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Did they widen the lanes slightly in the Vendor hall? It was crowded Saturday but it also wasn’t shoulder to shoulder press of humanity like it typically is. I didn’t go into the vendor hall till Saturday, and I made a list of the booths I wanted to visit so I had a plan. Unless you want new releases or an indie publisher, the consignment shop/auction seems to be the place to get good deals
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Aug 10, 2019 18:47
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My goal this year was to demo and do events for games or genres I hadn’t played before. Played a lot of fun stuff but mainly my takeaway was games that were all newbies were a much more fun experience than a game w even one person who’d played it before. It changes the whole dynamic from “let’s all feel this out” to “what does the experienced player think” which was super frustrating. True Dungeon was v much like this where a few basically min maxed the whole group If anything I wish there could be an option to split players up by experience before the session starts - but I guess everything is super busy already for the demo/instruction crew. Campbell fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Aug 10, 2019 |
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Aug 10, 2019 19:09
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Fellis posted:Did they widen the lanes slightly in the Vendor hall? It was crowded Saturday but it also wasn’t shoulder to shoulder press of humanity like it typically is. I could swear it was smaller. Probably all the people that stop in the middle to gawk at stuff.
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Aug 10, 2019 19:53
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Fellis posted:Did they widen the lanes slightly in the Vendor hall? It was crowded Saturday but it also wasn’t shoulder to shoulder press of humanity like it typically is. I think they placed the trash cans better? Last year it felt like every intersection had a trash can in the middle of it that people would always stop and talk around.
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Aug 10, 2019 21:53
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Platonicsolid posted:Thursday seems like clutch vendor day, when it's still quiet. When I went in 2014, it seemed nearly deserted for a couple hours after opening Thursday. I got to demo Murano with the designer. I do feel like the Mayfair area was a calming influence. Thursday rush is insane and has been since 2015 at least. And mayfair no longer exists lol 
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Aug 11, 2019 02:21
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Bottom Liner posted:Thursday rush is insane and has been since 2015 at least. And mayfair no longer exists lol Things have changed. I'm an old. Better than the alternative! :-P
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Aug 11, 2019 13:36
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Admiral Joeslop posted:I could swear it was smaller. Probably all the people that stop in the middle to gawk at stuff. It felt like they widened the center lanes in some aisles, but the edges seemed smaller for sure. I felt like I was hitting traffic jams more frequently in the 100 and 2300+ ends.
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Aug 11, 2019 18:05
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Admittedly hadn't been since 15, but between then and now, felt like there were more booths that broke up the aisles.
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Aug 11, 2019 18:52
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We ran into a situation in the 200-300 block where two different dice companies had been placed across from each other. What sadist does that?
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Aug 11, 2019 20:20
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Pangaea Ultima posted:
The generic hopeful had signed up for another game of Star Trek Adventures for the same day/time, but it had been cancelled about a week before the con. But for that confluence of events (and the 3D printed bribes), I would asked him to leave. Luckily, you and the rest of the table were cool with him sliding in, and I think we all had a good time. I know another Goon wanted to play but couldn't attend (checks email... Dr. Gargunza). It could be something worth setting up. Also - there are regrets, and there's Malort. Tread carefully, my friend. PS - look at your group me messages, Pangea Eastmabl fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Aug 13, 2019 |
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Aug 12, 2019 03:40
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I wrote up a fun Gencon 2019 experience for the TG chat thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3878708&pagenumber=154&perpage=40#post497452418 old school games run by young guys -> hit or miss old school games run by old guys who played it when it was the latest edition -> almost always better
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Aug 12, 2019 20:30
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Yeah, that is a true statement. OD&D was super weird. I played in a session of the first ever D&D Gen Con Dungeon at Gary Con a couple of years ago (it was run by Paul Stormberg who currently holds the Gygax papers for..., reasons I won't get into here). It only exists in the original format which Paul has. The dungeon was a crazy mess and it wasn't even really fantasy. You're a group of adventurers going through a "dungeon" but its all a joke. The players know their players are really going through an automated fulfillment factory because the "monsters" are things like machines to shrink wrap boxes, move product from one place to another, conveyor belts, etc. It was pretty weird, especially considering the high fantasy everyone thinks OD&D was (and it totally wasn't).
