Plane stuff

The dead license made it through four inspections in Hartford and two in Columbus. (Half TSA, half airline.) Nobody did anything with it other than glance long enough to confirm that its name matched the name printed on my ticket or boarding pass.

Sober and caffeinated, I had a squirming freakout on our first takeoff out of Hartford, but I was alone in the row and nobody had to see it. Singing along (silently) to Imogene Heap on my iPod did help a little. As always happens, maintaining a state of absolute terror takes a lot of work so I got bored of it and chilled out after a while. I was comparatively cool on the DC → Columbus leg, and the stranger next to me offered me an Altoid during descent, so I couldn't have been acting too awful.

I thought at the time that the flights over were kind of harsh in the landing department, but then there was today's flight, which really was bad. Turbulence all the way through, with a bump so awful towards the end from diving through what the pilot called "some weather" (no active precipitation, but the clouds around us were darkening and clearly up to something) that the flight attendant almost lost his footing while walking down the aisle.

It was no surprise since the pilot said it was gonna happen, though, so as horrible as it was I didn't actually fear for my life. When we broke through the clouds I turned to Zarf and croaked "The atmosphere." He said "Yes, next time pick a planet without one." Anyway, kudos to the pilot for making frequent updates over the intercom about what was coming up. Saying nothing and just bombing us into the rattling darkness would have been so much worse. I have been on flights like that, unfortunately.

And all this was on two beers. Maybe I'll try three next time, but then again maybe I'd have been much worse without any. Andy sez that he was surprised I didn't ask for more alcohol in-flight (since, surprisingly for a dinky connection jet, it was offered); I got ice water instead. The thing is that even though my rational thinking takes a back seat during all this I know that we are going to land, and that I'll be all dehydrated from travel-stress when it happens. And thinking ahead like this makes me feel a little better, too.

Origins oddments

Random stuff before I turn in.

• Even though I didn't really do any rabbiting I nonetheless interacted quite a lot with the Looneys themselves (and Josh, their current chief rabbit coordinator dude). They're all really excited about Volity and glad to be a part of our launch efforts.

A nice side effect of this: since they've been so visible at Origins for so many years, lots of vendors are familiar with Looney Labs, and reacted positively to seeing LL titles in Volity's initial stable. Some vendors told us of their intention to go talk to the Looneys about us, to which we say: please do.

• Russell (a former c.r.c.d.) very helpfully took charge of putting Volity flyers into the hands of the Werewolf players on Friday night. This was a tremendous favor.

• I barely played any games at all, Looney or otherwise. We let vendors demo games at us, but insisted that they keep it short, so didn't play many of them out. In the lab, I missed all the Fluxx tournament preliminaries, and joined the Zarcana tourney for the heck of it only to make a really dumb mistake and give up the game early in. It was a weird game, though, with lots of table talk and joking around, nothing at all like the two games from the 2004 tourney (which i won). And it was fun to lose to Andy Looney himself. (Kinda.)

• We're going to meet and discuss what happened and what we should do about it, soon after I wake up tomorrow. I may not have time to do that, start working through the business cards, and attend pre-4th social things all in one day. May have to snip out the latter. We'll see.

• Your Move Games was at the Expo, and they won an Origins award for Battleground, their card-based wargame. daerr and I let a rep show us how the game is played; it looks pretty cool. Gotta talk to Chad about this.

• zyxwvut found a postcard on the ground outside and gave it to me. It advertised an event called "Volatility: a benefit for Madlab". It was like a Bizarro-world version of Volity's presence among the Mad Lab Rabbits. It's in my bag now.

Dur-hur

Another rare example of geek-jokery that actually made me laugh, seen at Origins:

A t-shirt with a pair of large d20s at chest-level, each showing "20", with the caption YES, THEY'RE NATURAL

I think unfortunately that if you can work in naughty bits or excreta I'll always think it's the height of comedy.