Older

So last Saturday, October 4th, I got older. Thirty-one this year. Now I'm firmly mired in the thirties. At 30, there's still some wiggle room, some deniability -- you can always think of it as the very end of the twenties (you know, 'cause when you count in tens, 10 is part of 1-10, and 20 is part of 11-20, that sort of thinking). Can't fudge 31, though. I don't mind. There's plenty of cool stuff about being 31. For instance, my age is a prime number. Haven't had one of those in eight years. I've also been 21 for ten years now. And that's worth celebrating ... *uncork*
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The birthday itself was nice and relaxing, in stark contrast to last year's birthday, which spanned an entire weekend. Camille flew my two best friends and their wives (who are also best friends) down to surprise me with a coronary. The BBQ party had something like forty people in attendance; I still haven't read all the books I received. I have read all the calendars, though. This year, I wanted something small and simple, quiet and predictable. Something respectfully lame. That's what I got, and it was perfect.
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My parents sent me a trippy-cool painting of an iguana. Don gave me a copy of Watchmen, which to my geek shame I had never read. Camille cooked an amazing dinner for my birthday: chicken marsala with mushrooms and capers on a bed of arugula, with pasta and pinot from Kelsey See Canyon, our favorite winery. I don't remember the exact type of mushrooms that were in the dish, as I'm not normally a mushroom guy, but these were amazilicious. And for breakfast the next morning, I got lazy man pancakes. The recipes for both are on the cooking blog Camille shares, Cooking Kama Sutras. Ah, good eating. A gift that will remain around my waist for years to come.

That amazing birthday dinner. I got to do the dishes.

Epic Job

I've taken a part-time job at Epic Level Entertainment in Studio City. If that name sounds familiar, it should -- it's the production company of John Frank Rosenblum and Cindi Rice, co-producers of The Gamers: Dorkness Rising and the same people who optioned Pwned. I'm manning phones and taking care of sundry office duties. It's easy enough. Most of the time, I'm alone -- I rarely see my boss-friends, who commute from much, much farther away. I'm reminded of my time at the PLU writing center, when half the time I had no appointments and nothing to do. I got a lot of extra writing done at the writing center. And I'm feeling the itch to fill said time productively. Like, say, by updating my blog. And on other things, like writing content for an eventual Vancil website. More on that later.

Swing through E-Wa

So recently, we took a swing through eastern Washington to visit Camille's relatives (Camille = Wifey). Her family originally hails from Spokane, the second largest city in the state and center of the great Inland Northwest. Mainly we were going to visit her grandfather, who's 87 and in the middle of his fourth bout with cancer. The out-of-region family has been gathering to pay their respects and say their goodbyes. But the old goat may surprise us all and live another few years. He survived World War II in the Pacific and whupped cancer three times already, so I wouldn't count him out just yet.

Spokane River Park

We saw Grandpa most every day we were there. He's been giving his things away to friends and family, doing what he can to unclutter the place before he departs. He showered Camille with jewelry that belonged to his late wife, a lovely lady who died about a year into our marriage. I wish I'd known her longer. The first time I came to Spokane was to meet Camille's family as the fiance. Grandma -- who was carrot-haired and about 4' 10" -- came out with her arms open, an unmistakable "hug me" gesture. I walked into her arms -- and she pulled me down in a hug that guillotined my throat against her shoulder. "Oh, it's so good to meet you!" she gushed. I said nothing, because I couldn't breathe with her shoulder in my throat. At our wedding a few months later, she goosed my dad, who she thought was her younger son (but to be fair, my dad and Camille's uncle are both Gregs). We miss her very much. So does Grampa. Which is why the family thinks this may be the last round for him -- he's ready to be with his wife again. And I can't fault that.

Camille's Grandpa is also quite the hobbyist. He has a basement full of fully functional model rockets and airplanes, which he's selling off to collectors. He made me sit at his computer and play the model airplane simulator -- which has a perfect reproduction controller, with the two mini-joysticks -- until I could perform a simple turn. After about twenty impressive crashes and over $100,000 of virtual damages to his virtual air fleet, he got disgusted and let me leave. I never did make that turn, but I did perform a rare inverted landing (i.e., the plane landed upside down and didn't explode).