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Aug 12, 2019 20:40
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clockworkjoe posted:I got engaged this year at gen con so that's nice http://slangdesign.com/rppr/2019/08/panel-discussion/rppr-live-at-gen-con-2019/  Bogieman posted:I need to hang out with you folks. Gen Con is a lot of fun Shots Wednesday, I can now confirm first-hand, is definitely fun for drinkies and non-drinkies alike. Though joining the GroupMe in general is good for a funhavingsgoodtime. And attending T.O.V.A. LEST ANYONE EVER IMPLY EVEN IN JEST AGAIN THAT I DO NOT HYPE THE AUCTION ENOUGH Lord Of Texas posted:More evidence that there are many ways to enjoy GenCon. I can't stand the vendor hall - the crowd, noise, and general dehumanization is not worth the off chance that I actually get into a demo, and even then, the types of games I typically like enough to fight for a demo are not very numerous. And for as much as it has always been either my favorite or second-favorite thing about Gen-Con, I suppose if you are the kind of person who knows what you like and is interested in looking year-round for gaming things, it might not be the absolute must-do event of the year, even if it never fails to introduce people to dozens (or dare I say hundreds) of amazing vendors any given person would probably never have encountered otherwise. But as for me, I both pay basically no attention to nerdy things the rest of the year (Steam notwithstanding) and come to Tha GC with the intention to spend lots of money, so it is downright stupid when I do not get to spend much time there. Gotta remember next year to refuse all activities between 10 and 6 other than Groverlunch and WALKING THE HALL. Well except Holy Saturday of course. Losem posted:I think they placed the trash cans better? Last year it felt like every intersection had a trash can in the middle of it that people would always stop and talk around. Campbell posted:My goal this year was to demo and do events for games or genres I hadn’t played before. Played a lot of fun stuff but mainly my takeaway was games that were all newbies were a much more fun experience than a game w even one person who’d played it before. (I am increasingly convinced that about half of all True Dungeon runs involve long-time mega-players ruining the game for the handful of newbies who get stuck with them) nesbit37 posted:It was pretty weird, especially considering the high fantasy everyone thinks OD&D was (and it totally wasn't).
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Aug 16, 2019 05:46
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Dr. Quarex posted:
I think this is true. You're enjoyment of TD is like 95% based on who you run it with. And when you run with the people who do nothing but run TD all Gen Con and have thousands of dollars of tokens it is either going to completely turn you off or hitch on to your collecting addiction part of your personality and make you want to buy all the little kind of shinies. Dr. Quarex posted:I am also increasingly convinced that OD&D was basically nearly indistinguishable from the way my friends and I so truly love to play D&D (or many other systems), where the gamemaster comes up with yet another hackneyed but good-enough excuse to explain that all of us are sitting at the very table we are now sitting at in real life, when suddenly reality breaks, and we all find ourselves in another world. Which, I have found, is a style of gaming generally seen as kind of stupid in Traditional Games. But was seemingly one of the main ways things went down in the earliest and even pre-D&D Blackmoor days. Yeah, from my understanding that is pretty much OD&D. I am going to be going into the weeds a bit here so if you don't like this kind of topic that isn't all that much on Gen Con stop reading now. Transporting yourself into the game seemed to be a very big thing. Look at the name of many of the early characters. Rob Kuntz played Robilar, Terry Kuntz played Terick, Mike Carr played the first cleric in the game named Bishop Carr. See the D&D cartoon series Gygax had a heavy hand in that could have focused on anything, but instead took children and teenagers from an amusement park and transported them to a D&D hellscape. See Terry Kuntz's scenario Sturmgeschutz & Sorcery where a nazi tank column gets transported unawares and is suddenly ambushed by orcs, giants, and wizards slinging fireballs (one player plays the nazis, the other the fantasy folk, its a weird mishmash of D&D, Chainmail, and Tractics). What follows is purely speculation, but I have wondered if this is just a result of a combination of being a male in the 1970s and being a wargamer. It seems to me that many of the players of that period, D&D or wargamers, thought they were pretty awesome human beings. As such, why would they want to play as someone else when they could just play as themselves. What is cooler, after all, than myself plus magic and a sword in a world where I can do literally anything I want! In period wargames (and probably today), there was an issue talked about with some regularity in some of the zines about an issue some players had where they would imagine themselves as the general doing all of this stuff instead of just playing a game. The issue was this would lead to them being more frustrated if things didn't go their way, or sore-winners when it did. It really seemed a lot of the people who played these games at this time didn't have a lot of empathy, and you can somewhat see how that has carried on to many (not all) of their attitudes today for those that are still around. In the late 70s and 80s there was an influx from the sci-fi fandom into D&D. This caused a bunch of conflict, as you had your wargamers wanting to play this way, and this other group that was coming in from an experience of enjoying and becoming immersed in the stories and characters others have written. It also saw an influx of women, since such sci-fi fan groups at the time were something like 20% women on average. This is where, it seems, that shift from you being the character to you playing a character that is someone else started to happen with more