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BlackIronHeart posted:So who stole a $300k pallet of cards on Wednesday? Fess up! I hope it was those Disney cards.
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Aug 5, 2023 14:16
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Are there even any other vendors this year with $300,000 worth of cards I wonder Well maybe like overall for a reseller Edit: Huh, yeah Ravensburger just announced their product is all accounted for. Does that mean it was not Lorcana or that they immediately caught the guys though Dr. Quarex fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Aug 5, 2023 |
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Aug 5, 2023 14:25
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Apparently it was for the MTG prize wall?
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Aug 5, 2023 14:54
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BlackIronHeart posted:Apparently it was for the MTG prize wall? Even better
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Aug 5, 2023 17:11
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Someone about to get Pinkerton'd again
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Aug 5, 2023 17:17
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That does make more sense, it would be impossible to surreptitiously sell $300,000 of Lorcana while it was still valuable but Magic stuff is clearly not going anywhere
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Aug 5, 2023 17:23
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I hope it's all branded for whatever event it was scheduled for and are the only versions of the prizes so they're basically unsellable.
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Aug 5, 2023 17:43
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I assumed it was Commander Masters stuff
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Aug 6, 2023 00:54
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Charity Auction quote: “Once again, you have only angered the man in the Racoon Hat”
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Aug 6, 2023 01:40
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I'm not scared of raccocoony
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Aug 6, 2023 01:44
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Fellis posted:Charity Auction quote: “Once again, you have only angered the man in the Racoon Hat” What I cannot get past though is that from personal experience that red panda suit is the warmest thing ever crafted by human hands and he was sitting in it for, what, 3 hours at least
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Aug 6, 2023 02:32
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Aug 6, 2023 04:14
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Online has been weird this year. Had a five hour slot for mystery game, we solved it in about 105 minutes plus combat. With all that spare time, I joined another game, but the GM backed out. I offered to run, two people showed up out of the three others who were also scheduled there, one left randomly and then it fell apart.
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Aug 6, 2023 04:29
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Shadragul posted:My friend, have you tried Spirit Island? Very good, and as complex as you want it to be. my dude I was there for spirit island's unveiling at gencon 2017 and I've played it dozens of times.
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Aug 6, 2023 04:33
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I played some Imperium Maledictum and it was pretty good. It's like someone got 5e in my Dark Heresy and it tastes great
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Aug 6, 2023 06:06
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It is 1:13 pm on Sunday. The con has less than 3 hours left. And yet Will Call has a line several hallways long like it’s Thursday morning, and Customer Service has a line too, because people still want to buy badges. This con has been abnormal as gently caress.
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Aug 6, 2023 18:16
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Those people aren’t in Will Call, they are in Purgatory
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Aug 6, 2023 18:56
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If you spend more than an hour or two in lines during Gencon, I feel like you have failed on some fundamental level
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Aug 6, 2023 18:59
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Fellis posted:Those people aren’t in Will Call, they are in Purgatory Also, I’d love to know the attendance numbers for this year. The Exhibit Hall was as crowded as some Saturdays I’ve seen.
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Aug 6, 2023 19:26
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Selling out of 4-Days and Saturday badges doesn't happen every year, right? I mean, the last couple years have been weird and it obviously did for the 50th Anniversary but I can't recall other years before that.
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Aug 6, 2023 19:58
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Scalpers/Grandma Mules just trying to get a badge so they can get into the Hall and try and flip some Lorcana?
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Aug 6, 2023 20:29
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BlackIronHeart posted:Selling out of 4-Days and Saturday badges doesn't happen every year, right? I mean, the last couple years have been weird and it obviously did for the 50th Anniversary but I can't recall other years before that. Also yeah there were still people in line at 2. I just...I admire the commitment at least
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Aug 6, 2023 20:51
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Klungar posted:Scalpers/Grandma Mules just trying to get a badge so they can get into the Hall and try and flip some Lorcana? They were all sold out when I walked by before noon. Thanks to the guy that randomly gave me a promo while walking by Saturday though, bid is already up to $75 with 3 days left on the auction lol
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Aug 6, 2023 21:17
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My Sunday was a complete bust, I tried to get into four events on generics and every one of them had cancelled. Apparently they don't let the exhibitor update the catalog with little details like "this event is no longer real"?
