…with notes on the closely related Dummy and Goofball
DogCon 3: Day 0, Part 1
Once again, the Jones & Cross contingent gathered to go eat breakfast at 9:00. Our restaurant of choice was the newly opened “Waffles From Outer Space”, which has a cool sci-fi theme to it. They also serve great waffles, breakfast meats, eggs, etc, etc. The crowning bit of our breakfast experience was the Bacon & Butter Flavored Syrup. Let me repeat that: BACON & BUTTER FLAVORED SYRUP!!! Thus, we now have the newest and best definition to the word “WIN!”.
After brekky, we all waddled around town seeing all the new sights (skywalks between the convention center, the hotels and selected other buildings) and letting the critters do their biz. This latter was made more interesting by the fact that Wilted Springs (“The pet resort capital of the world”) now has an army of what look like extra large Roomba robots that are designed to pick up animal feces and dilute/neutralize animal pee. This is, of course, aided by the fact that the town center is blocked off to traffic and has many well maintained “Pet Bathroom” areas, most of which contain either grass or sand. Very cool. We are told by signs that all the animal waste is composted and used to make methane, which powers the street lights.
About 10:00, after leaving the pets at the hotel pet sitting center, we went to pick up out badges & swag bags. As always, DogCon was a model of efficiency and we were in line less than 10 minutes. While waiting, we met up with a bunch of friends who will almost certainly be joining us for the big pre-con dinner tonight.
The swag bags once again rocked. This year’s official con t-shirt has a pulp adventure them, while the custom dice feature tiny dogs & cats instead of pips. There are four short adventure modules, all system independent. Two are pretty basic dungeon crawls, one is pulp action on a zeppelin and the final one is the perhaps inevitable zombie uprising. This year also sees the inclusion of a custom 12 page comic book detailing the wacky adventures of the DogCon team in getting the con ready to go. It has a very Warner Brothers cartoon vibe and is hella funny.
The usual booth coupons are here, some of which get you free stuff and all of which give at least a 10% discount. One lovely coupon, for Big Sally’s Used Games, is a 2 for 1 deal. Spike and I agreed that we must hit that booth early on.
The free stand alone card game, Exploding Heads, looks good. The three posters are: a DogCon poster featuring a variation on the Poker Playing dogs, this time playing Kill Doctor Lucky…a poster for the new RPG “Dinosaur Invasion”…and a poster for a popular local bar called “The Lusty Wench”, which is, I can verify, staffed by both lusty wenches and lusty lotharios. All in good fun, of course.
Finally, the bag hander outer asked how many pets you had with you, then gave you a 4 ounce bad of organic pet treats. I got 3 for dogs (because Abby likes dog treats) and one for cats. They were all greatly enjoyed.
Now, we humans are gathered in the Cross suite to read our con books (which are styled like an old Sears catalog), while the critters are off with Sharon and our hired pet sitter, Arcadia, to spend the day at the Animal Theme Park.
More imaginary con bloggage later.
The Dociverse Blog 