In order of timeslot:

Thursday:

9pm: Rory
10pm: DJ RK
11pm: Dragonboy
12am: Genettic
1am: Dantee

Friday:
10pm: Rigel
11pm: Protocollie
12am: Cheetah.de
1am: Rawkz0rz

Saturday:

11pm:Firr
12am: Akonite
1am: Renard

As always, it's super hard to pick DJs every year. Lots of talent, too little time. I'm trying to shake things up more each year and get more new people on stage. We have 3 new faces on stage this year, one returning who's been gone for a good long while, and a few favorites from previous years. I'm going to try and keep this a lot more fluid in future years, since there's simply not enough slots to get all the awesome folks I want on stage. There will be a bunch more regulars benched next year (this year was a little harder to work that way.) I also know I said I'd be sitting out but I had to pull myself last year over a last minute schedule change. I'll be benched next year.

After several long years of work and patience, we are finally able to bring to you The Anthrocon 2013 Charity Poker Tournament!  This No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em tournament will be held on Friday, 5 July, starting at 3:00pm, with all proceeds given to this year's charity, Equine Angels Rescue.  The buy-in for this inaugural tournament is $20, and re-buys are available for another $10, until the first break. 

Prizes for this tournament will be forthcoming, however the list includes membership for next year's Anthrocon, as well as other assorted artist commissions and miscellaneous prizes.  Also, if you are willing to donate prizes for the Tournament, we would be most grateful!  We hope that we will be able to provide an exciting prize support package for players, but the best way to ensure that we will have bigger and better prizes in subsequent years is to donate to the featured charity, namely Equine Angels Rescue.

The main purpose of The Anthrocon 2013 CPT is not just to have fun, but also to give to a worthy cause.  The mission for this year's charity, Equine Angels Rescue, is "to provide a safe haven for abandoned, abused, unwanted, neglected or slaughter bound horses."  We want to combine our player's love of poker with the generosity that our fandom can provide by donating money to something worthwhile.  By our combined efforts, we will help EAR with their work and have fun while doing so!

If there are any questions concerning The Anthrocon 2013 CPT, please contact me, turtyl, CPT Coordinator.  The other half of our operations team is our CPT Tournament Director, Syaoran.  Thanks go out to Whitefeet for working behind the scenes to get the final approvals set.  And of course, Anthrocon and Uncle Kage for giving us the go-ahead to make the CPT a reality.

We have reached an agreement with Pittsburgh Transportation Group to provide a shuttle service to four of our downtown hotels. The shuttle bus pictured here carries up to 36 people, and will service the Wyndham Grand Hotel, the Marriott City Center, the Doubletree, and the Omni William Penn hotels. It will depart approximately every 30 minutes from the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, operating between 6 PM and 2 AM on Thursday, July 4th; between 10 AM and 2 AM on Friday and Saturday, July 5th and 6th, and between 10 AM and 6 PM on Sunday, July 7th. Pickup at the convention center will be outside the East Lobby (the one on the right).

Similar to the elevator rules, we ask our attendees kindly to give priority to fursuiters and persons with limited mobility when boarding the shuttle. It is a matter of simple courtesy.

We thought that we had enough rooms, but before we knew it, even the room block at the Marriottt City Center sold out.  We tried to get additional rooms at our hotels but we were not able to at this time.  Thanks to a bit of magic on the part of VisitPittsburgh Housing Services, though, we have added a block of rooms at the breathtaking Wyndham Grand Hotel.

This hotel, one of the city's most precious gems, is located a bit farther away than most folks are used to (about 3/4 of a mile, or about 1.1 km).  They are offering a very affordable rate, however, at $129 per night (plus 14% tax) to make up for it.  Anthrocon is also in discussion with their management about providing a shuttle service, which will likely have a fee associated with it if we are able to arrange it at all.  Please stay tuned for further developments as our chairman continues to try the big-sad-soulful-eyes on them.

We have also been able to add some more 1-bedroom suites to our block at the Doubletree.  If you don't want to walk all the way to the Wyndham and you enjoy living like royalty for a weekend (or have a large number of friends), note that all of the Doubletree suites have sofabeds in the parlor room.

So, if you are still in need of a hotel room, follow the link on our hotel page.  We are quite confident that with the addition of the Wyndham, Anthrocon will have more hotel rooms than it could conceivably need for all of its 5000+ attendees for 2013!