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Aug 6, 2023 22:09
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Klungar posted:Scalpers/Grandma Mules just trying to get a badge so they can get into the Hall and try and flip some Lorcana?
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Aug 7, 2023 02:06
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Ceebees posted:My Sunday was a complete bust, I tried to get into four events on generics and every one of them had cancelled. Apparently they don't let the exhibitor update the catalog with little details like "this event is no longer real"?
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Aug 7, 2023 02:08
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Well I ran Sentinels, Dallas, and Bullwinkle & Rocky Party RPG. Honestly Dallas and Bullwinkle were so good I'm thinking about having a team running a whole room of them next year instead of just one table.
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Aug 7, 2023 02:18
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Dr. Quarex posted:That is a bummer. Sounds like a lot of cancellations, too, honestly. Were they all Magpie Games perchance? One was Magpie, and I heard they had similar issues last year. But the others were FUG and two 'show your game' Indies in the stadium.
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Aug 7, 2023 02:41
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Ceebees posted:My Sunday was a complete bust, I tried to get into four events on generics and every one of them had cancelled. Apparently they don't let the exhibitor update the catalog with little details like "this event is no longer real"? Once you're in the con, they won't let you cancel.
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Aug 7, 2023 05:09
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Experience notes - I own panda onesies pictures, probably the hottest 2023 exclusive, PM for pricing and details. Since its been quite awhile since I went to Gen Con, the attendance felt very samey as it was say in 2018. Consistently busy. Lorcana was what I expected. Going to laugh at the scalpers when it does hit full FLGS released and realize that it has a MSRP unlike Magic/Pokemon so stores are required to NOT scalp. I expect it to be widely available. The new auction space was nice but man, was it just dimly lit or perhaps my old eyes deceive me, was hard to see stuff at times. I like where they put the food trucks now but everyone who gets food goes into that hallway that connects the center to the colts place and sits there and eats....and sweats. The Hall of Stench is then born and there isn't enough Degree to slay the dragon that lives there. Gen Con gear store was constantly out of stock on sizes and shirts and were sold out a good portion of the time. Definitely they were cautious in their ordering. FFG, man, used to ALWAYS be the place to go and now just a former shell and sad place. Star Wars Unlimited looked ok, still not a big fan of the art. I ultimately free rolled Gen Con having one a few K at Hoosier Park the day before so it was fun to blow money frivolously. What A+ do it again.
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Aug 7, 2023 14:59
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After action report for Gen Con 2023 This is the first year since 2016 I've attended mostly as a regular attendee. It was nice going back and having the time to do pretty much whatever and see whoever I could. I had a couple of business related meetings but it was mostly game play and socializing and it was nice to get back to that, even if it only lasts for this year. Overall impressions of the con: crowded. It felt better after Thursday, but I think that was just the shock of how many bodies were there got normalized for me. Don't get me wrong, Gen Con is always crowded, even last year, though a lighter year, was a ton of people. I don't know if this year actually was busier than 2017 or 2019 but it felt like it was. This year also felt a little bit like going back to 1994. Seeing the people lining up and going crazy for Lorcana reminded me of the big CCG boom at the con that year. There were also other CCGs people were hot for, though they may not have been at the show. Namely the new Star Wars CCG that was being demoed, and then though not nearly as popular there is one company trying to relaunch the Highlander CCG that came out in 1995. It didn't feel the same as 1994 as in there wern't people just lining the walls playing card games, but I got a similar sense of hype and speculation that I remember from then. Wednesday My flight got bumped up earlier so I got into Indy at around 10:30am. Got to the JW Marriott and checked in, no problems. I was worried there would be a line at Will Call to get badges but when I got there around 11:30 I was able to walk right up and just get my packet. Super happy with that. I had some time to kill so I went into the Gen Con Rollacrit Merch store line, which took