Ah, alright. I’ve been putting this off for much too long because I’ve been far sicker than usual following this con and it’s also been stupidly, dangerously hot this week. All this stuff below is travels and side quests that happened on my way to Anthrocon. I'm splitting them up because I know this will far exceed the limit for one journal, and so people can skip to the next one if they just want to hear about the convention. This journal may not mean a lot to you if you’re not familiar with the major players involved, but the small elite few who actually enjoy reading my con journals seem to want to get as much as they can get so I’m posting my account of it regardless. Skip to the first break if you want to hear about the con. For those curious, this crowd is a group of webcomic artists that I know. I’ll list the major players all for those curious.

Kathy Garrison Kellogg – Carry On: A fun slice-of-life sort of comic about hyenas.
Scott Kellogg – 21st Century Fox: A speculative fiction romantic comedy adventure… thing.
Mark Stanley – Freefall: A long-running, award-winning hard-sci-fi comic about the adventures of a genetically uplifted wolf on a new colony world. The fact that I wrote fanfiction of it attests to my affinity for this one in particular.
As far as I know Tiger-T has no webcomic but he was Legolas to my Gimli on this adventure so I’m still linking him here.

Yeah, grand start for this adventure. I managed to wake up far earlier than my summer-standard noon-ish on account of actually having something to DO that day. I was glad for the extra time, as some tiny last-minute things ended up taking the whole morning. Neither the Microtel nor Kathy’s residence showed up in my GPS, so I had to spend some time fiddling with it to get me someplace close to the hotel. That way I could regroup there and figure out the rest of my plan of approach. I also needed to print off a new insurance card for my car. I went to USAA, who promptly told me to fuck off because my policy had been cancelled. Were you planning on TELLING me that or was it supposed to be a surprise? It turned out that they just had old credit card information. So I updated and paid it off in full, in exchange for the privilege of still having no proof of insurance for the next aslongasitfuckingtakes. Yay, I’m good at car.

So anyways I got to the arbitrary point on the map I had chosen. I made it there without too much trouble and poked around a bit to find the hotel. All I had to do to get there was take a quick swing through the loading dock out behind a supermarket and wind my way up a narrow, dark road. They chose a poorly-accessible location is what I’m saying. I went into the place to find that their everything was broken and I may as well not have bothered. A recent brownout had broken their cable service, internet, and booking computers. So checking in took roughly a half hour and led me to a room that was already occupied. Realizing that I’d find neither rest nor information at the Microtel, I set out once again for… the intersection of the two roads in that area that my GPS has actually heard of. Yup, once again I SUPER know what I’m doing. Against all odds, I actually found the tiger-striped balloons that marked Kathy’s driveway and I made my way up into the fields to take part in the festivities.

I was quite floored by the spread that greeted me at the top of the hill. Quite a well-provisioned camp had been set up there and much livery was already underway. There was an interesting sampler to be had at the buffet, which is all I really ask of a party, truly. Alligator, bison, lamb, venison, it was quite a spread. It was interesting to spend some time with all of Kathy’s relations there. Introducing yourself with “Hi, I’m from the internet!” is a really fun and only slightly terrifying gambit to run. And of course it’s a treat to get to see other forum folk. Such opportunities have always been rare since I came on the scene. Ya can’t help but wonder what kinds of things would go on if we got all us loonies together in the same place. Mainly it’s little things. The way Angela kept calling Tiger_T “Mr T” was quite endearing, for instance. The marksmen in the crowd dazzled onlookers with some impressive bb gun slinging. Some of these guys are unsettlingly good at hitting moving targets, and many an injured balloon choked and sputtered its deathrattle out across the landscape. As the sunlight dwindled and the thickly-hanging plague of insects shifted from flies to mosquitoes, out came the pyrotechnics. I was glad for the opportunity to watch the display as I was likely to be busy the following week during America’s annual reminding-the-sky-who-runs-shit festival. Scott was feeling a bit off as he sometimes does these days, but he seemed quite energetic and attentive of the ongoing explosions. Quite fortunate, I suppose, given the number of ensuing events wherein one’s personal well-being depended notably on running away from a particular location very quickly. What followed was a very entertaining mystery room sort of challenge where we all tried to clean everything up in the dark. As far as I know it worked out okay. Naturally this frantic shuffle made everything a bit more difficult to find, but as far as I’m aware everything is still somewhere.

