My first (actual) GenCon

When I lived in Indiana, I would habitually go up to GenCon on a day pass just to go shopping in the dealers’ room. This year was my first time actually attending in any meaningful sense — mostly as a part of the Writers’ Symposium, but it counts, right?

Naturally, I took my camera with me. Wound up not taking nearly as many costume photos as I thought I might, but I quite liked this Lady Thor, posing in a sunbeam:

(I deliberately experimented with cranking certain settings to make the picture look less than entirely realistic.)

GenCon was a lot of fun. I went on a True Dungeon run at Patrick Rothfuss’ invitation, because of my participation in last year’s Worldbuilders fundraiser; most of us were complete newbies, but one of the players had such an enormous stack of equipment tokens for every class that we geared up and went through on Nightmare mode. We, uh, survived? I did a variety of panels, a one-hour workshop on Writing Fight Scenes (which hopefully taught participants many things, and taught me I should ask for a two-hour timeslot next time), and hung out with several friends from my Indiana days. All in all, I call that a good con.

Good enough, in fact, that I’m tempted to go back in a future year — and possibly to run a LARP when I do . . .

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

The Littlest Black Belt Gets Dressed Up

After my test back in March, Shihan gave me a plain black belt to wear.

My real black belt had to be ordered from Okinawa, you see. Which takes a while — and then I vanished for three months, on account of house-buying and travel and house-moving and the dojo’s annual summer break. But tonight I went back, for the first time since early May, and this was waiting for me:

Mind you, the really real symbol of my achievement won’t come until the dojo party this Christmas. As Shihan has pointed out, anybody can go online and buy a black belt — even one with their name embroidered on it in Japanese. But you can’t buy an enormous diploma signed by a ninth-degree black belt in your style, which is what I’ll get in a few months.

Still and all . . . it’s good to have the belt. 🙂

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.