about an hour, and bought way too much stuff. I was shocked to see when I had got to the front they were already sold out of a lot of 2x and larger shirt sizes even though the store had only been open a couple of hours. I don't know if that was a sign that things were busier, or Rollacrit just didn't plan better (you would think they would know better by now) but it was what it was. After that I went to Good Wood to get lunch. The food was better this year and the beer is fine, but they didn't put any effort in to make Gen Con attendees welcome. Sports on the TVs, no themed menus, nothing really to show that Gen Con was there. The RAM did a much better job, and Good Wood's patronage seemed to reflect that as they seemed to always have seating for the con. After lunch I went to Shots Wednesday and had fun there for sure, was great to be back after being away for a few years. Got back to the hotel a bit after 10 and pretty much went straight to bed. Thursday I wanted to start Gen Con off the classical way this year, and that meant participating in the opening game of Dawn Patrol. If you don't know your Gen Con history, Dawn Patrol was the first game ever played at a Gen Con, its been played at Gen Con ever since, and I am pretty sure there has been a Dawn Patrol game in the first slot of the con every year to open up the convention gaming scene. The game is about WWI dog fighting, and I was on the side of the Belgians. It was my first time playing and I did well, no one shot at me once and I shot up 2 planes. I got one opponents engine smoking but I didn't shoot anyone down. Game ended and I had 39 points. Seemed like a good score for not having shot anyone down? After that it was time for the exhibit hall. I started leaving the Stadium where Dawn Patrol was and immediately was awash with people. I couldn't believe how busy the tunnel was, it was difficult to walk through. This was at noon on a Thursday, which made no sense to me. They moved the block party this year down by the stadium so that might have contributed a bit to how busy it was but this was way more people than I was expecting. I got to the exhibit hall and it was pretty much just gridlocked in the south east corner I entered from. It was quite difficult to move through the crowd, but I managed. There were a few games I wanted to pick up, but it turned out most of them ended up not making to the show despite being listed as available on the BGG Gen Con list. I did pick up some D&D licensed fabric, a couple of bat stuffies for the girls, and a game called Holotype from a first time publisher that took a look at dinosaur paleontology from the academic perspective. I also got my first look at the Lorcana line, which was madness. According to a post on reddit people started lining up as early as 3pm on Wednesday, and then at like 9am on Thursday some one from Gen Con came by and said there was no line and just caused chaos to erupt. The line was big but pretty manageable most of the con but it looked kind of insane when you first saw it on Thursday. I made it through the hall in about 3 hours, and then went back to the room to unload and get something to eat before my evening game. For Thursday night, I played in a Highlander scenario for the new D20 Modern system that just came out. I was a little disappointed with it. It was basically just 5e with some reskinning, which is fine, but at least as we were led through it some things didn’t make sense to me. Like we started off the game in something like 316BC, yet we had the exact same stats as our characters did in the modern day. I don’t understand how a game that has you jumping through different points in history can have you use the same stat blocks and skills for that character no matter when they are in time. There was a dueling mechanic which was kind of interesting but I’m not sold on it, and in the end one of our party lost their head and then the rest of us took our opponents heads. I had fun, but I don’t know if what they created for Highlander really works that well. I have the book for it coming in the mail shortly so we’ll see if its a problem for the whole system or just how that one game I played was set up. Friday I got to sleep in till 8am this day, so hooray for that. Today was a card game day for me, I started off with a 10am Lorcana demo. I lucked into a demo ticket so since it was the hottest game of the con I figured I’d give it a try. Game was ok, only took about 30 minutes and it really felt like a very stripped down version of Magic. I think if the girls liked it when they are old enough, assuming its still around, I would play it with them but I have no interest in it otherwise. After this I went down to Highlander release tournament for the 4th edition of the CCG that was launched in 1995. I had a really bad draw in my first game and my opponent seemed to have attacks for everywhere I didn’t have blocks. Was a short game with me losing. I won the second game pretty easily, and the third game came down to us both at 0 0 for