He also has a bunch of old several video game systems. And that's what I pre-inherited. He gave me a Nintendo 64 and Super Nintendo, both with extra controllers and head cleaners. But the big prize, which I couldn't believe he gave me, was an old Atari 5200, first released in 1982. A game system as old as my sister. And with it came a stack of over twenty games, with plenty of old school 8-bit classics: Pole Position, Dig Dug, Pac Man, Jungle Hunt, Q-Bert, and more. Getting that through security was fun. I haven't set it up yet, because our home TV doesn't have the right hookups on the back. And because the Atari's adapter has a few exposed wires. And because we can't find the Atari controllers. We'll get it up and running eventually, I'm sure.

We stayed with Aunt Sharon and Uncle Terry on their farm outside the city. Far outside the city -- they own 80 acres of prairie on either side of a gravel road. It's been a long, long time since I've heard crickets. Or seen so many stars in a sky without light pollution. Time seems to move more slowly there, at a more relaxed pace. I actually had time to read for pleasure. I mowed through the latest by S.M. Stirling -- perhaps my favorite author -- before we left. Sharon and Terry have one of those basements that's quiet and dark as a tomb. You lose all sense of time and orientation slumbering down there. My grandparents, the late Vancil Grandparents, had a similar pair of beds in their basement bedroom. Until coming to Sharon and Terry's, I'd never slept as well anywhere as in my grandparents' basement.

The food on this trip was, as it always is with our family, amazing. Sharon cooked huckleberry pancakes twice for Camille. She left a tub of oatmeal cranberry cookies in the kitchen for me to raid, and pretended not to notice. For one lunch, she made me a tuna fish sandwich from a tuna Terry had caught himself and brought back to the farm. And at cousin Lisa's, we had fried chicken with garden-fresh corn on the cob.

We visited cousin Lisa -- who's really Camille's big sister -- and her two boys, Gunnar and Cannan, in the no-horse town of St. John. Last time I was with the bear cubs (what the family calls the boys), they tag-team wrestled me to a draw. They were six and eight at the time. Now they're eight and ten. I would have lost that match, so we played football instead. Eventually it got dark and we had to go back inside. I was the only one without grass stains, because they were more interested in tacking each other than me. And I'm quick on my feet. The boys kept asking if we could stay the night. Sadly, we had to fly out at midday the next day. But that didn't stop them from asking. And if we could have, we'd have stayed. The drive back was beautiul, taking us through the Palouse at night.

The entire town of St. John. I'm kidding. It's actually smaller.

It was hard for us to come back to LA. It always is, but doubly so this time. It didn't help that my bag never made the connecting flight -- Camille's did, but mine, not so much -- and didn't show up for another two days. There just wasn't enough time. There never is. Especially knowing that the next time we return to Spokane could be for a funeral. But at least we know that it's coming, so we could make the time to visit. And there's a blessing in that.

Love letter to DG

MWP's Jamie Chambers -- the award-winning game designer of the Cortex system and the man who created our very own Demon Hunters Role Playing Game -- apparently felt he hadn't done enough for Dead Gentlemen and wrote us this glowing love letter. It is the finest compliment I and my writing have ever been paid. I'm not used to receiving such praise, especially not from a man I admire so much. Jamie, thank you. You are a true friend and a karaoke god.