The next day was the much-anticipated luau, which opened with a selection of foods that have way too many vowels in them for me to reproduce them adequately. I’m still getting over the hernia I got from trying to call out the town of Aiea all in one go. And there was also Spam. Honestly I thought that Spam being a traditional Hawaiian food was some kind of meme or marketing construct, but it actually makes perfect sense. For many years the meat of the blunt-snouted western spamallamas was the only meat that would reliably survive the long trip across the pacific. Granted it can also survive light artillery bombardment and most natural disasters, but I’m not sure if that’s virtue or criticism really. The day’s entertainment was of course our hula dancers, who put on a stunning show. They bounced around the Pacific ring of fire quite a bit, showcasing styles from many different cultures on all manner of islands. They even dragged us up there with them to learn a few steps. Providence apparently let me evade photography for that particular part, which I suppose is for the best. I’ve never had the best luck in taking command of these weird gangly legs of mine in order to produce something resembling coherent rhythm. One fun part was when he was doing a real aggressive territorial display that made Honey run out and fiercely bark in defense of her own turf. I’m amazed at the fact that looking like a waddling furry Twinkie does nothing to diminish her warrior spirit. The dancer’s ability to intimidate fierce Chihuahuas and noisy guinea hens was quite impressive. The show was fun and only a couple things accidentally caught fire, so it’s aces in my book.

After the show was another large vowel movement as the main course came out, followed by some more hanging out in the shade of the porch. This was my chance to get a little QT with Mark Stanley, whom it was my honor to finally meet on this occasion. Burning up the rest of the day just chatting and hanging out was fine by me under such circumstances. Mark has a great deal of perspective to share. His knowledge I’m sure it would take years to scratch the surface of, but it was that perspective that struck me most readily in the moment. He’s got a way of thinking about things that is quite interesting to behold and rather impossible to describe. I’ve been told, at times, that I’m pretty smart, but ever since graduating high school I’ve been in far too deep over my head to ever feel that way myself. In discussing sundry little things like the implications of the Higgs Boson, what mass actually is and how it’s expressed, I came to realize that holy shit I’m actually contributing meaningfully to this conversation. It came surprisingly naturally to me, so much so that I might even say I could do that kind of thing again sometime. That certainly wasn’t a destination I had in mind when I set forth on this great journey of life, but it’s one I’m proud to have stopped at.

I guess I’ll slip this in here too. This is a link to the panda shirt that I was telling Angela about. It stems from a joke that for all I know Mark made first.

The day wound on and many of the guests operating on stricter timetables had to totter off for the evening. So it fell to Tiger-T and I, the listless squatters who intended to remain, to gather things up and get them in some kind of order for the night ahead. As it had many times during the party that task consisted, for me, largely of keeping tabs on all the things Kathy asked me to hold for her real quick that she never really came back for. And maybe just a little sitting on the floor so that Sparky could tell me about his problems. He’s an ailing old dog, so he had much to unload on me. At least that built some good faith, I suppose. By the end of the weekend Joy had decided, tentatively, that I would be allowed to live. Just about the highest honor she awards to shifty passersby. In any case, the night meant one more dark and spooky trek up through the fields to our camp up on the hill. It took some time to get used to the tremendous amount of disappointment that I was dispensing along the way, given that I brought neither food nor the promise of a release to greater pastures. By which I mean actual, physical other pastures that the sheep expected me to give them access to and not assistance in shuffling off their mortal coil. I suppose I’ve got to be more careful in my use of florid language. When one reaches a certain concentration of floridiitude, meanings start to blend together a bit and misunderstandings become all but inevitable. It’s pretty intense when those misunderstandings can lead to the mass-culling of livestock though, so I’ll be more careful. I do endeavor not to be as enthusiastic with my misunderstandings as the little yearling lambs that come barreling at you with all their might with the expectation of their daily milk ration just by virtue of you being vaguely human-shaped and in their pasture.

