Went to the Bay Area Renaissance Festival today with Athena and Ian. There we met up with some old friends like Amanda and Sarah. One other person that I knew there was Ashley, whom I have met at least one time before somewhere… probably at Hoggetowne.
Anyway, BARF is pretty much the same as it always has been… a busier version of Hoggetowne but really something that is the same. The shows are pretty much the same, the stores are most certainly selling the same crap, and the food is the same over priced stuff that is available at every ren/med fair I have ever been to… except they were missing deep fried artichoke hearts, which I adore.
There were really only two performances of note that I want to relate here. First was Christoph the Insulter, who bases his show entirely on insulting the crap out of crowd selected participants. For money, he insults them. His insults run towards the crude level of things, but there is some intelligence hidden in some of his words that take people some time to get at times. Not really my thing, but I respect him for his work, I guess.
The other was the Chess board that is run at BARF. Now, I have been doing the Chess board at Hoggetowne for the past six years, and I can pick out a good fight from a bad fight on a board pretty darned quick. These were not fights that were all that good, I am sorry to say. Typically their fights run too long, with lots of gaps installed for speaking parts, which unfortunately don’t work all that well in an open air, full circle arena with a crowd that is screaming its’ lungs out. If you can’t hear what is being said, it isn’t really worth saying. This is why our board fights at Hoggetowne last perhaps thirty seconds, except perhaps the final fight on the boards… and even then we are finding that those need to be cut down somewhat. People just get bored with the fights, truth be told.
Anyway, that is what I did today, in addition to a bit more work on the project for class that I have been assigned. Things are moving along on that, and tomorrow I actually get a chance to talk to the instructor about it and find out some things that need to be clarified.