Time for Camp Hyrule, Nintendo's weirdass online fanboy orgy. WoFo, for short.

This is my third year. Both previous years had a definite Zelda theme going on. This year, it's gone all outer space... presumably in celebration of Super Mario Galaxy, a future Wii title that is not even a launch release. Although you might be forgiven for being reminded more than a little of Katamari.

I'm in Cabin 7, as StocDred. (Or, as one chat room member fumbled, "Storecred," which is now officially the best SD variant I've ever seen. And I MUSHed under that handle, so I saw plenty.) The chief concern for Day One at Camp Hyrule is naming your cabin, which is just a toxic mess of forum spew that is best not trifled with. I got to the discussion board too late to submit a reasonably hilarious name, so here's what won:

WTF. "Cabin We Are Currently Experiencing High Volume Or Technical Difficulties." Seriously.

The deal is, every day the camp assigns various tasks to all campers. They're usually all artsy junk like writing haiku and photoshopping stuff. When you submit your task creation - no matter how crappy it may be - you earn points for your cabin. The cabin with the most points at the end of the week wins. In 2004, the champs won something exceptionally awful, like a desktop background. Last year, the winning cabin won t-shirts... and I was a proud member of that highly cohesive, team-oriented cabin. (***CABIN 9 FOREVER!***) I have not heard yet what happens this year.

Here's today's tasks:

Flag design. Always a day one flag design event. Given that our cabin name is treacherously awful, some enterprising campers suggested a shortened form of "High Volume Experience." This didn't stick, but I still went with it for my flag.

Face painting. You can pretty much count on a face painting task every day. Most kids copy/paste a Mario moustache and have done with it. Here are three of the "camp counselors" in a typical pre-photoshopped image, and my wacky "out of the box" submission.

Limerick. Another Camp favorite. You can bet we'll see songwriting and a haiku contest by the end of the week.

At last year's Camp I did play,
Because Zelda hype ruled the day.
This year will win boos,
If, like last year's bad news...
We hear Twilight Princess again is delayed!

Oh, me.

And lastly, some choice Cabin 7 chat room quotes. Don't worry about losing any context here; there was none.

from the Iconoclast-At-All-Costs department:

from the Sad-Truths-For-All-Involved department:

from the Paid-Shill department:

from the No-You're-Not department:

from the No-It's-Not department: