Every year, geeks in the Twin Cities (and some from further away) gather in the Sheraton South hotel for CONvergence, a sci-fi convention held every 4th of July weekend. This year we rocked it nerdcore for 4 killer days because it was CONvergence's 10th year. My husband calls it "Nerdi Gras" because of all the fabulous costumes, the heavy drinking, and the general wild party atmosphere. Most people dress up in costume, and you can see anything from a Klingon to Doctor Who to a zombie to Princess Leia.

Room parties are a tradition of CONvergence. People rent out the poolside cabanas on the first and second floors and open them to the public, serving free drinks and food, holding contests, giving away prizes, and generally providing merriment. These room parties advertise themselves with posters plastered on every inch of every wall of the entire hotel. Seriously, the walls are fucking papered with multicolored fliers, most of them humorous.

Most of the room parties are the same every year; that is to say, they are fixtures at the CON and are beloved by the CONgoers. Three such places are House of Toast (which serves toast with your choice of more than 50 toppings), Cow Asylum (a dance party beerfest run by Wisconsinites that usually has drunk girls gyrating on the veranda), and Connie's Space Lounge (not technically a room party because it's officially part of the CONvergence programming...it's a huge, dark, blacklit room full of glowing bodypaint, glowsticks, techno music, and fruit smoothies and it's run by a large group of SF0ers).

I decided that these three parties needed Welsh representation. I know the task says to make the signs bilingual, but there were already SO MANY English signs advertising these establishments that I chose to make my signs purely in Welsh. Also, it's funnier that way.

I used a free online English to Welsh translator to help me create the text for the signs.



This is for the House of Toast. The sign reads:
Visit the House of Toast!
(We speak Welsh--ask for Ian)
Toast with many toppings
Glory to Wales!
Glory to CONvergence!






This one is for Cow Asylum. It reads:
Cow Asylum
Fat and/or ugly girls dance for your pleasure!
"It's like Coyote Ugly without the coyote."
-anonymous
"Ew! That girl needs more clothes."
-also anonymous
Follow the loud music





This one is for Connie's Space Lounge. It reads:
Get down with yourself!
Connie's Space Lounge
Trance dance and body paint


I made 10 copies of each sign and proceeded to put them up all over the hotel.



Posters by the elevators


Posters between the escalators


Cow Asylum poster outside of Cow Asylum, underneath their signs



Two Welsh posters on the same wall! Insanity!





Now that the posters were up, I was keen to see how people would react, especially the folks who were running the parties.

Personally, I don't like the Cow Asylum. Maybe you could tell from the tone of the poster I made for them. They blare their music, they encourage half-naked girls to dance up on their veranda's ledge, and the narrow passageway everyone's forced to walk down that runs past them is always clogged with people because of the stupid dancing girls, most of whom are nothing to look at whatsoever. So when I spotted a Cow Asylum staffer, I didn't explain myself or my poster, I just handed it to him and said, "I made you guys a poster in Welsh" and walked away. Again, it's funnier that way.

I'm good friends with a couple of the guys who run House of Toast (Ian and Joe) and I know another couple people who run it as well, so I was excited to get their reaction. I showed the poster to a Toastmaster (a guy I didn't know) and he was tickled pink. I put the sign up right next to their door and he posed with the sign.




Next, I stopped up at Connie's Space Lounge. Neither star5 nor spacebug was around, but I explained the poster to the woman working the smoothie counter and she was quite amused with it. I left a couple of posters with her in the Space Lounge to show the other SpaceLoungers later.




A cool sidenote: I went back into the Space Lounge later in the night and was adorning myself with glow necklaces when a man walked up and tapped me on the shoulder. It was none other than Burn Unit! It was so crazy cool to meet him in person. He pointed out all the other SF0ers in the room and welcomed me warmly. It was a great moment. I told him about the poster and he mentioned that he'd seen it when he was walking around and was confused by it but shrugged it off and kept walking. Hilarious!

I feel my efforts were well-met and quite successful. I was happy as a clam at the way the posters turned out, and also at the response I got, which was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone who saw the posters as I was putting them up asked me what they were about, and whenever I explained them, they inevitably said, "That's so COOL!" God bless the geeks for loving weirdness in all forms.




[[Voo]]