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That's disappointing, the 9 irish in Lafayette was pretty reliably decent irish food!
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Jul 20, 2017 04:18
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Dr. Quarex posted:And that said--I agree with you, of the incredibly few not-good experiences I have had at Gen-Con, most of them are related to the people running random tabletop games in far-flung rooms of outside hotels. I will never forget either the gamemaster at the next table who was so loud that we could not hear our own gamemaster, or the gamemaster at our own table who was so quiet that we could not really hear even if there was virtually no other noise in the room. And if that is as bad as it gets... There are definitely bad experiences to be had at Gen Con, though in my personal experience they tend to be fairly minor. My worst was about 5 years ago when a friend I was with really wanted us to play in an all night (12 hour long) D&D homebrew game he found. We went, and it became clear within the first 30 minutes the guy running it was just trying to get in as many player hours as possible so he could get a free room. He didn't follow the rules at all, just let people narrate everything including dice rolls, didn't care what anyone did, had about 20 players, and let 3 of the guys there run with their idea of using their dicks as their casting implements for their fire magic. I didn't last more than an hour before going back to the hotel, I don't know how my one friend did it but he made it till midnight before finally saying screw it. There is also one sure fire way to have a bad Gen Con and that is the Hobocon way. Those guys had such a bad time that at the end of the film they packed up and left the second the sun was up on Sunday.
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Jul 20, 2017 14:10
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:lmao just lmao if you waste your nacho time at HV and not at old point Psh, real pros consume the convention center "Nachos" Bottom Liner posted:I'll be setting up goon games every day Wed-Sun. I'm bringing the following games: I'm planning on tossing AFFO & Terra Mystica in my trunk this time, maybe archipelago Dr. Quarex posted:Yeah I do not remember if the first year in Indianapolis was like that, as I shamefully only went for the weekend and barely spent any time in the surrounding area, but by the second year I know we were already starting to notice nearby businesses picking up on things--a far cry from our treatment in Milwaukee, at least by the last few years once I started going. Milwaukee is bad, yeah def (i live there, so it is even worse). There's people that go to Indy gen con and still think milwaukee is better/can handle it (Milwaukee locals, no less)
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Jul 20, 2017 14:35
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though I suppose if I went on the Monday before things started and demanded a booth seat it might be salvageable.
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Unrelated to anything I am about to write, I am always upset hearing people talk about how the convention center food is garbage; the stalls that sell the same recycled crap pizza/nachos/whatever that you expect to find in sports stadiums are not good, but about five years ago or so they put in an additional set of food stands that sell something approximating real food and some of the things they sell are easily as good as what you would get from, like, the Ram's average offerings. Though there is minimal fun involved in getting food from the convention center, certainly. But the coffee people are always very nice!nesbit37 posted:There are definitely bad experiences to be had at Gen Con, though in my personal experience they tend to be fairly minor. My worst was about 5 years ago when a friend I was with really wanted us to play in an all night (12 hour long) D&D homebrew game he found. We went, and it became clear within the first 30 minutes the guy running it was just trying to get in as many player hours as possible so he could get a free room. He didn't follow the rules at all, just let people narrate everything including dice rolls, didn't care what anyone did, had about 20 players, and let 3 of the guys there run with their idea of using their dicks as their casting implements for their fire magic. I didn't last more than an hour before going back to the hotel, I don't know how my one friend did it but he made it till midnight before finally saying screw it. nesbit37 posted:There is also one sure fire way to have a bad Gen Con and that is the Hobocon way. Those guys had such a bad time that at the end of the film they packed up and left the second the sun was up on Sunday. Sloober posted:Milwaukee is bad, yeah def (i live there, so it is even worse). There's people that go to Indy gen con and still think milwaukee is better/can handle it (Milwaukee locals, no less) (I still remember the angry glares we got from the mall food court workers in Milwaukee when walking in in costume. I basically stopped cosplaying by the time it exploded in popularity. Ugh no I am not claiming cosplay hipster cred I am actually lamenting this fact and thinking all those judgmental gazes of the past are ... look just leave me alone)
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Jul 20, 2017 15:50
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Dr. Quarex posted:I am growing increasingly desirous of organizing some sort of tradition to watch this at the start of every Gen-Con. Though I suppose I would have to figure out how to watch it at all for that to work. The webpage was down (was it ever truly up?) and the only source listed in the single review of Hobocon that actually has it available is Noble Knight Games, which has a copy of the DVD for $18. Am I really committed enough to this joke to spend actual money on it? Sometimes I am. Do it, you know you want to. It's just $18, and those are probably the last copies of that movie that anyone will ever have for sale. It's where I picked up my copy.