The Sunday Spam-n-pancakes breakfast was just the sort of relaxing moment many of us needed after all the partying and work we’d done, both in varying proportions. Good food and good talk was had. The crowd had dwindled with Mark, Angela and most of Kathy’s kin having taken off, but it was still a good group. It opened the floor for a lot of fun shit-talking about the forum members who weren’t present. Don’t let ‘em tell you different, that’s exactly what we do whenever any of you guys aren’t around. Tiger-T debuted some beautifully bound compendiums (compendees? Compendii?) of both the 21st Century Fox and Carry On archives to date. How he got such brilliant print quality is as much a mystery as how he managed to smuggle all those massive tombstones all the way there to present them. Once again everyone else took off in their time and we proceeded to a slightly more enthusiastic teardown, boxing up all the tents and awnings and such and shuttling the tables and chairs back to where they actually lived down the road. With Kathy pretty much running on fume-scented air and the house only trivially resembling a place people might live in, at the time it felt more like damage control than a cleanup, but we made it work. At least until the monsoon came. Tiger-T’s drainage project proved quite handy at managing the runoff, so that’s another hats-off to him.

The next day brought a sojourn into town to return the animal standees that had leant such wonderful atmosphere to the safari day. That ride in an unlicensed junker farm truck went about as well as the hula dancers did, quite diverse, entertaining and only a minimal number of unintended fires. The trip back was the real adventure, given that the wipers were in varying states of disrepair or existence and I was not quite up to the task of both navigating in this unfamiliar area and reminding Tiger-T that stop signs exist. A big part of our perilous sojourn was motivated by a need for some mechanism by which we might contend with all the flies that we’d invited inside with all the activity over the weekend. With this being a farm and all, the number of unintended guests was quite intimidating. We came across a frog in the bathroom and Scott rather effectively captured the mood by saying “Fuck it, he’s hired.”

It was a rather difficult problem to contend with, actually. Since most of them were in the kitchen, the aggressiveness of the agents used had to be carefully tempered. There were plenty of products available to wipe out a broad range of the creepy-crawly spectrum, but there wasn’t much for just flies. I guess the conventional wisdom was that you just swat them with something. What we couldn’t convey to the wielders of that dismissive attitude was the scale of the invasion. We were at pretty much “We have angered Hades and he has dispatched unfathomable pestilence to claim us” sort of fly population, so the idea of smashing them all was ludicrous. Such volume of insects is actually a fair bit LESS disgusting if kept in a solid state. I shudder to think what the cleanup would look like if I were to devote the day to aggressively liquefying them one by one. Eventually some patient searching turned up a sticky thing that looked kind of goofy but ended the day covered in enough flies that newcomers were jostling through the adhered mounds of corpses to get a spot. So I’ll call that a win. We also picked up a patch kit meant for the air mattress which, in turn, was meant for taking a bit of the sting out of camping in a sheep pasture. Apparently it was meant for rubber-only tasks because the adhesive was quite actively repelled by the material that the mattress was made of. Though my fingers were thoroughly coated in allegedly sticky stuff by the end of the endeavor I was no closer to getting the troublesome bag to hold air. Ah well, I can’t win ‘em all.

Another effort that we were stocking up for was our trip to Westpark. It was an objective that we’d decided on to make good use of Tuesday. There was quite an array of things that needed to be taken up there and it would probably be wise to check up on the place with all the flooding that had hit many other parts of the state over the weekend. Since Hades had cursed the kitchen it was probably worth taking a look to see what Zeus had made of Westpark. I’d never seen the fabled Westpark before, so I was up for it. It seemed to be a good use of my time. Tiger-T seemed to be running out of ways to make more work for himself and I seemed to be running out of ways to avoid it. Though part of that was the heat. It was the kind of oppressive sticky heat that doesn’t even let you get through a complete thought much less motivate you to do things. Even just working on this writeup felt like too much work. “Too hot to type” is a very unique climactic arrangement, one I don’t hope to encounter much in the future. We still both managed to hit our core skill sets pretty well during that time. His was in landscaping, cleaning, organizing and such, and mine ran more in the vein of disposing of leftover food from the party. Hey, when in the company of hyenas, do as they do.

