Since I exploded FA's journal uploader last time I'm going to try and divide up the con report more sensibly this time. This is all about my adventures en route. The actual con journal is here for those who want to skip straight to the good stuff.

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Alright, tales from my latest adventure, then. With the first winter snows beginning to grace my homeland the week of my departure, I was worried that the weather would complicate my journey, but mercifully the skies remained clear the whole way out. I got to my first contact in Oxford in a reasonable expanse of time. It was longer than Google Maps predicted, but what trip isn't? Ohio has an interesting way of handling road construction that made things rather difficult. Namely that they declare long sections of roadway as construction zones without any apparent intent to ever work on them. With numerous and lengthy lane closures and speed restrictions, the state made itself quite difficult to traverse. It took me a while to figure out how the locals handled it. That is to say, completely ignoring the signs and proceeding unabated.

My first stop was Miami College in Oxford, Ohio. (Why are all Ohio places named after non-Ohio places?) The visit there was pretty uneventful. My friend is doing postgraduate work there as a teaching assistant. Just like at Blinn in Texas my presence at the college was completely unobtrusive thanks to my impeccable college student disguise. I got to help out in the metal shop there and put together two implacable metal demons disguised as display cases. Think IKEA bookshelves made of metal that have been disassembled and re-assembled dozens of times, without even the benefit of cryptic hieroglyphs in an instruction booklet. Their construction had always baffled all the art students that were using them. Therefore, engineering to the rescue!

It was interesting to see the difference in mentalities between us. The art guys were all worried about the shape and making the finished product look and perhaps even function like a display case. I thought to hell with the finished product if we can't even make the pieces fit together in a structurally sound way, so I focused on that. He kept asking me why I was always taking the fittings apart, and was actually rather impressed by my answer. "I can't make them work if I don't know how they work." A lot of the connectors were spring-loaded little lynchpin devices that slid out to grab a grommet in the other end of the fitting and then would pull back in when you tightened the hex screw into a slot in the side of the pin. The screw in the slot provided the force needed to bring the two fittings together and make a solid connection. Ingenious little things that got the job done eventually, but the mechanical clearance involved in there made a lot of fiddling necessary before the slot would line up with the threaded hole and the pin would turn to the right orientation in the case and so on. All that fiddling became my job, and soon we had most of a display case built.

In the course of this, work was stalled by a fumble worthy of a lighthearted spring-release family comedy film. The hex bolts don't have countersunk heads, and are thus pretty much cylindrical, making them capable of rolling across a flat surface in a straight line. A straight line happened to be the path that led underneath the partially constructed case, across the hall and then under the locked door to an office. Brilliant. My friend scolded me for taking everything apart all the time, also known as the only thing that got us this far, as he walked off to find a kindly old custodian to get us that hex bolt back with his master key. While he was away, I finished assembling the display case, missing parts be damned! What I actually did was scavenge a hex bolt from the other display case, so that I could finish the first and start on the second without encountering the need for the missing bolt for some time. Of course when my friend got back and asked how I'd completed the case without all the parts, I calmly assured him that I am a prolific architectural genius and I can build anything out of anything. I am nothing if not humble in victory.

While we were getting the second case together, a passerby that apparently had above-average spatial perception skills suggested that we assemble the case upside-down and then flip it over when we were done. That was a stupid idea, but not stupid enough that we didn't give it a shot. I was worried that it would invalidate what we learned the first go-around, but since most of my gathered intelligence had to do with irritating little fastener things that are just as obnoxious regardless of their physical orientation, that threat never materialized. In fact the new angle did make the fiddly hex bolts somewhat easier to get to, so in that it was in fact an improvement.

My friend now regrets telling me "You can play anything you want on Netflix." After seven or eight episodes of My Little Pony though, his tune has changed, if only slightly. His final take:

"Okay, fine. It's an entirely tolerable show, and it's definitely not what I thought it was. It's just that the pink one is SO ANNOYING!"

He also commented on Fluttershy's voice being hard to hear (duh), but that just made him enjoy the effects of poison joke on her all the more. He was also a big fan of Pinkie losing her voice it that one. The Ticketmaster was also a treat.

*Everyone else turns down their ticket*
"Yes! I get the ticket! I'm going to the Gala!"
"HAH! Oh my God Rainbow Dash is so awesome!"
"Pay up!"
"What?"
"I bet you'd have a favorite pony by five episodes in, this is number three, Dash-fan!"
"I... but that- it... dammit."

A good time was had by all.

After that I was off to Garret, Indiana to see my best friend from high school. I hadn't seen him since joining the Navy, and he acquired a wife and daughter in the interim, so both of us were expecting the other to have changed dramatically. And we were both kind of wrong. He was much as I remembered him, and he remarked several times about how I hadn't changed a bit, apart from not recognizing me with long hair and a beard. I was astonished to hear that he thought the Navy would completely change me and that he thought I'd become a lifer. Boy, he really was out of the loop. I believe I summarized it handily.

