Jecca Mehlota (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jecca_mehlota) wrote2014-11-09 05:40 pm
jecca_mehlota) wrote2014-11-09 05:40 pm
Entry tags:
BOW DOWN OVERDWELLER (UNDER THE WEIGHT)
TRAVEL ENTRY THE FIRST because i was a bit busy near the end of last month. So! Final Fantasy XIV ver2.0 / A Realm Reborn turned one year old recently! And Squeenix decided to celebrate by bringing back their Fan Festivals. They had a bunch of them for FFXI, but that was many years ago, when I was younger and even more broke. And they were always in Los Angeles, which, you know, that's fine, but by the time I was old enough to feel confident in myself to consider going, I was already flying off to BotCons, and two weekend trips to the west coast in one year is still more than I want to bother with, even though I could probably get away with it now. I HAVE ALWAYS REGRETTED THIS. So when they announced they were throwing one for XIV, even though it was in October and I already had plans for TFCon Chicago, and even though it was all the way over in Las Vegas, I was like, I'M GOING.
Fortunately, they were considerate enough to not plan it for the same weekend as TFCon. I was not prepared to deal with that. Back-to-back weekends, instead, which, while exhausting, was at least physically possibly for me to pull off.
First off, here's a link to the photo album on Facebook. Since whenever I go back to old travel entries, I find the links have changed and broken the pictures posted, whatever, I will not be linking directly to many of them.
By being the Obnoxious Older Sibling (my brother, the younger of us, should obviously be the annoying one, but he has refused to step up to this role, and so I have assumed it), I managed to trick my brother into coming along (mostly by managing to trick my parents into helping him pay for it), so I was even traveling with someone, which is... really very weird to me now, since most of my trips are taken solo.
I did not go to bed Thursday, October 16, because I doubted my ability to then wake up at 4am for my flight at 6 in the morning. Still managed to stagger through the security line, though I forgot to take off my hairband, so my head had to be groped. BECAUSE THIS IS BURLINGTON, we took a flight to New York and then hung around for a few hours until we could catch a real flight. My brother had convinced me to take my tablet along, so we killed time getting some kinda game-sharing thing installed on mine. It wasn't, haha... It wasn't very GOOD, as we soon found out, because we'd be racing each other or something and then we'd both win the race, so it quickly devolved into "who can push the re-sync button faster" which was hilarious. We were probably annoying other people by laughing so hard that early in the morning.
AND THEN MORE PLANE and I mostly slept on this flight because geez I was tired. We landed in Vegas, no problems. The airport was... really weirdly deserted. I didn't like it. The signage was crap and we couldn't even find a person to be like, hey, where do we go??
So, fuck it, we finally went outside and there were a couple different shuttle services, we booked trips and then loitered around for not-long and my ticket apparently hadn't activated (???) so I got a purple chip to carry around, instead. Super fun. Also, two of the other people in the shuttle had never done the shuttle bus thing before and one of them was really freaking out over her seat belt not working. "ARE THERE NO SEAT BELT LAWS IN THIS STATE???" and no amount of reassurance could console her, so eventually we all just ignored her. Sorry, lady.
As we were riding around, we passed a big sign for CRISS ANGEL, whose name I recognise only because of the Supernatural episode titled "Criss Angel is a Douchebag"... My brother had no idea who he was at all, and after my admittedly-bad explanation, said it must be hard to be a magician in this place when you had to compete with the likes of the awesome Penn and Teller.
I did not mention to him that the Rio is host to the Penn & Teller theater. I let him figure it out for himself and then laughed. (He didn't actually care about seeing them in person, because whatever, he can watch it online, but it was still pretty cool.)
Check-in normally wasn't until 4, but I guess because of the convention or something they were letting people into their rooms early, so we were able to get our room, drop our bags, DITCH THE SHOES UGH SHOES, and relax for a little while. Nice enough room. Two beds, big sofa. Confusing window between the bed area and the shower stall. It was super-frosted, so all it did was let light through, but it still baffled.
And then we went down into the casino of doom to try and find out where the convention stuff actually was. I used years of experience to follow the reverse flow of people wearing FanFest shirts and badges, but we still had to ask a few times. That place was a maze. Probably the intent. Still. Dislike. NOISE AND SMOKE AND BLEH.