The volume of stuff that was meant to make the trip with us was quite impressive, and we discussed the option of taking two vehicles. I really pushed for cramming it all in the Subaru because it really would’ve been such a shame to have someone driving alone all that way. I was really hoping for a chance for us to all be together on a long road trip. I had plenty enough five-ish-hour lonely driving expanses planned for that trip already. Putting Tiger-T on the case proved to be the right choice, as his organization tetrising got all the required belongings and people into the vehicle without bringing harm to any of them. And with that we were on our way. I was really glad that we made it work, because we talked non-stop the whole way there. Chances to get Kathy sitting still had been sparse up until that point, so this was a valuable opportunity. Conversations roamed a great deal, as they’re known to. At the outset a lot of it was me explaining weird fandom stuff. I find myself doing that a lot, actually. I kind of like it, to be honest. I’ve learned a lot about all these crazy folk that I continue to subject myself to for some reason, and I’m happy to share what I’ve learned with any who are interested.

It was a bit nerve-wracking seeing the landscape turn more and more strewn with debris as we traveled. Fortunately our destination seemed quite well-off by comparison. Sure the creeks had swelled and meandered somewhat, but it was hardly the scale of disaster that we saw on the way. I was glad for the chance to explore the property as we checked in on all the animals and such things on our rounds. I’ve spent a lot of time in big cities and trapped in steel cages in the middle of a vast uncaring expanse of nothingness of late, so getting a chance to walk about some big open pastures and woodlands was very refreshing. Westpark seemed a bit lonely for its recent lack of tenants, but it’s certainly a charming place. I could definitely see myself falling in love with a spot like that. Kathy was justifiably quite protective of it too, chastising me once for crushing a tick on the furniture. I really should’ve known better, but that was my third tick of the day so I do hope I can be excused for losing my sense of decorum a bit by then. And of course “Don’t use my dresser to crush a tick!” simply brings to mind one heaving a whole chest of drawers over one’s head and bringing it down on top of the offending little bug. Which as much trouble as those things had been giving me I didn’t feel was all that out of line, really.

The drive back was far quieter, what with all of us being quite worn by then. I tinkered a bit and got my music widget going, subjecting the Subaru’s other occupants to the adventure that is the shuffle button on my playlist. Often the first thing anyone comments on when they get in my car is the strange juxtaposition of speed metal, My Little Pony songs, classical music and video game themes that I tend to have my speakers spewing out. I also put on a podcast that didn’t put everyone to sleep immediately so there’s that. We switched drivers towards the end of the trip, and while it did stop us from crashing due to Kathy falling asleep we fared scarcely better. To hear her tell it, it was my sedate and cowardly driving that allowed Kathy to nod off so easily now that she was safely in the passenger’s seat. The slow speed was mainly a function of West Virginia being composed almost entirely of sheer cliffs as though it were crafted from a handful of Lego bricks discarded haphazardly by the gods, and also a much different gearing system in Kathy’s vehicle. If I had tried to roll down a 9% grade without braking in MY car the number of land-speed records broken in the attempt would only be exceeded by the number of pedestrian femurs broken as I found myself unable to stop after reaching a town. It was a surreal and confusing experience to keep trundling along at roughly the same speed while the car falling off the edge of the world was a significant concern. Hold on, where’s the part where I’m ramming on my brakes until they smoke to keep it under 90? Where is all this momentum even going? Am I driving a giant clockwork flywheel toy right now? Seriously, what the fuck though?

Anyways, my craven and unmotivated driving apparently still made decent time, as it soon got us WELL past the unmarked and not-really-exit-resembling exit that we were meant to use. Naturally I still had no idea what the fuck so I didn’t really get suspicious until the highway ended. So apparently the answer to Kathy’s dismissive “what could go wrong?” was “Well, the road ended, I don’t know where we are and also we’re running out of gas.” So yeah, we got home a little late from that one. Probably didn’t help that I cleaned off the windshield at the gas station. I cost us about 20 minutes or so with my driving, but I was set to cost us an HOUR with my accidentally giving Tiger-T the idea to wash the car. I swear whenever he’s not working he’s thinking of things he could be working on. Lunacy, that boy! Regardless, we all made it home okay and tumbled into our respective sleeping spaces. The next day I was off on my next adventure, which I’ll be chronicling below. Hopefully I won’t be such a bitch about it and it’ll take me less than a month.

The thrilling conclusion is online now. So by all means check that out.