Dorsai Thing 32 Con Report

[giza]

Yeah, I procrastinated on this for quite a while. I actually wrote up most of it in the airport while waiting for my flight back, but never got a chance to finish it off. So anyway, here's my con report from Dorsai Thing 32. It was held in Ann Arbor, MI, March 30th to April 1st.

Thursday

I flew up to Detroit a day early to meet up with girtygrin and some of the local Michigan Furs to hang out, drink and chat. In attendence were Gir, 2_gryphon, nikvulper, Kargo, and Jason. Here, Nik shows us how to drink two beers back to back:



On Friday, we bummed around downtown Ann Arbor. It was quite a lovely town, and the weather was great. In the middle of our trip, I was shown the giant spinning cube:



What is difficult to convey in this picture is that the cube spins freely on the corner that is attached to the ground. Anyone can walk up and give the cube a spin. I decided to do this a few times, and discovered that it's not unlike the big $10,000 wheel that one finds in the final round of the game show The Price is Right. It takes a bit of effort to get it spinning, but once spinning, it will do so for quite a while, and is difficult to stop.

Friday

On Friday, I swung by the hotel where Dorsai Thing was at this year and found the con suite in full swing. This year's theme was "And now for something completely different". The con did not fail to live up to this name.

To start with, Dave and Dianna Stein had brought in a rather pristine gumball machine. Except this machine did not sell gumball, it sold pins with sayings about the Dorsai on them. I got three buttons which read:

• "The Boogyman checks his closet for Dorsai"


• "People can piss names in snow. Dorsai can piss names in concrete."


• "Dorsai Capitulus: Veni; Vidi; Bibo"

Also, I had bacon mints. They were pretty uh, interesting:




Saturday

On Saturday morning, we had a group breakfast together. After the breakfast, a book swap was set up, where people could drop off any old books that they wanted to get rid of, and folks could pick up any books that they might be looking for. Since I haven't read too much in the way of science fiction (I was more of a Dragonlance guy back in high school), I took the chance to add a few books to my collection. Here's what I ended up with:

• The Dragon Lensman (David A. Kyle)


• The Currents of Space (Isaac Asimov)


• Tales from the White Hart (Arthur C. Clarke)


• Tales of Ten Worlds (Arthur C. Clarke)


• Changewar (Fritz Leiber)


• The Bug Wars (Robert Asprin)


• In The Last Analysis (Amanda Cross)

Plushies were contributed, too:



In the afternoon, I attended the panels that were held. The first panel was called "D.O. Panel". D.O. stands for "Duty Officer", which is the person who is in charge of a group of Dorsai during a contract, and writes the final report after the con. They talked about some of the issues that the D.O.s deal with, and for some reason challenges related to staffing Anthrocon were mentioned quite a bit. Some new ways of working the upcoming Anthrocon were discussed, with the hope that this will make the Dorsai more efficient and provide for a better level of service to the convention's membership.

The next "panel" was called "The Spanish Inquisition", which was actually more of a game. It was a bit difficult to play, because the rules weren't actually explained to us. The only guidance we were given is that the judge (Steve Simmons) would tell us when we were doing something that was wrong. Also, he mentioned that he would lie to us at least once. So each of the four teams tried doing different stunts that were related to Monty Python's Flying Circus. At one point, I called Steve's cellphone and yelled, "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!" Unfortunately, that was "wrong". When all teams were done, Steve explained to us that the objective was for each team to write down what the rules were and hand it into him. The winners would be announced at dinner that night.



The final panel of the day was the Contract Negotiation Panel. This panel went into more detail about the process of securing a contract for the D.I to work a convention or event. They covered the different types of compensation for contracts, how the workflow went, and gave examples of past contracts. For some reason, Anthrocon was also mentioned. I have no idea why. ;-)

Dinner was held, and lots of fun was had there, too. Our friend Furp (evil_dwagon) was unable to make it this year, something about working in a country name that ends with "stan". However, he was able to call us thanks to Vonage. So we arranged for him to call my cellphone at the start of dinner, and I then passed the phone to one of the D.I. so they could talk to him. The phone was passed from D.I to D.I., and some 40 minutes later the phone was handed back to me.

Many more Dorsai Trading cards arrived in the mail. There were a few packets to distribute to each table. I recall at least one person asking me to autograph the "Giza" trading card. o.O

The Spanish Inquisition winners were then announced, and the Furry Team (petercat, duncandahusky, takaza, and myself) ended up winning First Place! Steve then explained that there were really no rules, but the test was to see how creative the teams could be in coming up with rules. Our prize was St. Adrian, the Paton Saint of butchers, arms dealers, and prison guards:



After dinner, we returned to the con suite and drank just a wee bit more. Somewhere in there we called triggur to thank him for the lovely bottle of Scotch that he had sent along. We also took a late phonecall from unclekage, who had also been unable to make it out this year.



Sunday

Sunday was a pretty short day for me. I woke up and got breakfast, than packed up to catch my flight out. I said my goodbyes and caught a ride back to the airport courtesy of Gir. I caught my flight home, and that was the end of this year's Dorsai Thing for me.


For those interested, my entire collection of pictures from this year's Thing can be found on Flickr.

Comments

[triggur.livejournal.com]

It makes me very sad that I couldn't be there :(

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

We have one of those darn cubes at the FIU campus! It looks almost identical, with some minor styling differences. Same deal; it's hard to get going but it spins for a while once you do. It doesn't spin as well as it did ten years ago; looks like time has taken its toll on the bearings, but it's kinda neat to see such a similar piece of art located elsewhere....

Yay for spinning cubes!

[whitefeet.livejournal.com]

=( Makes me miss home

Maybe I'll have to swing while I'm home for Memorial Day

[whitefeet.livejournal.com]

swing by rather

[baconcoyote.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I cannot read the whole thing right now.. but I glanced at your bacon mints! Someone actually bought these things for me recently.. Ill get them at AC *laughs*

http://i145.photobucket.com/albums/r205/baconstrip01/DSCN0855.jpg

Your post looks really interesting though, will read soon ^^ I just had to comment on the mints :D

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

AA is indeed a nice place. I've not been there many times - part lack of a car, and part lack of interest in seeing places generally - but from what I have seen, I'd consider living there if I needed to move. The narrow alleyways were neat - reminded me of Bath. :-)

[duncandahusky.livejournal.com]

I have a fond place in my heart for college towns, and AA seemed one of the better ones. Zingerman's Deli lived up to its stellar reputation, and I had a nice time driving around a bit downtown on Saturday morning looking for (good) coffee.

[sidepocket-pro.livejournal.com]

Oh my god you have a spinning cube too? We have one in NYC and I use to sit in it and my hacker friends would spin me around. Its also fun fucking with people about it.

Sounds like a kick ass time.

[xshengx.livejournal.com]

MMmmmm, cheetah-flavored alcoholic drink. Yum XD

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Here's how to show that the cube spins:

http://kinkyturtle.masemware.com/diaries/animania/cm1/photos/spincube1.html

[gen-talon.livejournal.com]

Aww damn. You were right around the corner from me and I missed ya!
Ah well no biggie. Looks like you had fun which was awesome.

[wildw0lf.livejournal.com]

The cube was definately cool :) And nice, you now have your favorite cat on a bottle of wine. I got upset when they pulled Red Wolf beer a number of years ago.