AND THEN LINE. LINE FOREVER.
that's a lie, by the way. Yes, the registration line was slow, but it was steady. UNLIKE ANOTHER CONVENTION I COULD MENTION cough cough botcon cough but we'll actually touch on this again later hahaha
We entertained ourselves by watching cosplayers go by (including a few weird ones like Vaan - and I almost didn't recognise the character wearing a shirt like that - and a few that I didn't get pictures of, like Squall Leonhart and Zack Fair. Guess they took a wrong turn or something?), looking at signs, and chattering with people in line around us. Mostly the folk behind us, for whatever reason. We got to the front of the first line and got our badges, and then hopped immediately into the next one over, which was much shorter for some reason, for our goodie bags. When we got to the front, they did not have any more small shirts ASSHOLES so I got stuck with a medium with I guess I could use as a sleep shirt or something whatever. AND THEN THERE WAS ANOTHER LINE FOR THE RECEPTION EVENT so of course we got in it, though as we got near the pool area the guards were saying they might have to start filtering people in as people left because they were approaching capacity. But we got through. And because I'm an alcohol-intolerant nerd, we got into Line #4 for the photo booth with two of the cosplay judges. One of them was a damn awesome Garuda and the other was a Miqo'te.
And shortly after we got in line, they needed to take a break, so Iol and I parked ourselves on the stone wall and MORE CHATTING with the people behind us, who were pretty cool and we ended hanging out with them all weekend. Husband-wife pair from Goblin, Jurobei Tama and Aozora Tama. We ended up filling out most of the Live Quest activity booklet with them while waiting for the people to come back. We got our picture taken, and I took a few on my own, which you can see in the album (I LOVE THE BLACK EYES ON GARUDA SO COOL).
Pictures taken, not caring about spending wads of money at the cash bar, and hungry enough to be considering cannibalism, we decided to go back to the Tamas' hotel because there was a TGI Friday's, which was the closest, cheapest, and quickest food we knew of. There were similarly-priced eating options at the Rio, but they all had lines. F dat. There were some fcking massive grasshopper beasts along the way, though I only got one good picture, because I haven't quick got my new digital camera's close-up option figured out yet.
We did a bit more of the live quest (see album for shots of the pages from my book. We decided to go for Ridiculous rather than Serious. IT IS THE ONION WAY. And also the Team SnG way) (Team SnG is a mini-company mostly within the ONION company. We do stupid things in the name of fun. SnG stands, of course, for "shits and giggles"), and got super, super concerned about our sanity and coherency levels for a while, until we realized that no one at SE can count, because in one quest there was no question 7, and also there just wasn't a quest 8. Quest 6 gave us the most trouble, because as far as we can tell, any ONE of them could've been the right answer. We went for the most obvious. And we didn't quite finish because food arrived and then we all tore in like crazed animals seriously it was like. Really late. We were REALLY HUNGRY. And then, stuffed, we were tired, so we went back to our rooms and passed right out. Glorious.
Overslept in the morning a little, so we skipped breakfast (this would turn out to be an amazingly bad idea) to get - yes - IN LINE for the convention hall, hahaha. Unending. No, when they opened the doors, the swarm moved quickly, no worries. I wanted to jump into the merchandise line straight away, but they capped it before the opening ceremonies, so then Iol and I got seats and I wandered around taking pictures of costumes. Aozora and Juro did not make it to the opening ceremonies because they were being defeated by their own costumes. Opening ceremony was fun, there was a lot of emphasis on thingZZZZZZZZZZ being plural, brief chatter about the expansion in the works for next spring I can't find a video of it or I'd link it, I don't know. I was still half-asleep, but after Yoshi-P left the stage, most of the audience left the seats and we all ran into lines. Merch line for me because I was ON A MISSION, but lots of people got in line for the in-game events. The events did not open until 10 or so, though, so people just stood there waiting.
Of course, WE just stood there waiting, too, because the line was very, veeeeery slow. And then - they did not announce this, we found it out later - oh, THEN. THEN THE LINE STOPPED.
IT JUST.
STOPPED.
And it STOPPED because they had exactly two open registers and only one of them could process credit card transactions, and it broke. So we stood there, not knowing the line was literally NOT MOVING because they pulled all the cash-buyers out of the front and then left the rest of us to just die. In the end, I was in that line for over four hours. I don't really want to talk about it. There's an army of Tweets from me, just look for Oct 18 to watch the gradual slide into insanity. ffffffffff. Totally missed the music panel (aside from when they played track snippets, which we could hear quite well), but I plan on watching it someday, as it has so nicely been uploaded to YouTube... Juro and Aozora did eventually make it down, and we pulled them into the line with us.
