Notes from the MBTA, post-meetup
On the last Red Line inbound from Cambridge — a party of three getting to the train a few seconds later than us were split up, two left on the platform, one on the train. The guy who made the train is from Dallas and doesn’t know where the hell he’s going, but he says he’s okay with that and I believe him.
For the last couple of days I’ve been playing (I’m tempted to scare-quote that word) a Nintendo DS game called “Treasure World”, which could be reasonably described to that small segment of the population capable of decoding the following string of words as Mario Paint Meets War-Driving — it’s a game where you collect wifi hotspots to refuel a spaceship. Wildly aggressive traveling is a big boon to this sort of thing; I feel almost like I’m cheating.
But I left my DS on during the meetup, and several hours later I find that it has run out of charge and shut itself down. Does Treasure World save progress incrementally, or are hours of passive wifi detection lost? Is that really a loss in any meaningful sense, and if so, how and why? Video games are going in strange and wonderful directions lately.
On the logistics of meeting tons of people:
There’s a discursive conflict with meetups, a bit of unmapped etiquette, in the format of introductions: do you introduce yourself by your first name, or by your username on the site, or by both? I’m terrible with real names but have a reasonably good facility for mapping usernames to faces in my mind, so I prefer to hear a username, but I hate to press people if they choose not to use that in an introduction, and feel bad about pressing them to repeat a username if I couldn’t make it out the first time. This was a pretty loud meetup, so there were a lot of opportunities to chew on this dilemma.
On the Orange Line now, our Dallasian friend left behind to god knows what next. Waiting for the train to leave. My EVDO USB dongle, a marvel of modern telecommunications to my late-adopter eyes, is still fallible: sit in a tunnel underground and you may not get cell phone reception.
The meetup was fun; too crowded at first, with our hodgepodge of internet nerds clustered around an intermediate bar area and only slowly assimilating the tables we were promised over the period of an hour and a half or so, but eventually we asserted dominance over that quadrant of the venue and things became more comfortable. I saw some familiar faces and met a lot of people for the first time, and there were several lively rounds of Broken Picture Telephone throughout the night.
The Cragganmore that I erroneously directed shmegegge to purchase in NYC from the bar that did not stock it? This bar stocked it. Serendipity.
Our server, a woman named Kim, was fantastic, and took to the crowd famously, distributing at one point monkey stickers to those who would take them and promising at the end of the night to check out Metafilter and to look up this “cortex” guy. A potential convert? A new voice in the recurring server-vs-served flamewars on the site? We’ll see. She earned her tip, anyway, and we made sure it didn’t go missing.
