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This summary was originally written by Patrik Montgomery, but I've edited in some of my own and Bill Garrett's comments to it as well.
We also have a few pictures available. First, a few small grayscales (those have been here for some time now). But we can now present several colour pictures, taken by Carin and with commentary from Fredrik. Also, the report from the other side of the pond!
The posts on rasfwrj keep flooding the newsservers, and Darkfriend Socials come and pass, leaving reports that are posted. The posts are webified, and even the URL is long forgotten when the Social that gave it birth comes again. On one Social, called the third SWEDFS by some, a Social yet to come, a Social long past, a train from Gothenburg rolled in at Stockholm Central Station. The train was not the beginning. There are neither beginings nor endings to Socials like this one. But it was a beginning.
As the Wheels of the Train ground to a halt, passengers left through the doors, among them yours truly, Patrik Montgomery, and the Gray Man, CD Skogsberg. I found CD almost immediately (his Gray Man capabilities must have been turned off or something) and noticed that he was somewhat unshaven. I did not point it out, however; I do have manners, even if I seldom let it show. CD later told me that he had been growing that moustache for 11 weeks. No offense intended, CD, but unless your facial hair suddenly triples its speed of growth, I doubt that anyone will recognize it as a moustache before Christmas, and you'll propably still need a false beard if you're going to play Santa Claus.
As there was still one hour left until the social was supposed to begin and almost three before we were going to have dinner, we decided to get something to eat (Even by X2000, Sweden's fastest train, it is almost a 3,5 hour ride from Gothenburg, and we were hungry). After leaving McDonalds (it's good to eat junk food before a good dinner. Makes you appreciate the real food more), we had to decide how we were going to get to SF-bokhandeln (the SF-bookstore, literally), the meeting point, without getting lost in a foreign city. We decided to play it safe and follow the generic instructions I had printed from the 'net and go by subway. We entered, payed and checked how far it was. It was only one stop away! Did we feel foolish as we followed the rest of the instructions and entered the store.
Inside we eventually managed to gather the whole gang. The guilty ones were: Karl-Johan Norén (surprising, eh?), CD Skogsberg (but you already knew that), Fredrik Strandberg, Kjell Ståhl, Bo Lindbergh, Carin Wesslau, Anna-Stiina Antola and Samppa Mäkelä (both from Finland), Carl Nilsson (from Västerås), Björn Wennerberg, and Patrik Montgomery (Yes, that's me).
On the last DFS, we considered burning a Goodkind book, but decided against due to the fact that noone had a camera. This time, both Fredrik and Carin had cameras, so we bought the first of Sword of Truth-books, Wizard's (sic!) First Rule (because that was the thickest - value for money, you know) and went looking for the best place to burn it without being charged with arson. In a suitably secluded area we found a good, large, black ashtray, which Carin immediately named The Altar of Ba'alzamon. As I had experienced the double disgrace of buying the book and carrying it around in our search for a suitable spot, I got the honor of lighting it. It caught fire nicely and burnt with a satisfyingly large flame until there was nothing but ashes left. We saved what was left of a page as proof of our offering. Several pictures were also taken, both of us and of the burning book. To the extent of my knowledge, we have not yet recieved any word from Ba'alzamon if he liked the book, but since he is mad, he propably did.
We left the Altar for the restaurant, an Italian Restaurant named Haga. We ordered everything from pizza to pasta, and at least I liked what I had. To save Karl-Johan from the dishonour of being the last to finish again, I ate slowly and talked a lot. As a result, I was the last. The serving staff removed everyone else's plates before I was finished. What do I put with for friends sake :-) ?
[Karl-Johan: You was helped by that you got almost twice as much pasta as I did...]
At the beginning of the dinner, we did not even mention the books. Really. I mean it. It was almost as if everyone wanted to show that they could talk about other things than "Who killed Asmodean?" and "Is Osan'gar Dashiva?" (The discussion, BTW, was partly in English because of the Finns). After a while, though, Carin asked if anyone had any theories to discuss, and that was what woke the sleeping bear. I mentioned the prophecy about a laurel crown, a beggars staff and something more and asked what everyone thought about how Rand would become a beggar. Karl-Johan suggested that Alanna would die and that the backlash from the broken bond would push him over the edge. The taint was up for discussion, which lead on to one of the few memorable quotes. "I can just picture Rand standing alone in a large room asking 'Hello? Is everyone here?'" (considering that he already shares his head with LTT and Alanna, and that Elayne propably also would want her share, plus a possible sul'dam, if the male a'dam is found again).
[Karl-Johan: Followed with: "And then the Gray Man said 'I'm here'".
Another exchange:
"Jordan has no clue what he's doing, and he's
doing it just to piss us off."
