firstfrost | Boats and Pieces

JoCo Cruise Crazy II was a lovely indulgent vacation. I am probably a little too much of an introvert for it to work for me by myself (despite the nerds there all being my people), but with a little mob (me and harrock and shumashi and mjperson and jcatelli) to mini-socialize with in addition to the larger group, it was great. Mike reports that towards the end, about five different people on ship staff told him that we were so much nicer than the usual passengers, which makes me both happy and sad, because while I like being thought of as nice, I hate that that is apparently the outlier.
(Many thank yous to chenoameg for taking us to the airport, and tirinian and ringrose for dealing with when the van sulked about having been driven by strangers again (okay, I think we have finally figured out the problem, though it will of course have to wait to be playtested) and more tirinian for coming to get us very late at night...)
My, hmm, fangirl tendencies did get kind of played up on the cruise. I mean, I don't squee or bounce, but I am kind of ridiculously impressed by famous people. (One of the memorable highlights of my career was when Sir Tim Berners-Lee came in to change his password! Or setting up a temporary guest account for Scott McCloud to get on the MIT network; I was tempted to ask him to sign my cleavage, but figured surely by then someone would already have made that joke, and plus it seemed crazily unprofessional). I was very proud of myself for speaking to four Famous People, and I am still taking stun damage from the "Wait, the famous Perl guy was our cruise photographer last time?" revelation from shumashi.

Yeah, we were just a subgroup of the cruise. The first cruise was about 250 people, this one was 500-something, out of a total passenger set of more like 1500. The main thing about cruise ships is that they're not designed to have everyone in one place, ever - there's two seatings in the main dining hall (plus the buffet), there's two identical shows in the main hall (which a lot of people skip anyway), so I think we were close to the maximum that we could, as limited by the big hall (but which was too many for the little hall where things like karaoke were). So being all the people on the ship would probably have to have different logistics, more like a conference where everyone isn't expected to be at anything specifically.

Holland America is apparently the Retired Folks cruise line (as opposed to say, Carnival, which is the young party-boat line or Disney, for families with kids), so we were different than the average passenger. (Apparently also much nicer than the average passenger, which surprised us. Not that we're not nice, but I have to admit that "the *nice* people" is not part of the nerd archetype; we're supposed to be socially awkward and weird. Not that there weren't any of that subspecies. :) )

I think we are socially awkward and weird to *friends*, which is different from being socially awkward and weird to *staff*.

Boats and Pieces

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