Over the weekend, I visited the hostel in central/eastern Mass with melopoeia, drclaw, and coda, which will hopefully be the location of a demoparty for 40-80 people next June. Some pics here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/val.grimm/Party2ndSiteVisitNovember2009

Some nice features I took away:
* Beds! Enough for everyone, cheaper than a hotel, and right there in the same building, just up a flight of steps or two, no elevators. :)
* Main room has lots of comfy couches and chairs.
* Dining room has tables already set up for computers and laptops.
* Sufficient power will be provided in both main and dining rooms.
* Big meadow! Right outside the main room. They have firewood and a fire pit!
* Kitchen for all our cooking/refrigerating needs.
* Remote enough that we won't be bothering anybody, but within driving distance of civilization for getting food and supplies (such as large inflated pancakes).

Feature/size-wise, it's the venue I wish we had for Impulse. As for ambiance, well, it's quaint as fuck. :) The site reminds me of Mekka/Symposium and Breakpoint (the original depot site) in various ways. I'm uncertain if we can get the northeast demo/art/music scene going again, but at the same time, I'm psyched.

About a month ago I went into a Barnes & Noble for the first time since April. Aside from the regular, common board games like Jenga, Scrabble, etc, back in April they only had two games that were ranked high at boardgamegeek.com. These were Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne New World.

Still their selection was a lot better than Borders that didn't have any games like that whatsoever, and presumably still don't.

So a month ago I went in B&N and they had Dominion. Then yesterday I went and they had gotten a lot more. Now they have two games by Fantasy Flight, the new Conan one and Red November. They also have a bunch of Catan expansions, such as Seafarers. What shocked me the most was that they actually had Puerto Rico, that was a game I thought would never be carried by a national chain store because the premise has the capability to offend so many people. The copies of Puerto Rico were stocked on a lower corner of the island of games and a copy of The Age of Conan had been put in front of them, but they still had several copies of it. I also saw Merchants of Venice and a few others.

I'm not really into spending a bunch of money so I won't be buying any of these, but I just thought I'd make a post about it to revive the community.