...Does anyone else remember the crazily angry woman from BotCon 2011 who got way, way, WAY over upset about some of us joining up with our friends near the front of the line after they kicked everyone out of the panel room between panels for no real reason? I kept thinking of her ALL WEEKEND because queues were so lax. No one thought anything of it if you held a place in line while your 7 friends went out to get food or water or do one of the quick events or buy merch or whatever. She'd probably have died from rage.
Heck, while we were in the merch line, the guys in front of us were watching us watch the "Garlean artillery" (shooting foam balls out of air cannons to try to hit all the targets down) and were finally like, the line is so short, just go do it. We know you're behind us you've been there for like 3 hours. AND SO WE DID. And we told them they could do the same. Because when your lines are that slow, you kind of have to.
Iol actually escaped the line first because as we finally neared the end, they started pulling cash-only people again, and we'd heard (unfounded, it turned out) rumors that they were low on Mail Moogle plushes, and a friend of ours in-game really wanted one and WE WERE GOING TO SUCCEED IN OUR MISSION. So he got the moogle, and then I told him to go get us food but instead he just hung around us. We also had a close encounter with Yoshida, who was wandering around for a bit. Not close enough to fulfill Kanon's request that I punch him, but, you know. Can't have everything.
AND FINALLY THE END OF THE LINE I handed over my page with all the numbers of how much of what I wanted filled in and then found out the mugs were limited to 2 per person, so I turned to Aozora behind me and handed her $20 and said GET ME A MUG I NEED A THIRD. And also I found out I'd forgotten to remove the mail moogle from my list after Iol picked one up, but I had kind of wanted one, too, so it all worked out okay.
And that is how I spent ALL OF MY MONEY except I didn't have that much cash ON me so instead that's how I put a lot on my card. Totally worth it. And then we missed the Lore panel because OMG FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD there was a cash line outside that was closing because it was 3 and we were like NOOOOOOOOOOOOO so they were nice enough to let us grab food, though they'd already packed up the condiments. Blandest but still most delicious sandwich I'd had in a while.
Wow, I love when my browser just randomly crashes thanks guys. At least DW stores drafts.
ANYWAY. What else did we do? Um. At this rate, I'm just gonna list things I know we did on Saturday. We hit the green screen photo area and had our pictures taken with Shiva (as a group) and the Leviathan (Iol and I. IOL IS MY BROTHER DID I MENTION THAT? That picture made more sense when he was giving me bunny ears, but he got them down right before the shot. Or it would've made sense if Levia-chan was on the other side. Oh, well.). We turned in some of our pages and got some prizes. Iol and I signed the wall. There was not much room on it. We SHOT ARROWS AT IXALI TARGETS ahahaha real arrows guys. (We were standing in that damn line and we went behind the "Gridanian Archery" booth and at some point we figured out the THUNK THUNKS were real actual arrows. Little bit alarming.) They let us keep our paper, woo. You can't see the hits super well (aside from my two amazing misses), but I got my target right in the middle of his forehead and Iol shot his in the knee, which, of course, there came the Skyrim "arrow to the knee" jokes, haha.
We looked at the art contest entries and voted! And I introduced the three of them to the amazingness of Starbuck's salted caramel hot chocolate!
And I'm pretty sure the last event we did on Saturday was to attempt the Odin fight. Already there were two lines there: first timers and retries. Juro had to run for costume contest stuff right after archery, but the rest of us got in line and then flew to the front because the first timer line was super fast. We had to pull a few second timers to fill the party, and we still didn't succeed because WHY DIDN'T YOU DOOOOOOOODGE??? /DBZadbridged
Also at some point Iol and I played some Theatrhythm which, it turns out, is REALLY FUN and now I'm sad I don't have a 3DS.
Then we left the hotel via shuttle and walked around on the Strip. We were looking for fooood and we did not find our intended target (neither of them, actually), because phone GPS is fail. Ended up at a PF Changs, which I'd never eaten at, anyway, so it worked out. And then somehow it was really damn late again, so we hopped a shuttle back and SLEEP COLLAPSE.
Sunday morning Iol and I packed our stuff up and checked out before heading back into the convention. We had one goal: BEAT ODIN.
