• Dates: August 12-13, 2000
• Location: Fairfax, Virginia / Washington, D.C.
• Attendees: Sam, Leen, Dave, Balanthalus, Darien, famous, Issachar & Jacqueline, Mina

Friday, August 11. It was 12:30am, technically Saturday, by the time everyone had arrived at the Holiday Inn in Fairfax. Issachar, Jacqueline, and famous arrived after 8pm; Darien, Mina, Leen, and I didn't arrive until 10:30pm, having driven together most of the way. Before we were even checked in, I left right away for Dulles Airport to pick up Dave, whose flight was scheduled to arrive at 11:15pm. Upon our return, the eight of us (Balanthalus would not arrive until the next morning) all pitched in to help carry things in from the car. At some point we peeked in the conference room, which was all set up for the next day. It was the perfect size: there was plenty of table space and plenty of open area, too. Then we collapsed in our room and talked and laughed and did who knows what else, because I was too tired to remember most of it. Stephen was there, in spirit. Darien wrote "Stephen's Spirit" on a piece of paper and hit Dave with it. Around 1:30am, everyone drifted off to their own rooms for the night.

Saturday, August 12. The room opened at 8am, but after such a late night, we knew we wouldn't be getting started that early: 10am for an official start was looking more desirable. I got up around 7:30am, and Darleen and I started bringing stuff down around 8:15am. No one else was around, but famous, Issachar, and Jacqueline made appearances not long after, while we were setting up. In the conference room, there were two round tables, set up with eight chairs each, and a counter running much of the length of one wall. At each place at the two tables were a glass, for water, a small notepad, and a Holiday Inn pen. I took two chairs from one table and squeezed them in at the other, so we could all sit together and use the second table for games and extra storage. Darleen used the counter to set up a variety of model horse displays featuring her handmade saddles, bridles, harnesses, and so forth, as featured on EquiWorks. She also included some saddle pieces in progress, saddle trees, and the mold she uses for her side saddles, so people could see how she makes them. This display was left up until 4pm that afternoon, so people could examine it at their leisure.

Balanthalus wandered in around 9:30am, having stumbled across Issachar and Jacqueline eating breakfast and finding them familiar. Dave was not long to follow; by 10:15am, all were assembled except Darien and Mina; at 10:30am, I began with some preliminaries. A change basket was put out (with demo change, even, graciously provided by Dave when I realized I didn't have any) for the soda and drinks that I provided. I also set out some bags of non-American Smarties (for which I did not collect change) that were provided by Wolfspirit for the occasion. I showed off the RinkWorks T-Shirts I had made. If the place I ordered them from didn't have a minimum order of 25 shirts, I would have had "RinkWorks Convention 2000" shirts made; on the back would be the RinkWorks Convention 2000 Tour Schedule with just the one entry for Washington, D.C. But I couldn't do that, and so I made generic RinkWorks shirts that will be sold on RinkWorks for $9.99, but, at the convention, specially priced at $10.00. I brought free stuff, too: official RinkWorks pens and travel corkscrews (you know, for when you need to open a wine bottle while driving). The pens were printed professionally; the corkscrews were made official with a black marker, in the manner of the prizes for the Site Market Game. I also gave out RinkWorks temporary tattoos, which were made by Dracimas (in a nutshell, color print on wax paper) some time ago and given to me by mail. Later, famous gave out keychains with her company's logo on them. Sometime, during the dispensing of goodies, we also had Moxie tasting. Moxie is one of the oldest sodas there is, originating in 1884, and is sold pretty much only in New England. It is loved by a few and hated by many. Discussion of Moxie in the RinkWorks Message Forum piqued the interest of many, so I brought some Moxie and Dixie Cups so we could try it. Everyone who hadn't tried it did, but no one took any of the remaining cans I had. Around this point, 10:45am or so, Darien and Mina drifted in, and I piled their free stuff on them and got going with the activities.

On Things People Said, in the "Language Barrier" section, there is a series of revisions of instructions that are printed on a certain brand of chopsticks. All the versions have numerous comical errors of grammar and spelling. I had one of these chopsticks wrappers with me for a quick show-and-tell session. (Actually I packed two, but heck if I know where the other one went.) So I read that.

Then we played a little memory game to compete for a prize: the Official RinkWorks Thing, which is something I picked up at an HQ going-out-of-business sale. It was the least recognizable thing I could find, and it was cool because it was posable and made noise when you clacked it shut. Of course it was officialized with a black marker. Anyway, I distributed sheets of paper that had, on it, a grid with four column headings: Name, Color, Meal, and Movie. To start, we wrote down everyone's name in the Name column, in the order we were sitting at the table. Then the pens went down, and we each had to think of our favorite colors, meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner, or possibly something like tea or midnight snack), and movies. Then, starting with me and going around the table, each person would name their favorite color. When it got back to me, we would each in turn name our favorite meals, and then favorite movies. Then we would pick up the pens and try to write down as much as we remembered about everyone else's favorite things. The game actually went really well, especially considering this was something I made up while lying in bed just a couple days before. The scores were better than I would have anticipated, too; everyone got at least half right, and Darien and Mina tied for first with perfect scores. Rather than doing a tie-breaker, which would have involved another couple more categories of favorite things, I gave them the RinkWorks Thing to share.

Immediately after that, I ran another game: real-life Whack-A-Mole. I instructed everyone to pick up a lethal weapon, and then I called out the moles. I pretty much only called out "Dave," and Darien took advantage of the opportunity.

