Conventional Wisdom

(Historical Notes: I suppose props are in order to Past Me for being a bit more upfront about the REAL reason I didn’t get a hotel room.  Granted, Past Me also neglects to mention the fact that I didn’t really try all that hard to FIND a room, just giving up the second I realized most of my usual roommates either weren’t going or didn’t have any space to spare.  That’s increasingly become the problem with out of state cons like this.  It’s already harder and harder to find friends who’ll be at the con the farther away it is, and the more my old friend circle implodes or drifts off, the harder still that becomes.  But it IS the truth that the Ichibancon experiment went juuuust not bad enough that I‘d been tempted ever since to try it again.  And it was DEFINITELY true that I’d burned through a lot more money on hotel rooms this year than I’d budgeted out for myself, so doing SOMETHING to cut costs was pretty important.  It’s just… well, read on…)