Okay, so before we get started this time, everyone who likes my photosets owes a debt of gratitude this time to my brother-in-law, Mike. I stop at my sister's house on the way to Ohio and on the way back from Ohio, and on Sunday night I wanted to show them a few of the more memorable pictures. However, I found that everything before late in the Trivia Competition on Saturday evening was missing, including my entire visit to Penn State on Thursday afternoon. I barely had time to think "Worst Photoset Ever" before Mike said he could probably solve the problem. He called a friend of his to ask where to download a restore program for the card, and he just happened to have a cardreader in his pocket (really), and so he downloaded the program to his laptop, put my memory card in the cardreader, ran the program, and a few hours later, voila (literally, "What, you don't carry a cardreader in your pocket?"), most of the photos were back. About half the Penn State pictures are gone, so you are spared most of them, but without him, I would have had very few photos to work with, and the photoset would have sucked, and you'd all deride and heckle me and I'd get miserable and depressed and stop going to work and end up getting fired, and with no income I'd have ended up destitute and friendless and alone, living in an old refrigerator carton behind Wal-Mart, licking discarded candy wrappers and old pizza boxes for nourishment. Thanks to Mike, that didn't happen. So if you want to email Mike to thank him for saving the pictures and sparing me a rather hideous fate, you can't, because he asked I not post his email address. However, you can email me and I'll forward your words along, kind or otherwise.
That said, a few Penn State moments before I move on to the KoLumbus meet, which I know you all wish I would just get to already instead of rambling along with huge blocks of text about places you don't care about. But it's my photoset, so tough.
Ah, scenic Penn State. Here's the view toward the new Creamery. The old Creamery, behind me as I took this picture, is currently cordoned off with chain link fence and blue tarps and is not nearly so photogenic. When they were raising funds for this, I let my Uncle Mike (not be confused with my brother-in-law Mike) know that for a donation of one million dollars, they would name the new creamery after him. He promised to check his couch cushions, but it's not named after him, so I guess he came up a little short.
While at Penn State, I visited my friend John, who I graduated high school with. When he saw this sign at the Creamery, he said to me he wanted a cone with extra allergens. The staff did not accomodate him.
I don't know what this thing is or what the hell it's supposed to do, but every time I look at it I think "snorkel." I don't know why.
Best defacing of a sign ever. It's not just any pedestrian crosswalk, it's a hula-hooping pedestrian crosswalk. A subtle but important distinction.
Penn State has brass pigs. I don't know why.
This is Lester The Lizard. Some of you may have noticed that all my KoL familiars are named Lester. They are named after Lester The Lizard. It's hard to explain why, so I'm not going to try, but there it is. Lester was actually the title character of a story that John wrote. Lester was a sentient lizard from future New Jersey who came back in time to tell Willard, a florist from Philadelphia, that he was the Destined Champion Of Mankind. (The book's cover blurb would have been "Yesterday he was just a poor boy; today he is a hero." John had to explain the joke to me.) Lester came back to enlist Willard's help to stop their arch-nemesis, the Martians (all of whom are named Fred), from destroying history by altering the past by changing events, introducing technologies, etc. One part I was against but which worked out brilliantly was a send-up of The Scarlet Letter in which Willard and Lester ask Hester Prynne (not KoL's Hester Prynne), "So, does that A stand for Adultery?" and she tells them, "No, automobile recklessness. Would you like to watch some satellite tv while I microwave some popcor--oh, hold on, there's a fax coming in." Probably my favorite bit was when they were caught in a Soviet nuclear missile silo during the Cold War, and Lester was trying to talk them out of it, and John provided the conversation in Russian and English. For example, in the interrogation scene, the Russian phrase "Je porte un grand chapeau" was translated as "We're tourists!"
Why do people do this to cars? It's hysterical, but for all the wrong reasons. And it says Kriner's Racing Engines. I fear many people don't realize this, but the spoiler has nothing to do with your engine. If they were really serious about looking cool, they'd make sure the spoiler weighed about 8000 pounds so the car would be in permanent wheelie mode and give off an endless shower of sparks.
A sunset pic. I found that when you're driving toward the sunset, it lasts for a long, long time, which sucks when the sun is blinding.
Me in my sister's living room. The lights behind me are very bright, as you may be able to tell. "How bright are they?" you ask? They were so bright that as I was walking up to the house, I actually thought to myself, "Holy crap, god is in their living room!" However, as it turns out, god was not in their living room. Maybe that's why I look so put out. (God was hiding in the computer room, but I didn't realize this until later.)
I wonder if this guy is going to get matching SWEEP 07 plates for his other car.
There was a bomb scare at a nuclear power plant in Phoenix. The good part was they couldn't blame us, because we were all in Columbus.
Okay, I have to ask, what's the deal with hotel carpeting? Bright primaries are for superheroes, not hotels. People told me "It hides stains better," but there's gotta be a way to hide stains without having carpeting this garish. Seriously, is this look really necessary?
Roux The Day and Wombatilim discuss bacon salt, the official food-evocative substance of the KoLumbus 3 meet.
