Splashdot 2026 - Day 6

Formal Day (John Scalzi)

Formal Day is a whole thing to think about. On one hand: we, a boat full of nerds and weirdos (complementary), whose daily attire consists of cargo shorts and shirts with our favorite anime characters (complementary), put on our hats and monocoles and dresses with frills and sparkles. It’s fun! It’s fresh! It’s a whole switch-out! A couture zig, if you will, in a life of casual-wear zags.

On the other hand: Formal wear, as we typically think of it, hearkens back to the days of patriarchy and colonialism and systemic enforcement of caste and social stratification (very uncomplimentary)! In, essentially, aping the manners and dress of those days and times, we might be unintentionally reinforcing those values! How do we, the wild, anarchic and undoubtedly queer (in several definitions of the word and definitely complimentary) denizens of The Boat, square our free-spirited nature with the rigidity of “formal”?

Well, perhaps like this: One relevant definition of “Formal” is “done in accordance with convention or etiquette,” and of course, “convention or etiquette” is highly contextual, depending on place and time and culture. As it stands, our place, time and culture are: BOAT, which has had fifteen years to develop and grow and enrich itself. We’ve had a decade and half of figuring out how to do its own thing and be its own thing, create its own context and meaning. This boat is its own self-generating environment! It has independent meaning! We have our very own memes!

As such, “formal” here on the boat does not have to mean “unthinkingly recreating the visual identity of older and meaner places and times.” It is a continually evolving term that encompasses dressing in a considered fashion, and also with whimsy, and wit, with bangles and accoutrement that express our identities, not just who we are on the boat but who we would like to be in the world. Our formal is a celebration of self! And community! Because that open, wild and accepting ideal is our convention and etiquette. That is our formal.

Alternately, Formal Day is us saying, “Look, we are wearing the skins of the people who in another day and time would have tried to keep us down. AND WE WILL TOTALLY DO IT AGAIN.”

That works too.

Spotlight on the Board Game Library

As we all know by this point, JoCo Cruise is blessed with a superabundance of games. Many of these are housed at the Board Game Library in the Main Dining Room: 4,021 lbs of them, to be precise, according to Principal Sabourin, equivalent to 1.79 imperial tons, 1.82 metric tons, or about 1.8 million Meeples.

To learn a little more about the game collection and how it’s been used, our correspondent visited the library on Wednesday morning. According to Game Librarian Joe, interest in borrowing board games has remained strong this year. The game library staff carefully track statistics (what games are borrowed the most, how many times, what games are requested) and plan to post their findings on the JoCo 2026 Facebook page. “We are seeing a lot of interest in two-player games this cruise”, said Joe, noting several new additions to this year’s lineup. Slay the Spire (1-4 players) is also a popular choice in 2026. The library staff suggest games each day according to category (two-player, party game, strategy game, 6+ players, etc.) and post their recommendations on a white board. I asked Joe what game he would gravitate to given the chance, and he recommended “Space Cadets Dice Duel”, a team-based space combat game, or “Captain Sonar”, a submarine game.

When our reporter visited, the tables near the library were packed with gamers, while others took their loaned games to the Lido Deck. I spoke to one gamer, James, who was re-familiarizing himself with the rules for “Ra”, a 2-5 player game inspired by ancient Egypt. In addition to the library games, many cruise guests bring their own personal collections, and James was kind enough to show me his bag of 15-20 games, which included some rare gems, such as Cambridge Games Factory’s famous “Glory to Rome”, a game about the rebuilding of the city of Rome after the great fire of 64 CE. First released in 2005, GTR received rave reviews but is sadly no longer in print. Many games produced by relatively small designers can easily go out of print, and the library’s collection ranges from old standards to quite hard-to-source items.

Keep an eye out for the Game Library staff’s statistics on this year’s gaming when we get back to shore, and feel free to drop a suggestion on games you’d like to see on future cruises!

Fish of the Day: Barberfish

The BARBERFISH (J. Nigrirostris)

To the Tune of “A British Tar”

The BARBERFISH is a very fine fish,

And a very fine fish is she,

She’s yellow black and white, and she makes a pretty sight,

In the cool Vermilion Sea.

Her fins are small

And her nose is cute,

She loves the reefs,

And she loves to scoot

Over to other fish

Whose parasites she eats,

She’s a member of the genus Johrandalia….

The BARBERFISH, well she bears that name,

Since she’s skilled with the brush and comb,

If I go for a swim, I will ask for her a trim,

So I’ll look good back at home.

Her fins are small... etc.

Interview with Hal Lublin

Your intrepid reporter interviewed Hal Lublin yesterday in the Fern Bar (aka Billboard Onboard). Unfortunately (for you), your intrepid reporter is also from the Philadelphia area and the interview frequently devolved into mutual admiration of our shared hometown. These passages have expurgated where possible.

Splashdot (SD): How does the ethos of JoCo Cruise intersect with the ethos of Gritty? [ed: Gritty is the mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers, introduced in 2018. He is a 7-foot-tall furry orange creature with googly eyes who wears Flyers gear.]