This year we'll welcome screenwriter Tom Minton of Animaniacs fame, renowned fantasy author Mercedes Lackey, and her husband, the artist and true Renaissance man Larry Dixon. And for those who could not get enough of his incredible acrobatics last year, Sardyuon will be joining us once again!

As you may have heard, Anthrocon's selected charity this year is Equine Angels Rescue, a local 501(c)3 equine rescue, rehabilitator, and shelter.  While cash donations made at the convention are great, the majority of funds are raised via donations of artwork and merchandise to our Charity Auction and Charity Raffle.  We're looking for popular items and unique craftwork that will make people say, "I want that!"

While we must distribute items between the Raffle and Auction based on available space, time, and perceived and past value, here are some examples of donations that went big in past years...

Great examples for the raffle: Crafts based on hot trends (Harry Potter handmade house scarves - $57); Large amounts of candy (5lb Hershey bar, 9.25lb Nestle Crunch bar - $70); Art bought at prior convention art shows ("Wrath" art by Terrie Smith - $83); Giant, brand new plush of popular characters (Large "Bolt" plush - $107); Merchandise based on popular fiction (Dr. Who's sonic screwdriver - $158)

Great examples for the auction: Fursuit costumes and commissions (Horstachio costume & candy - $150); Rare convention memorabilia (Full set of all AC t-shirts since 1997 - $200); Professional sculpture (Dragon statue - $225); Unique opportunities (A speaking part in audio version of Diane Duane's "The Last Meow" - $500); Dorsai fursuit tags (Tag #1000 - $1600)

If you have an item you believe would be appropriate and would like to donate, please contact charity-2013(at)anthrocon.org!

Helpful links:

Charity Auction/Raffle FAQ - http://www.anthrocon.org/charity

Anthrocon has selected Equine Angels Rescue to be our beneficiary for 2013. Their mission is to rescue and rehabilitate homeless, neglected, and abused horses. They will be at the Charity Auction and will have a table in the Dealers' Room where you can meet them and peruse information about their organization.

More information about Equine Angels Rescue can be found at their website, www.equineangelsrescue.com. If you have any questions regarding Equine Angels Rescue, they can be reached through the Contact page on their website.

The Challenge

When hotel reservations open, that is the single busiest time of the year for Anthrocon's webserver. In fact, it even caused us performance problems last year. That was not so good.

So this year, I decided to try something different. Instead of leaving the regular website up and running, which involves using Drupal, I instead decided to replace the entire page with a relatively static "countdown" page, which displayed a countdown timer and automatically started displaying the hotel link at 11 AM on the opening day.

First, some stats for the Anthrocon website:

• Peak bandwidth: 1.6 Megabits/sec
• Peak connections: 1,400 concurrent connections

And now some status for Passkey, who handled most of the traffic:

• Peak bandwidth: 190 Megabits/sec
• Peak connections: 4,000 concurrent connections

Lightening the Load on the Webserver

With the kind of traffic mentioned above, I figured that the only way to keep the website from falling over again was to get Drupal out of the picture, at least for a few hours. Drupal is a fine Content Management System (CMS), but it's pretty heavy on CPU and database usage. That means it won't scale unless we throw tons of additional hardware at it. And it's not cost efficient to provision additional hardware that is used only once a year.

First off, we apologize to the few folks who did not know that we were using the Passkey system this year and that they could not call the hotels directly in order to book rooms.  We really thought that we had gotten the word out through enough channels, but apparently we still missed a few people.

Secondly, please watch our hotel page for updates on the status of the hotels as they fill.  As expected, the Westin and the Courtyard went very quickly.  The Hampton is full on the middle nights but we're trying to see if we can expand the block there, since we only have a fraction of their room inventory. 

Thirdly, we as well as the folks at VisitPittsburgh Housing Services are anxious to know how folks felt about the Passkey system we used this year.  We'd like to know if we should continue to use it, and what needs fine-tuning to make things run more smoothly in the future.  It's all part of Anthrocon's attempts at continuous improvement year after year.  We've put together a survey that you can find by clicking here if you have not already seen it.

Fourthly (and we have added this to our FAQ), the system for charging the first night's pre-payment is not automated.  It is done by the individual hotels once they get the list from the Housing Service, and we pity the poor person who is going to be handed the task.  For this reason the charge will not show up immediately on your credit card statement, and in fact it may take several weeks for it appear.  Please keep that in mind and make sure not to overspend yourself.  If the hotel cannot process your pre-payment they will try to contact you, and that only slows the process down further.  We ask patience.