatt space ours forever more—felisdemens was all for burning it to the ground and salting the earth, while I figured just having a cat pee on it would pretty much serve the same purpose—but in the end we simply bid Niche a fond farewell and left it to its dull fate.
Grand Duchy of Niche and its fair citizens, we salute you. Voyeurism! Separatism! And a chair!
(Still to come: Arisia—The Necessities of Life Part 5: Clothing.)
It was always our intention to reclaim the Grand Duchy of Niche for ourselves upon our return this year. To our great delight, we had in the intervening year been upgraded: by gum, we had ourselves a couch.
(From left to right:
mianathema, rafaela, felisdemens, and enderfem.)Unfortunately, we soon discovered that this apparent blessing was in fact a double-edged sword, as what was once an Albania-like patch of barren woe is now a place where people would actually want to sit—more specifically, people who weren't us. And really, declaring war in a situation like that just seems wrong when your plans consist of sitting around and exchanging movie references. (Assuming you won the war, of course, which is hard when your chief weapons are paper airplanes and sarcasm.)
So we bore the matter stoically, seizing the space whenever we found it empty and turning it into a general meeting point for things like my aforementioned birthday hoopty. At one point we even sent stalwart explorers forth to conquer new culs de sac, establishing Niche's first remote colony, the Principality of Nook, on the second floor near the Con Suite (go, Manifest Destiny, go). This proved even harder to maintain than Niche, however, due to its superior natural resources of four comfy chairs and a table.
Monday, then, when the above photo was taken, was a bittersweet occasion, as we prepared to bid farewell to glorious Niche for the final time, in anticipation of Arisia's move to the Weston Waterfront Hotel next year. We're already talking about creating a New Niche upon our arrival (already dubbed "Niche Prime," because that's how we roll), but it won't be the same. There was some talk of making the Hyatt space ours forever more—
felisdemens was all for burning it to the ground and salting the earth, while I figured just having a cat pee on it would pretty much serve the same purpose—but in the end we simply bid Niche a fond farewell and left it to its dull fate.Grand Duchy of Niche and its fair citizens, we salute you. Voyeurism! Separatism! And a chair!
(Still to come: Arisia—The Necessities of Life Part 5: Clothing.)
