It's finally over, which is a huge bummer. But at the same time, almost a bit of a relief. The heat was absolutely brutal this year, which had more people inside than usual. This meant that there were lines everywhere, and the common areas were asses to elbows.
There are many great cosplays that attended this year, I didn't get to see every single one, so these are the favorites my my photo collection.
DragonCon has been going on for 40 years, I've been attending for about 15 years. Worked for TechOps for almost all of that but I'll make another post about that. But tonight, I met an imamous figure that isn't a name I've thought about in a long time. I got to meet a cardboard cutout of Chris-Chan. His story is something that isn't worth researching, but he was all over the internet in the early to mid-2000's. Almost like he was one of the first weirdos to go viral. For all the wrong reasons but I digress. It was a fun start to DragonCon 2026.
I had this silly idea earlier this year. We tail gate a lot and the people across the parking lot would occasionally walk over and give us some free shots. The thing is, I am kind of lazy, and it's sizeable parking lot. So I got this little trailer for my TRX4M r/c so I could load it up with a few beers, and drive it over to them. It worked great, is a fantastic idea and it was a lot of fun.
However...that tailgate crew hasn't been there since I got this little thing. Bit of a bummer I suppose, it never got to get used for it's actual purpose. But still, if I need to haul loads that are 1/18th scale, I am set.
I did test the weight limit, I put a 20lb weight on the trailer. The little tires couldn't handle it, they squished. But the little dude r/c did well so long as it's little wheels could get traction.
I've been on WordPress for over a decade. Somewhere in there it stopped being a blogging platform and turned into a full time hobby of fighting plugins.
Every time I wanted to do something simple, like add a gallery or embed a video, I'd end up three plugins deep watching them fight each other for control of the page. And actually writing a post? Moving an image around in that editor was like trying to move a picture in Microsoft Word. A complete mess. You'd nudge it an inch and somehow your whole paragraph ends up on a different page.
So I built my own CMS. Say hello to the Cyclone Management System. Yes, it's a pun. No, I'm not sorry.
I vibecoded this with Claude, same as the Ticket Foundry thing. And it only took an entire work day. Everything went far smoother than expected however. I was able to get all of my images, plugins, tags, etc from Wordpress migrated over to this complete custom system, and everything mostly works!
The biggest thing that makes me happy is removing about 10,000 extra images that Wordpress make in every resolution it could come up with, while retaining my original full scale images that it just refused to upload. The entire point when I created this site was to have somewhere to share my own photos and not have them get massively compressed by Facebook.
But seriously though, I do have around 960+ images hosted on this site. With Wordpress's own image handling, the Next Gen Gallery, and some other stuff I was using, there was literally over 10k images.
Maybe it becoming a huge mess was my own fault. Maybe it's Wordpress getting bloated. Who knows, but I have a new toy to play with. And some deadlinks I still need to fix!
The difference. Is absolutely insane.
Over the past few days, I've been working on completely redoing my two silly websites, Flatiron Specials, and Endless Drunk Ron Swanson. The Flatiron Specials page went through a lot of changes, and has hundreds more ingredients added which means it can generate up to 2 billion combinations. Drunk Ron Swanson was just modernized so it works consistently across desktop and mobile browsers.
The addition of the Share button was a nice touch. It provides a link back to the website as well, so that others can play with it, and learn about The Flatiron.
Far as Drunk Ron Swanson goes, well - the link is https://www.drunkronswanson.net. Someone swatted the .com address, so I'll never acquire the original.
Oh yeah, this entire website has a new design too. I'm still playing with the CSS so there are probably things broken.
Flatiron Specials