View from Benacia/Issue 103: ShireCon Goes Amazingly Well

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This imported article was originally posted at http://viewfrombenacia.blogspot.com/2005/10/issue-103-shirecon-goes-amazingly-well.html at 10/20/05.

Well, well, well... that was pretty interesting. New York is, for a humongous city with massive problems, not entirely the overwhelmingly scary place I thought it would be... er, WE thought it would be. And by "we" I mean the editorial staff of the View. Yeah.

An excellent overview can be found here, but as long as we're publishing, we'd like to take the time to point out a few things that happened to us personally during the trip. We ordered tickets online for a Greyhound bus to New York, a week or so before the trip; the instructions told us to arrive an hour before our bus was due, in order to pick up the tickets. So when the 15th came, we arrived at the kiosk a full hour before the bus left, just as instructed. The kiosk was closed, but this was not a subject for immediate alarm, as it was about the unholy hour of the morning when the kiosk normally opened; surely, we thought, it would take only a few minutes.

After half an hour, I... gah! I mean, WE... and the other poor people in line were getting anxious. A passerby bus driver (as it happened, the driver of OUR bus) informed us that the person assigned to work the kiosk was out sick, and no one could replace him, and so no one could get tickets. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth on our part, however, the driver said that the first three people in line could get on the bus, and just get the tickets in New York. We (yes, all of us) were one of those three people.

After arriving at the Port Authority, we picked up our tickets and called up various people to figure out where everyone was, discovering that the group was heading to Grand Central to pick up dStryker. After consultation with Gryphon, we convinced them to come by and get us as well, because we tried stepping outside to look around, but immediately found ourselves suffering from claustrophobia with all the buildings and people outside. We quickly acclimated, however, once we were among friends. After that, there's not much to say, except that we had no idea it was possible to get utterly trashed on a game like Diplomacy as if it were, say, an addictive substance.

Meanwhile, in Shireroth there's been some semi-massive reorganization going on. The former Duchy of Brookshire has become the Kaiserial Realm, a sort of personal fief of the Kaiser; Elwynn is a Duchy again, Naudia'Diva and Benacia are in Yardistan, BAM has been dissolved and replaced with Netopalis, led by Foghorn... *takes breath* Moose has given up Dukeship of Yardistan to Greg, and Bill is Baron of Antya in Brookshire.

And, in a rather surprising move, the Dinarchy of Antica has responded to the Republic's recognition of the Dinarchy by passing a resolution that not only refused to recognize the Republic back, but promised "swift and permanent" breaking off of relations with any other nation that recognized the Republic. The move surprised many in the micronational world, and angered others; both Alexandria and Slobovia responded to the resolution by recognizing only the Republic.