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Jul 20, 2017 16:04
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nesbit37 posted:Do it, you know you want to. It's just $18, and those are probably the last copies of that movie that anyone will ever have for sale. It's where I picked up my copy. I am tempted to try to find the guys who made it and ask if they would mind me uploading it to YouTube because I always think it is ridiculous when I cannot literally find any video I want to watch both immediately and for free.
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Jul 20, 2017 16:17
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Upload the whole thing to youtube unlisted, i doubt the automatic content filter will catch it and not being searchable it is unlikely to get reported Then everyone queues it up, we sit in a discord chatroom and all hit play at the same time. Easy!
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Jul 20, 2017 16:19
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Dr. Quarex posted:(I still remember the angry glares we got from the mall food court workers in Milwaukee when walking in in costume. I basically stopped cosplaying by the time it exploded in popularity. Ugh no I am not claiming cosplay hipster cred I am actually lamenting this fact and thinking all those judgmental gazes of the past are ... look just leave me alone) The best part is that the grand avenue mall has gone no where but downwards the past 15 years and half of it is empty, there's maybe like 5 food places in there now still in business. They're 'overhauling' it but that means nothing with how awful Milwaukee is as a convention city Sloober fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jul 20, 2017 |
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Jul 20, 2017 17:35
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To be fair to Milwaukee, gaming was nowhere near the mainstream hobby it is now. At the time, it was still very niche. The convention organizers themselves could have done a much better job to promote the con to local businesses though. Had it not been in my hometown though I never would have been able to go when I was in High-School.
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Jul 20, 2017 19:51
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Yeah I imagine hitting 10,000 attendees by the late 1980s was even more shocking back then than the probably-like-70,000-this-year is to us now. It really would be interesting to know (if such a thing were knowable) whether a complete and utter lack of outreach by the convention was responsible for some significant part of the frosty reception. Though I would be interested to hear whether anyone who was attending in the early years of Milwaukee remembers it being any more welcoming (I do not think we have any such person here though).Fellis posted:Upload the whole thing to youtube unlisted, i doubt the automatic content filter will catch it and not being searchable it is unlikely to get reported Sloober posted:The best part is that the grand avenue mall has gone no where but downwards the past 15 years and half of it is empty, there's maybe like 5 food places in there now still in business. Glad to hear that they are two locals who agree that the Safe House was basically the only bright spot for "things in the greater Gen-Con environs" back in the day. And not-coincidentally because it was already the sort of place gamers would love, obviously. I also read about how they are basically turning the second floor of that mall into office space...yeah, that does not sound very promising for it as a cool mall to hang out at.
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Jul 20, 2017 20:24
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I'm pretty excited for Gencon ya'll
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Jul 20, 2017 21:16
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Dr. Quarex posted:Yeah I imagine hitting 10,000 attendees by the late 1980s was even more shocking back then than the probably-like-70,000-this-year is to us now. It really would be interesting to know (if such a thing were knowable) whether a complete and utter lack of outreach by the convention was responsible for some significant part of the frosty reception. Though I would be interested to hear whether anyone who was attending in the early years of Milwaukee remembers it being any more welcoming (I do not think we have any such person here though). There are people on record saying Milwaukee was much better in early years and that Gen Con pretty much wore out its welcome as far as a lot of the city was concerned. See Robin Laws 2007 book 40 Years of Gen Con.
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Jul 20, 2017 21:21
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:I'm pretty excited for Gencon ya'll Buy all Gen-Con merchandise. All. Now. nesbit37 posted:There are people on record saying Milwaukee was much better in early years and that Gen Con pretty much wore out its welcome as far as a lot of the city was concerned. See Robin Laws 2007 book 40 Years of Gen Con. Hmm...but Gen-Con also only ("only") made it 17 years in Milwaukee, and we are already on year 14 in Indianapolis. And I can speak to Indianapolis year 12 being profoundly more welcoming than Milwaukee Year 12 at least. I wonder how many good years they even had? Maybe two, and then it was like "is this seriously going to happen EVERY YEAR?"