PAX Dorkana

So last week, Don, Jeremy, and I flew up to attend Dead Gentlemen's first ever PAX -- the Penny Arcade Expo made famous by the geek culture vanguards at Penny Arcade. The con showcases computer games, console games, and role-playing games. In only its fifth year, PAX had outgrown its original home in the Meydenbauer Center, and had levelled up to the Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle.
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For the DGs, it was coming home. We've filmed all our projects in Washington. The real Washington, not that fetid swamp between Maryland and Virginia. Most of our members, cast, and crew call the damp and drizzly northwest home. And to be honest, compared to the cloying, invasive heat of a Los Angeles summer, we didn't want to leave. Overcast skies, clean air, crisp wind -- I don't want to film anywhere else.
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So excitement trumped our fatigue. For a while. Because this was our fourth con in four months, and our third in six weeks. We were more than ready for the con season to be over. This one should be easy, though, we figured. We only have one screening, so we're only doing one day at the con. Plus, with the home stays and local friends around, it should be an easy and relaxing experience. Right? Right?
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We arrived Friday morning at 11:00. We thought we were arriving a bit late. In our experience, cons usually start at ten. So we got in line to enter the hall -- a rather massive, wrapping-around-itself line that reminded me of a derailed train -- and waited. And waited. Which was odd, because the hall should be open. That's when we bothered checking the schedule, and noted that the hall didn't open until 2:00. So we abandoned the line and groused around, scoping out the hall.
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On the fourth floor, at the top of the convention center, we found our screening room. Which was not so much a room as a corner of the hall floor -- a corner right at the top of the escalators, right at the exit to the main exhibit hall. We were going to screen in an open floor theater. Which, upon reflection, was a great location, really -- the cross traffic alone from the escalators and hall would be massive. Except there was a massive supporting pillar right near the screen that obscured the view from most angles. We'd have to see ...
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So we had a few hours to kill before the hall opened. We ambled around a bit more, and found the entrance to the exhibit hall. Figured we'd sneak a peak in, so we tiptoed up to security. Who, oddly enough, didn't stop us or send us away. So we kept walking -- past them, into the hall. Ninja skills for the win? Not so much. The badges the con had given us -- our special guest media badges, cha-ching! -- allowed us into the exhibit hall an hour before everyone else. So we got to walk the hall with a small crowd. At 2:00, the hall opened to the public, and some 50,000 gamers stampeded into the hall. By then, we'd safely navigated our way towards a lunching station, and had belunched ourselves.

So properly fooded and orientated, we set out to bother celebrities. We met Felicia Day and Sandeep Parikh of The Guild, the much loved webseries that has won all kinds of awards and much critical acclaim. They are lovely people, approachable and funny, with serious Geek cred and the glow of newly-minted celebrity. Sandeep recognized Jeremy from Comic Con, and Felicia recognized Don when he introduced himself -- we've volunteered to crew the second season of The Guild, which is slated to film as early as this fall. Which would be an awesome of undeniable magnitude.

After getting our Guild fix, we found the line to meet geek guru and web entity extraordinare Wil Wheaton. But we didn't actually get to meet him; there was a dude at the end of the line, a Security Guy, turned around with his back to the line. "I'm the end of the line," he told us. Wil would be leaving in a few minutes to attend a panel, so we'd have to come back in a few hours. "Oh," said Don, bummery clouding his face, "we wanted to give him this," and he held up a Dorkness Rising DVD. "Oh, you're Dead Gentlemen!" Said End-Of-The-Line-Guy. Then another Security Guy came over. "Dorkness Rising? Cool!" said New Security Guy. "This is for Wil?" We nodded, and New Security Guy took the DVD to the front of the line. He handed it to Wil ... and Wil warily took it, looked at it ... and then totally geeked out. Big clowny smily grin. "Oh, I've been waiting for this!" he said. "Thank you!" We strutted off, rather stoked. We'd comped Captain Awesome McKickass, and liked our movie.
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After dinner, we attended The Guild screening in a two hundred seat theater, which was packed to the gills; they had to turn people away. The audience -- some of whom hadn't seen it before -- absolutely loved it, as well they should have. At the panel afterward, Felicia said this was the first time they'd actually seen it with an audience. It was a huge thrill for them. There's nothing quite so rewarding as watching your work with an appreciative audience. There's also nothing quite as terrifying. Cinema is the the only art I can think of where you can be both performing and a member of the audience at the same time.

