CabinCon 2025: Ice Ice Baby

I know I said I was going to write more here on the blog, but what with the state of, well, everything, I just didn’t have a whole lot to say that wouldn’t be incredibly depressing. But over the last week or so I was able to take a much needed break, meeting up with friends for what we’ve come to affectionately call CabinCon 2025.

We had intended to meet up at Katsucon in National Harbor, Maryland, but again: with the state of everything going on we thought it best to avoid the area in the foreseeable future. Instead, we were able (through the kindness and generosity of our friend Jax along with Ciarán and Tasha and Rosie and Alex) to redirect and get a large-ish rental house in an Undisclosed Location north of DC. It meant a slightly longer drive, but it was so very, very worth it.

You see, Katsucon this year turned out to be something of a shitshow. OK, so technically it was a grey water show, but is that really any better? Over the course of the weekend, we got the following updates from Katsucon attendees:

• No hot water
• Hot water restored, but with a water boil advisory
• No water at all thanks to a broken water main
• Bedbug infestation
• Unannounced alterations to the VIP passes, effectively eliminating front of line and preferred seating privileges, meaning folks paid an extra $100 for a different lanyard and a t-shirt
• Jammed cell service, combined with the venue asking $400 per device for three-day access their high-speed wifi per device
• Hotels being extra shady with their resort fees
• Higher-than usual number of theft/attempted theft
• Explosion of a grey water pipe in Artist’s Alley (oringally reported as a sewer pipe)
• And then a leftover prop/gag left behind and unseen or not removed by hotel staff caused problems for a meeting occurring directly after the convention, causing none other than Brittney Griner to cancel her appearance .

Announcing at their closing ceremonies that the 2026 Katsucon theme will be “Apocalypse” seems a little on the nose.

But we weren’t there. We were in our wonderfully remote Undisclosed Location.

Of course, the East Coast had a significant amount of winter weather the last few weeks. I watched the weather leading up to our departure date and thankfully the first storm cleared out hours before we left. We drove through the evening and made really good time – I know now why my dad always preferred driving at night, though it can be a tad taxing if there’s no time to rest beforehand.

There was about a half hour of terror when I had trouble getting Krystal’s main prop into the car along with our luggage. If you’ve ever seen the show Arcane, she was going to cosplay Jinx, and so built her Rhino and one of her grendades:

But with a little finagling we made it work. Huzzah.

We stayed over at one of our friend’s house to be nice and rested for the final leg of the drive and to be mostly rested so as to fully enjoy every second of our getaway.

There was another few minutes of concern when we arrived to find our stay at the top of a relatively steep hill covered in both ice and snow – the first of our group to arrive couldn’t make it up the hill but just then a man with a plow came by to clean it out. Huzzah.

We made it up and determined that we would only go out again if absolutely necessary, and even then we’d use the one vehicle with all-wheel drive to have the best chance of making it back up the hill.

I started a batch of sweet tea and got a simmer pot going to start setting the mood for the weekend, and then about half of us went out grocery shopping. We played our own version of “The Price is Right” at the cash register, and I won, coming in just $5 under the actual total.

Upon our return, my most dear friend and beloved Sibling Mine Ciarán gifted me with a shirt – it is now a tradition that Ciarán gifts me with clothing when we have these get-togethers; last time it was a marvelous traveling cloak that I often wear while playing D&D. This time, Ciarán had found an amazing gender-euphoric inducing shirt at a market that just so happens to combine elements of my old PC Garrett and my new PC Rustle.

That first evening we enjoyed some take-and-bake pizza before settling in to play our first TTRPG session of the getaway: Shadows of Eclipsium. This game is DM’d by our friend Tasha, and she gave all her players 3D-printed dice-and-mini boxes!

This would be the first of many sessions that weekend; I think we ended up playing close to 24 hours of campaigns over the course of four days. This was glorious, as our in-person games only happen once a year or so. It also means that I had SO MANY NOTES to type (a good problem to have) that it took nearly three additional days to type them all.

In case you forgot or didn’t know, Shadows of Eclipsium is a D&D campaign in which I play Rustle, a Kenku Way of Shadow Monk. I forgot to take a photo of my word board before I left, but thankfully realized I’d only added two words since my last photo: “motherfuckers” and “chocolate” – and so made it through the session with minimal vocabulary difficulty (other than the one I already have as Kenku have no speech of their own and can only mimic what they’ve heard).