Hal Lublin (HL): It’s not an exact parallel. You know, when Gritty debuted (in 2018), the city wholly rejected him as ridiculous and weird. But the second someone from elsewhere said anything negative about him, he became like a god to us. So there’s the connection, I think: the idea of community and circling the wagons. Gritty doesn’t give a f*** - he’s himself at all times. What a gift to be on this cruise with 2,000 Gritties.

SD: You’ve been on JoCo Cruise once before, in 2017, which was our first time to Loreto, and we haven’t been back since 2018. Did it seem the same?

HL: My memory from last time was it wasn’t necessarily a destination people would go to. It felt like our visit was a really big deal to their community. But from yesterday, it seemed like the economy has gotten an infusion: more hotels and nice restaurants. They had a lactose-free ice cream store.

SD: What about the cruise overall? 2017 was our first full-ship charter, and this year is our ninth. How has the cruise evolved and changed?

HL: The feeling remains the same for me. [As a performer], there’s a bit of a feeling of being the new kid in school. I have friends here I know, but I knew more people really well last time (from Night Vale; Mark, Greg, Janet, Brandon…). This time I knew a few folks in advance, but overall the experience of making new friends, that remains the same.

The shadow cruise has really taken on a life of its own [since 2017]. The retro video game consoles, that’s new.

SD: Have you been playing some video games?

HL: Duck Hunt, Genesis – I forgot that Dreamcast had a hard drive – Crazy Taxi and NBA 2K2.

SD: This is the hard-hitting journalism our audience craves.

HL: People need to know that I’m playing retro game consoles. One thing I haven’t done enough of yet is playing tabletop games. Last time I was here, I ran a late night game of Werewolf.

SD: One of the things I see and hear discussed a lot on the cruise is folks discussing social anxiety and challenges interacting with others. Do you think that improv comedy provides some advice for that?

HL: I’m stealing a bit from Marc Evan Jackson here, but he’d say everyone should take an improv class – not just for performing, but to practice listening, connecting, conquering your fear – knowing fear’s going to be there but moving past and doing it anyway. Everybody talks about “Yes, and…” which is finding agreement. I use that skill in my day job.

I started doing improv because Whose Line Is It Anyway came to American TV around 1994 and I was blown away by the idea that you could make a living doing that. That kind of short form party game improv eventually led me to long form.

SD: I did a bunch of improv classes in summer camp as a kid. I came back to it a couple years ago as an adult expecting to know what I was doing but it had changed…

HL: Long form improve lets you tell a long story. After a while the short form starts to feel constrictive. Say you’re doing an alphabet [short form] game and something really interesting emerges, but it’s over before it started. What if that could be a longer scene?

When I teach workshops you use all of that stuff. It’s very similar to D&D except for the DM who has a story planned out but then has to be flexible when the players decide to spend all of their energy on an NPC who was supposed to be there for only 2 minutes)…

SD: Yeah, my class was long form and it was… much harder!

HL: The first improv class I took at Groundlings – I’d already been improvising 5-6 years and I came in thinking “I’ve been doing this a while, I’ll be fine. I’m gonna deliver my one-liners and work my bits in.” And the teacher told me, “you’re hunting down laughs, don’t do that!” It changes everything and it’s a lot funnier than someone up onstage winking with “that was pretty good what I did there.” Of course there’s a place for all of it.

SD: Looping back to the cruise. What’s something that the Nieuw Amsterdam’s kitchen could learn from Wawa [ed note: Wawa is a regional convenience store chain in the Philadelphia area, known for having clean bathrooms, delicious hoagies other delicacies, fee-free ATMs, and being better than Sheetz].

HL: I want soft pretzels on board.

SD: Oh wow. That would be a perfect item for the kitchen team here. They’re so good at things they can do well in bulk. If you ever get the chance, you have to take the kitchens tour on the ship. The ship is half kitchens. It’s engines and kitchens.

HL: I love that. I’m a logistics nerd. I always want to understand “how do you achieve this? How do you feed all of these people and keep going all day every day?”

SD: If you could bring one person – living or dead – on the cruise, who would it be?

HL: My mother passed away in 2008 before Thrilling Adventure Hour took off – she and my dad had been coming to the show monthly when it was at a supper club in LA. I think she’d really get a kick out of the cruise. This isn’t a vacation with strangers – I feel like I know most of these people. So it feels appropriate to want have my family here.

SD: How would you describe JoCo Cruise to people who don’ t know about it?

HL: I can’t think of anything like this that I’ve ever experienced. No convention, party, summer camp, music festival or comedy festival. It’s all of it, everything. It takes all of these things that everyone here loves and wraps it up and gives it as a present. There’s a conjuring spirit. We get to create this Eden at Sea in the middle of a world that still exists that we came from and have to go back it. The hope I’m holding onto is maybe we can make that world a little more like this one.