This year, I wanted to get all my clothing into one bag, and success was had. Last year, I took workout clothing, but I was an idiot and took so much other shit I didn't use that I couldn't fit it in my regular duffel bag, so I had to take an extra bag to hold the workout stuff. After omitting the shit that I didn't use, it all fit quite nicely into one bag.
I kinda screwed up signing up for shifts, I didn't get to it fast enough and a lot of my preferred stuff was already taken. This MAGFest was a mishmash of both Floor Staff and Inventory as a result.
Wednesday
I drove up on Wednesday evening, just like usual. Fortunately, this year there was zero snow in the forecast, so I didn't have a repeat of last year's anxiety-inducing 25MPH drive north. I parked in the Gaylord's garage this year, because after careful consideration, the reserve-a-spot lots that MAGFest was promoting were both uncovered, one was a gravel lot, and my usual garage a block away would charge me in real time as opposed to in Gaylord room-nights, meaning I'd theoretically have to pay more to park there. For once, the Gaylord's garage looked like the cheaper option.
I arrived at 11:30 PM or so, grabbed my badge, and walked up to the LAN room to hang out with some friends for a while, and eat the meal I'd made for myself to eat when I arrived, which consisted of a ham and cheddar wrap with ground pepper, shishito peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, and brown mustard, a banana, and some Coke Zero. After that it was just me aimlessly wandering around the hotel.
Almost immediately in the wandering, I noticed this new vending machine with ice cream inside. It looked kinda neat, so I took a picture of it. Sadly, I don't have any video of it in action. I bought some on Saturday after dinner, just for the novelty. It's sorta like Dippin' Dots, and while it was neat, it wasn't really worth the price.
The rest of the wandering was just, you know, wandering.
Thursday
Wandering continued well into Thursday, where around 2:30 AM I decided to try and find coffee. Spoiler alert: you can't get coffee in National Harbor, MD at 2:30 in the morning. I walked all the way out to where the gas station and McDonald's were, to no avail. The Starbucks was closed. Even the coffee shop in the Gaylord's atrium was closed.
At 5 AM, the atrium coffee shop opened, and I finally got my damn coffee. It was almost four dollars, but I didn't really care, I needed the caffeine.
Later I picked up my "swadge", which is basically just a custom PCB with a microcontroller and some other shit on it that does token novelty stuff. Honestly, my badge collection is filling up with this stuff, and I don't touch it after the event. Can it be optional for staff in the future? That'd be nice. Anyway, I appear to have been the only one to whom they didn't give batteries, so I had to borrow two rechargeable AA batteries from Consoles while I was on shift just to have the thing light up like it was supposed to.
Thursday was home to the sole panel I went to: DwangoAC's TASBot panel. He highlighted some technical difficulties (and a baggage handling problem that broke some of his stuff...) while giving a nice presentation and showing a few TASes of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World. If you've seen all the various TASes of those that have been shown at GDQs, then you've seen the TASes he showed here.
After that came the sole dealers' room raid of the event. My bounty was Super Nintendo-filled:
Getting cartridges to boot in old systems is sometimes a hassle, so Future XT™ will chime in with details about that.
Future XT™: Hey, Past XT™! Super Metroid, The Lost Vikings, and F-Zero all boot just fine with zero or very little hassle. I've already spent a while playing Super Metroid and died like an idiot trying to sequence break and get the Wave Beam early. Anyway. Unfortunately, Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 are very temperamental, but I have gotten both of them to boot. I'll give their contacts a good cleaning with some isopropyl alcohol and see if that doesn't help. *mutters something incomprehensible about still needing to do this with Blaster Master*
Back to you, Past XT™.
Past XT™: Thanks for the input there, Future XT™! Now, where was I? Oh yeah, that's right...
I bought a Super Famicom cartridge of Super Metroid because Japanese cartridges are cheaper than their US counterparts for some silly reason. The Japanese and US ROMs of Super Metroid happen to be identical, with English text and an option for Japanese subtitles. It's just the cartridge shell and label art that are different. All the more reason to break off those tabs in your SNES' cartridge slot.
4 PM rolled around and I checked into my hotel room. I was the first one of the people assigned to my room to get there, so I had to dodge putting my debit card on the room for incidentals. As it turned out, neither of the other people assigned to my room materialized, so I ended up with a hotel room to myself for the weekend. Not complaining.
Later I remembered that I hadn't yet paid for parking, so I went back to the hotel reception desk to take care of that. Or at least, I tried to take care of that. There's a separate exit lane for pre-paid parking, and it would have taken the whole thing off of my mind for the weekend. Unfortunately for me, the guy at the reception desk misunderstood my request as "activate the parking lot in/out privileges on my room card" and my attempts to dumbfoundedly rephrase "I'd like to pre-pay for parking" so that I could get my point across failed spectacularly.
I didn't have a staff shift on Thursday night this year, so I just played games for a while and went to bed. I beat World 2 of Yoshi's Island, including successfully doing a 1-1 warp on one of the levels. I also figured out how to be reasonably decent at Asteroids on the Atari 2600.
Friday
Going to bed marked the end of my usual really long first day of MAGFest. I got up at 11 AM on Wednesday and didn't go to sleep until 2 AM on Friday.