The next morning I got up and had some coffee and ice cream bread and did some journaling while the others rested. We had no official time schedule, so it was quite relaxing for all involved.

For lunch that day, Rosie and I made a charcuterie board – it was so much fun being able to work in the kitchen making food for my friends with my friends:

We started making a CabinCon playlist to serve as the background for our time together, and one of our party also found a great LoFi station to start out the mornings. That afternoon we just sat and talked and watched some Arcane, and that evening Rosie helped me make chicken vegetable soup, containing shredded chicken, peas, carrots, green beans, corn, celery, onion, and assorted seasonings – and it paired quite well with a nice blueberry wine chosen by our friend Tasha, us having enjoyed it so much when we got together in 2023.

The soup received high praise, and Ciarán told me “you don’t cook like white folk; you really believe in seasoning” (or something similar) as their whole body did what I call a “happy heart wiggle” in pure joy. I love feeding my family and seeing their joy and enjoyment warms my heart as much as the soup warms my insides.

That night we played the first of two sessions of our Hilan: Legacy campaign (DM’d by our friend Jax), in which I play Kai: a fire genasi oath of glory paladin with a camel mount named Za’atar and a donkey named Clover. He needs to find a safe place for Clover because it’s getting dangerous.

The image above is only concept art; Kai now has more heavy plate armor and wields a glaive. I’m working on updating his look but haven’t quite got there yet.

Saturday morning I got up and enjoyed some coffee while also enjoying the scenery. There were storms predicted for Sunday, so Rosie and I did another grocery run just in case. We saw many deer on our drive, picked up Starbucks for everyone (I had a white chocolate peppermint hot chocolate), and enjoyed a Taylor Swift car ride karaoke session.

That afternoon, we did some cosplay while Rosie made baked Brie: one sweet with raspberry jam, and one savory with a more garlicky flavor.

Tahsa and Alex dressed as their D&D characters (Yulind and Katarzyna, respectively) while the other four of us dressed up as Arcane characters: Krystal as Jinx, Ciarán as Felicia, Jax as Silco (all of them absolutely stunning, by the way), and myself as Lest – this was a surprise to me that Krystal had been planning with Ciarán, and I can’t thank them enough for both putting the cosplay together and then giving me makeup tips (along with Rosie and Alex) as I got into character. Here’s a gallery of my transformation into the Vastaya:

That evening I made burgers based on another of our TTRPGs, Harper’s Calling, at the request of everyone else (though we wouldn’t be playing this game that particular weekend). The burger was seasoned with my “Harper’s Calling” mix of instant coffee, mushroom and onion umami seasoning, kosher salt, chili power, black pepper, and celery seeds. Cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato, and ketchup were additional options, and it was all served up on potato buns. I enjoyed mine with a nice Riesling picked out by Rosie, and it was perfection.

Ciarán gave us all small duckies before we sat down to play our second session of our Hilan: Legacy campaign, during which we took a break to enjoy S’mores. I had mine with a Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup and oh my soul was that delicious.

My mom called while we were playing D&D; something had told her to check in on us, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary just then, and many of us stayed up late until the early hours of the morning long after game had wrapped for the session just talking and vibing.

However, early Sunday morning the power went out due to the second ice storm of our vacation. Tasha and I gathered up firewood and found some small candles and generally did our best to get things cozy for everyone else. Jax and Tasha talked to the owner, who relayed that the power company said the power would be back on around 7PM – this was somewhat frustrating as Ciarán had planned to run their game early that afternoon, and we had a friend unable to be at CabinCon that would need to join in digitally.

In a CabinCon miracle, the power company was better than their prediction and we regained power with plenty of time to play Nights of Revelation – and enjoy some Aztec Hot Chocolate prepared by Jax.

While we played we also enjoyed spaghetti made by Rosie: the sauce was started as soon as the power came back on and I enjoyed the dish with a nice, sweet Moscato, but I forgot to take a picture of the delicious meal. I was also privileged to help Rosie make the sauce!

