The Country Where I Quite Want to Be

Back in the dark days of the original Ronin Publishing (also known as the mid-90s), my business partner got invited to be a guest of honor at a convention in Switzerland. They offered to pay his way over and pick up his hotel. I told him he should go for it and he arranged to attend. I think many convention organizers outside the US don’t realize what a cheap date American designers are. Offer us a ticket to someplace more exotic than Columbus or Milwaukee and odds are we’ll come. Anyway, months go by and this Swiss show approaches. The night before the flight my partner has this dream in which his dead grandfather told him not to go. This freaks him out and he cancels at the last minute. I told him a free trip to Europe was probably the coolest thing he was ever going to get out of being in the game industry, but it was too late. He skipped the trip and a couple of years later he was out of the industry.

All of this is a long preamble to the fact that I’ve been invited to be a guest of honor at Ropecon in Finland and you can bet your ass I’m going. I was actually invited last year for the first time but it was on the same weekend as Recombination in Cambridge, England. This year I had no previous obligations so I was happy to accept. Nicole, being a proud Finnish-American, will be coming with me. We hope to arrive a few days early so we can see some of Helsinki and perhaps beyond. I, of course, am keenly interested in the Winter War and the Continuation War but I’ll try not to drag her to all war-related sites. Anyway, very much looking forward to it. The only downside is that it’s the weekend before GenCon. It seems likely that Nik and I will have a 15 hour flight home and then have to get on another plane the next day for GenCon. We may be quite zombiefied by the time we get there, but whatever: we’re going to Finland, baby.

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