"When we parted ways six years ago, we were unemployed high school graduates living with our parents. You now have a wife, a child, and two jobs. I, on the other hand, am an unemployed high school graduate living with my parents. Why would I have changed?"

He joked about how he was "ahead of me" in life as a result of that.

"Uh, yeah sure. I have all the time in the world to spend here. I'm pretty much gallivanting across the country because I felt like it. I had to make a last-second schedule change to avoid getting sucker-punched by that tornado yesterday, and it was just as simple as turning the steering wheel of my car for me. You, on the other hand, had to get your wife to pawn your daughter off on her family, and take an unpaid leave of absence from your second job, just so that you can spend half your time with me while you're not working at your first job. Yeah, you have all the advantages. By the way thanks for paying your taxes so that I can go to college for free."

That shut him up. I really was disappointed that his schedule was so tight though. We spent pretty much one evening together where we actually had time enough to do something. We went to play laser tag, which was awesome. They had a promotion that day for unlimited games for $10. We played for about five hours until we could barely walk and the place closed. It's an exhilarating and intense game. A half-hour round feels like five minutes.

My hosts in Indiana made the same mistake about turning me loose on Netflix. I really thought that they would be a bit more inclined towards My Little Pony, seeing as their household actually contains someone in its target demographic and there were plenty of vapid, unredeeming cartoons played in her direction while I was there that could have easily been supplanted by the magic of Equestria. His wife was quite resistant though. She said that she didn't like it and thought that the show was "too dark". She never gave me any further reason or answerd me when I asked where she got that idea from. Where could she have? I mean, any violence is Tex Avery style and the word or even concept of death is never mentioned. You know that the ponies are mortal only because the princesses are immortal, and there are references to ponies from history that aren't around anymore. I didn't figure it out until the last day I was there when I saw Equestria Girls in their queue. That's certainly a big reason to not like that movie. It's bad PR. That movie pretty much has demonic possession and baleful mind-control, not to mention shameless, unnecessary romantic subplots, so of course any responsible parent is going to regard it with suspicion.

I never did get along well with his wife, and not solely because of the Pony thing I assure you. She wasn't intolerable, I just think our sensibilities didn't line up very well. A lot of it was just her trying obsessively, unsettlingly hard to be a good host. Asking several times about food, asking if I got my bed set up okay, asking if I wanted her to do my laundry, asking if I'd be okay in the house while they were gone, if I needed help finding anything in town, if I needed anything from the store, are you really sure you're going to be okay here while we're out? Goddamnit woman I am an adult! I have a car and a credit card. I just got out of a place where you eat what is served or you go hungry and now I have complete freedom to obtain and eat anything I want! This isn't the freaking Sims, I won't start to slowly starve to death if you leave me alone for a few hours. In fact, I'd rather you leave me alone for a few hours. It would make me much more comfortable if you would just CHILL OUT for a second. You're making me nervous and I have absolutely no obligations in the world whatsoever.

Fortunately I had the sense not to say any of those things, but it really began to worry me when I heard her say:

"What happened to the glasses? There are supposed to be six adult sized glasses and two child sized ones out on the counter and I don't know where some of them went. I need to get them back in order, help me find them."

Dear God what sort of batshit insane obsessive compulsive bear trap did I just stumble into?

Bah, whatever. I was probably just overreacting to a bad first impression. She did keep house pretty well, and after my assurances that I could handle the task, she let me use her fancy, futuristic washer and dryer. They were pretty impressive machines. Liquid Crystal displays, fancy sensors and automation, the works. The sheets I brought had been used on an air mattress on the floor previously, so I figured I'd wash them. Naturally this led to my decree:

"Yes, machine, well done. Now go forth and do my bedding!"

Maybe I was too hasty when I claimed to be a mature adult. Oh well, no more time to worry about that. Time to head to the cartoon animal convention!

MFF is a good con. Having to drive through any amount of Illinois to get there is clearly a human rights violation. They have coin-only toll stations there. I'm going to repeat that in case all the unfathomable stupidity concentrated into those words caused your brain to insert a gap in its memory transcription in order to protect itself. There were unmanned, not cash only, but COIN ONLY toll stations. There was no warning of this. No sign that said "Hey if you're going this way, you'd best visit a prior era of civilization so that you can pick up some clunky denominated metal shards because that's the only legal tender that's accepted here due to the perpetual state of martial law this area has existed in since World War I, or as they call it 'The War', because it's been a century since any information from the outside has penetrated the miasma of willful ignorance that surrounds the time-displaced hole in the fabric of existence that this region occupies." Come to think of it, it would've been very dangerous to try and read a sign of that length in a moving car. Still, a heads-up would've been nice. Something to the effect of "Persistent hobos ahead. Bring change!" would've gotten the job done.