"Either that, or he knows exactly
what he's doing, and he's doing it just to piss us off."]
We left the restaurant and continued on to Karl-Johan's work, where he sits days and writes nice things about Netscape Communicator in the book he's writing.
[Karl-Johan: YM "tries to write nice things". Since I can't, I make lots of stupid jokes instead.]
He also confessed that he uses Netscape for reading news. "But that's not possible", I exclaimed (I have used the news client in Navigator 3 when I was bored with the programming lessons at school). Karl-Johan assured me that it was, and that he was forced to do so to for evaluating purposes.
[Karl-Johan: Well, barely possible. If you don't post. If you can stand the broken threading. If you don't get a mouse arm.]
We fired up Communicator and used The Compleat Index to check out different art pages, most of which were really good. I did yell "Bryce! Bryce! Bryce!" a few times while seeing the pictures, though. Not that they weren't good, they are, but it was really clear how they had been made. To fill up the space until the InterContinental Virtual DFS (or ICVDFS, for short) could start (there is a nine hour time difference between Stockholm and San Francisco) we checked out a few WOT-related MIDI-files and the homepages of some of the persons present. I discovered that Adobe Pagemill seems to have more than one nasty bug, because several of the pages looked wierd in Communicator. The new background did a lot for readability, though. This lead to a discussion about bugs in Communicator, and Karl-Johan revealed that there are several. Not very surprising, but still.
Carin, Anna-Stiina and I also had a very interesting discussion. The result was basically that Jordan writes the books the way he does just to piss us off. He introduces persons like Moridin and Cadsuane just so that we shouldn't think that we knew anything. We also assumed that he reads the FAQ and then writes the book so that most of our guesses turn out to be wrong :-).
At around 2130 local time (about 1230 in California) Karl-Johan and Drew Gillmore managed to make Netscape Conference work - more or less. The sound didn't work, but the Whiteboard did, and that was what was most important. Using a QuickCam, we had prepared a few pictures that we sent. A group picture was of course sent, and also a picture of the halfburnt page from Wizards first rule. The gang at the Bay Area DFS promised to burn the Gor books in response to our offering. (I'm not going to give you a list of who were there, because they'll propably do that better themselves).
Basically, we sat there for 4 hours (some left earlier to be able to get home before the subway stopped going) just sending stupid pictures back and forth and saying "Ook?" whenever the connection seemed to have broken down (it did break down twice or thrice).
[Bill: You were saying "Ook?" It sounded like "Bork". In fact, everything you said sounded like "Bork".]
We had a really good time, though (at least I had). A few highlights were the pictures of Ba'alzamon appearing at the Bay Area Social, shortly after followed by Rand. It seemed like a certain Bill Garrett (K-J's guess. If he was wrong, don't blame me) and his editing skills had something to with that. My compliments, Bill. The pictures were really great, and you were fast as well.
[Bill: It wasn't me. I think Drew was the artist. I can't be too sure, though, as I was drinking maple syrup at the time.]
All we could do was paint a few Horns on Karl-Johan's head and make CD's face gray. As soon as most of the Darkfriends on the other side had gathered, they returned a group picture of their own. Hawk wasn't in it (surprised?) but she had a "Hawk-Guac" as her representative. I don't know what a Hawk-Guac really is, but it's green and reportedly chunky. It sure looked funny.
Anna-Stiina traded her Warder, Samppa, to Briana for $1 000 000. Briana bugged Anna-Stiina about until she gave up and put a price on his forehead (literally. "He has nice big forehead. There's room for a nice big price tag there") and Briana accepted ("We're talking pesos, right?" "No, yen", I answered. "Darn" came back on the Whiteboard.)
In the middle of everything, a mail was sent to our email-list, swe_dfs. It was Oskar Brandt who wondered when that DFS was going to happen... In between laughs we sent an answer "NOW!!!!!!" and said Hi to the Americans from him. Their response: Ooga Booga.
Since Drew was there, I used the opportunity to ask him about his nickname, Kid Propability. The answer was very interesting. Appearently, he threw 18 with three dice 23 times in a row! The propability of someone doing that is 1 in 4,92*1053! He also had a period of about an hour when he could throw a number you called. I don't even want to think about the propability of that happening. It doesn't work very good in Las Vegas, though. It seems Jordan knew what he was talking about when he created the concept of ta'veren.
As the clock reached 0130, we closed down the ICVDFS and caught the last subway train to go to Rissne and Tensta, respectively (that's where our hosts for the night, Karl-Johan and Fredrik, live). I and CD joined Fredrik as the Finns already had their stuff at Karl-Johan's place. I volunteered to write this report as I felt that it was my turn, and here it is.
Karl-Johan Norén,
kjnoren@hem3.passagen.se