our ability but because the way the time rules for the tournament worked I ended up losing. I was a little annoyed at that since I pretty much lost the game because I was the player that started the game despite the fact in the end I was getting the upper hand on my opponent. Oh well, it was a double elimination tournament so I was out. Afterwards I had a demo session for the new Star Wars: Unlimited CCG that also seemed like a stripped down magic and very similar to Lorcana, though perhaps a tad more complicated. I went back to the dealer hall for a couple hours, picked up a couple things I didn’t notice my first time through, and then had dinner with my friends Kate and Kevin. After that I went to the auction for the collector’s session. I always love spending time in the auction, and the collectors section especially so. I bid on quite a few things but only won 1. The prices this year were all high. There were a couple of things that went for what I would have expected them to, but several went for $10s if not $100 or so more than I would have expected them for. The item I most wanted I lost out on big. It was a program from the 1991-1992 Siege of Minas Tirith game from Gen Con. This was a very large event that happened at Gen Con where dozens of attendees played with 10s of thousands of miniatures over the entire convention. I figured this program might go for $100 or so, but a friend of Randy Porter’s ended up winning it for $1000. Would love to see the contents of that program some day, was prepared to over pay, scan it, and then sell it again if I paid too much but I wasn’t willing to go up to $1000 for it. The biggest item of the night was the TSR financial report from the early 1980s, that went for $7500. Auction ended around midnight, so I went and hung out with some people for a bit and then went to bed. Saturday I had another 10am game this day, this time it was for the Arda format for the old Middle Earth CCG ICE put out back in 1995. The Arda format is basically a cube format so you can play the game with 1 giant deck and a bunch of people. There were 6 people in my “pod” and you were supposed to come to the event with some experience with the game but one person was completely new. I am glad to have new players at games but this one was listed as experience needed, and having a newbie there completely bogged down the game. Many of us found ourselves just sitting there for 15-20 minutes while the new player figured out how to play and what to do, and this persisted for the entire 4 hours. I had fun, and I don’t get a lot of opportunities to play this game, but I wish we could have moved through faster and actually finished the game. I ended with 22 points and all of my characters making it to the council which was pretty good for the number of rounds we went through. Immediately after that game I had a meeting in the Writer’s Symposium which went well, so I was happy with that. I got lunch after that at a new place in town called the Social Cantina that actually put in an effort to attract Gen Con attendees. It wasn’t my favorite place but the food wasn’t bad. Then at 5pm I went to the Deephaven Megagame. If you haven’t done a Megagame before it is essentially 50 or so people on different teams playing a bunch of little games that are all part of a bigger metagame. There is a lot of social deduction and trading and such during these games. It was only the 2nd Megagame I had ever played in, and the first was at professional military gaming conference. In this megagame, you were all dwarves trying to build build the great dwarven city of Deephaven in a mountain. I was part of the Deep Dwarves, which were newer to the city and kind of looked down upon. My guild was for the Inkbeards, which were essentially the news network for the city. I had a couple of side goals but they really weren’t that interesting, and we were supposed to have clan goals but the way they ran the game we really didn’t get a lot of time to plot with our clans and those goals didn’t get addressed effectively. I had fun overall but I was tired, and though I liked the experience it could have been much better. I feel like those running the game missed some good opportunities. We’ll see if I play another Megagame. I kind of like the format but I am not in love with it. I kind of want to play the Den of Wolves Megagame, which is basically just Battlestar Galactica, so I have a feeling I’ll give that one a try and then judge the genre from there. Sunday Last day of the con was super simple for me. I had one RPG in the One Ring system at 10am. We went on a simple quest for Bilbo Baggins and didn’t have any combat. It was fine, but the GM was a little weird, though he did ok, and the game ended super early. We only played for about 2 hours. I didn’t mind too much though as I had to get to the airport. So I headed there, sat at the Sun King Brewery station for about an hour and half and flew home! No travel problems, even got back to Philadelphia early. Always nice when that happens.