But now we were on our Not First Try, so we had to get in the super horrid long line of doom. Also Juro and Aozora were running late again because, again, costume malfunctions. So really it was me, the PLD, and Iol, the WHM. Only a quarter of a party. So when a big group wandered by looking for a healer, I said, "I won't begrudge you," and kicked him out. Fortunately, not too much longer, someone was shouting for a tank. ME. ME! Only I got up there and they already had a Paladin shiiit. The tank jobs were the only two characters you couldn't change the jobs of. Fortunately, it's a one-tank fight, and while I don't know how to end-game tank as a Warrior, I CAN at least hit buttons to do damage. AND SO IT WAS.
AND WE WON! \o/ It was very exciting. Iol's group had also won, so he and I went to the table to grab our shirts. They still had Small Odin shirts, thankfully. Possibly after that was the live letter. Iol and I did Frontlines. We ended with the Maelstrom, but most of the group had never done Frontlines before (Iol included), and we lost SHAMEFULLY. Oh, it was so bad. Also, when they were stamping our books for Frontlines, they accidentally stamped my Primal Challenge page first, so I had to correct them. This worked out for me later when I got angry. We also did the Dungeon Speed Run, and some higher power in the universe took pity on us there. In the SE MMOs, there is a group of elite (and elitist) players known as Blue Gartr. They are intense. THEY WERE DIRECTLY IN LINE BEHIND US, and after a bit of observation and a quick head count, Iol and I realised we would be competing against them. WELL, FUCK.
but then something wonderful happened
For this one instance, and for no reason anyone can figure, instead of filing the four of them in behind us, the people in charge put them at a different row of computers.
???????????
Instead, we ended up competing against a normal group of normal players who, like us (we'd been paired with two random Damage Dealers), had a person who'd never run the dungeon before. Sadly for them, it was their tank (Iol had never done the dungeon being run, but he was just the healer, so that wasn't too bad. What do you do? YOU KEEP ME ALIVE. Boom). We beat them by a fair margin and actually came in only shortly behind Blue Gartr, which was kind of an awesome moment. One of the con staff actually complimented us on our run.
Aozora and Jurobei pretty much missed Sunday, sadly, on account of their being in the costume contest and having to deal with a bunch of stuff for that. We had lunch together, but they didn't get to any of the challenges. IT'S OKAY, THOUGH, because during the costume contest, Jurobei won one of the Judge's Choice awards. And after the fact, the presenter guy took pity on Aozora when she asked him if there was anything to be done about her having missed EVERYTHING because of the contest, and he got her book stamped up for her.
Note: they CLOSED THE DAMN LINES at 5 when the costume contest started. We never got to the Primal Challenge. I was SO ANGRY. So I turned in my page that had been stamped accidentally because fuck you, square, you said it went until 10 and now you're closing the lines at 5 because JUST KIDDING after 8 it's just the closing ceremony and it's going to take THREE HOURS to finish off the lines already there oh my god. But I was really sad because, see, when you compete in a challenge, you get one stamp and a sticker patch. When you BEAT IT, you get a second prize! For Odin, it was the shirt. For Frontlines, Dungeons, and Primals, it was a poster! And I really, really wanted that Primal poster. Oh, it was so damn pretty.
After the costume contest, Juro and Aozora ran off to change quickly and I looked at the art entries again and noticed one of the people checking books was letting people who were cut from the lines have prizes ANYWAY but she caught me noticing and so I ran away. And then I cried about it to Iol, who took it upon himself to go ask for a Primal poster SO I GOT ONE ANYWAY :D :D :D :D
So only I didn't get the Frontlines poster, but that's the one I was least interested in.
And then Iol and I had to miss the closing ceremonies because we had to get to the airport for our Almost Midnight flight and, you know, airports, security...
Only they rushed everyone through security (the airport was still spooky empty) and then we had to sit in the terminal knowing we'd missed an awesome closing ceremony and an epic concert FOR NO DAMN REASON that kinda burned.
Also when we checked in the guy was like, I NOTICE YOU ARE SITTING FAR AWAY I could move you to the same row in the back of the plane if you want? And we were like ... uh, why not. Which, after we got on the plane, we were like, shit, that was stupid. But then the third person, who had the window seat, did now show up. SWEET. So we had the whole row to try and sleep in.
And then somehow we made it to Burlington and had breakfast/lunch at a diner with our parents and I went home and
took a shower, actually, because I felt gross after being in a plane all night.
And then I was going to just go to bed, because I hadn't seen the cat (figured she was hiding) and I was tiiiiiiired and I threw back the covers and OH THERE'S THE CAT so then I had the most epic cat snuggle session I'd had in a while and THEN I went to sleep. And I basically did not get out of bed again until I had to go to work in the morning. (I'd tried to get the week off, but another coworker was already off that week, so I wasn't able to...)