This blurry photo shows someone, sorry but I don't know who, attempting to snort bacon salt. He succeeded. He regretted it. (UPDATE: Someone has informed me that this is dier_cire. So much for him pretending that it's someone else who just looks like him.)
Worrying I may be low on ideas for captions, I decided to take pictures of goofy and/or geeky shirts. This one is definitely geeky.
Rungalo's shirt, on the other hand, is just goofy, but I like it. I think it sums up what we all feel about Wyoming.
Some of the losers who couldn't make it. Also Dazz, who is not a loser, and I'm saying that because I really mean it, not because he could kill me half a dozen times before I could even blink.
These people got stuck next to KoL on Friday night. We think they were there just to keep an eye on the beauty pageant for the nine-year-olds. More on this later.
The ol' standby of taking a picture of someone taking a picture. In this case, the picture I took of someone taking pictures of someone else is of Doc Trauma, who is actually a photographer, unlike me. That's why he just posts his photos online, while I have to prop mine up with dialogue.
The outside of the store I dubbed Kroger Bahgdad. Notice that the brick wall on the left is not complete, and the store name is printed black on a tarp dangling from the side of the building.
Inside, the decor consisted of festive tarpage.
They did, however, have this rebate offer for roasted chicken, backed by ads for beer. I assume how it works is you mail in the rebate, and the guys at the other end, who are drunk, mail you back your roasted chicken.
I have no comment about where spocket's hand wandered while TechSmurf was busy looking at me.
Sweet Sarnia and Pesh sing karaoke while the guy running the karaoke looks determinedly noncomittal.
Hester Prynne at her dignified best, with Ceiling Mariachi. I don't understand the concept of Ceiling Mariachi at all, but I find it hysterical anyway. I don't know why.
Doc Trauma and Hester Prynne at their cheerful best.
Drunken Irishman with a suggestion for the rest of us.
Somebody editorialized on the karaoke song list.
Mr. Skullhead, Nytmare, and Thing from The Addams Family.
Princess Sunshine brought a huge freakin' fish. I don't know why.
Mr. Skullhead sings, unaware that behind him Sweet Sarnia is being possessed by demons.
Let's skip forward to the next day at the Mongolian BBQ. I gotta tell you, I couldn't do this job. It's not the job itself as much as spending all day listening to the clanging of the metal off the grill. Gotta mix everything up. CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG! Gotta chop the vegetables a little smaller. CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG! Okay, I'm done, but the person next to me--CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG! I'd go insane in no time flat. (Please spare me your sarcastic comments about me implying I'm not already insane.)
Apparently bacon salt also goes good on shirts. Wombatilim thankfully gave me a ride down to the Easton Mall on Saturday, because I wasn't up to driving at that point, and the next day when I headed back down there, I knew how to get there thanks to being a passenger on the drive the day before. Nice how these things work out. I never did try the bacon salt, though.
Before this meet, I'd never seen a building with metal seafood mounted on an outside wall. Easton is teh cultural center.
Lilac and Dance Dance Revolution go together like, um, bacon and salt, I guess.
Wombatilim and I saw this on our way back to the car to head back to the hotel. We both didn't see it on the way in, so obviously they installed this while we were in the mall. It's really the only explanation that makes sense.
The only thing cooler than a double barrel generic Nerf shotgun is a sawed off double barrel generic Nerf shotgun.
Blokus rocks. This is the second game I ever played, which I lost by one square. The first game I played I won, and I got all my pieces out. I knew then and there that it was all downhill from that point on. You just can't improve on that. Sure enough, I lost the second game I played, plus I took some verbal abuse from Roux The Day for blocking her out and causing her to not do so well. What can I say? I'm a dick like that.
Some people take their inability to stop a friend from smoking very personally. Way to go, Merle.
Trivia Time! What is the name of Greenpeace's boat? We didn't know the correct answer, so we went with The Toxic Avenger. Hey, it was worth a shot.
What is truly terrible about this photo is that it is quite honestly the best picture I managed to get of jezerfly at any point during the entire weekend.
Hester dressed up in bright superhero primaries, brought over a giant purple hat, and posed for a photo with me. I don't know why.
This is the theme of the current RPG campaign I'm in.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt advertises a tv show. The Mongolian BBQ overshirt advertises a restaurant. The Little Miss Sunshine pants advertise a movie. Princess Sunshine has sold out.
More shirts. The guy on the left wasn't walking around with his head covered, but he wanted to put that on before I took the picture. Whatever works, I guess. Considering what the shirts are, you'd think other guy would have his head covered.
Another shirt.
Princess Sunshine asked this person why she was laying (lying?) on the floor. I said, "Because the Law Of Gravity prevents her from lying on the ceiling." She just gave me that Look that people always give me at one time or another. (UPDATE: I have been informed that this is Sandry. So, this is Sandry, and she still can't lie down on the ceiling. Or lay down on the ceiling, either.)
Mr. Skullhead leads a KoL singalong.
Okay, it's time for the rant. There was a beauty pageant for kids in the hotel while we were there. Early Friday night, when we first saw them, Doc Trauma commented, "For once we're not the creepiest or worst-dressed people in the hotel." I thought that was pretty accurate, and pretty funny, too. As the weekend went along, though, my sense of the whole pageant crowd got darker and darker.
