As an alternative to Super Bowl weekend, the Yachting Club hosted the annual What the Hell? Con Feb. 4 through 6 in Dana Auditorium and Duke Hall.
The Con featured events ranging from three variations of a Dungeons and Dragon guide from 1979, a Geek Auction for charity, the Crapathon to a concert from “nerdcore” rapper MC Frontalot.
The convention raised over $1900 for Child’s Play, a charity started by the creator of Penny Arcade that buys video games and batteries for children in hospitals, despite largely being a free event and staffed entirely by volunteers.
“I am especially happy about the Geek Auction because this is the first year that girls were allowed to be auctioned off,” said Lead Convention Runner Lauren McClure. “They had a lot of creative acts, and we raised more money than ever this year. We totaled about $600 from the Geek Auction itself. We are donating all that money to a charity call Child’s Play. Yay, charity!”
Bearded Yachting Club faculty advisor and Assistant Professor of Mathematics Dr. Jon Hatch came from the old days of geekery and is a table top Role-Play Game aficionado.
“Room 204 is the Jon Hatch Memorial Board and Card game room, and I am Jon Hatch,” he said. “The games in that room–95 to 99 percent of them are mine, so that is my collection that is up there. That is my special area of geekery, as it were.”
Three “dungeon masters,” including Hatch, hosted different takes on the “Keep on the Borderlands” module of D&D, one of the first RPGs to hit it big in the states.
“I am one of the ones who ran (the D&D module from 1979),” said Hatch. “I am old enough that I played it when it came out. Eric Mortenson and I, both. Nathan Murdoch is also running one. He is an alum, but he is also older. It is not that I found it. It is that I had it, so did Eric and so did Nathan. So it came out of that. Ben Marlin has done it in the past.
“He couldn’t do it this year because he just had a baby,” Hatch continued. “That is a new thing: there has never been a baby at What the Hell? Con before.”
Former Con runner, “Minion of the Con” and Guilford ’10 graduated Lindsay Lavenhar has stayed active in the club, and she was able to lend her expertise in organizing the Con.
“I helped out all four years I was here,” said Lavenhar, who is geekiest about web comics. “I live in an apartment in Westboro right across the street, still going to Yachting Club, and since I really like helping around the Con, I thought I’d help around the Con. There is always a little chaos as we are setting up, but once we get it set up, it runs really smoothly.”
The Crapathon, held in Dana Auditorium on Feb. 4 hearkened back to midnight showings of cult movies such as “Rocky Horror Picture Show”. The audience, who had to verify they were over 18, chanted “we want porn” as the collection raunchy Japanese cartoons and “hentai”, or Japanese animated pornography began.
The Con started with a group of Guilford students watching terrible VHS tapes and joking around in 2001, now called the Crapathon.
“The actual thing that was shown is an intentional homage to the original,” Hatch said. “The original was a Guilford’s student’s brother gave the bag to a different Guilford student. It was just a Kroger bag of bad stuff.
“Not all it was funny bad stuff,” Hatch continued.” One of them was a Brazilian soccer match where the commentary is in Japanese with Portuguese subtitles. It is an entire game followed by the local news in Tokyo in Japanese subtitled in Portuguese. You are going ‘what the hell?’ so What the Hell? Con. That is what became the Crapathon, which became What the Hell? Con.”
McClure noted that vendors came from far and wide selling various geek-centric items, and one web comic artist came all the way from Boston, Mass.
“We had a lot of vendors who sold different stuff,” McClure said. “Clockwork Jungle sells handmade jewelry. We have two or three vendors who sell chainmail ware. There are chainmail ties, chainmail necklaces, chainmail earrings. You can also buy chainmail bras, and they sold pretty well.”