====== 1998 Convention Reports ======

Here is a convention report from NPL member Tyger.

===== From Tyger =====

My Con report this year is a little different because I wasn't
mentally or physically taking notes but instead just enjoying the
experiences, so there is a mishmash of memory rather than a
timeline.

You may remember that I like to get in a lot of sightseeing, and
this year was no exception.  On Wednesday, I climbed the 800-foot
Stone Mountain using the 1.3-mile "historic trail," never finding
out what made it historic.  Then I took a Swiss cable car back
down, ostensibly to give a close-up view of the sculpture of 3
Confederate bigwigs carved into the side of the mountain, but when
I saw the nearly vertical drop from the front of the cable car, I
squeezed my eyes shut and missed the view.  The view walking up the
mountain was beautiful enough.  I shot a whole roll of film that
afternoon, including several snaps of the sculpture from further
away on solid ground.  That evening, several of us ate dinner at a
Moroccan restaurant; I enjoyed most of the food, but some of it was
a little too strange (eg chicken and eggplant in puff pastries
sprinkled with cocoa and powdered sugar).

On Thursday, Momus and Ariadne joined me for a traipse around the
old Oakland Cemetery where there were some beautiful headstones and
mausolea, as well as a whole section for Confederate soldiers.  We
also visited the Cyclorama, a 19th-century circular painting of the
Battle of Atlanta which was over 300 feet in circumference and
placed in a circular room with a diorama leading up to it so well
that it was hard to tell where the 3D diorama ended and the 2D
painting began.  We were all seated on a tiered platform that
rotated while the different sections of the painting were spotlit
and explained.  Our afternoon plans for the botanical garden were
scrapped due to rain; Momus and I visited the High Museum of Art,
where we ran into other Krewe, and saw lots of art by the self-
taught, many if not most of whom seemed a little weak in the
marbles department judging by the text which comprised a great deal
of the paintings.  The most featured was Howard Finster, a Georgian
whose incomprehensible diatribes on sin were woven into all his
colorful works.

On Friday, Momus, Wampahoofus, 100 Down and I visited Six Flags
amusement park, where I got a stiff neck from getting rattled
around in the wooden roller coaster (bad) and soaked from a couple
of water rides (very good in the heat).

All the games and puzzles in this year's program were terrific. 
Teki solved the Hidden Contest (by Qaqaq), by finding that some of
the nomtags were unrecognizable and could be organized so that
phonetically they instructed the lucky party to give Willz a bagel
(at last year's con, Willz revealed that he had never eaten one). 
Willz did eat this one, and the event was captured on film.  I
especially enjoyed the slightly chaotic Word Trade Center (by
Chainsaw) Friday night, which involved making 7-letter words from
the 7 letter-cards dealt us, then trading with Krewe to make new
words, and Chain Reaction (by Sluggo) which involved 2 players
(Famulus and I) alternating words without consultation to make a
complete sentence that would enable our teammate (Wayne Robert
Williams) to guess the solution word or phrase.  We did well enough
that our team members were able to join the playoffs, in which
teams of 2, 1 of which could see the solution, alternated words to
make a complete sentence.  Famulus and I went first in the
playoffs; I figured out that the receiver should be the one who
starts, and should say "What."  The dialogue went something like:

  * me: What
  * Fam: [helpful noun]
  * me: Is
  * Fam: [another helpful noun, or maybe an adjective or -ing verb]


All the teams that followed started off the same way.  We were
bested by one other team; the teams with real trouble were the ones
in which the member seeing the clues could not give helpful enough
words.  Another team figured out that the guessing member should
say "and" when a complete sentence was established but more
information was needed.

A variant of this game, invented by Al Desuda and called 
[[gamerules:sabotuer_chain_reaction|Saboteur Chain Reaction]], 
was my favorite late-night game.  The players were
divided into 2 teams.  When it was team A's turn, there would be 2
givers and 1 receiver from team A, but the word would be chosen by
a member of team B who would provide every third word.  After the
number of players dwindled, play just shifted around the table,
with one receiver, and 2 good givers plus one saboteur who chose
the word.  The receiver knew who the saboteur was, but the
constraint of forming a grammatically correct sentence could throw
off the 2 good-guy givers pretty badly.  Fortunately the sentences
did not also have to make sense.

Saturday night was the highlight of Con for me, and not just
because Squonk mentioned me in his lengthy acknowledgment speech
(because I badgered him into joining the Krewe) which later became
one of his Extravaganza puzzles, when we had to find the
inconsistencies in the printed transcript.  My teammates were
Blade, Wombat, and Wanderer, and we worked well together, even if
we did need some nudges to finish.  The inter-team camaraderie was
even more remarkable.  There was one puzzle, intended to make us be
nice to each other, in which each team ended up with a different
letter as an answer, and we had to send ambassadors to each table
to exchange letters, which were then arranged in order of team
number to get the answer.  But even before that stage was a
cryptogram posted on the wall in which a letter was represented by
different cards from the same game (for example the letter B could
be represented by either a Chance or a Community Chest card from
the game Monopoly).  We all had lists of the card games represented
but had to figure out which was which and then solve the crypt.  I
was thrilled that the other teams' members and I were able to
openly share with each other the games we knew without anyone
getting secretive or uptight.  This cooperative competition was
everything I could have hoped for in a friendly game.

The business meeting was very encouraging, as we found out from
Willz that the NPL History will be ready for the printer by the end
of July, and that we will in fact have a place to convene next year
(Big Sky, Montana, courtesy of Uncanny) as well as a couple of
years to come.  The "mood of the meeting" was to welcome bids by
Trazom for Frisco in 2000 and by me for New York City in 2001. 
(There were even less formal bids by Ember, via e-mail list, for
Indycon 2002, and by Alf, during the awards ceremony, for Boston
2003.)

Since NYC is the City that Never Sleeps, it should be perfect for
us.  Speaking of which, my hours of sleep this con set a personal
record on the low end:  6 Wed. night, then 4, 4, and 0.  I slept
1.5 hours on the plane Sunday and 8 that night and woke up
refreshed when the alarm went off at 5:30 Monday morning.  Without
the all-nighter Saturday (my first since college cramming) I
probably couldn't have managed that, since I was getting to sleep
pretty close to 5:30 the nights before.  So thank you to everyone
whose sparkling and enthralling company kept me awake all night,
yes even QED who created quite a scare when he showed up in the
hospitality suite with a camera at 8AM Sunday.  And a big thank-you
to Jrman and Sew Do I; the plane coming back was too crowded for us
to sit together, but they went out of their way to drive me home
from the airport.

Back to real life for now... until [[cons:1999:announcements|Contana]] (which coinage I
overheard, but can't remember who said it) next July.