Reddit's Fantastical Voyage Pt. Ten

10:30am - Arrive in Boston

1:00pm - Finally make it to the Crafts House

4:00pm - What the Fluff Fest

7:30pm - Cooking, followed by eating.

9:00pm - Costumes, Calimocho & Cake

12:00am - The hair-cuts begin

2:00am - Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy

September 27^th into the 28^th

11:00am - Quality internet time

2:00pm - Origins of Reddit explored

3:00pm - xkcd and the ball pit!

5:30pm - Banquet

8:00pm - Tom disappears to watch some movies

9:00pm - House meeting, party theme decided

11:30pm - Solo bike ride around Boston

1:30am - Tour of the craft center

3:00am - Bed

6:00am - Make our way to the airport

8:00am - Discover flight discrepancy. Sit around airport.

4:30pm - Depart for JFK

8:00pm - Rain delay and unscheduled maintenance

9:30pm - Depart for Portland

Tom and I made it to Boston and were immediately delayed trying to make it to our host's house due to an accident in the subway. Apparently a woman got stuck either between the train and the platform or between cars on the train. I couldn't tell which one people meant. We made it to our host's place on the Tufts campus to discover it was not a host but hosts who we were staying with. Several Redditors in the crafts co-op had volunteered to put us up for our stay in Boston.

The first afternoon there coincided with the annual What the Fluff Festival, a celebration of marshmallow fluff, an odd foodstuff invented in Boston. Activities included a fluff food lottery where the number you receive determines what sort of food is paired with your fluff. Combinations ranged from sardines and fluff, marshmallows and fluff, to the crazy "chef specials" like spam, ginger, jelly and fluff (which Tom ate; I had sardines, bacon bits, and fluff). There were fluff inspired songs, a fluff cook-off, fluff magicians, a fluff queen as master of ceremonies, and the Flufferettes, scantily clad dancers who had no real relation to fluff that I could figure out. Restaurants in the area also were serving fluff inspired food and drinks, so Tom and I decided to try any alcohol + fluff drinks we could find, for science. There was a Fluff Alexander, the fluff take on the brandy Alexander (side note: apparently the drink that John Lennon and Harry Nilsson were famed for drinking during the whole "lost year" period) and the flufferchino, a coffee, fluff, and liquor drink. The Fluff Alexander was pretty tasty and light, while the flufferchino was made in a dive bar by a bartender who claimed someone else signed him up for the event and he wanted no part of it, but fuck it, if we were there he would made us the god damned drink. It sucked.

From there we made our way back to the Crafts House to help cook (but mostly help eat) the huge meal that everyone in the house pitched in on. After diner I was introduced to a drink I had heard of before but never tried, calimocho. This is where you mix cheap red wine with cola, normally Coke, but in our case Dr. Pepper. I was surprised by how much I liked it. Throughout the afternoon while we were hanging around, some mysterious baking project was going on that the girls would sort of giggle about when I asked about it. I had assumed it was something juvenile and funny (cock cake anyone?) but after diner they surprised Tom and me with a huge Reddit alien cake. I was so happy I made out with the cake. By this point the lion costume had already been worn by several of the people in the house, so I gave it to them knowing it will get way more use in their hands than if I kept it with me.

I had stupidly made a comment to Tom earlier in the day about how I had assumed that someone would request that I do something to my hair. So of course he immediately started a thread asking if people thought I should cut my hair. Tom, you are a bastard. So I got my hair cut while people partied throughout the house, and then Tom followed suit and got his own ridiculous haircut. There will be a full video of the haircutting process to follow.

As the part wound down someone put a movie on, and oh, what a movie. I honestly cannot believe I have never seen it before. It is entitled Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy. I recommend it to you all.

It was a nice, drizzly day when Tom and I woke up to go biking off in search of some Reddit history. We heard the day before that there was some Reddit graffiti on top of one of the house-mate's friend's apartment buildings, and we wanted to investigate it before heading over to hang out with Randall Munroe and getting permanently sucked into the ball pit. It appears that several of the Reddit founders had lived in the building and spent some time tagging the roof with their user names and one of the original sketches of the Reddit alien. Even now the building is crawling with programmers; I had a nice conversation with a current resident who is one of the lead developers on Sugar, the old OLPC OS.

The building was right around the corner from Mr. xkcd's abode. We barely got through saying hello before we all jumped into the ball pit. A few rounds of Mario Kart were played and some pictures taken before we got too wrapped up in a ball-sorting war to bother anymore. It was Tom and Randall vs Alana from the Crafts House and myself. Green and yellow vs red and blue. You can only throw your color and the game goes until the ball pit is sorted, or I jump in the middle and fuck it all up. We should have made a video of it, but no one was going to get out of the ball pit to do it. Sorry.

When we felt like we had bugged Randall enough we biked it back to the Crafts House for dinner. Tom took off to watch the Lion King and I biked around Boston a bit because it occurred to me I hadn't really left a few block radius around Tuft's yet. Then it was another early morning and off to the airport...

...except it shouldn't have been. It turns out both Tom and I were booked on a flight that left at 4pm instead of 9am despite both having given the 9am flight number when we made the reservations. But we were still getting to Portland pretty much on time, so we had about eight hours to kill in Logan International. Oh what fun.

Next stop: Portland