Shortly after that, I pulled out a few pages' worth of quotes from some of the craziest email I've ever received and read through several. We decided to take a break before I was done and finish that after lunch. By then it was 11:30am. We also figured that was a good time to put up the decorations that Darien and Mina had brought, so they did that. They rented a helium tank for balloons, which turned out to be a hit. We had a number of balloons, white, because that's the standard RinkWorks background color, filled with air, filled with helium, and filled with both, and had a lot of fun swatting them back and forth at each other. Darien and Mina also brought a really long streamer of red, white, and blue flags that was hung around the perimeter of the ceiling.

At noon we walked to the mall next door and ate at Ruby Tuesday's, a family restaurant in which nearly every menu item has a superlative adjective in front of it, much like the characters in Sinbad of the Seven Seas, the Official RinkWorks Bad Movie. Somehow they managed to accommodate the nine of us and even did separate checks. We got back a little before 2pm and started again a little after. We did a bit of socializing before getting back to the crazy email; after finishing those, I read some of the goofiest reader review submissions we've gotten from It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie. This was closely followed by Dave's sneak preview reading his new review of The Blob, which will shortly appear on It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie. Dave held an impromptu contest for the notes he jotted down while watching The Blob -- Mina won by being the first person who could state his middle name. After that, I presented Darien and Mina with the Official RinkWorks Superball as a thank-you present for the decorations. Then we took some time to play around while I pulled out the camera and the video camera to preserve the occasion for posterity.

Just a bit after 3pm, we started the poetry reading session. For that, the tables were moved out of the way, and we set up the chairs in two rows, with one chair up front, facing them. I started off by reading The Foe and Musings of a Lonely Shadow. Balanthalus had to leave, so he was next, reading two short poems, To Those Who Laugh At My Dancing and This Is a Haiku. He stayed long enough for Issachar to read a comic audience participation poem, the title of which I do not know, and then we exchanged goodbyes. Mina was next, but she didn't want to read them herself at first, so Dave read #153. He put enough ranting bitterness in the performance that Mina was persuaded to read #123 herself. But Darien was content to let Dave read his poems: Aftertaste, Golden Horde, Haiku In Orange Ink, June First, a.d. 1999, and Shining On To Forever. famous read Keys, The Terrible Tale, and Stephen, Start Talking. Issachar read Valentine '97 and Valentine '96. I closed the poetry reading by reading some poems by Howard Agassiz Murrill, who is the grandfather of the Howard who frequents RinkWorks today. The first was Shoes. The next two I read from Mountain and Stream Songs of the Virginias, which is a book of his poetry published in 1918. I read The Sanguine Sail, because the word "sanguine" has significance in RinkWorks as it is studied on Slapdash City, and The Old Man, because I found it vivid and moving.

Following the poetry reading, I took a moment to show off my copy of the book Critical Approaches To Writing About Film, by John E. Moscowitz, because in it is quoted one of my film reviews from At-A-Glance Film Reviews. (At some point earlier, I showed a couple of the newspapers that had articles about the The Dialectizer, but I don't remember exactly when this was.)

At this point it was just after 4pm, and the conference room part of the convention was over. We took down the decorations and cleaned up the room a bit, then adjourned to our rooms upstairs. famous' room was adjacent to only the stairs and Darien and Mina's room, so we stuffed all the balloons in there and, after a break to get refreshed, piled in there for some game playing. Issachar, Jacqueline, Darien, and Mina played a board game Issachar had brought; Dave, famous, and I played a card game; Leen conked out next to us on the bed. Around 7pm, we left for the Outback Steakhouse for dinner and returned a couple hours later. At 10:15pm, I showed some video footage of Leen riding our horse, Timmy, then two claymated shorts I made back in 1997 shortly after I got my video camera. Then we watched Sinbad of the Seven Seas, the Official RinkWorks Bad Movie, and there was a lot of loud howling with laughter and snide remarks. It's true. Watching bad movies in groups greatly improves them. I rewound the "HA!" part so we could see it twice, and after the movie was over, I went back and pointed out where the elusive little alien dude is. (Check the many reviews of the movie on It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie.)

Sunday, August 13. At 9am, we left the hotel in three vehicles for the Metro. The Metro ride into Washington, D.C. took about thirty minutes once we got going. We talked about Sinbad of the Seven Seas for much of that time. In D.C., we walked to the Washington Monument, which is quite impressive when you're standing right underneath it, but we didn't want to go up it, because it would have taken a lot of waiting in line for free tickets, then bound us to a time to return later in the day. So we walked over to the Lincoln Memorial, then to the Korean War Memorial, then across to the Vietnam War Memorial, and then back. On the way, we found a memorial for the signers of the Declaration of Independence and checked that out. Then we walked over to the cluster of Smithsonian museums and hopped into the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. We ate lunch after that at a hot dog stand in which nearly everything cost $1.50, then headed for the National Air and Space Museum. Darien and Mina had to leave while there, around 1:30pm, so they left, and the rest of us stayed there for a while longer. Around 3:00pm, we got back on the Metro and went to the White House, checked that out, then headed back to the hotel. We had about a half hour before I needed to take Dave back to the airport, so we rested and relaxed for what time we had. Dave, Leen, famous, and I headed for the airport, while Issachar and Jacqueline headed home. When we got back from the airport, famous, Leen, and I ordered room service, talked for a while in a state of half-sleep, and finally retired for the night.