regularity, and it seemed to start to bring more empathy to the game which has continued to grow over the years, particularly the past 5 years from an influx of yet more players who come from different backgrounds, both socially and in the types of games they play and media they consume. I dunno, I find this stuff fascinating. Jon Peterson did a piece talking about the first influx I talked about. It's mostly talking about women starting to enter D&D (and wargames before that), but its definitely worth a read if you like this kind of stuff. https://medium.com/@increment/the-first-female-gamers-c784fbe3ff37 Additionally, PAXsims has been talking more about women and wargaming which I find interesting (especially since I am starting to work on a feminist wargame, can't wait for the flak and I hate I am going to get from the wargame community for this one): https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2019/08/09/armchair-dragoons-on-the-culture-wars/
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Aug 16, 2019 16:18
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True Dungeon talk - having a newbies only run/scenario would be fantastic. Of course it'd be up to the player to decide to join an open group or a newbies group. That said, the whole thing (at least the scenario I was in) was an escape room plus shuffleboard which I kinda found pretty underwhelming but that's probably my fault for not watching more reviews or whatever. Also I was heavily encouraged to roll Barbarian by other ppl in my group since it was my first run. The cool part was I did a 44pt rage-enhanced crit (the dm guy seemed v impressed) to kill the final boss that was a dragon on a scissor lift that was in severe need of chiropractic.
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Aug 16, 2019 18:09
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Dr. Quarex posted:And for as much as it has always been either my favorite or second-favorite thing about Gen-Con, I suppose if you are the kind of person who knows what you like and is interested in looking year-round for gaming things, it might not be the absolute must-do event of the year, even if it never fails to introduce people to dozens (or dare I say hundreds) of amazing vendors any given person would probably never have encountered otherwise. Yup this makes a lot of sense. I am an attendee of several other board gaming cons and enjoy playing at local stores and with local friend groups, so I've got a pretty good feel of what i'm looking for in games, so for me it's not worth fighting the crowds to explore new releases. I also like to spend money at my unironically great FLGS to support them, not that money going straight to publishers is a bad thing. I do like vendor halls though - the hall at Origins is far more enjoyable for me since it's soooo much less crowded and they usually have a lot of the same stuff that's demo'd at Gen-Con. Very few wrong ways to enjoy Gen-Con 
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Aug 16, 2019 19:15
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Lord Of Texas posted:
Steak & Shake
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Aug 16, 2019 19:25
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Nesbit37, looking forward to the feminist wargame bringing rage from all the people mentioned earlier in your post. And gonna read anything Jon Peterson writes certainly It also hit close to home to read the thing about egotism leading organically to playing yourself but with magic, as I 100% remember arguing that Vampire: the Masquerade should have random rolls for trait assignment because some people like me are strong, smart, AND social so my character should have that same chance!!! Proving both that I was not as smart as I thought I was and that nobody should have wanted to be around me. I was strong though Bottom Liner posted:Steak & Shake Though at this rate Steak 'n' Shake will not even make it to Gen-Con 2020 and I will no longer have any reason to defend its virtues
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Aug 16, 2019 20:39
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TD does have a newbie scenario, sort of. one of the four at gencon is 'sealed', meaning you can't bring any of your own shinies and have to use stuff from the random pack you're issued. it's also a little cheaper.
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Aug 16, 2019 20:57
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Yeah, the sealed runs are usually the new player runs, or the remix of last year. Unfortunately, there are some folks who want those sweet sweet tokens far too badly, and buy out those runs as well. Same concept with the legendary Charm of Avarice - the official ones now have RFIDs in them because people wanted them too much and folks were making and selling copies for an uncomfortable sum. People obsessed with games can be problematic, even for the game itself.
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Aug 17, 2019 03:08
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Yea I was in the cheaper $59 run (opposed to $89) where we just had a roll of tokens we needed to trade amongst each other to gear up. Now I dread what the other runs would be like lol - a team of quarterbacks.
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Aug 17, 2019 04:25
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If two higher level folks are fighting over a class, it is a to-do alright. Ego fights are rough. Really depends on your group though! Friends in your group are a priority, then various forum folks, then randoms. The more people you know the more consistently fun it is.
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Aug 17, 2019 05:13
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Welp I forgot to check the GroupMe and didn't hang out with a single goon this year. Despite that, what a lovely danged Gen Con. It was my eighth GC, and maybe the best I've ever experienced. Great games, great people, etc. I proooooomise I'll hang out with some of you next year (because I know y'all were losing sleep over not seeing me, an obscure, socially awkward rando from the internet).
