What'd I miss? P4: I'm Colleen you out

Note: This series of events I regretfully missed while on the cruise was too long for a single post, so I'm publishing them in staccato bursts (semi-)daily until I run out.

I spoke to almost all the celebrities on the cruise, to my own great joy, but there's one person I didn't say hello to. So I'm saying it now.

Hi, Colleen!

Let me back up.

I've made the comparison between the Joco cruise and PAX several times now, always favoring, highly, the cruise. This is largely because I'm not that much of a video gamer, truth be told, and since my friends mostly are, I wander around the event hall, watch other people play video games, fail miserably in my attempts to play the games, and generally get bored.

PAX 09 I decided this was the wrong way to go about it all. I brought along Zombie Fluxx and decided, shyness be damned, I was going to meet some people and play some games. So while the rest of my friends waited in endless lines to play 3 minutes of Dragon Age, I went up to wait in line for the musicians Q&A. Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm were all going to be there, and since I'd seen them live, I thought it would be a fun panel.

I was first in line, because I had nothing better to do. I sat there nervously for a few minutes before being joined by the second person in line.

This was Colleen, and she agreed to play Fluxx with me. I invited the two people behind us too, but they were too cool for such things (see, another thing that would not happen on the Joco cruise). So the two of us talked, and played, and she told me about how long she'd followed Jonathan Coulton (an insane amount of time, by the way -- like since almost his first show!). In the end, I think she won the game. After an hour the doors opened, and we went in. What I took from that was: Hey, I can get to know people pretty well if I do it over a card game. And people who like to play games with me are probably going to be worth getting to know.

And of course Colleen was on the cruise. This is the Joco Superfan after all. We never ended up in the same circles, so I never got to demand a rematch. Or generally catch up. And that was something I regretted.

So thanks for being cool, Colleen, to me that very first time I dared ask a stranger to play a game. If you'd been mean or dull or any of a hundred other things, I would never have used the same trick to form the new friendships I did on the Joco cruise. And that would have been truly tragic.

Here's Colleen's post on her blog about the Joco cruise:

http://colleenky.livejournal.com/149248.html

And here's a bit of cruise life I'm so glad Angela captured of Colleen's mini ukulele performance. If you could boil the non-celebrity parts of the cruise down to its best parts, I think it would look just like this: