Denis Baldwin's Rubi-con 2002 Writeup

PREQUEL: An interesting number of events happened during this time. I drank
more than I ever have in my entire life. Somehow, I lost my pants. Somehow,
I sweet-talked a few girls into wearing CAT5 bikinis. Somehow, we got thrown
out of the hotel. Somehow, we actually made a bit of money on this deal.
Somehow, I survived.


Wednesday, April 3rd, 2002

Went to work. Took a Rightaway going to Plymouth, where I meet Jim. Jim,
Simon9x and I go to Kinkos. We make thousands and thousands of packets.
Beefcarver has my car and is entertaining Sebastian Tricaud. Beefcarver
meets us at Kinkos at 1:00 am, as we are about half way done with the packet
copies. I get called off to work and I end up staying up ALL NIGHT. Damn,
I'm tired.

Jim and Simon9x apparently get popped during this endeavor. Some stuff
happens. They get away very luckily with only a few hundred in damage. Life
is good.

Thursday, April 4th, 2002

I worked from 5 am to 2 pm at CAE. Got into the Neon, went home and packed.
A lot of stuff had to be done very quickly, as we had the con in less than
16 hours and NOTHING was done.

I called Jim. Got some stuff together. Picked up BSD and Beefcarver. Picked
up all of the old ass beer from Dustan's house. Jim calls me and asks me to
pick up 20 black pocketless T-shirts for the staff. I get the wrong ones. We
wing it.

In all of this, I was really anxious to try out the new lens for my camera,
so I stop at the camera store in Dexter and get some batteries. I hit up
National City and Rightaway for some cash. It's not 4:30. Time to get
working.

I get to Jim's house after much debotchery (including taking pictures of
some girl in a car near us on the freeway and pissing her off). There are
20+ random folks there, so we eat the Last Supper. We pack up our game and
head to the hotel.

I went through a lot of silliness in getting my room. I ended up taking
Jeff's room, as he canceled on us. The drinking begins. I meet up with Nancy and Paulette in the lobby. Jason Scott joins us. Nate joins us. Others were there. Sneak comes in and starts an intellectual conversation about something technical. I had to get some fresh air, so I bolted. I went to AdminX's room. Everyone was just hanging out. It was a nice, cool atmosphere. We fille the tub with ice and offloaded all of the liquor I brought. It was gone within 45 minutes. AdminX and I had to hit up the liquor store with the cool arab guys from Wednesday. We got back and the drinking continued. I was very
conservative on Thursday night, as I hadn't slept on Wednesday. A dozen
drinks in 6 hours, and I went to sleep, for a whole 74 minutes. When I awoke, BSD was in the other bed. T7G was on the floor and Beefcarver was taking up the remaining floor space. Oh god. It has begun.

Friday, April 5th, 2002

I wake up from the nuttiness that is my hangover and proceed to the con
rooms. As always, the network isn't set up. The sound guy is setting up.
People are wandering by and introducing themselves to me. I get my black
badge. It is fucking leet. I wander about snapping a few pictures. From now
on, we will know these simply as the "before" pictures.

Around noon, we opened for business. We had a HUGE line of people to get in.
I would say there were at least 50 people standing around waiting for their
badges.
We sell some shirts. Some of our presenters get some speeches together. Network is up and
down. We hit a snag with some of the recording equipment, which we fix by
stealing someone's DJ gear. Speeches rage on. Network is up and down again.

During all of this, I somehow acquire a hanger-on named Spike. Spike quickly became my bitch. It was the funniest thing watching him drive speakers around and do little bullshit errands. In return, I gave him a good deal on a 24-port hub and I bought him a t-shirt. 

I notice most people are leaving the hotel alone (i.e. not breaking anything). Most of them are quietly
moving about. A few beer cans and cigarettes show up in places that they
shouldn't. I've got a huge headache from the lack of sleep. We sell out of all of the printed circuit board badges and have to resort to cheap imitations. Everyone seems ok with the idea. I get some dinner with Jason Scott and Tom at the local Coney Island. Not bad at all for $25. Chili and hot dogs makes for a content Denis. I was sober again, my god.

Night rolls around and going so long without quality sleep is wearing on me. I begin drinking. A few coronas and hour, as I man the front desk. The hotel staff is giving everyone shit for drinking and smoking. I do my best to hide my drink. At about 11:00, Dameon (and online friend from New Jersey) shows up. It was nice to finally meet him. At shortly after midnight, this stark blonde with a big smile (Kali) arrives. She pays, gets her crappy badge, and cons Dan into "upgrading" her badge in return for her bra. Dan complies. Somehow I end up with said bra on my head. I was a very happy guy. Pictures were taken. Money was exchanged. We continued to sell tickets until 3:00 a.m.

At about 3:00 a.m, I pack up all the money and stuff and am called into the network room. Problems routing. Who woulda thunked it? I try to get ahold of Beefcarver. No luck. I rant and rave to some others. No luck. I give up. I go up to J.T.'s room (a double room with Karl Mozurkowich) and hang with the crew for a while. Mostly Project Nexus and 2600 kiddies there. Some drinks. Some fun. This is all wearing on me. I talk with Jason Scott for a while. He is one of the most interesting people I met. He was telling me all about his work with his BBS documentary.

