I had the opportunity to spend 6 amazing days with 850 people who understand, love, enjoy, care, and appreciate everything about geekdom and nerdom.  I can’t tell you all the feels that well up inside every time I think about all the people I met on the cruise.

I know that some people will say “It’s just a convention, but on a boat” or “It’s just hanging out with friends while you cruise” but really it’s that times 10000.  Every room you go into there is a SeaMonkey doing something they love to do.  No one judges, everyone is welcome.

Each year the official talent puts on an amazing show with amazing events that scatter across the week. You go for this show, but you stay for the Shadow Cruise.  The Shadow cruise is all the events that all of the attendees build around the official events.  We have people who are artists from every field who put up shows, exhibits, classes, and art to share with everyone else.  In many cases, it’s a fan run show that has some other stuff that the official people do.  And it’s THAT that makes the cruise special.

This year I brought my own talent and tried to make it available to folks by doing what I called the “Humble Indie Photographer Bundle”.  This meant that I made myself available for folks to have their picture taken anywhere at any time.  Lots of people took me up on it and, after sorting, I have close to 1000 pictures to process to show for it.  In payment I accepted everything from a “Hey thanks!” to drinks, to a couple bucks.  All of the photos will be posted to Flickr under a Creative Commons licence for everyone to see.

If you know I took a picture of you, and you want to provide me with anything in payment, Please wait until the photos are up! (You never know, they could look like crap!) I’ll be working throughout the week on getting them up as fast as possible and then post here when they are all done.

Thanks again for making my cruise experience another for the memory banks!