GenCon UK has come and gone, and was pretty good actually. The organisation ahead of time had a few bobbles, but the con itself was fine, and the site at Bognor much better than last year's at Minehead. It's compact enough that popping back to the chalet for a few items was not a humongous hike, rather a matter of a three-minute walk. The con itself had a couple of areas to itself, the main one of which had its own bar and some options for food (including the very scary baguette vending machine), with others available and selling things that weren't actually physically painful to eat.
I would have liked to see more LARPers there, but some had been put off by the change in the way tickets had been handled -- which worked a lot better than I thought it would -- and some were feeling the Tombstone Effect, that being the big game running this coming weekend. Hopefully we will see some of them returning next year, if we run stuff then.
I also wouldn't have minded having the chance to play more table-top stuff. It's been an annoying feature of GCUS and also GCUK of late that most table-top stuff is Living X, for some value of X, i.e. an ongoing campaign. I don't really want to get involved in anything ongoing at a convention, and playing that sort of scenario if you're not involved in the campaign is not a lot of fun. Ah well...
There has been discussion elselist about whether the others staying at Butlin's for the weekend (there was a Fireworks Event on -- belated Hallowe'en-themed stuff on the Friday and an actual fireworks display on the Saturday evening) can or cannot be referred to as "chavs". OK, I didn't see any Burberry, but there were a lot of baseball caps, tracksuits and families with four or more children -- make of that what you will. I was walking through the main pavilion at one point when one of the children's shows was going on, and the high-pitched ubiquitous squealing was neither more nor less than the sound of E-numbers and sugar. I managed to avoid most of the more obvious ways set in my path to part me from my money; I didn't come back with souvenir yards-of-Coke, nor a temporary tattoo, nor a recording or video of a karaoke performance. Still, the non-gamers seemed to be a bit more tolerant of the gamers than they had been last year -- or possibly it was just 'cause I was usually wearing my leather jacket and probably giving off fairly good Do Not Fuck With Me Or I Will Eat Your Children vibes.
I managed to see Broken News last night -- thank you for the reminder,
dyfferent -- and found it amusing although possibly not sustainably so (twenty minutes might have been better than thirty). Other than the above, most of my time lately has involved games; either the writing of them or the playing of them. Oh, except for thoroughly breaking DocPotempkin by playing him Hayseed Dixie's version of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. I can't imagine why he didn't want to borrow the CD....