And that was my Vegas trip, in less than 4,000 words.
(It did not END there, of course, because I'd bought stuff for my in-game friends and then I had the drama of trying to get it shipped before leaving for TFCon. I did just barely manage it over my lunch hour. Despite there being a post office like five minutes from my work. I stood in line - THE ONLY PERSON IN LINE - for 40 minutes.)
BUT YOU KNOW WHAT. Despite all the horrid line mismanagement, I had a blast. I will totally go again if they have another one next year.
Fortunately, they were considerate enough to not plan it for the same weekend as TFCon. I was not prepared to deal with that. Back-to-back weekends, instead, which, while exhausting, was at least physically possibly for me to pull off.
First off, here's a link to the photo album on Facebook. Since whenever I go back to old travel entries, I find the links have changed and broken the pictures posted, whatever, I will not be linking directly to many of them.
By being the Obnoxious Older Sibling (my brother, the younger of us, should obviously be the annoying one, but he has refused to step up to this role, and so I have assumed it), I managed to trick my brother into coming along (mostly by managing to trick my parents into helping him pay for it), so I was even traveling with someone, which is... really very weird to me now, since most of my trips are taken solo.
I did not go to bed Thursday, October 16, because I doubted my ability to then wake up at 4am for my flight at 6 in the morning. Still managed to stagger through the security line, though I forgot to take off my hairband, so my head had to be groped. BECAUSE THIS IS BURLINGTON, we took a flight to New York and then hung around for a few hours until we could catch a real flight. My brother had convinced me to take my tablet along, so we killed time getting some kinda game-sharing thing installed on mine. It wasn't, haha... It wasn't very GOOD, as we soon found out, because we'd be racing each other or something and then we'd both win the race, so it quickly devolved into "who can push the re-sync button faster" which was hilarious. We were probably annoying other people by laughing so hard that early in the morning.
AND THEN MORE PLANE and I mostly slept on this flight because geez I was tired. We landed in Vegas, no problems. The airport was... really weirdly deserted. I didn't like it. The signage was crap and we couldn't even find a person to be like, hey, where do we go??
So, fuck it, we finally went outside and there were a couple different shuttle services, we booked trips and then loitered around for not-long and my ticket apparently hadn't activated (???) so I got a purple chip to carry around, instead. Super fun. Also, two of the other people in the shuttle had never done the shuttle bus thing before and one of them was really freaking out over her seat belt not working. "ARE THERE NO SEAT BELT LAWS IN THIS STATE???" and no amount of reassurance could console her, so eventually we all just ignored her. Sorry, lady.
As we were riding around, we passed a big sign for CRISS ANGEL, whose name I recognise only because of the Supernatural episode titled "Criss Angel is a Douchebag"... My brother had no idea who he was at all, and after my admittedly-bad explanation, said it must be hard to be a magician in this place when you had to compete with the likes of the awesome Penn and Teller.
I did not mention to him that the Rio is host to the Penn & Teller theater. I let him figure it out for himself and then laughed. (He didn't actually care about seeing them in person, because whatever, he can watch it online, but it was still pretty cool.)
Check-in normally wasn't until 4, but I guess because of the convention or something they were letting people into their rooms early, so we were able to get our room, drop our bags, DITCH THE SHOES UGH SHOES, and relax for a little while. Nice enough room. Two beds, big sofa. Confusing window between the bed area and the shower stall. It was super-frosted, so all it did was let light through, but it still baffled.
And then we went down into the casino of doom to try and find out where the convention stuff actually was. I used years of experience to follow the reverse flow of people wearing FanFest shirts and badges, but we still had to ask a few times. That place was a maze. Probably the intent. Still. Dislike. NOISE AND SMOKE AND BLEH.
AND THEN LINE. LINE FOREVER.
that's a lie, by the way. Yes, the registration line was slow, but it was steady. UNLIKE ANOTHER CONVENTION I COULD MENTION cough cough botcon cough but we'll actually touch on this again later hahaha
We entertained ourselves by watching cosplayers go by (including a few weird ones like Vaan - and I almost didn't recognise the character wearing a shirt like that - and a few that I didn't get pictures of, like Squall Leonhart and Zack Fair. Guess they took a wrong turn or something?), looking at signs, and chattering with people in line around us. Mostly the folk behind us, for whatever reason. We got to the front of the first line and got our badges, and then hopped immediately into the next one over, which was much shorter for some reason, for our goodie bags. When we got to the front, they did not have any more small shirts ASSHOLES so I got stuck with a medium with I guess I could use as a sleep shirt or something whatever. AND THEN THERE WAS ANOTHER LINE FOR THE RECEPTION EVENT so of course we got in it, though as we got near the pool area the guards were saying they might have to start filtering people in as people left because they were approaching capacity. But we got through. And because I'm an alcohol-intolerant nerd, we got into Line #4 for the photo booth with two of the cosplay judges. One of them was a damn awesome Garuda and the other was a Miqo'te.
