WR #8 and #9 Late, lulz. [TJC, LS, JL, EW]

Poasting my last 2 weekend writings so you can comment if you don't want the wrath of Harris.

The Festival (WR#8)

The odd thing is the lack of customers. I’ve never seen the festival from this point of view. It’s very uncanny valley. I feel out of place, so I follow the yellow signs leading me to the volunteer “lounge,” which I soon discover is nothing more than two coat racks and a table behind a makeshift curtain at the back of the right-side hallway. Mildly disappointed, I set down my messenger bag (decked out with pins from the previous year’s festival) and look for the proper nametag, which I affix to my volunteer pass. I rummage through the giant GILDAN cardboard boxes under the table until I find a medium volunteer shirt. Then, mildly flustered, I sit down at the top of the stairs and survey the vile, stained paisley-patterned carpeting. The “lounge” is dimly lit and the walls and floor are all dark red. There’s a creepy glass door in the back left corner that opens into an anonymous concrete corridor lit with a single fluorescent tube in the ceiling.

LAN Party (WR#9)

The LAN Party has been around since the late 1990s with the advent of networked video games. Though the history of LANs is largely unknown due to antisocial gaming nerds and the impermanence of the events, it is generally understood that all serious gamers have been to at least 4 or 5 (I will not deny the implication behind this statement that console addicts are not, in fact, legitimate gamers [while console owners can sometimes connect their consoles over a local network, these gatherings are considered amateurish by people of real value]) and they are usually casual affairs, barring the occasional nerd rage as the result of a well-placed nuclear missile on the part of the other team. A LAN party can, obviously, run the range of size from only two people to five or twenty or ten thousand. Larger LAN Parties are organized events that look suspiciously like cult gatherings to outsiders. Gaming culture generally warrants making it bigger, faster, and more awesome, and thus the humble suburban dining-room-table LAN party has been evolved into multi-day events filling up entire convention centers with live music, hired security, and as many as just over twelve thousand unique attendants.