Cupiditas Vitae: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, the Totally Awesome, and the Weird

Extracurricular activity was arranged: touring downtown Indianapolis via Pedal-Bar.

There are a few prerequisites, perhaps the most important of which is libations. It is, after all a bar. However, it is not permitted to take glass containers. The brewpub with which the pedal bar is affiliated helpfully sells “bullets” – tall plastic containers that they are only too happy to fill with micro-brew goodness for you.

That detail taken care of, the other thing needed is a playlist of cool tunes to crank out of the bar’s loudspeakers. Fundamentally, the whole exercise revolves around the joy of showing off and convincing everyone you pass by that you are having the time of your life, as you pedal a ginormous trolley down the street. The experience is actually pretty fun, so there’s not much embellishment required.

Personally, I was pretty much drenched in sweat halfway through our two-hour tour. It was something of a challenge to pedal hard enough to make the next light, while chugging a beer out of a bullet, while hoarsely singing along with an 80’s or 90’s party anthem, while trying not to wheeze. It was, to be clear, genuinely enjoyable. Also, there was a fair amount of cheering from spectators we passed. Some of them may be convinced, as we once were, to try this sometime. And so the great Wheel Of Life keeps turning.

***

I originally met the other Zulus when I was a late-stage teenager and they were Jr. High students, when a friend of mine and I ran a tournament at a local game convention in Colorado, where we all lived at the time. The game was B-17, which is a solo game in which you try to successfully pilot a B-17 bomber on a WWII bomber mission and return successfully. We set up an event in which multiple players flew the same mission at the same time, as if the whole group were an allied formation. We ran that tournament at local conventions for a number of years, and made some friendships that endure to this day.

So I was pretty jazzed when a couple of the gang said they wanted to run a group B-17 mission. The game was set up in our Private Gaming Paradise. A raft of storied names took their place on the flight line as the bombers queued for takeoff: the Blind Slug, Zulu Dawn, Loads O’ Pun, and the Endorphin Mama Jones were joined by thirteen others. We all thundered into the sky to rain havoc upon the foe. About half the bomber group made it back. As for myself, my plane caught a burst of FLAK and exploded shortly after I unloaded my bombs over the target.

Good times…

***

Sunday at Con is always tinged with a sort of optimistic melancholy. Nobody wants to talk about it, but everyone feels the shadow of the conclusion of the convention approaching. Later in the evening, we will all congregate in one or two hotel rooms to fire up some last game sessions and generally hang out and relax together. During the day, there are some who still have some events scheduled. For most, however, this is also the day to crawl the dealer's area.

It’s hard to describe how huge the dealer area is at Gen Con. Suffice it to say that to properly crawl the dealer area takes roughly three hours – and that’s if you’ve already taken care of all the major purchases you had already planned on, and aren’t taking time out for demos. In the dealer area there are wonders and delights to be found, beside items of bewilderingly head-scratching improbability, and other things that are just plain wrong. Here is a survey of some of the things that this year’s crawl unearthed today.