And shortly after we got in line, they needed to take a break, so Iol and I parked ourselves on the stone wall and MORE CHATTING with the people behind us, who were pretty cool and we ended hanging out with them all weekend. Husband-wife pair from Goblin, Jurobei Tama and Aozora Tama. We ended up filling out most of the Live Quest activity booklet with them while waiting for the people to come back. We got our picture taken, and I took a few on my own, which you can see in the album (I LOVE THE BLACK EYES ON GARUDA SO COOL).
Pictures taken, not caring about spending wads of money at the cash bar, and hungry enough to be considering cannibalism, we decided to go back to the Tamas' hotel because there was a TGI Friday's, which was the closest, cheapest, and quickest food we knew of. There were similarly-priced eating options at the Rio, but they all had lines. F dat. There were some fcking massive grasshopper beasts along the way, though I only got one good picture, because I haven't quick got my new digital camera's close-up option figured out yet.
We did a bit more of the live quest (see album for shots of the pages from my book. We decided to go for Ridiculous rather than Serious. IT IS THE ONION WAY. And also the Team SnG way) (Team SnG is a mini-company mostly within the ONION company. We do stupid things in the name of fun. SnG stands, of course, for "shits and giggles"), and got super, super concerned about our sanity and coherency levels for a while, until we realized that no one at SE can count, because in one quest there was no question 7, and also there just wasn't a quest 8. Quest 6 gave us the most trouble, because as far as we can tell, any ONE of them could've been the right answer. We went for the most obvious. And we didn't quite finish because food arrived and then we all tore in like crazed animals seriously it was like. Really late. We were REALLY HUNGRY. And then, stuffed, we were tired, so we went back to our rooms and passed right out. Glorious.
Overslept in the morning a little, so we skipped breakfast (this would turn out to be an amazingly bad idea) to get - yes - IN LINE for the convention hall, hahaha. Unending. No, when they opened the doors, the swarm moved quickly, no worries. I wanted to jump into the merchandise line straight away, but they capped it before the opening ceremonies, so then Iol and I got seats and I wandered around taking pictures of costumes. Aozora and Juro did not make it to the opening ceremonies because they were being defeated by their own costumes. Opening ceremony was fun, there was a lot of emphasis on thingZZZZZZZZZZ being plural, brief chatter about the expansion in the works for next spring I can't find a video of it or I'd link it, I don't know. I was still half-asleep, but after Yoshi-P left the stage, most of the audience left the seats and we all ran into lines. Merch line for me because I was ON A MISSION, but lots of people got in line for the in-game events. The events did not open until 10 or so, though, so people just stood there waiting.
Of course, WE just stood there waiting, too, because the line was very, veeeeery slow. And then - they did not announce this, we found it out later - oh, THEN. THEN THE LINE STOPPED.
IT JUST.
STOPPED.
And it STOPPED because they had exactly two open registers and only one of them could process credit card transactions, and it broke. So we stood there, not knowing the line was literally NOT MOVING because they pulled all the cash-buyers out of the front and then left the rest of us to just die. In the end, I was in that line for over four hours. I don't really want to talk about it. There's an army of Tweets from me, just look for Oct 18 to watch the gradual slide into insanity. ffffffffff. Totally missed the music panel (aside from when they played track snippets, which we could hear quite well), but I plan on watching it someday, as it has so nicely been uploaded to YouTube... Juro and Aozora did eventually make it down, and we pulled them into the line with us.
...Does anyone else remember the crazily angry woman from BotCon 2011 who got way, way, WAY over upset about some of us joining up with our friends near the front of the line after they kicked everyone out of the panel room between panels for no real reason? I kept thinking of her ALL WEEKEND because queues were so lax. No one thought anything of it if you held a place in line while your 7 friends went out to get food or water or do one of the quick events or buy merch or whatever. She'd probably have died from rage.