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Jul 20, 2017 21:44
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The Gen Con 50 years of event history project is done and up! (well technically we had a loading problem with 1998 that will be fixed by tomorrow morning, but you can see it now). I am very glad we were able to put this together and now have a great data set to work with on this stuff. I'll just paste the blurb I sent out below as well as our about page. Go bathe in the nostalgia! "The Temple University Digital Scholarship Center is happy to announce that the online database of events for all 50 years of the Gen Con gaming convention is now live! You can access the site at http://best50yearsingaming.com/ On this site you can explore the events of Gen Con's present and past, take a historical tour of the locations that have held Gen Con, listen to or read interviews with Gen Con attendees, and learn about the types of research that is conducted using this event information. Be sure to catch Matt Shoemaker's presentation on this project and Gen Con's event history during his retrospective panel." About Welcome to the Best 50 Years in Gaming! This project aims to explore the evolution of gaming and popular culture by examining the history of scheduled events at the Gen Con gaming convention. Gen Con officially began in 1968 and provides a rich sample of gaming events through its physical and digital programs. By taking the event data from fifty years of programs and putting it into an easily accessible and standardized digital form we vastly increase the usefulness of the data to scholars, enthusiasts, and anyone interested in Gen Con's past. We at Temple University's Digital Scholarship Center aim to use the data in statistical and textual analysis to learn about changes in gaming and popular culture over time as reflected by Gen Con. We encourage others to do the same, as well as to simply explore the Gen Con event dataset for any research, historical, or nostalgic purposes. You can access an online version of the data set (hosted via Blacklight) here, and you can download your own CSV copy of the dataset here. We have created a companion site for this project In addition to the data set. This site, hosted on the Omeka platform, aims to provide some historical background on Gen Con as well as showcase findings from work with the dataset. If you have any questions about the history of Gen Con or other information you would like to see beyond our timeline of the event and oral histories please let us know at digitalscholarship@temple.edu or tweet us @templedsc. This project is ongoing, with the initial work to digitize and organize the data taking place during 2016-2017. Normalization of the data (doing things like making sure machines understand that "D&D 2nd ed" and "Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition" are really the same thing) is ongoing as of summer of 2017. Analysis and use of the data by Digital Scholarship Center staff, as well as public release of the data set, began in July of 2017. A special thanks goes to Peter Adkison, Mike Carr, Scott Griffin, Allan Grohe, Jon Peterson and Randall Porter for providing physical and digital copies of several of the programs for our use in this project. Additionally, we would like to thank Gen Con, LLC., without which this project could not have occurred. Staff at the Digital Scholarship Center who worked on this project are: Program digitization and data clean-up: Jillian Benedict, Luling Huang, Kaelin Jewell, Emily Logan, Ritomaitree Sarkar, Gary Scales, Matt Shoemaker, Crystal Tatis Blacklight and Omeka systems work: Chad Nelson, Steven Ng Web design: Rachel Cox, Chris Doyle, Matt Shoemaker Omeka exhibitions: Matt Shoemaker Principal Investigator: Matt Shoemaker About the Dataset The dataset was created from the event sections of the physical and digital versions of official Gen Con programs, pre-registration programs, The Spartan zine and the International Federation of Wargaming Monthly zine. Years 2003-2017 were all pulled (with permission) from gencon.com where snapshots of the event database were hosted. Data from 2002 and earlier is from physical programs that were scanned and had their data entered into our database by hand or were OCRed with ABBY Fine Reader software, with the resulting text cleaned by DSC staff. We have made minimal changes to the data and other than normalization do not plan to further manipulate information from the programs. We conducted minimal correction from OCR, fixing obvious mistakes when found but in general the scan quality was high enough (400dpi) that OCR errors were minimal. There are exceptions for some years that have information in or near the gutter of their physical counterparts. Additionally, virtually every year has events that run multiple times. Some programs listed these events under the same entry and others spread them out based on when they were running. We neither separated these entries out nor did we collapse them, but left them as they were presented in each particular program. This is important as it may skew some text analysis you perform with the data set. A small number of programs had their digital counterparts created from pre-registration booklets rather than the official program guide. This was done either because the official program book was not available for digitization, or, in one case, the official program had SOLD OUT printed over so many events it made the majority of the event section impossible to read. The year 1973 is omitted from this dataset because we could not locate a copy of event information from that year. If one exists and we can get a copy of it then we will add that event data to the dataset and update this section. We are actively seeking any event information from that year. If you have a program please contact us at digitalscholarship@temple.edu so we can add 1973 data to our database. As of July 2017, the process of data normalization is ongoing. Normalization is the process of clarifying what information in specific fields means. For example, programs from 1990 may have games listed under the system "D&D Advanced", while in programs from 2000 the same system may be listed as "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st edition." This information must be normalized to reduce confusion, particularly for machine analysis of the information. When this process is complete this section will be updated. Gen Con® mark is a registered trademark of Gen Con LLC, used by permission. Images, artwork, and events listings Copyright © Gen Con LLC. All rights reserved.
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Jul 20, 2017 22:46
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Funzo posted:To be fair to Milwaukee, gaming was nowhere near the mainstream hobby it is now. At the time, it was still very niche. The convention organizers themselves could have done a much better job to promote the con to local businesses though. This is true but looking at an influx of people for a con so openly hostile seems like bad business. Indy is cool since businesses are capitalizing on it so openly
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Jul 20, 2017 23:41
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:I'm pretty excited for Gencon ya'll I'm getting pretty hype, myself.