We snuck out of the Guild panel to prep the Dorkness screening, which started directly afterwars. Many of the northwest DGs turned out for the screening, even with Matt Shimkus' wedding looming only fourteen hours away. We saw some people we hadn't seen in years, others we hadn't seen since we filmed: fight choreographer Kevin Inouye; Tracy Ivory, one of our amazing costumers; and the omni-talented Ed Gibbs, who plays the Hierophant. My parents, who'd never seen the movie with a crowd, somehow talked the convention into giving them free passes so they could attend the screening. They stood out a bit, being as they were the only gray-haired attendees we'd seen.

The screening itself went as well as could be hoped. The chairs filled quickly, and it was sitting room only. Over 200 people crowded any spot with line-of-site to the screen. The tech folks had to jack the volume up to contend with the convention noise, which only attracted more people. I've seen the movie so many damn times that I'm interested in watching it is with an audience. And I don't so much watch the film as the audience. They gave us a standing ovation after the credits, and after our mini-panel after the credits. And after that, we completely legally sold about fifty DVDs to fans. Which is pretty good for not selling anything at the con.
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I got a nice chance to chat with Sandeep Parikh, who caught the end of the screening. Great guy, quick on his feet and very funny. He was showing the first three episodes of The Legend of Neil directly after us. If you haven't seen The Legend of Neil, and have ever played or heard of The Legend of Zelda, you must watch this series. It's absotively marvlarious. Really damn funny. Not for the kiddies, though, and not safe for work. But absolutely worth the viewing.
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With the end of the screening, so ended our convention season. And not a moment too soon. We bade farewell to family and fellow DGs, and trekked back to Magnolia to billet ourselves in Wifey's dad's house. The lid came off the hot tub, and it was Tub Time with Don, Matt, and Jeremy, boiling the brats with beer.
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So now we're back in L.A., with no more cons to attend this year. To all the fans, friends, and family of Dead Gentlemen: Thank you for your support and camraderie. We would never have gotten this far without you. And I solemly swear that the next project will not take five years to complete. If I break this promise, you may burn Don in effigy.

Gen Con, Day 4

Gettin' all Guillermo at breakfast

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Gen Con. Day the Last. I promise, I'll try really hard to keep this post in non-mammoth territory.

For the first night of the con, we got a decent night's sleep. Which means we slept well past the hall opening, and didn't arrive until the day was half over. Sundays at cons are sad. Numbers are often down, and continue to go down as people leave during the day to fly back to wherever they hail from. The fact that the con is ending is on everyone's mind, the same feeling you get on the last day of your vacation, or pretty much any Sunday when it's back to work in a few hours. What made it worse was that I was just getting used to the con. Which is how it always happens. But it's still depressing.

Sunday's sales were good, just slightly less than Saturday. All in all, over 1,200 Dorkness Rising DVDs sold at Gen Con -- the first four days it was available. On top of that, Margaret Weis Productions sold somewhere between 80 and 100 copies of the Demon Hunters Role Playing Game. We've never had numbers like that a at a convention. Never. And that's not counting pre-orders on Paizo's website, or what Netflix ordered. By the way, if you add Dorkness to your Netflix queue, it will tell you there's a "very long wait" to get the movie. =)
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As the day wound down, I got my promo copies of the DVD to swag for con goodies. The haul wasn't bad -- a coupl'a boxes of D&D minis, a wonderful little board game called "Key Largo" ... and a TON of Legend of the Five Rings cards from John Zinser, president of AEG. L5R is my favorite collectible card game of all time, hands down. The interactive storyline and fan devotion to their particular factions are unmatched in the CCG world. I've been off the stuff for a few years, pretty much since we moved to Cali. But with Nathan moving down in a couple months, I may have to get back into the game. Can't let the Crane prance around the courts of the Empire while the Crab die on the Great Carpenter Wall.
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Wifey poses with Jen Page, who was banished from the con

after someone left a cold iron charm outside her room. BOOM! Elf joke!

