Thom

UBCon just freaked me out! Why were so many people wearing dog collars?

I'm afraid that modern fashion often eludes me.

Why did that one girl get a table in the art room for making video game key chains, but the guy that was hand making leather "wares" was stuck in the vendor room? Is his leather working not on the same level as key chains?

Personal preference. There's a lot of handmade stuff in the dealer's room; it's just a matter of where they decided to rent a table. I believe it's even the same contract to sell handmade stuff in either location, you just pick which one you want. Sometimes space can be a factor – we'll probably have next year's vendor's room at least half full by the end of the summer.

Why did the lady that ran the con remind me of uin13?

They do look a bit alike, and from the one video of uin13 I checked, their voices and speech patterns are similar. Interesting coincidence.

Why was Santa Claus handing out luggage?

If he was handing out packed luggage to people in staff shirts on the last day of the convention, it's because he fit a truly unbelievable amount of games in his car and we were carrying it out. Seriously, Toledo Santa has a metric boatload of games, and I do not say that lightly.

We ran capture-the-flag, attack/defend, VIP, medic, zombies, and (once most of them had gone home) team and individual deathmatch. Everyone had team-colored colored armbands. Come to think of it, since I made 128 armbands the second night, and we ran out and needed at least two dozen more, we must have broken 150 participants that night, which I think makes UBCon just about the largest war in the US.

The second night, we repurposed the entries from the corrugated cardboard castle competition for a couple of the rounds. That was fun until we had to clean up the cardboard. It got pretty chaotic at times – I remember one round in which a player captured the flag by slowly and calmly walking up to it. We had a minute-long conversation right next to the flag, inside that team's fortifications, on whether it was legal; I told him if they hadn't noticed him in that time, he'd earned it. Good times.

It helps more than one might think if your gun isn't modded. I know people who can reliably get another 5–10 feet doing that. Obviously, the technique does not do much for one's accuracy. I wouldn't try it with a modded gun, though.

I live near the University at Buffalo, and we have quite a few Nerf enthusiasts here. If you run something in Rochester, we could probably send a few people over. I wish I'd read this last week; UBCon was last weekend, and as best we can tell, we have the biggest Nerf war around.

If you do hold anything in Rochester, please post it here or PM me and I'll see if I can get some people together. Given some notice, we should be able to scare up a couple dozen Nerfers.

I wonder if you could take the shell and stick in the internals from an air gun? It seems iffy, given the limited width available, but you could perhaps make a respectable "luzer" rifle out of this.