Nights of Revelation is a World of Darkness kitchen sink campaign where I play Cyrus, a Silver Fang Galliard. Ciarán ran an absolutely EPIC session in which the only PC still around from Session 1 gave a HUGE info dump & set the party on course to actually solve some of the problems they’ve created and/or uncovered in the previous thirty-five-ish something episodes. Ciarán has developed an absolutely enthralling plot and now we have both the information and ability to start putting the pieces together.

We went to bed earlier than the previous nights but still slept in a bit: we’d planned to leave on Monday but the icy conditions meant we had to wait for some road conditions to improve – and once we went down the hill we weren’t getting back up.

For lunch we had pierogi:

Then we stated de-icing the cars and packing up and almost forgot to take a group photo but we made it just before we lost the light:

We each headed out, keeping in contact with our group chat. I had already taken the next day off of work in anticipation of needing an extra day, and Krystal had been in communication with her work as well. We made it a few hours in the homeward direction before once again stopping at our friend’s house – while there we learned that an ice storm was headed our way and so we decided to leave a little earlier the next day to make it back in time to go to the grocery store “just in case”

We managed to do exactly that, and that proved to be the right decision: while driving home I got an alert that my work would be closed Wednesday and Thursday preemptively, and Krystal was likely going to be able to use adverse weather leave. We got home and I unpacked the car, brought in the mail, then went out and got gas and groceries. Even in that short amount of time I could feel the temperature dropping.

Wednesday brought the freezing rain exactly as predicted. I spent the day unpacking, enjoying some Pusheen-brand Quality Beans that arrived while I was away, and started typing up my notes to update the wikia pages.

We also received a package; new blankets. The place where we stayed had the best snuggly blankets and so we looked at the tag, found them online, and thus far four of us have ordered our own with two others just trying to decide on color. Krystal found me a nice orange color:

I made tomato soup and grilled cheese for supper, somehow managing to spill soup all over my stovetop and down one of the burners. Then that evening we played “part three” of our Hilan: Legacy “mega session” – and in this session Alex was able to have her PC Katarzyna give us our gift sketches (created by Hexbayne) in-game!

Alex is also a lover of puns and MANY times through the weekend we looked at each other mad just knew what we were thinking. Glorious.

On Thursday I thought to make things cozy inside by making another simmer pot when I ran into a minor setback when my apple slicer simply fell apart:

But on the positive side of things I had absolutely nowhere to go, so I kept at typing of our session notes and watching Monty Python while enjoying some apple cider from a mix packet. That afternoon I received yet another package: a keychain I’d won from alexmusttodraw!

Thursday night I made myself some macaroni and cheese from a boxed mix. It was mushroom and truffle flavor with cheddar cheese sauce and it was quite good paired with a limoncello LaCroix with some extra drops of lemon juice and a tablespoon of rich honey syrup.

Thursday afternoon we received word that my work would stay closed on Friday, and therefore I would not need to return to work until Monday, which means that between my requested time off and closures due to inclement weather, I’ll have had eleven and a half days off work counting weekends. I can’t complain about that in the least.

Friday the cold bothered my back something fierce and I did not get up until 9:00 or so, when I helped Krystal get into her car so she could go to work. Then I typed more TTRPG notes before taking my car to get inspected and pay my registration. Work made the right call: anywhere the sun hadn’t touched for a significant amount of time remained icy – even now on Saturday almost two days later the ice is still melting and causing some treacherous conditions.

When I got to the inspection station I was the next in line, but even greater was when I got to the payment center and found there was no line at all, and so was in and out in under three minutes!

I came back home, talking to my mom through the car stereo on the way (huzzah for handless technology), where I finished typing up the TTRPG notes and then ordered supper for Krystal and I: she got a ham, pineapple, and cheese calzone and I got a green pepper and mushroom pizza. We split some peasant bread with meat sauce and watched Last Voyage of the Demeter. It was a good movie that I enjoyed quite a bit and wish they’d use to spin off some more Dracula movies. But it didn’t do well at the box office, so there’s that.

Today I cleaned the kitchen and have been getting cozy with my new blanket and a new heating pad. I had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch with sour cream and onion potato chips and this evening I’ll have my leftover pizza.

What have you been up to?