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Aug 7, 2023 15:12
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GC 2024 was pretty fun and I'll echo everyone else; where the gently caress did all these people come from? My game group felt more or less the same way and everyone was mentioning the huge crowds and large lines. Lorcana, of course, was a topic of conversation and there was a lot of comparison between PAX and Gen Con culture. Overall though it felt like a return to the spirit of things pre-pandemic. Highlights: I played a couple fun RPG sessions, did a couple fun demos, spent a lot of time in the vendor hall but not as much money as I budgeted. Nothing really grabbed me this year as a Must Have game or product but I did get some things at the Consignment store! I think next year I'm going to spend a lot more time there and bring some stuff to sell. Lowlights: A friend I've known for a few years came along this year and shared my room at the Crowne Plaza. We've been to a couple PAX cons together in the past and always had a good time so, Gen Con, right? But I hosed up and I don't think I explained the point of Gen Con well enough as they basically just stuck with me the entire weekend unless I was at a ticketed event. I'm pretty introverted by nature and not having a chance to decompress made me pretty quiet and withdrawn by Saturday morning. They're already talking about GC '24 and I think I need to have an uncomfortable conversation with them.
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Aug 7, 2023 16:49
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BlackIronHeart posted:Lowlights: A friend I've known for a few years came along this year and shared my room at the Crowne Plaza. We've been to a couple PAX cons together in the past and always had a good time so, Gen Con, right? But I hosed up and I don't think I explained the point of Gen Con well enough as they basically just stuck with me the entire weekend unless I was at a ticketed event. I'm pretty introverted by nature and not having a chance to decompress made me pretty quiet and withdrawn by Saturday morning. They're already talking about GC '24 and I think I need to have an uncomfortable conversation with them. Sounds like this was their first Gen Con? I mean, did you try to talk to them about it during the con? I know that can be difficult, but that bit of pain might have been better then enduring no introvert time the entire con. I hope you get it figured out for next year, whether you tell them it just isn't going to work for next year or you explain what you need your con experience to be like. Out of curiosity, how are PAX cons different for you with this person if you're fine with their behavior there? Or are you all separated so much due to all the time you have to spend in separate lines or something?
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Aug 7, 2023 16:56
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This year was a total bust for new board game releases it seems. Bought a couple of older games I found in the hall but it's dry out there. I want to try Dorfromantik but I'll wait for the competitive version they just announced.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:00
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nesbit37 posted:Out of curiosity, how are PAX cons different for you with this person if you're fine with their behavior there? Or are you all separated so much due to all the time you have to spend in separate lines or something? My PAX experiences (which have been South and Unplugged, if it matters) have definitely been more 'We all get together and hang out' (whether that's in lines, at panels, free play areas, whatever) as PAX definitely isn't as structured as Gen Con. The big difference is that we had a much, much bigger friend group at PAX so it was way easier to slip away when there were a couple dozen people all hanging out. I couldn't do that with a group of two. I'll get it figured out by next year, I just feel bad I didn't clearly set my boundaries very well.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:04
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Did they catch the card theives yet?
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Aug 7, 2023 17:08
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I don't think so, I've seen a bunch of posts about them today and all of them seemed to point to them still being at large.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:10
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stealing from corporations isn't just right it's your civic duty.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:58
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BlackIronHeart posted:GC 2024 was pretty fun and I'll echo everyone else; where the gently caress did all these people come from? Sounds like they all time traveled from 2023
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Aug 7, 2023 21:03
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It was my first GenCon and a friend who came with me. All the games and events were fun, but a highlight was the Grimoire Girls, a Call of Cthulhu themed Gilmore Girls larp where the Old Ones bayed for the blood of Rory Gilmore.
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Aug 7, 2023 22:11
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