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At four, the hall closed, and the convention hall staff started processing the corpse of the convention. The carpets between the booths were rolled up, the banners above them taken down. Quickly, efficiently, the cold concrete bones of the convention center poked through what moments before had been the center of the RPG universe. And will be again next year.
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The trip back to L.A. was blessedly uneventful. We said our goodbyes to the few DGs hanging around an extra day and vamoosed to the airport. Mercifully, Air Tran's computers were working for the return trip. From the L.A. park and ride, Don and Cindy gave us a lift back to our apartment -- our car still being dead -- and dropped us off shortly after midnight. We have yet to completely unpack.

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So ... yay for Gen Con! We can finally get back to regular life. Until next week, when Don and Jeremy and I head up to Seattle for PAX.

Gen Con, Day 3

One of the realities of convention life is that you're going to have to share your room. I've roomed with my fair share of snorers. Brian was neither the loudest nor most obnoxious of these. He was, however, the hardest to wake. The whispering didn't work. The yelling didn't work. The crossing-over-and-nudging didn't work. What did work was the violently-shaking-the-bed. The snoring stopped after that, but I only netted about four hours of sleep -- the bare minimum to function the next day.
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And sadly, the first thing I did the next day was miss Tracy Hickman's fan-favorite event, one of the hallmarks of the convention, the Killer Breakfast. Every year, Tracy runs a Dungeons & Dragons campaign from the front of a ballroom and mows through hundreds of player characters in about two hours. There are no survivors. It's not if you will die -- it's when, and how violently. If you can survive the Killer Breakfast for more than 30 seconds, that's commendable. I think Christian set a record with two minutes. I was looking forward to getting killed in front of hundreds of fellow gamers myself, but sadly, that wasn't in the cards.
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No, I was at the signing table -- the only Dead Gentleman at the table, I might ad -- nearly getting trampled by the new herd of gamers thundering towards the Wizards booth. Seems today's promo was an exclusive Hero Clix miniature. Watching the gamers galumph across the floor, I imagined a small tile-based board game called "Con Rush." In this game, players would compete to grab as many con promos as possible from different booths before their character died from a massive coronary.
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BELOW: Signing my future away. That's John Frank with the Joker grin.
Saturday is typically the biggest day at Gen Con, but sales-wise, it didn't take the crown away from Thursday. By the end of the day, Paizo had sold 250 Dorkness DVDs. They'd also completely sold out DVDs of the Director's Cut of The Gamers and Dead Camper Lake. Haven't had that happen for a while.
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The signings held steady througout the day. And in the middle of them, I signed the option agreement with Epic Level Entertainment for the next Gamers film, The Gamers: PWNed. I've been working on the script for the last couple years. It's set in an MMORPG, so the budget will be significantly higher than anything Dead Gentlemen's ever done -- hence Epic Level holding the reins on this one. We're pretty excited about it, expecially coming off the momentum of Dorkness. John Frank and Cindi already have meetings set up. If I have to miss Gen Con next year, I hope it's because we're knee-deep in PWNed.
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I left the hall at five to get a nap in before the Big Screening that night. This would be the sole evening screening of Dorkness Rising at Gen Con, at 10 pm. And for me, the film would not be complete until I'd seen it screen with a Gen Con audience. The first Gen Con screening was two years ago, in '06, but due to a family tragedy I had to leave before the premiere. So I had a lot emotionally tied up in this screening. I needed it. I needed to be there, to see it in front of an audience. The Comic Con screening was great, but it was no Gen Con crowd.
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Gen Con expected a massive turnout, so they gave us two ballrooms to screen in. It was the same setup as last year: seating for a thousand, with a large central screen and two smaller side screens at the halfway point where the halls met. We posed for pictures with fans as the line outside the hall grew, and grew, and grew -- we couldn't go in, because the live table reading of Knights of the Dinner Table was just wrapping up. The DGs trekked in when they finished, and then, predictably, things started to go wrong.
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Remember the big central screen? Apparently, the con decided we didn't need one. All we had were the two small side screens -- and half the chairs in the place were past those. So we had two ballrooms, but one we couldn't use because it didn't face the screens. Also, hundreds of people stayed over from the KoDT reading for our screening, so the back seats were already pretty much full before we'd opened the doors to the folks in line. This did not bode well.
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So the doors opened, and we explained to the attendees that the side screens were all they got. Folks filled in the back, and angled their chairs towards the screens, splitting right down the middle at oblique angles. That was weird -- watching a 600 member audience crammed into half the space, facing opposite directions.
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Screening to the left!