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Aug 17, 2019 16:27
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So huh, nearly 70,000 this year. Maybe Frank Mentzer's claim that he overheard convention center people saying they could do 75,000 was not wrong after all! I remember back when I wished anyone had ever heard of Gen Con as no matter who I talked to about it in real life the person was like "oh, is that like Comic Con?" whereas now I keep being approached in public whenever wearing a Gen Con shirt to either be told how cool the person heard it was or, my favorite, immediately shown pictures of that person's most recent cosplay. Not sure what specifically happened to kick it into the general anecdotal consciousness just in the last year or two, but I am glad for it; maybe a convention selling out badges instantly makes it seem cooler and more relevant forever? Of course, the downside to that is that I just had to book the most expensive hotel in downtown Indianapolis for 2020 because it was the only one available to book at all, even about a year out (and yes I checked even before Gen-Con ended this year and the situation was no better; I doubt I snoozed I losed/I snost I lost). Dang, booking a year early used to give me my pick of a half-dozen connected hotels, and for minimal markup at that. Radio Free Walrus posted:Really depends on your group though! Friends in your group are a priority, then various forum folks, then randoms. The more people you know the more consistently fun it is. I am certainly continually proud of them for proving the concept of "insanely elaborate fantasy gaming thing" does indeed work as so many of us assumed it could, even against all evidence to the contrary, in the 1990s or earlier. Trustworthy posted:Welp I forgot to check the GroupMe and didn't hang out with a single goon this year. Despite that, what a lovely danged Gen Con.
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Aug 18, 2019 03:32
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what are you all still doing here gencon is over go home
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Aug 18, 2019 03:52
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THE GEN CON MUST FLOW
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Aug 18, 2019 04:06
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Still haven't posted all my GenCon photos to Instagram ( Like Quarex ), read up on the GroupMe constantly, but never found time to hang out. I did however go find the auction and watch a master at work. At least I got to meet Quarex, albeit very quickly. My biggest regret, I missed TOVA, but it was for the Wyrmwood meetup at least, which was also the highlight of my trip.
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Aug 18, 2019 11:45
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This is now the 2020 count down thread.
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Aug 18, 2019 14:58
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Fellis posted:365 days till gencon 347
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Aug 18, 2019 16:17
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Drowning Rabbit posted:Still haven't posted all my GenCon photos to Instagram ( Like Quarex ), read up on the GroupMe constantly, but never found time to hang out. NO TOVA EXCUSES though yeah if you miss it for "the thing you are most excited for [other than Critical Role]" then that is very much in the spirit of The Gen Connin' 345
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Aug 20, 2019 06:02
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Dr. Quarex posted:...A Lynndie England avatar somewhat appropriately greets me from the Gen Con 2006 thread, and by the third post I am foreshadowing my horrific future by complaining about how weird it is that Gen Con threads never break a single page considering how awesome the event itself is. Pretty sure that was me. Yeah, that didn't go so well . . . .
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Aug 20, 2019 18:02
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ltugo posted:Pretty sure that was me. Yeah, that didn't go so well . . . . Also lol at me saying there were up to 50,000 attendees already in 2006, was I trying to make it sound more impressive only to make it still sound small in the future
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Aug 20, 2019 20:44
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Can we register for badges yet?
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Sep 15, 2019 12:42
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Eastmabl posted:Can we register for badges yet? No, it’s like end of January that registration opens again 319
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Sep 15, 2019 14:05
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I definitely have it on my t'do list to make the 2020 thread at least a month before badges go on sale. Knowing me that means I will either fail and put it out right about then again or end up finishing it two hours from now
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Sep 16, 2019 04:32
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It's not Gen Con yet and, imo, that's hosed up.
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Sep 16, 2019 05:32
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Resonym at GenCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EjkYHlK_EU A friend works for this company and just posted their video of their GenCon experience. I found it fun to relive at least some of it.
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Sep 17, 2019 23:19
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Quarex is gathering pictures for the new Gen Con thread, if you have any from any Gen Con you think would be good for the thread you can upload them to this folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17r3KEXC8jrsaxcFthUHML2u-TGASOZmV?usp=sharing
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Nov 22, 2019 15:27
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You broke the post dam! We are free!!! Yeah, my goal is to post the thread in December instead of my typical "frantically get it out the day before registration opens oops" or similar. And as I said in the GroupMe, yes, I have the "sold out of 5XL shirts" picture and the "huge people lying seemingly dead on the ground" photos already.
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Nov 22, 2019 18:44
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I just added a bunch of stuff from 2012-2019
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Nov 22, 2019 19:09
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