Heck, while we were in the merch line, the guys in front of us were watching us watch the "Garlean artillery" (shooting foam balls out of air cannons to try to hit all the targets down) and were finally like, the line is so short, just go do it. We know you're behind us you've been there for like 3 hours. AND SO WE DID. And we told them they could do the same. Because when your lines are that slow, you kind of have to.
Iol actually escaped the line first because as we finally neared the end, they started pulling cash-only people again, and we'd heard (unfounded, it turned out) rumors that they were low on Mail Moogle plushes, and a friend of ours in-game really wanted one and WE WERE GOING TO SUCCEED IN OUR MISSION. So he got the moogle, and then I told him to go get us food but instead he just hung around us. We also had a close encounter with Yoshida, who was wandering around for a bit. Not close enough to fulfill Kanon's request that I punch him, but, you know. Can't have everything.
AND FINALLY THE END OF THE LINE I handed over my page with all the numbers of how much of what I wanted filled in and then found out the mugs were limited to 2 per person, so I turned to Aozora behind me and handed her $20 and said GET ME A MUG I NEED A THIRD. And also I found out I'd forgotten to remove the mail moogle from my list after Iol picked one up, but I had kind of wanted one, too, so it all worked out okay.
And that is how I spent ALL OF MY MONEY except I didn't have that much cash ON me so instead that's how I put a lot on my card. Totally worth it. And then we missed the Lore panel because OMG FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD there was a cash line outside that was closing because it was 3 and we were like NOOOOOOOOOOOOO so they were nice enough to let us grab food, though they'd already packed up the condiments. Blandest but still most delicious sandwich I'd had in a while.
Wow, I love when my browser just randomly crashes thanks guys. At least DW stores drafts.
ANYWAY. What else did we do? Um. At this rate, I'm just gonna list things I know we did on Saturday. We hit the green screen photo area and had our pictures taken with Shiva (as a group) and the Leviathan (Iol and I. IOL IS MY BROTHER DID I MENTION THAT? That picture made more sense when he was giving me bunny ears, but he got them down right before the shot. Or it would've made sense if Levia-chan was on the other side. Oh, well.). We turned in some of our pages and got some prizes. Iol and I signed the wall. There was not much room on it. We SHOT ARROWS AT IXALI TARGETS ahahaha real arrows guys. (We were standing in that damn line and we went behind the "Gridanian Archery" booth and at some point we figured out the THUNK THUNKS were real actual arrows. Little bit alarming.) They let us keep our paper, woo. You can't see the hits super well (aside from my two amazing misses), but I got my target right in the middle of his forehead and Iol shot his in the knee, which, of course, there came the Skyrim "arrow to the knee" jokes, haha.
We looked at the art contest entries and voted! And I introduced the three of them to the amazingness of Starbuck's salted caramel hot chocolate!
And I'm pretty sure the last event we did on Saturday was to attempt the Odin fight. Already there were two lines there: first timers and retries. Juro had to run for costume contest stuff right after archery, but the rest of us got in line and then flew to the front because the first timer line was super fast. We had to pull a few second timers to fill the party, and we still didn't succeed because WHY DIDN'T YOU DOOOOOOOODGE??? /DBZadbridged
Also at some point Iol and I played some Theatrhythm which, it turns out, is REALLY FUN and now I'm sad I don't have a 3DS.
Then we left the hotel via shuttle and walked around on the Strip. We were looking for fooood and we did not find our intended target (neither of them, actually), because phone GPS is fail. Ended up at a PF Changs, which I'd never eaten at, anyway, so it worked out. And then somehow it was really damn late again, so we hopped a shuttle back and SLEEP COLLAPSE.
Sunday morning Iol and I packed our stuff up and checked out before heading back into the convention. We had one goal: BEAT ODIN.
But now we were on our Not First Try, so we had to get in the super horrid long line of doom. Also Juro and Aozora were running late again because, again, costume malfunctions. So really it was me, the PLD, and Iol, the WHM. Only a quarter of a party. So when a big group wandered by looking for a healer, I said, "I won't begrudge you," and kicked him out. Fortunately, not too much longer, someone was shouting for a tank. ME. ME! Only I got up there and they already had a Paladin shiiit. The tank jobs were the only two characters you couldn't change the jobs of. Fortunately, it's a one-tank fight, and while I don't know how to end-game tank as a Warrior, I CAN at least hit buttons to do damage. AND SO IT WAS.
