It was a big milestone for me for a couple of reasons: one, Gen Con was my first convention ever. I went shortly after moving in with my current roommates for my first time ever last year in 2009.  It was overwhelming and incredible and amazing to know that I was among my people in such a high concentration.  Two: a very good friend of mine from a long time ago was there; more on that in a minute.  Three: Are you kidding? For a geek who cut her teeth on gaming of various sorts, Gen Con is like Mecca!

More on number two: this friend was the person who, more than anyone else on the planet, can be pinpointed for catapulting me into a life of geekhood.  We’ve referred to him as my Yoda for years because one night, he role played online with a girl who was in it for the story, and then he taught me my first-ever pen and paper RPG.  For reference, it was Vampire: the Masquerade.  From that moment, I was hooked on gaming – and on being a geek – in a way I’d never been excited about anything.  Since then, D20 Call of Cthulhu has helped me get to know some of my favorite undergraduate faculty; Dungeons and Dragons helped me make friends with some of the coolest people I’ve ever met, and with whom I now live; Mind’s Eye Theatre helped me make friends with another ridiculous number of people I all consider to be great friends – and the effects of my relationship with gaming have cascaded much further than just these apparent friendships.

Needless to say, my “Yoda” can (and often does) take credit for a large part of that. I was excited to finally get the chance to hang out with this guy, and we had a great time actually getting to know each other – at times it was scary how much we had in common.  That’s another thing that happens a lot at Gen Con – people get your jokes, and they don’t roll their eyes when you make them.

So here’s what I did at my Gen Con:

• Gifted a professor from the college at which I did my undergrad with a book of Tolkien sheet music I knew she’d appreciate more than I ever could;
• Met a new old friend and celebrated that very thing upon which our friendship was founded for FOUR DAYS STRAIGHT;
• Took a belly dance class, where I learned an entirely new set of fundamentals from the ones I’d drilled into my head over the spring semester last year;
• Played an incredible game of Vampire: the Masquerade, which featured the absolute best luck with the dice I ever had (a beautiful set of smoky gray Crystal Caste D10s with tiny blue glitter swirled through them);
• Got a million and one compliments on the incredible Tiefling costume I put together for Saturday! Including ones from Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton;
• Got to chitchat with Jeff Lewis, Sandeep Parikh, Robin Thorsen, and Felicia Day; upon meeting Wil Wheaton, lost all cognitive abilities, got a +1 and an autograph on my dice bag (after I’d already had such incredible luck with my dice that weekend!), and then stammered out, “I’m a huge fan!” and ran away embarrassed;
• Attended the Saturday night White Wolf party, where I danced my heart out ’til the wee hours of the morning in between bouts of talking about White Wolf’s games, a love that I seemed to share with everyone in the room;
• Saw two of my very favorite people from Indianapolis – whom I get to see normally no more than once a month – EVERY DAY, and got to share in the joy of our mutual love of gaming;
• Spent the ensuing two weeks mooning over the experience, and then realized it’s only been two weeks.

I used Mecca earlier in my description of what it’s like to go to Gen Con, and for me, it’s incredibly apt: Gen Con this year was almost like a spiritual experience.  Even though I got a total of twelve hours of sleep between Thursday and Sunday – and Saturday morning, after the all-night V:tM session that kept us up past dawn, only two hours – I was in a constant state of bliss. There’s something very zen about watching a half-dozen men trekking down the street in broad daylight wearing replicas of Jayne Cobb’s famous hat from Firefly. A man walks down the street wearing a hat like that, people know he’s not afraid of anything.  A group of men walks down the street wearing hats like that, in August, in Indianapolis, you know you’re at Gen Con.

And that’s why I can say with absolute certainty that in the year 2040, the people who were in Indy that weekend for the Con are going to be talking about it in much the same way hippies talk about Woodstock now.  If you don’t get it, don’t worry – you just had to be there.

One, I’m getting my start in educational technology. I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to work with Sarah Robbins, also known as Intellagirl, on a really neat project that I think is going to be an incredible learning opportunity for me. I only wish I could talk about it – I sat through training basically completely riveted by how interesting the subject matter was! I’ve never been excited about a job the way I’m excited about this.

What does that mean for my position at UITS? Simply put, I’ll be scaling back my hours and switching to a more documentation-based focus. Instead of taking phone calls, e-mails, and support chats, I’ll be working with supervisory staff and on occasion the Knowledge Management team to update and create documentation for the IU Knowledge Base, which is an incredible resource if you have technical questions.

Additionally, on deck for this summer, I have a few websites I’ll be working on. One of them will be a professional development style site, portfolio, and CV for my good friend Jeana Jorgensen (she’s a PhD student in Folklore at IU, and she’s one of the smartest people I know). Once that’s all put together to a point where Jeana can manage it herself (I’m all about implementing technology that empowers the user regardless of tech skills!) I’m going to be working with my former teacher Troy Brownfield to bring back his site, Shotgun Reviews.

Once all of that is completed, it will be time to update my own web site again. With all these exciting projects, I’m thinking more and more that I ought to have a portfolio available online to showcase the types of projects I’m working on as I am able to do so.

And finally, at the end of the summer, I’ll be starting classes again. My fall schedule is full – thankfully my work schedule is looking like it’s actually going to allow me to do classes full time again – and I’ll be taking classes focused on organizational informatics, human-computer interaction, and computer-mediated communication (that’s nine credits, for those of you counting).

It’s awesome being a geek!

However, being as I’m not exactly a PHP genius (I rank somewhere around ‘rank novice,’ I’m pretty sure), it can be frustrating sometimes. I just broke comments.php so many times that I wasn’t sure I could ever fix it. But fix it I did – the comment form now displays on only those posts/pages wherein comments are actually allowed. This took far more time than it was probably worth wasting, but given that I actually managed to solve my problem, I’m glad I took the time to do it. Back to actual content, I guess!