I guess this is turning into a con report. That’s cool.

Yesterday, there was nothing I was interested in attending in the afternoon, so I didn’t end up at the convention until 4:30 pm or so. That’s when J&J were heading over, so I just hitched a ride with them.

At loose ends, I wandered around a bit until I saw a poster for a “Waffle Donut Party”.

Well, this was something I just had to investigate. I was aflame with curiosity. Are they waffles that taste like donuts? Donuts made on a waffle iron? Donuts that were publically indecisive on important political issues?

Alas, I will never know, because even though the partty started qat 4 pm, it was over by the time I got there at 4:40 PM. The door to the official hotel room of the party was closed and all was quiet on the inside.

And I was too shy to knock and inquire.

SO I wandered back to the video game room, which was on the same floor. They had all kinds of consoles set up. It was pretty awesome.

Not sure where to start, I decided to leaf through the catalog of Playstation 4 games. There were many intriguing options, but I didn’t want to play something with a plot that I would grow attached to and then have to abandon.

Then I came across the game that called out my name : Street Fighter V.

And yeah, I felt a little lame for having chosen a modernization of a game I already knew from long long ago when I had all this modern stuff to choose from, but what the hell, I’m here to have fun.

So one of the kids behind the counter took my badge and gave me the CD for the game, and pointed me to a PS4 and got the thing and its TV turned on for me, and left me to my own devices.

I hate it when that happens. My devices suck.

But hey, how hard can it be to stick a CD in a thing and play a game?

As it turns out, maddeningly so. Why? Take a look at this :

That is what the PS4 looks like. Now take note of two things :

First, note how amazing 1970’s electronics it looks. We have come full circle. The angularity, the flat black plastic, the forward slope : it is the exact same design asthetic as late 70’s high end electronics.

Heck, it looks like you could open it up and play LPs on it.

But secondly, note how absolutely featureless it is. Only the two controller ports interrupt its dead black shininess.

Note in particular its lack of buttons.

Now imagine poor old me staring at this thing trying to figure out how to get the CD into it. There was no “eject” button. There wasn’t even a “power” button. And there was absolutely nothing to indicate where a CD would even go.

This is what happens when you give the designers too much control. They create things they think are too beautiful to be marred by things like buttons, directions, or any other purely utilitarian concerns that would dare to try to interrupt its aesthetic perfection.

I eventually had to swallow my pride and go ask the kids behind the how to turn the frigging thing on. Turns out, there ARE buttons, but they are teeny tiny and crammed into the vertical gap on the left hand side of the goddamned thing.

And the CD goes into an invisible horizontal opening in the horizontal gap.

Ao I got the CD into the thing and started playing SF5. It was pretty good. Then Spuug showed up and watched me play for a bit. Then Jax showed up and suggested we play some Jackbox games.

They are made by the same people who did You Don’t Know Jack back in The Day, and they are fun, silly party games.

There was some technicaly futzing trying to get the damned thing working, then we realized we had to let the PS4 update its software before we could play.

Jax suggested we go get some pizza at Panago’s while it did so. So that’s what we did.

Then we got to playing and had a lot of fun. Other people joined in from time to time, and all in all, it was a very social thing for me to be doing, and I am proud of that.

Then, at 9, it was time for the VancouFur version of the Turkey Readings. In that version, a fur named TonyGreyFox reads aloud from truly terrible books and people pay to make him do it in very silly ways. like “read it in a Scottish accent”, or “slap your thigh every time there’s a quotation mark”, or “end every sentence with the word haggis”.

It is ten tons of fun in a one ton barrel. Hilarious. I laughed so hard it was exercise.

My own contributions included the haggis one, making him replace every comma with the word “boing”, and, in a My Little Pony fanfic of epic awfulness, , replacing the word “pony” with the word “beaver”.

That reached its apex when a character said “Haven’t you ever seen My Little Beaver?”

After that, I attended Whose Lion Is It Anyway, which is a hilarious improv show . There is tons of audience participation, and I tried to volunteer to go up for a game but another guy wanted to do the same thing and I lost a game of rock paper scissors to him.

Otherwise, I could not overcome my timidness, even though I really, really wanted to do so. But it did get my mind to thinking about how good for me joining an improv troupe could be because it would help me learn to trust my instincts and not overthink things so much and that could do wonders for my mental health.

I mean, God knows I’m funny enough.

I just need to get the fuck over myself.

And improv could help.

Anyhow, that was my day yesterday. Back to your regular compulsive self-examination tomorrow, as there is only one panel I will be attending today.

Feels kind of neat to diarize for a change. Most of the time I have no events in my life to detail. But conventions are full of them.

I’ve been doing things! Yay me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.