AND WE WON! \o/ It was very exciting. Iol's group had also won, so he and I went to the table to grab our shirts. They still had Small Odin shirts, thankfully. Possibly after that was the live letter. Iol and I did Frontlines. We ended with the Maelstrom, but most of the group had never done Frontlines before (Iol included), and we lost SHAMEFULLY. Oh, it was so bad. Also, when they were stamping our books for Frontlines, they accidentally stamped my Primal Challenge page first, so I had to correct them. This worked out for me later when I got angry. We also did the Dungeon Speed Run, and some higher power in the universe took pity on us there. In the SE MMOs, there is a group of elite (and elitist) players known as Blue Gartr. They are intense. THEY WERE DIRECTLY IN LINE BEHIND US, and after a bit of observation and a quick head count, Iol and I realised we would be competing against them. WELL, FUCK.
but then something wonderful happened
For this one instance, and for no reason anyone can figure, instead of filing the four of them in behind us, the people in charge put them at a different row of computers.
???????????
Instead, we ended up competing against a normal group of normal players who, like us (we'd been paired with two random Damage Dealers), had a person who'd never run the dungeon before. Sadly for them, it was their tank (Iol had never done the dungeon being run, but he was just the healer, so that wasn't too bad. What do you do? YOU KEEP ME ALIVE. Boom). We beat them by a fair margin and actually came in only shortly behind Blue Gartr, which was kind of an awesome moment. One of the con staff actually complimented us on our run.
Aozora and Jurobei pretty much missed Sunday, sadly, on account of their being in the costume contest and having to deal with a bunch of stuff for that. We had lunch together, but they didn't get to any of the challenges. IT'S OKAY, THOUGH, because during the costume contest, Jurobei won one of the Judge's Choice awards. And after the fact, the presenter guy took pity on Aozora when she asked him if there was anything to be done about her having missed EVERYTHING because of the contest, and he got her book stamped up for her.
Note: they CLOSED THE DAMN LINES at 5 when the costume contest started. We never got to the Primal Challenge. I was SO ANGRY. So I turned in my page that had been stamped accidentally because fuck you, square, you said it went until 10 and now you're closing the lines at 5 because JUST KIDDING after 8 it's just the closing ceremony and it's going to take THREE HOURS to finish off the lines already there oh my god. But I was really sad because, see, when you compete in a challenge, you get one stamp and a sticker patch. When you BEAT IT, you get a second prize! For Odin, it was the shirt. For Frontlines, Dungeons, and Primals, it was a poster! And I really, really wanted that Primal poster. Oh, it was so damn pretty.
After the costume contest, Juro and Aozora ran off to change quickly and I looked at the art entries again and noticed one of the people checking books was letting people who were cut from the lines have prizes ANYWAY but she caught me noticing and so I ran away. And then I cried about it to Iol, who took it upon himself to go ask for a Primal poster SO I GOT ONE ANYWAY :D :D :D :D
So only I didn't get the Frontlines poster, but that's the one I was least interested in.
And then Iol and I had to miss the closing ceremonies because we had to get to the airport for our Almost Midnight flight and, you know, airports, security...
Only they rushed everyone through security (the airport was still spooky empty) and then we had to sit in the terminal knowing we'd missed an awesome closing ceremony and an epic concert FOR NO DAMN REASON that kinda burned.
Also when we checked in the guy was like, I NOTICE YOU ARE SITTING FAR AWAY I could move you to the same row in the back of the plane if you want? And we were like ... uh, why not. Which, after we got on the plane, we were like, shit, that was stupid. But then the third person, who had the window seat, did now show up. SWEET. So we had the whole row to try and sleep in.
And then somehow we made it to Burlington and had breakfast/lunch at a diner with our parents and I went home and
took a shower, actually, because I felt gross after being in a plane all night.
And then I was going to just go to bed, because I hadn't seen the cat (figured she was hiding) and I was tiiiiiiired and I threw back the covers and OH THERE'S THE CAT so then I had the most epic cat snuggle session I'd had in a while and THEN I went to sleep. And I basically did not get out of bed again until I had to go to work in the morning. (I'd tried to get the week off, but another coworker was already off that week, so I wasn't able to...)
And that was my Vegas trip, in less than 4,000 words.
(It did not END there, of course, because I'd bought stuff for my in-game friends and then I had the drama of trying to get it shipped before leaving for TFCon. I did just barely manage it over my lunch hour. Despite there being a post office like five minutes from my work. I stood in line - THE ONLY PERSON IN LINE - for 40 minutes.)
BUT YOU KNOW WHAT. Despite all the horrid line mismanagement, I had a blast. I will totally go again if they have another one next year.
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