Leah (and about 10 more of us) capture Spike and ducttape and handcuff him together. During the ruckus, he gets a black eye. He seems happy about it. I don't know who gave this guy beer, but he definately wasn't 21. Then again, the bar didn't card me (or anyone else) at all.

Paulette came back and her, KK and I hung out for a while. I was getting rather intoxicated, at this point. Apparently, there are some incriminating pictures of me somewhere on the web. I really really hope I can find them :). I can't believe how many people are still awake. Some guy in the network room is sleeping and I trip over him. Oh well. Ben and I go outside for the obligatory cigarette break. I pee on the side of the building. We go back inside to find Spike has returned, intoxicated.

As of 8:00 a.m., I was still awake and my headache was growing. No matter how much I drank, I couldn't get drunk and I couldn't sleep. Infact, I think I drank myself sober. Lots of people with cameras wandering around, so I'm sure we will all be unindated with the pictures soon enough.

Saturday, April 6th, 2002

Water. Need damn water. I drink said water (about 3 gallons of it). I go back to manning a desk. Some more speeches continue. More pictures taken. 

Around 4:00, I get the bright idea (well, Kali actually had the idea and I acted on it) of a flesh auction. It all came together nicely. We had 4 willing girls. One of these girls actually weaved a bikini out of Cat5. Then the hotel caught on to this and shut us down. Too bad, as it would have been really fun. 

Dan's wife brought us all free pizza. She was gorgeous. That Dan got himself a good find, I think. That was great. I hadn't eaten very much this weekend. It was a nice change.

Jim was mumbling something about it being boring and people weren't happy. This year's Rubi was just "missing" something. I implied the same thing to a few others. Within an hour, people were simply not caring. Everyone seemed angry at the hotel. I met up with Dead Addict and a few others and casually drank in the hallway. Jim and Kate were there, moping about. We were trying to figure out what could be causing the con to drag. Then the hotel guy basically walked up to us with a list of minor things and made it sound like we were causing the next crucifixion of Christ. I socied him into making us a formal list and fucking off. He complied. The venue just brought out the worst in everyone, I think. Instead of getting angry, I decided to head to the bar.

As of about 8:00, I meet up with Dameon and Kali. We drink. Drink. Brian Deline was there as well. I think he kept his drinking to a minimum. I continue to drink. Shots. Lots of shots. 22, as I counted. Coronas. My throat burned. I was so drunk that everything moved in waves. Paulette was there. KK was there. People were noting me as the NFF of this year. I didn't seem to care too much.

At one point, I lost my pants. When I started drinking, I had on grey pants. When I awoke from my drunken rage (read: crashed at 12:30 or so, came to, wandered a bit, crashed at 2:30, wake up at 8:30), I had black pants on. Who knows what happened to my pants? :) 

Sunday, April 7th, 2002

I awoke to Jennifer V. in her underwear (she, as a speaker, needed a room and I offered her part of mine) and a piercing fire alarm. Some jackass had set off a fire alarm and completely coated a stairwell in fire extenguisher mess. This was the least of our problems, at the moment.

While I was off getting hammered, absolute mayhem occured. Apparently, I had incited a riot on Saturday that I remember nothing of. Someone put soap in the pool and the jacuzzi. Lots of tagging on the elevators. Someone jacked the card reader out of the elevator. Police had been in and out of the building all night. I personally counted 7 holes in the ceiling on the third floor, but someone noted even more.

I got down to the main room to find out that NFF and J.T.'s game shows were both absolutely awesome. I can't say I remember much of either. It was nice to get some sleep though. I found Dameon and get some breakfast at the eatery in the hotel. It wasn't bad for cold, gross, overly cooked omlettes with toast. We talked about the weekend's events. It was crazy. I met up with Dankaye, Raven and a few others and talked for a while in the bar. Somehow, during all of this, something went very wrong.

Josh's equipment got ganked. My compaq laptop got ganked. All of our mp3s were on Josh's box, so it was not cool. The hotel was yelling at Jim and I a lot. I proceeded to offer my services to clean up the mess. They proceeded to kick us out. 

I went back to the t-shirt table and sat down for a while. It was good to get off my feet. All of the standing up this weekend has lead to huge blisters on my feet. Then, after 40 minutes or so of this, the obvious happened.

Angry police were there. Operation Human Shield had begun. We begged for 15 more minutes to do closing ceremonies. Everyone gathered as we made the most of the time we had. The police and hotel decided to call it quits for us. They made us all leave. The exact quote was, "Everyone please leaves slowly in groups of five or less with your hands in sight." Oh god.

POST RUBI-CON INSANITY

We don't know yet what will become of the hotel, or of the core. There is some question of a shift of personnel in the core. There is some question of where and how the event should be handled next year. We don't know yet if we are going to be sued. I had dinner with Jim last night and we both seemed happy it was over, but ready for next year. If anyone has suggestions on how to make a better con, please let me know.