Gen Con 2014

I’ve been meaning to go to Gen Con for a long time, and this year I tagged along with my old college friend Rob and his gang, who've been going for years. We had a lot of fun.

This year they released the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Forgotten Realms legend Ed Greenwood signed my copy.

I also got a copy of Call of Cthulhu, one of the other classic RPGs, autographed by Sandy Peterson. He wasn’t actually signing stuff, but by crassly pestering many total strangers, I was able to track him down.

Rob and his friends got me into a day-long game of D&D even though I’d missed the sign up. Here’s the D&D play area, which was just one of many at the conference. Here is a 360-degree pano showing the same area.

Everyone knows that folks dress up for Gen Con, but I was surprised by how many costumes there were. There were about 50,000 people at the conference, and maybe one-tenth were in costumes. Here's Rob with Darth Vader.

Here’s Rob and Karen with (I think) the Winter Warlock. 2014.08.31: Correction: it's the Ice King from Adventure Time.

Gen Con was in Indianapolis, just a couple blocks from the Indiana state capitol.

Here's a detail from the Sailors and Soldiers Monument nearby. I'm not sure what those bears are doing!

Chicago

I visited Chicago the weekend before July 4. I spent my time there walking around the Loop and whistling the Bob Newhart theme song.

Chicago is where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan. In 1900 the river's direction was artificially reversed so that it wouldn't carry sewage into the lake.

Downtown Chicago is known as the Loop, for the elevated train loop that goes around downtown.

Chicago is known for its architecture and skyscrapers. The Monadnock Building was the tallest commercial building supported by its masonry walls rather than a steel skeleton.

The Reliance Building was the first skyscraper with a facade dominated by windows.

The Marquette Building was "...one of the early steel frame skyscrapers of its day, and is considered one of the best examples of the Chicago School of architecture....it is considered an architectural masterpiece."

Bas relief panels over the doors depict Jacques Marquette's exploration of the Great Lakes area.

A view of the Chicago skyline from Grant Park near the Lake Michigan. The Willis (Sears) Tower is the black building with antennas on the left.

American Gothic is at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Cloud Gate (or “The Bean”) and Crown Fountain are in Millenium Park at the north end of Grant Park.

The Chicago Picasso is in Daley Plaza, while Calder's Flamingo is a few blocks away in front of the Kluczynski Federal Building.

The world’s most complete T. Rex, Sue, is at the Field Museum.

Chicago's Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup a few days before I visited.

Kids posing in front of the Art Institute's lions, who are wearing Blackhawks helmets.

Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Florence, Italy

Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance. Renaissance greats like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, Botticelli, Galileo, Dante, and Machiavelli were born there, lived there, or worked there.

The Duomo (Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore) is Florence’s main church. The Duomo was started in 1296 and finished with Brunelleschi’s dome in 1436. The white octagonal building left of the Duomo is the Florence Baptistery, built between 1059 and 1128.

Ghiberti's north doors for the Baptistery, finished around 1422, are considered the start of the Renaissance.

The gold-colored east doors were Ghiberti’s second commission for the Baptistery. Ghiberti considered the east doors his best work, and Michelangelo called them the "gates of paradise," which is still their name. The current east doors are a copy, with the originals nearby in the Duomo museum.

Florence's museums include Michelangelo's David, Donatello's David and Mary Magdalene, and Botticelli's Birth of Venus. This is Donatello's St. Mark at Orsanmichele.

Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli's remains are in Santa Croce, Florence's Franciscan church.

The Medici banking family ruled Florence. The dynasty’s founder, Cosimo, is shown in the Piazza della Signoria.

The Palazzo Vecchio -- Old Palace.

Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin

In June an old friend and I visited Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, where the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers meet. This is the spot where the French explorer Jacques Marquette first discovered the (northern) Mississippi River. In my picture, taken from Pikes Peak State Park in Iowa, the Mississippi is in the foreground and the bridge in the background crosses the Wisconsin.

The United States build two Fort Crawfords on this spot, much like Fort Snelling at the intersection of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers further north. Chief Black Hawk fought against the United States during the War of 1812 and the 1832 Black Hawk War, and ultimately surrendered at the second Fort Crawford. William Beaumont performed some of his famous digestion experiments on Alexis St. Martin, a man with a hole in his stomach, at the second Fort Crawford. My picture shows the rebuilt fort hospital, which is all that's left of the second fort.

Effigy Mounds National Monument is also there. Prehistoric American Indians built mounds here in the shape of bears, birds, and other animals between 1,400 and 850 years ago. My picture shows the Little Bear Mound, although the shape isn't very clear -- Wikipedia's picture is better.

Atari ST, Starglider

The Atari ST is the next computer in my retro gaming spree. Atari introduced the 520ST in 1985 to answer the Macintosh, but the ST's main rival was the Commodore Amiga, introduced later that same year.

My picture is a 1040ST, which had 1 megabyte of RAM and an internal 3.5” floppy drive. The green desktop is GEM, the ST’s Macintosh-like desktop environment.

I wrote a lot of Pascal programs on the ST in the day, but it also had great games like Jeremy San's Starglider.

You fly over the landscape attacking targets drawn with vector graphics. Starglider is reminiscent of the Star Wars coin-op game, and the targets include walkers and stompers like Star Wars' two-legged walkers.

Shields and fuel are the keys to survival. You repair your shields by entering a dock on the battlefield, where you can also pick up another missile.

To refuel, you fly between the charging towers.

Starglider One is the main target. You spend most of the game flying around hoping to see it, but when you start on level 1, it's right behind you flying away, so you might be able to turn and catch it easily. Here, we're catching up to it.

You need to use a missile to bring it down, and here we're about to hit in the missile's view. If you fly your missile directly behind it, it will destroy your missile with one of its own. Instead, come in where the wing attaches to the body.

Destroying it gives you 7,500 points, which is most of the 10,000 you need to advance to the next level.