Looting for a good cause.

[gridlore]

Home from Baycon, which was wonderful as usual. My panels were great, especial the Phone Phreaks panel where we stunned Steve Mix by saying that, we, we war-dialed by hand. Parties were sparse and oddly spread out all over the mysterious third floor. This needs to be fixed next year.

I bought my usual assortment of books and finished Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire in three days. A really good book, I highly recommend it. But then came the Charity Auction. On Saturday, I had a panel immediately after the auction in Connect 4, which, sadly, was not the game room (too small), and I saw the stuff being carried out to be put up for the next day's auction. There was an amazing number of older gaming products. Since we had been hoarding money for months, I resolved to be there for the next session.

After my wildly successful 0800 panel Are Cupcake Really Evil? Transformative Roles and Baked Goods in Modern Science Fiction (which ended having a variety of nommy baked goods) I scurried over to the auction room. This year's charity was the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation so all the money raised was going to a good cause.

There was plenty of great fannish stuff, but I bided my time. Then the Earthdawn set come up. I was the only bidder. For $20, I got:

• Earthdawn Game System. 6001 (softcover)


• Earthdawn Gamemaster Pack. 6002


• Barsaive (boxed set). 6100


• Denizens of Earthdawn, Volume 1. 6101


• Denizens of Earthdawn, Volume 2. 6102


• Legends of Earthdawn, Volume 1. 6103


• Parlainth: The Forgotten City (boxed set). 6104


• Creatures of Barsaive. 6105


• The Adept's Way. 6106


• Horrors. 6107


• Sky Point & Vivane (boxed set). 6108


• Serpent River. 6109


• The Book of Exploration. Legends of Earthdawn, Volume 2. 6110


• Earthdawn Survival Guide. 6112


• The Theran Empire. 6114


• Magic: A Manual of Mystic Secrets. 6201


• Mists of Betrayal. 6301


• Terror in the Skies. 6302


• Infected. 6303


• Parlainth Adventures. 6304

None of the boxed sets were in boxes, and a few minor bits, mostly small play aides, are missing. Looks like I got about 2/3rds of the first edition. But I wasn't finished. This lot came up, and I had to have it.

• d20 Future (WotC)


• d20 Modern (WotC)


• d20 Urban Arcana Campaign Setting (WotC)


• The Tome of Drow Lore (Mongoose)


• d20 Call of Cthulhu (WotC)

Got those for $30. Can you imagine the campaign I could run with those books? But still, I had money. My final score was the AD&D 2nd Edition Volo's Guides to Waterdeep and the Sword Coast. I think I paid $10 for the two of them.

By then, kshandra had joined me, and she won us two memberships to Baycon 2019 for $50. At that point, we were done, both in wallet and spirit. We watched as more goodies went to good homes. Our auction raised about $1,200 for the JDRF, along with a similar number the day before and who knows how much at the final auction at the Dead Dog Party.

Good con, and it shows that squirreling away money really pays off. This was entirely my recycling money and gift cards Kiri got for taking part in a diabetes study.

See all y'all at WorldCon76!

Comments

[kengr]

Wardialing by hand?!!

Closest I've ever heard to *thast* was when I was maintaining a file with a list of what were valid exchanges in the 503 area code, and which were local calls.

There were online resources to find what the valid exchanges were (but not always when they'd become active), but finding which were local calls involved dialing numbers in each of the new exchanges by hand and listening to what error message you got, or if you got connected to something.

[gridlore]

That's what we'd do. We had a list of the missing exchanges, and we'd split it up into chunks, and record what we got for each number. Eventually, we'd find the inner operator and other goodies.

When I was getting out of Phreaking in 1984 we were starting to use a TRS-80 as a wardialer. My going-away gift when I left for Fort Benning was a nice little Red Box.

[melchar]

Nice haul of gaming loot. Congratulations for being in the right place at the right time!