May 22, 2007 – Convention News

The convention was great. Our booths were excellent; right at the end of the second row near the bus entrance. We’re planning on getting the same spots next year. We probably had 500 people stop buy on Friday, 700 on Saturday and another 150 on Sunday. Not too many buyers, but lots of great feedback on the www.sarcasticwear.com shirts and the www.alienheadgames.com board games.

I didn’t get the video game finished, but it turned out to be okay. I was planning on having the game just run off the CD, so there would be no install needed, but the build puts some of the 3D objects in a zipped file and to get them to load the app has to be moved to the user’s hard drive. So even though I got the game finished, I didn’t have time to write an installer. The reason it works out is because now I can add another level (which I’ve been playing around with, anyway) and add some intro and level segue animation. I probably won’t put much time into that until next week, though, since I have a lot to do on the t-shirt site.

There were a lot of people who wanted to use credit cards to buy the t-shirts or needed shirts in sizes I didn’t have there, so I gave them stickers and cards and explained that the site is being moved and should be back up this weekend. So that’s the plan this week. Get the site updated and moved.

Probably the highlight of the weekend was when the 2600 guys came over and hung out with us for a while on Sunday. When I went over to the 2600 van to buy some of their t-shirts and a TV-B-Gone (which has been super great fun) I took them some of the SarcasticWear t-shirts. They seemed pretty happy about it and a few of them stopped by and hung out with us for a bit. Bernie S. came over for about 15 minutes we had a pretty interesting conversation.

Everyone buy a TV-B-Gone. http://www.tvbgone.com/cfe_tvbg_main.php. Then we can all go hang out at our favorite Wail-Mayert and turn off the wall of TVs as soon as the customer disservice person puts the ladder away again.

Probably the funniest thing that happened was the reaction of the dude in the bathroom stall when the guy waiting to go walked in and stood INSIDE the stall until dude was finished. (No, Tony, neither of the guys were me) I wish I could capture that look of horror for a page in my comic book. I don’t think the guy meant anything by it, I think there was just a grand lack of any kind of social skill whatsoever. I’d guess a lot of these people don’t get out of their parents’ basement very much.

Second funniest thing was the 30-something guy who stopped and lit into me about the “I’m the guy your daughter is dating online” t-shirt – my most popular shirt at the convention, btw. He walked up, read the shirt, looked horrified and snapped, “Why would you put something like that on a shirt?!”

“Because it’s funny.”

“NO ONE WILL BUY THIS!!!”

“Well, don’t tell the 20 people I’ve already sold them to…heh.”

“Who would buy this!?”

“Lots of people think it’s funny.”

“No they don’t! This is not funny.”

“To you.”

“To ANYONE! It’s like putting ‘I was on Dateline’ on a shirt and wearing it.”

“Dude, that’s awesome! Can I use that?”

“No one will buy this shirt! You should remove it!”

“Sorry you don’t like it.” This is where I stopped trying to be polite and just went right ahead and laughed.

“You can’t sell something like…oh, I have to go…my mother just came out.” Runs like a girl over to the antenna booth where his mother is exiting.

“It was nice meeting you. Seriously. I need stories for my blog and whatnot.”

He never noticed I was wearing the shirt.

Third funniest thing was this guy who came up and was looking at GC’s oscilloscope. He had $80 on it, which was pretty low, from what people were saying, so it got a lot of lookiloos. I tried to speak to everyone who came up because that’s just good business. Plus everyone who knows me knows I just LOVE people. (About 10 minutes has passed since that line, while I regained my composure from laughing at my own joke – bad taste to laugh at your own jokes?) Anyway, I said, “Hi, how are you today?” or something along those lines. He replied, “Uh…iyah…uh…chahku…I…uh…,” and then shouted “SCOPE!!!” and lowered his head about 6 inches from the oscilloscope. For a minute I felt bad for not knowing how to respond, because I thought he might be mentally handicapped, so I just smiled and let him look. But then his friend came over and they walked off together and the guy spoke very plainly telling him about how good a deal the oscilloscope is. (shrug) I should probably feel bad about spending the rest of the day laughing about it off and on.

The moral of this story is that it’s almost impossible to even GIVE AWAY 17 inch CRT monitors these days.