20 october 2025
The plane ride home was instead spent on sleep and recovery. However, now that I have some downtime and a proper keyboard, I can type it out.
Town con was PHENOMENAL. From the moment I arrived at the airport, to the moment I arrived at vilmibm's house and saw owl, kingcons, vilmibm and spinecone there, I was already overwhelmed with joy and excitement about how the rest of the weekend would transpire. The house was so cozy and homely, partly because vilmibm and spinecone have an awesome house and partly because of the natural warmth and camaraderie of townies :) I went around and stared at all the trinkets for maybe the first hour before I even thought to settle down into the guest room.
We had food, then went right to bed to prepare for the next day. The air mattress was super comfy, but my jetlag and the dryness of the air in California when compared to Michigan didn't let me get much sleep. Not to mention the excitement for the next day!
The next day came, and yet more townies poured in. It was sad to find out last-minute that at least 2 townies wouldn't be able to make it :( but I hope they had fun over the virtual event. Breakfast was nice and so was going into the backyard to pick the apples for the pie :) we laid down the groundwork for towncon proper, especially the virtual event. We went to a local pizzeria and I also got some smoked salmon from the fish store next to it, as everyone said "tunas has to get tunas!" I decided that I wouldn't spend 30 minutes showing a single photo of me photoshopped in front of the town server, and I could recycle one of the talks I'd given; this just so happened to be the talk about custom radio firmware from 2023. It was fun to realize just how much work we'd done on this since 2023! The townies were delighted.
One of the only sad things was that I couldn't read all of the messages in #con :( but I can always revisit them when I have an empty moment, and email anyone that I didn't get a chance to answer.
One of the things that I am super proud of, is making the dot matrix printer work via a TCP socket port forwarded to ~town at port 4200. Many fun things were printed; many more fun things would've been printed if conditions permitted and I polished the script in advance :(((( but it took some major hackery to make it work and I'm still super proud!!!! Thanks to all who contributed.
After the talks and presentations and recipes and free jazz album, we, um... I don't rember :0
To be continued later!!!! There's so many fun things to say about the rest of con <3