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Jul 21, 2017 00:47
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nesbit37 posted:The Gen Con 50 years of event history project is done and up! (well technically we had a loading problem with 1998 that will be fixed by tomorrow morning, but you can see it now). This is fantastic. I love the Program Cover gallery. I distinctly remember getting the '89 program in the mail and poring over all the games I wanted to play.
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Jul 21, 2017 16:38
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Whoa, my two-day trip down to Gen Con just evolved into a four-day. Haven't done the whole shebang in three years or so. gently caress yeah. 
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Jul 21, 2017 19:11
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Hope your badge is good for all four of those days - if not, fix that soon or you're gonna have a bad time  Edit: And by that I mean you won't be able to buy badges for those days - they already sold out of four-day badges, and individual days are creeping much closer to that point with alarming speed.
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Jul 21, 2017 19:55
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LuiCypher posted:Hope your badge is good for all four of those days - if not, fix that soon or you're gonna have a bad time Yeah, I've had my 4-day since they went on sale. Despite my shorter-than-ideal trips to Indy the last few years, I haven't actually missed a GenCon since my very first one, and single day badges are for suckers. Trustworthy fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Jul 21, 2017 |
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Jul 21, 2017 20:22
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Nevermind! Glad to hear you're all set.
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Jul 21, 2017 20:25
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I think they're down to just Thursday and Friday badges. I wouldn't be surprised to see Friday and maybe even both sell out.
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Jul 21, 2017 22:27
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Trustworthy posted:Whoa, my two-day trip down to Gen Con just evolved into a four-day. Haven't done the whole shebang in three years or so. gently caress yeah. HELL YEAH I am so excited I am even like microplanning my days now to some extent, like "Embassy Suites breakfast always devolves into a like 5-10 minute wait for cream by the time I want to get coffee to go...maybe if I carried my own half & half I could get to the convention hall faster?"
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Jul 21, 2017 22:51
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Trustworthy posted:single day badges are for suckers. 
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Jul 21, 2017 23:51
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Do they sell like the lanyard and sleeve you can put your badge in at the con? I could've sworn it came with it in the mail the last time I went, but then that was over a decade ago.
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Jul 22, 2017 00:26
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That Old Tree posted:Do they sell like the lanyard and sleeve you can put your badge in at the con? I could've sworn it came with it in the mail the last time I went, but then that was over a decade ago. Yeah, they sell them at the same place you can buy all the other Gen Con official merch, usually out in the convention center halls near registration somewhere.
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Jul 22, 2017 00:42
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Last year my badge came with a lanyard. Is that not the norm.
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Jul 22, 2017 04:37
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Rad Valtar posted:Last year my badge came with a lanyard. Is that not the norm. Yeah it comes with a Top Deck Legendary lanyard for whatever new license they are pushing. I've been reusing my ConTessa lanyard.
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Jul 22, 2017 05:08
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They always have the lanyard at the ticket area, you can just grab one
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Jul 22, 2017 05:49
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Yeah sorry, I thought he was asking about the nicer pocketed badge holders like these . Standard lanyard with the regular badge holder is always included, of course.
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Jul 22, 2017 10:29
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So no lanyard came with my badge this year... what the fuzz.
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Jul 22, 2017 18:03
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Sounds like an excuse to spoil yourself with one of those offworld badge holders.
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Jul 22, 2017 18:17
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Texibus posted:So no lanyard came with my badge this year... what the fuzz. I think they just leave them at the ticket widows instead of paying to ship them.
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Jul 23, 2017 01:50
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I got a really nice one from GaryCon a few years ago I may just use.
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Jul 23, 2017 22:20
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Texibus posted:So no lanyard came with my badge this year... what the fuzz. You should have got one. I did, at least with the four day badge.
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Jul 23, 2017 22:44
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Sionak posted:You should have got one. I did, at least with the four day badge. I got another Legendary one with mine.
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Jul 24, 2017 01:04
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Yeah, I got a Legendary lanyard, so I'll just probably be using one of my own.
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Jul 24, 2017 01:14
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Funzo posted:I got a really nice one from GaryCon a few years ago I may just use.
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Jul 24, 2017 03:51
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Paging Dr. Quarex (or anyone else who knows WTF about running seminars at GenCon): What's the skinny on getting projectors or screens (or gently caress, even whiteboards) in one of the seminar rooms? Is that something that a) is available, b) costs extra (I'd imagine, and if so, through whom do we arrange it?), or c) gently caress you, bring your own?
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Jul 24, 2017 05:35
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Ilor posted:Paging Dr. Quarex (or anyone else who knows WTF about running seminars at GenCon): The good news is that it sounds like it is really easy and that all you have to do is pay them and they make it all happen, the bad news is that I bet it costs even more now than that. A whiteboard, hmm. They might just have those in the room depending? MODS???
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Jul 24, 2017 05:46
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