When you see BlueCyborg at a convention, everything is already there.
Games are on shelves, dice are laid out, miniatures are lined up, signs are in place and the card reader is hopefully behaving itself.
I wish I was at that stage now.
London MCM is about two and a half weeks away and at the moment very little is packed. I still have a load of miniatures to print and pack, hundreds of duckies to paint, shelves full of games that somehow need to become sensible boxes, and stock that is either on its way or, in some cases, hasn't even been ordered yet.
So yes, everything is completely under control.
Mostly.
Part of the problem is that this weekend was supposed to be Elgin Comic Con. I had been working towards that as the next event, with London coming afterwards, but Elgin was cancelled and that has thrown a fairly big spanner in the works.
You would think suddenly getting a free weekend would make getting ready for London easier. In reality, event preparation tends to build around the next deadline. Stock I expected to have ready for Elgin would then have been packed, counted and much closer to being ready for London.
Instead, I've suddenly jumped forward to preparing for the biggest trip without that intermediate deadline forcing me to get everything sorted.
There is quite a lot still to do
A lot of the miniatures I take to events are printed here, and the printers have plenty of work ahead of them.
Some models need topping up, others need printing from scratch, and everything has to be sorted and packed afterwards.
Then there are the duckies.
Hundreds of them.
They are currently somewhere between "stock for London" and "a very large pile of things I still need to paint".
The board and card games present a different problem. They're already sitting nicely on shelves, which is great for running a shop and less useful when I need to get them several hundred miles south in a van.
At some point I need to decide what is actually coming, how much of each game I need, and how to box it all without wasting half the available space.
There is also stock still arriving, and some things I know I want for London that I haven't actually ordered yet.
This is fairly normal for me before a big event. I always think I'm going to have everything sorted earlier next time. It never quite works out that way.
Choosing what comes
I cannot take the whole shop with me, so eventually everything has to pass the "is this worth putting in the van?" test.
That gets harder as the range grows. Board games take up a lot of room. Miniatures are easier to move, but there are now enough different ones that keeping sensible stock of everything is a job in itself. Dice are compact, but people still want a decent choice. Then there are card games, accessories and all the other things that somehow multiply every time I look at the shelves.
And that is before I get to the stuff that is not for sale.
Shelves, tables, signs, bags, card readers, cables, tools and all the boring things that only become interesting when one of them is missing.
I have forgotten the card readers before. Going back for them added another two hours onto an already long journey, which is a fairly effective way of making sure you remember them next time.
I have also had to get more ruthless about display pieces.
The five-foot LED D20 was great, but it took up far too much room for something that was basically there to look cool. So it stays at home now.
Packing the van
Eventually all of this needs to stop being piles, shelves and half-finished stock and actually go into the van.
For London the van needs to take the shelves, tables, display stuff and all the stock, so it fills up pretty quickly.
I also have to think about what goes in first. If I pack something I need for setup at the back, I'll end up unloading half the van just to get to it. And anything fragile needs packed well enough to survive seven or eight hours on the road.
It becomes a very large game of Tetris, except getting it wrong means standing in a loading bay pulling half the van apart because the thing I need is somehow right at the back.
There is usually a point where I look at what is still waiting to go in and think there is no chance it will all fit.
So far, it usually has.
Thursday starts at 5am
For MCM I will be leaving at around 5am on Thursday.
The drive normally takes about seven and a half to eight hours, so if everything behaves itself I should reach ExCeL at around 3pm. From there I have until roughly 8pm, when I get kicked out, to unload the van and turn everything back into BlueCyborg.
And all of this is me.
There is no events team and no driver taking over halfway down the motorway. Nobody is waiting at the other end to unload while I take a break.
I print the stock, paint the duckies, pack the van, drive it south, unload it, build the stand, work the event, pack everything back up and eventually drive it home again.
Setup days are also not exactly a shining example of good nutrition. Leaving at 5am is too early for breakfast, and by the time setup is finished and I make it to the hotel it can be after 10pm. At that point I am usually too tired to go looking for food.
I keep meaning to get better at that too.
My biggest setup problem is usually me
The first part of setup is the bit I dread most.
Nothing is fixed yet. I have shelves, tables, stock and an empty patch of floor, which apparently gives my brain permission to redesign the entire stand from scratch.
Maybe the dice should go somewhere else. Maybe the miniatures would work better at an angle. Maybe there is some clever new layout I have somehow missed at every previous event.
I can waste far too much time on this.
Most of the time I eventually end up with something pretty close to the setup I already know works, except I have burned a chunk of the evening getting there.
Once I stop trying to be clever, things normally move quickly. Shelves go up, stock comes out and the stand starts looking familiar again.
This time I am also hoping to record more of the setup with the new 360 camera. Setup and strip-down are normally difficult to film because I am busy doing them, so the plan is to put the camera somewhere useful, get on with the job and see afterwards whether I captured anything worth watching.
London will be the first proper test.
There is every chance I come home with several hours of excellent footage of the back of a shelving unit.
Then the doors open
By the time people start coming through the doors, none of this should be visible.
The unfinished miniatures, hundreds of unpainted duckies, orders that hadn't arrived yet, 5am start, eight-hour drive and five hours of setup will hopefully have turned into a stand that looks like it was supposed to be there all along.
I've got two and a half weeks to make that happen.