Weekend in review
Monique and I went up to Mansfield MA Friday night so we could attend the NERO 25th anniversary party. While it didn't do much for the much needed productivity of a long weekend, it was a nice change of pace.
We joined Rachel and Ford for breakfast Saturday morning where we did a fair amount of pre-reminiscing party reminiscing and Ford telling us about his latest inventions and us doing a fair amount of brainstorming about additional uses and geeking about potential ways to handle some technical challenges, because Rachel and I are like that and more likely to focus on the technical.
We had the reunion in one of the small conference rooms overlooking the pool because there wasn’t enough responses to warrant anything bigger. It started out with just the four of us again but we were joined in relatively short order by Bill McInnich. Ford did a lot of demoing his prototypes for his idea; a very cool product that is not ready to be shared publicly yet, even having the patent on it already.
Rachel got the great idea to be putting up blow-by-blow descriptions of what we were doing on Facebook (check it out if you want more details of what happened all day). This not only increased the interest but actually netted us a few more attendees. All told I think we had about 14 or 15 people over the course of the day.
There was waaaaaay too much eating of junk food, a lot of reminiscing about the “good old days”, a slide show that brought up tons of memories, some war stories and just a generally congenial fun day.
However, what it showed me is how disconnected I personally am from NERO. I remember most of the stories that were told and the people that were talked about. I don’t remember most of them as fondly as the people there did. There were a lot of, “What’s the coolest (prop, story, NPC, PC, etc) that you remember?” type discussions. They were fun to listen to other peoples’ answers, but almost always my first mental response for my answers was, “Oh wait! That wasn’t NERO, that was (insert other game here)”. I often had to think hard to come up with good answers.
I even found myself in philosophical discussions with Ford about games and just couldn’t get behind views of how certain things are “better”. I think I’m just too far removed from the NERO mindset to enjoy this kind of gathering. I had a decent time, but I won’t be going to the 30th reunion.
There was a most amusing moment for me that had nothing to do with the party except for the fact that it occurred while going to pick up the group’s dinner Chinese food order. I was wearing a T-shirt that says, “Would you rather be Popular or Defy Gravity?”, a tribute to Wicked, the musical. As I walked up to the counter, the young guy behind the counter looks at me and says, “Defy Gravity” and I replied, “Me too!”. It was cool he recognized the reference and said something. I paid the bill and had about 7 or 8 dollars left over so I gave it to him and said, “Here, keep the extra” and he said, “Now you’re popular too”.
We were only about 15 minutes from John and Michelle’s house, so we agreed to stop into their BBQ for about an hour on our way home. There were some wonderful people there, including almost our entire Fifth Gate team. LARP talk was relatively light and there was pretty much no war storying, Monique’s personal turn-off. We ended up talking mostly mundane things that Monique really enjoys, so we ended up staying a lot longer than we intended and a wonderful time was had.
Monday we spent a lot of time putting away stuff from last weekend’s Halloween party and inventorying all the costuming. I have a ton of Halloween costumes and almost all of it had to be sorted back into sets and bagged up. Final count, not counting loose masks, gloves, robes, capes, etc was 64 complete costumes and I think there’s a couple more still in the garage because I didn’t see the body bag and the second skeleton in a cage costume.
So, fun weekend if not terribly productive again and now off to another (blessedly short) work week. Happy Monday everyone (even if it is Tuesday)!
We joined Rachel and Ford for breakfast Saturday morning where we did a fair amount of pre-reminiscing party reminiscing and Ford telling us about his latest inventions and us doing a fair amount of brainstorming about additional uses and geeking about potential ways to handle some technical challenges, because Rachel and I are like that and more likely to focus on the technical.
We had the reunion in one of the small conference rooms overlooking the pool because there wasn’t enough responses to warrant anything bigger. It started out with just the four of us again but we were joined in relatively short order by Bill McInnich. Ford did a lot of demoing his prototypes for his idea; a very cool product that is not ready to be shared publicly yet, even having the patent on it already.
Rachel got the great idea to be putting up blow-by-blow descriptions of what we were doing on Facebook (check it out if you want more details of what happened all day). This not only increased the interest but actually netted us a few more attendees. All told I think we had about 14 or 15 people over the course of the day.
There was waaaaaay too much eating of junk food, a lot of reminiscing about the “good old days”, a slide show that brought up tons of memories, some war stories and just a generally congenial fun day.
However, what it showed me is how disconnected I personally am from NERO. I remember most of the stories that were told and the people that were talked about. I don’t remember most of them as fondly as the people there did. There were a lot of, “What’s the coolest (prop, story, NPC, PC, etc) that you remember?” type discussions. They were fun to listen to other peoples’ answers, but almost always my first mental response for my answers was, “Oh wait! That wasn’t NERO, that was (insert other game here)”. I often had to think hard to come up with good answers.
I even found myself in philosophical discussions with Ford about games and just couldn’t get behind views of how certain things are “better”. I think I’m just too far removed from the NERO mindset to enjoy this kind of gathering. I had a decent time, but I won’t be going to the 30th reunion.
There was a most amusing moment for me that had nothing to do with the party except for the fact that it occurred while going to pick up the group’s dinner Chinese food order. I was wearing a T-shirt that says, “Would you rather be Popular or Defy Gravity?”, a tribute to Wicked, the musical. As I walked up to the counter, the young guy behind the counter looks at me and says, “Defy Gravity” and I replied, “Me too!”. It was cool he recognized the reference and said something. I paid the bill and had about 7 or 8 dollars left over so I gave it to him and said, “Here, keep the extra” and he said, “Now you’re popular too”.
We were only about 15 minutes from John and Michelle’s house, so we agreed to stop into their BBQ for about an hour on our way home. There were some wonderful people there, including almost our entire Fifth Gate team. LARP talk was relatively light and there was pretty much no war storying, Monique’s personal turn-off. We ended up talking mostly mundane things that Monique really enjoys, so we ended up staying a lot longer than we intended and a wonderful time was had.
Monday we spent a lot of time putting away stuff from last weekend’s Halloween party and inventorying all the costuming. I have a ton of Halloween costumes and almost all of it had to be sorted back into sets and bagged up. Final count, not counting loose masks, gloves, robes, capes, etc was 64 complete costumes and I think there’s a couple more still in the garage because I didn’t see the body bag and the second skeleton in a cage costume.
So, fun weekend if not terribly productive again and now off to another (blessedly short) work week. Happy Monday everyone (even if it is Tuesday)!