Booking the venue for UPCON, the story so far

The story of booking the venue for UPCON 2011 began last year when I went to tukkiewerf and asked, I was informed that I had to come back next year, so in this time the TKV, and GGC began plotting on how to make UPCON as awesome as we can.

So on the first day that the university was open –January 3^rd- I made the arduous journey from JHB to PTA –only done that for an entire year prior- and began scouting around for people to speak to since half the 75% of the university staff aren’t there. I spoke to the person in charge of managing the bookings for the venue (and no I’m not publicly announcing the date until I can confirm the venue).

So I come back to the university a week later to get the form now that the people responsible for them are back from holiday. So I fill the form out. And the land in charge of managing the bookings wonders why someone from tukkiewerf can’t just send her the form to book with, when the people at tukkiewerf says that a lady who is only coming back in a week needs to sign it off, but the lady in charge of managing the bookings, and blah blah blah blah the administrative procedures make no sense to me, and most of the staff.

So today I get the call from the lady that was away on holiday, aaaaand. Oh sorry your student society doesn’t exist. See last year's TKV council forgot to file some rather important paperwork, and ye we technically don’t exist, though we did host UPCON, and have out AGM.

Now the university won’t let us book the venue since we don’t have a society. And I asked if I can book it privately and pay full price, that’s not allowed either. So I was then told that I should go speak to the dean of students. He was out so I spoke to a senior assistant, I was told to email someone else since it was rather likely that the dean of students would refuse us the request.

So here we are. And we’re not done. We’ve not even started. We will get the venue, there will be an UPCON, and it will be awesome. We might just need some help from our beloved CON goers, and exhibitors.

PS, I do not wish to blame anyone. Blaming people will do nothing to help UPCON be a success. People banding together and showing support is what will help us. If we can show the university "Hey we are THIS AWESOME" then they will have to give us the venue. And hopefully forgive the past mishaps of the society.

Number13 ARG

So for those of you who do not know what an ARG is. Wiki it. It stands for Alternate Reality Game, not Argentina.

So the Number13 ARG is the first ARG in South Africa. And it so happened to occur at the University of Pretoria (TUKS) which I seem to go to a lot, don't ask me why. The ARG began by the hacking of the university Multimedia website. A link to a strange website was found, and down the rabbit hole we went.

The basis behind the ARG was that someguy (better known to the players as Kael) sister or girlfriend. Was kidnapped by stone masons for the ritual of a virgin sacrifice. I suppose at the point of virgin sacrifice the sister makes more sense so she is his sister.

Kael sends the players around on a bunch or arbitrary quests to save his sister. Since a never ending quest to save his girlfriend would be lame. So off we go solving encrypted puzzles with recording devices, hard riddles and since most people doing this were studying Computer Science. Laptops.

(On the note of laptops I might at the humorous part of me not having a single programming compiler IDE or anything on my now stolen laptop since I couldn't have been bothered to re-installed when i was getting my lovely new netbook)

So now we run around campus and discover the scary amount of stone mason stuff on campus. We also learn that Kael doesn't really want to save his sister since he only wants clever people running around doing stuff, In the end his sister in fact died in the ritual and we consumed her body make of delicious snackage and soft drink.

Not bad for something that lasted from the 14th of April to the 13th of May.

If you want more info try:
http://www.number13.co.za/ (The mysterious website)
http://num13.pbworks.com/ (The player wiki)
http://www.dreamfoundry.co.za/archives/1299 (A blog by someone who isn't me)