I had a receipt with me from the Indiana tollway, a fortunate occurrence because I was forced to look at it to confirm my own sanity. Yep, there it is, a charge of $7.00 to my Visa card to pay one translocation-across-a-state's-worth of tolls; proof that such technological wonders are indeed possible in this version of Earth's timeline. Upon entering Illinois' temporal stasis field, my reliance on fantastical future space technology that we recovered from the Prothean ruins on Mars soon became a hindrance, as I found myself without the necessary crude medium of exchange that this stoic, mechanical soldier of a bygone age demanded of me. Yet I refuse to feel stupid as a result of my staunch refusal to carry change on my person, because change sucks and I will not compromise on that position.

When I visited Europe and conducted business there I thought that I had stumbled into an impossibly perfect utopian economy. Now that I've come crashing back to the desolate wastes of American commerce I no longer have any qualms with stabbing the POS with a fee when I use my charge card to buy something that costs $3, because it doesn't cost $3.00 now does it? No, $3.00 is a long-forgotten myth, a fantastical creature that only exists in the mystic paradise across the seas. It costs $3.16 or some bullcrap because of sales tax. If they want me to save them money by paying cash then they'd best make cash less of an anachronistic, crippling inconvenience to use.

I was near to a state of shock when I found that 2,4, and 3 Pounds totaled nine Pounds and ZERO PENCE; as if they'd undergone some revolutionary calculation process that involved the combining of integers. Sales tax in Europe is applied to the sale price, not the purchase total like it is here. This eliminates the large handful of shrapnel and useless slag that must accompany all cash transactions here.

I bend over backwards to avoid change because to hell with change. The way look at a traditional transaction is like this: I walk into a burger joint, hand over $2 and get my hamburger.

-Oh wait, sir. In addition to your purchase, you get this handful of woodscrews!
-But I didn't want any woodscrews. I didn't ask for them and I have no use for them.
-Sorry, sir. Company policy. I have to give you the woodscrews.
-... Fine. Damn this is going to be so inconvenient. They're just going to poke holes in my pocket and stab me when I try to get my keys.
-Oh, don't fret. Those screws are valuable! Get together several thousand of them and the hardware store will buy them for a couple dollars!
-Wait, now I have to count all these up and run an errand to the hardware store before I get anything useful out of these?
-Well if you don't want to count them all yourself the hardware store will do it for a small fee, or you can get their full value in bookscrews that are only usable at Barnes and Noble bookstores.
-So right now I have an inconvenience that will do nothing but grow until I run two errands in order to earn 20% of the cost of a book?
-Exactly!
-Whatever. Jesus, wouldn't melting down all these woodscrews yield more money in scrap redeem?
-Indeed, sir. Don't worry about it, though. Since it costs the government $241 to produce $100 worth of screws, they can't keep up like this forever!
-Well I hope the government runs out of money soon so I don't have to deal with all these screws.
-Too late! *points to a newspaper, headline reads GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN*
-And yet the screws remain.
-Enjoy your hamburger, sir!
-I'm... not hungry anymore.

Regardless, I searched my car for all the change I could come up with and threw it into the toll cyborg's vacuous, unfeeling gullet. Whatever amount it was, it was less than $1.15 because the machine didn't budge. It didn't have anything so sophisticated as a screen to tell me how much I had paid. Its only output were the green light that said "Thank you for your correct/excessive payment. No need to worry about the money you are owed if you couldn't come up with exact change. We'll just skim that off the top for you in an act of larceny so blatant that this toll station is a more obvious mechanical swindler than an Atlantic City gas station slot machine!" and the red light that said "Sorry, you have not yet deposited a sufficient amount of museum-quality defunct ancient currencies. Please search the immediate vicinity/adjacent dimensions for additional funds and try again." So in all likelihood I just paid half of the guy's toll behind me in addition to getting an unpaid toll fee.

Fuck this state. If they're going to ask for coins they had damn well better have a change machine next to the toll machine, because I only carry paper money, if that, just like EVERYONE ELSE FROM THIS CENTURY you backward, swamp-water-swilling luddite pricks! And while you're at it, you'd best put an ATM up next to the change machine for people from an even further future, or a place where a lot of muggings happen, who don't carry any cash at all. And while you're at it, you'd best update the toll stations with the capacity to accept cuneiform tablets and bartering for livestock because those are from roughly the SAME AGE OF COMMERCE AS COINS GODDAMNIT!

My other impressions of Illinois are smudged by the rage aneurisms, but the distinct memories include getting stuck waiting for a train for negative 38 minutes. (I adjusted my watch to Central Time while I was waiting.) I saw the gates raise, only to see the eight cars in front of me cross the tracks before the gates came down for another train in the opposite direction. Later I went to a Panda Express that had two measly entrees in the serving line and no chow mein or any form of chicken, and I went to a Subway that was out of ice tea. As a result of my trip there, I've determined that the only thing that Illinois doesn't suck at is painfully freezing the hairs in my moustache together.