I heard one kid barely half my height talking in a practiced prissy self-important voice, going on about her two-piece bathing suit and practicing a catwalk strut. Princess Sunshine saw one girl stuffing cushions down the front of her shirt and the back of her pants to create the sort of supermodel bimbo curves that every nine-year-old should have. Some KoLers got yelled at by a woman who said that if her kid didn't win the pageant because of all the noise that other people in the hotel were making, she was going to sue.
It's hard to blame the kids on this one. Yeah, they're fucked up, but it's not their fault, it's their parents' fault. I ended up in the hall behind one of the contestants. She, like many of the kids, had hair that was very carefully styled into a look that was very popular back when her parents were kids. She was wearing this huge green dress with a hoop skirt or some damn thing, I dunno, but this nine-year-old was blocking the hall all by herself, and she was getting a little worked up because she couldn't walk in the damn thing. The skirt kept catching on the floor and tripping her up. In front of her, her mother and another woman walked along, engrossed in their conversation, oblivious to the world around them. The girl in the green dress called out more than once, "Slow down!" because she couldn't keep up. The adults did not slow down. They did not even look back to make sure the kid was still there. The kid was there to be entered in a pageant, not to be looked after between events.
The photo above is a schedule for the pageant posted on a door. (I notice now that the early kids only get 15 minutes each, then two of them get twenty, and the last two get twenty-five. This takes over two hours, and this is for just eight people. My high school graduation didn't go on that long.) On Saturday night some of the KoL crowd were taking pictures of this, and an older woman saw them, and I heard her say, "You're taking pictures of our kids' names? That's a little creepy, isn't it?"
Think about that comment for a moment. Here's a woman who has decided that her kid is going to participate in a pageant. The kids are nine but firmly believe that they have to look at least twice that. The parents deck them out in dated hairstyles and gaudy dresses and enough make-up to make Tammy Faye Bakker weep, and then they put them on display in front of a crowd of strangers to be judged by adults on their appearance and conformance to a very rigid set of acceptable demeanors and behaviors, where it doesn't matter who the kid is or what they're like or what they want because the entire event is structured to prevent the kids from showing any sense of identity. The parents are so obsessive about living vicariously through their kids that they put their kids through all of this shit and threaten to sue over people talking too loud in the halls, but can't be bothered to acknowledge their own kid's increasingly panicky pleas to slow down as they slowly leave their kid behind alone in a crowded hotel. And then, when this process of putting their kids on display to be seen and noticed and acknowledged and rewarded results in people taking photos not of the kids but of a list of just the first names of the kids who made it to the crowning ceremony, that's when this woman thinks the siutation becomes creepy?! (So creepy, in fact, that the next day the list was still there, because hey, just because you find it creepy that strangers are finding out your kids' names is no reason to do anything to prevent it.) Though I know it was better that I resisted the urge, it did occur to me to ask this woman, "So, who's your hero, the Ramseys or Paris Hilton?"
I know there's realistically no chance that anyone involved with the pageant, or that woman in particular, will ever see this, but nonetheless, to those people, for all the damage you do to the people you're supposed to be caring for, for all the damage you do in the name of feeding your own egos, I just want to say, from the bottom of my heart, honestly, sincerely, and truly, I hope you all burn in hell.
Moving along...
Cinnabons! I don't think anyone tried them with bacon salt, though.
TechSmurf and I, neither of us looking our best. Also I misplaced my left arm.
Three way swordfight!
Here's the Little Miss Sunshine shirt that that pairs up with Princess Sunshine's pants.
Roux The Day, pictured here wearing hotel carpeting, has her coffee cup ready to go after a long meet weekend.
Doesn't this look like something out of a bad movie, or at least a poster for one?
If only all games had rules this sensible.
The construction of Fort KoL, or possibly a scene from The Cask of Amontillado.
A rare action scene at a KoL meet, I managed to get this picture of the plate in midair through the time-honored expedient of dumb luck.
What little we can see here of Dave (I'm assuming Dave, based on the sign) is okay with the current set-up.
I peeked at the end of the book. Tragically, the treasure is not the Genesis Device.
After he dies of chocolate poisoning, what's left of this slab will serve as his headstone.
I love things like this. Shouldn't the handicapped-accessible ramp line up with the crosswalk?
Has anyone else noticed that on I-70, you enter and leave Licking County like three times?
At the hotel I was saying goodbye to Doc Trauma, and he said it wasn't necessary because he and Sweet Sarnia would be joining us at the restaurant. I said okay and retracted the goodbye, and that was the last time we saw each other at the meet. (So, Doc, Sarnia, "Goodbye!") The wait at the restaurant was pretty long, so brunch ended up pushing into dinner. Brinner, I guess, is what we had. This is the gang who stuck around for that, less Big Dick, who took the picture. The TARDIS is visible on the right. My favorite detail is that Lilac wore that helmet through the entire meal. Got almost as many stares as Princess Sunshine's iron did. I don't know why.