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Screening to the right!

Stand up, sit down, fight fight fight!

And so our screening began. We led with the trailer for Midnight Syndicate's The Dead Matter, directed by our buddy Ed Douglas. It's a truly original (and rather jump-inducing) horror movie. Don and Jeremy and I got to see it at GAMA back in April in Ed's hotel room, with Ed narrating the effects and scenes that weren't fully finished. We enjoyed the hell out of it, and that wasn't even the final version. So the trailer screened, and as we watched, we thought "Huh. They did the trailer in black and white. Odd choice for a movie in color."

But of course that wasn't the choice, as we discovered when we loaded the Dorkness screener -- the projector was stuck on black and white. So we abruptly stopped the screening to howls of protest. I pondered how quickly a friendly audience could turn into an effigy-burning mob. We powwowwed (it's a word) with the con's tech guys, and fixed the color in record time.

Then we noticed the aspect ratio was off -- the projector was projecting in 4:3 instead of 16:9 (fullscreen instead of widescreen for you non-dorks). The projector was chopping the sides off the image. The loading screen even read "ed Gentlemen presents," with the option to "Play Mov." We circled up to toy with the projector ... and that's when the chants of "Play mov! Play mov!" started. So we just took the aspect ratio hit and played the mov.

I sat down with Wifey in the dark, in the midpoint between the differently angled crowds. Here it was, my Gen Con screening. Please, dear God, let it not suck.

It didn't. I mean, sure, there were some problems. There was the aspect ratio, and the focus was a bit soft, and the audio wasn't as clear as it could be. The fans didn't care. What they cared about were gaming jokes and dead bards. Laughter filled the hall, loud and constant and appreciative. Wifey was so excited she screamed herself into laryngitis, the poor thing. The credits rolled a hundred minutes later to a standing ovation. Two, if you count the divided crowd.

So, completely high off the screening, we headed out to the most raucous party of the con: the White Wolf party. I'd been hearing about this one for two years, about the insane debauchery and the flashing bard junk in a go-go cage. So it was a bit surprising when the club we crammed into turned out to be nothing but three drab stairwells worth of suck. There was no balcony, no fresh air, no open windows -- and no air conditioning.

Now, my three great hates are crowds, heat, and noise. This party was nothing but. By the time I reached the somewhat cooler third floor -- which only felt like a sauna -- I was ready to leave. And oddly enough, so were the rest of the DGs. The party two years ago was in a different space, they assured me. This party wasn't happening. We had to get out or we'd melt.

So we headed over to the Embassy Suites with Jamie and Renae Chambers of MWP to carouse in their con pad. And that turned out to be the best party we could hope for -- friends, alcohol, and privacy. And flow the alcohol did. Tree drank Stevie under the table. Which, to be fair, isn't hard. I believe I texted "Balls 4EVER" to Cindi at one point -- Cindi, my producer. We ended the night in the loading dock outside the hotel, smoking Brian's "I'm a dad!/We made a movie!" cigars.

And it was there, in that atmosphere of effervescent camaraderie, that many of us had to part ways. Several of the guys had early morning flights to catch -- this was it for them. We hugged our goodbyes, bade our fellows safe passage back to the damp and drizzly northwest. We'd be at half-strength tomorrow on the last day of the con.

We got back to our hotel at 4 am. Brian, bless him, had felt so bad about the snoring that he'd bought us a pack of earplugs. We corked our hear-bits and collapsed under the weight of the day.