During my wandering around on Thursday morning looking for coffee, I'd noticed a shop in the National Harbor area that I'd never had the opportunity to notice before because I always just stay in the hamster habitrail: Pepper Palace. They sell hot sauces, spicy seasonings, and lots of it. I went back there on Friday, spent a while looking around the store, and using their sampling station to try various sauces before settling on a couple to buy. I ended up with a bottle of Wok Dis Wey, which has a panda on the label and came with a panda keychain (they all had different ones, so I spent a while looking at them to figure out which one I wanted), and a bottle of The Great American Hot Sauce. Wok Dis Wey is sweet and spicy, and The Great American Hot Sauce has a nice smoky flavor to it.
After that, I walked over to Subway and bought lunch: my usual footlong sub. I ate half of it and saved the other half for the trip home. Hotel rooms have refrigerators these days, did you know that? They keep food from going bad in the short term. They're nice.
Once I was back in the hotel and fed, I went down to consoles and did some of the challenges. I accrued enough points to get a couple rewards, and declared myself done there. I didn't actually pick up my challenge rewards until Sunday morning, though.
I did another walk around the dealers' room before my shift began and flagged a couple things as "if they're sti2ll there later, possibly buy them", but then I never went back later to see if they were still there. They were all lower-priority things, but still, it would've been neat to get a SNES mouse, the mouse pad that goes with it, and Mario Paint. Maybe next year.
Friday was the beginning of possibly the worst thing I've ever had to do: a 12-hour shift. I made the mistake of standing for the entire first four hours, which was an Inventory shift. Given that the second four hours was Floor Staff, which involves a lot of walking, that didn't turn out so well. I ended up trading off some Floor Staff work with others who were on Inventory just so I could rest my feet.
I say the 12-hour shift wasn't that great, but it could've been far worse. I originally had an entire extra mathematically unnecessary shift in my schedule that would have made it a 16-hour shift. Once I did the math and noticed the extra shift, I dropped it. In the meantime, though, I was very close to emailing STOPS and asking if I could work something out to swap shifts with another staffer.
There was cake during the shift, that helped somewhat. As seems to be the usual when a group has cake and wants to offer me some, I was invited over to get a slice by one of the higher-ups asking me if I liked cake. It was a "Do you like cake? Because we've got cake!" kind of thing.
On one of my bathroom breaks I experienced something I can only really explain in video game terms: I call it an NPC interaction moment. Basically, staff can do certain things that regular attendees can't, in this case it was the ability to enter the expo hall through doors marked as exits. Ostensibly for the convenience of staffers transporting large items or something that need to use the door that's most convenient to them, but certainly usable by me for a quick bathroom break without having to run all the way back around to the entrance in order to return to my shift.
The security staffer on duty at that exit door saw me walking over to the door and said "you can't enter here, this is an exit". I showed my staff badge, and he said "oh wait, you're staff, go on in". It's like in video games when there's a guard standing in front of the door you need to go through that refuses to let you pass no matter what, but when you have that one key item that grants you permission to pass (and, typically, progress the story), he immediately changes his tune.
The 12-hour shift took me into Saturday as well.
Saturday
During my shift, I saw a Wii running a game that had been left on this screen. I don't know what game it was, but since Waluigi is a character everyone likes to talk about (previously WALUIGI AMIIBO PLZ, now mostly how he's not in Smash), I found this kinda funny and took a picture of it. It stayed that way for several hours.
I haven't been mentioning it here, but of course, I went to the Gaylord's fitness room once every day. I absolutely didn't feel like doing anything other than sleeping after the 12-hour shift, so I had to do Saturday's workout after I woke up.
My next (and final) shift didn't begin until Sunday, so I had a bit of time to kill. I decided to spend it playing Super Mario World. A couple of other people showed up and we started passing the controller around after each level completion, stomping our way through the game. Before they had to leave, we got to the end of World 6, I pushed it a bit farther to partway through World 7 (with all of Star World complete and Special World unlocked) before my shift.
It didn't help that we were playing it on an LCD TV, which meant there was input lag messing with us and making us miss easy jumps and stuff. Using the cape is a lot harder when there's a significant delay between pressing a button and seeing the result on screen. Anyway.
Sunday
Consoles must have been through some shit in the hours prior to me and the others that comprise the usual evening crew arriving on the scene, because when I got there, the operations officer on duty said "hey, a competent staffer!". What the hell was someone screwing up? Staffing consoles isn't even that difficult of a thing to do correctly!
Anyway, this was more my usual style of shift: only eight hours long. After it ended, I went down to the fitness room for one final workout before packing up and heading home. Parking ended up being cheaper as expected, $72 instead of $80.
The one remaining issue I have yet to solve reared its ugly head once again: driving fatigue on the way home. I kept two 500ml bottles of Coke Zero and the other half of that footlong sub I got on Friday for this purpose, but it didn't work. I had to stop a few times to regather myself. One time I stopped and walked into a McDonald's just to use its bathroom. Apparently you can order something that vaguely resembles food there? I dunno.
I prevailed over the driving fatigue one way or another and made it home, and hey, now I'm here typing this, taking photos of things I bought, and grumbling about how uploading pictures to Blogger doesn't work in Pale Moon. Well, it kinda works. You can upload them, but you can't add them to your post. I don't have the patience to pretty print and reverse engineer obfuscated JavaScript just to look for a solution, so I get to launch a Chrome incognito window instead.
