Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium has offered a generous deal to BlogHer attendees! With your BlogHer badge or LobbyCon bracelet, you can get free admission for yourself and a friend anytime from Thursday to Monday.

On Thursday night from 6 to 10 pm, “Jazzin’ at the Shedd” is open to BlogHers as well – free admission for you and a friend, AND a free drink!

Since LobbyCon Ladies cannot check in until Friday, they should bring their tickets (the ones with the barcodes) for admission on Thursday night.

Take advantage of one of Chicago’s great attractions while you’re in town. Even if you’re spending Friday and Saturday inside at the conference, this is a great activity for Sunday.

For more info, go to http://www.sheddaquarium.com and follow @shedd_aquarium on Twitter.

Ladies, there is now an official BlogHer forum for LobbyCon discussion. Click on over to get involved in the introductions and making plans for our time between general sessions!

Even if you’re NOT going to LobbyCon but ARE going to BlogHer, stop over at the forum and read some of the introductions so you’ll know who those nuts are hanging out in the Sheraton ChiBar and cruising the Expo all day. Because we will be cocktailing with you on Friday and Saturday nights, you know…

I haven’t had a party for years. Forgive me if I squee and get a little “!!!” happy.

Thursday was my Girlfriends’ Guide to Gaming party, sponsored by Brand About Town and Nintendo! And on Thursday night, the first thing I saw when driving up to the St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum on Washington Ave. was this sign:

The ladies of Brand About Town had reserved a gorgeous space inside the museum. We were there to promote the new Nintendo DSi, the newest in the DS family of handhelds. It was launched in April of this year.

I’ve never even held a DS or DS Lite before so I can’t make a comparison to those earlier models, but I CAN say that the DSi is pretty darn awesome. I’ve spent hours already just playing with all of the features on the one I got a few weeks ago. Seriously – it has wireless and an Opera browser! The marketers did the right thing in targeting us tech nerds for Girlfriends’ Guide to Gaming.

It was such a great night, getting to know the games and especially getting to know the girls. I was more than a little nervous when I was first asked to host the party and realized that I don’t have a lot of girl friends who live in St. Louis. Now I think the party was a great success because I invited people I knew – or mostly-sort-of-blog-land-knew – and invited them to each bring a friend. That method proved to be a lot of fun because we all got to know new people.

The party room was a huge space in the St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum.

Melissa and Erin's husbands love gaming, so I invited the girls so they could give the boys a taste of their own medicine.

Amelia promised not to give birth at the party - she and Jen had to finish CrossworDS first.

Rachael almost couldn't come, but she managed to swing by for a little bit, Baby James in tow, and try her hand at Brain Age.

New friends, Angie and Liz IRL!

Liz blogs at Will There be Cake? and this was the first time I’d met her.

Even my little sister was able to come. This is my last chance to upstage her - I'm going to be her bridesmaid in August!

My friend Becky brought her old Gameboy case as a purse! That was a definite conversation-starter. Oh, Nintendo, you've come a long way.

The Rhythm Heaven group pauses for a snack. The food was fantastic! Black bean cakes with cilantro, chicken satay, chocolatey desserts, and of course we could has teh mini cheezburgers.

When the girls finished gaming at all four stations, they got a little surprise gift! Kelly and Nora show off their new toys.

I met Nora for the first time that night – she blogs at Walking Through the Rain.

And a good time was had by all

I think it’s safe to say that our new DSIs won’t be gathering dust. Brain Age was probably the most popular game at the party. We all wanted to have the lowest score! (I’m 33.) I got Brain Age with my starter set a few weeks ago, and I’m an addict. I smelled addiction in some of my fellow partygoers… you can tell. You just can. And since the DSi can connect wirelessly to other players in the room, you can play against each other on BrainAge, MarioKart, and others.

Rhythm Heaven was crazy because it LOOKS so simple, but once you get into it you realize that there is no messing around. It was tricky to get used to the stylus, but I think it made everyone more determined to beat the thing.

You can learn more about the DSi on the official website, http://www.nintendodsi.com. One of the coolest things about it – an upgrade from the previous models – is the DSiWare Shop. You can connect wirelessly from your DSi and download apps and new games – some for free, and some using DSiWare points. You can get points by registering your DSi and your software on the website, and use those points to get more! Since all of the girls took home a DSi and a game, we’ve all got points to shop with. Jenny from The Reckless Chef got me started on a downloaded game called Boxlife and I think we may have a habit on our hands.

AND… you can use your DS and DS Lite games in the DSi!

Big thanks to the ladies of Brand About Town and the folks at Nintendo, who for some reason chose me to hostess this fantastic Girlfriends’ Guide to Gaming party. And a big pink puffy heart to all of my friends – new and old – who came out to join me for this awesome evening. Game on!

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The Brand About Town ladies took all of these pictures. Click here for their Flickr photostream of the whole shindig.

Disclaimer: I am always carrying champagne in these photos because I was mingling and didn’t set it down at any one station. And it was free.

(The Nintendo Girlfriends’ Guide to Gaming post will be up as soon as I get the photos from the girls at Brand About Town. I took very few of my own, as I was too busy gaming and chatting.)

I met a fellow blogger at my Nintendo party the other night! For the purposes of this particular post, she shall remain nameless. We got to talking about – what else? – blogging and the act of moving one’s blog, as I did recently. She confided that she’s moved her blog several times, and one of those times the move was prompted by some Mean People.

There’s a common conception in the blog world that when you start getting trolls, spammers, and the occasional negative “you suck” sort of comment on your blog, you’re on the right track to “making it.” People are noticing you. Your URL is getting hits from bots because it’s getting hits from people. They’re annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, the spammers and bots and trolls kind of mean that you’re moving on up. So we deal with them through Akismet and other filters.

But we should not have to deal with Mean People. Mean People attack us personally and use our comment sections as a place to spew venom and say hurtful things to the person behind the blog. Mean People don’t care if their comments are moderated, they just want to put their vile thoughts on the blogger’s screen so she has to read them before she can delete them.

Mean People need to go back to MySpace with the other rotten, immature teenagers. No blogger, whatever her stance on anything as a writer or as a person, deserves personal attack. Especially in her personal space.

New Blog Friend, I encourage you to take action. I encourage all of us to protect ourselves from Mean People.

Those of us who host our blogs on Wordpress.org can make a quick fix by means of a plugin called WP-Ban. It allows you to ban specific IP addresses from ever accessing your page again, and you can use it to block Mean People as well as spammers and bots. Just copy the IP address on the comments they leave, drop it into a certain text field, save, and you’re done. You can even choose what kind of message you want to show up on the screen when they try to access your domain.

I wish I knew how to do something similar on Wordpress.com and on Blogger. There ought to be something to protect people on every content management system. Mean People are the blogosphere equivalent of the junior high school bully – and should be treated as such. Shut them up.

</rant>

Bloggers, please share so we all know: Have the Mean People gotten to your blog? What platform do you use, and what did you do?

Like Donkey Kong. Oh yeah.

My slacker-self always misses BlogHer for two reasons:

1. I forget to sign up on time.
2. I do not have the money to sign up anyway.

This year I have thwarted both of those excuses. Even though I did forget to sign up for a full conference pass (and couldn’t have afforded it anyway), I’m still going because BlogHer 09 is in my friendly neighboring city of Chicago and I can get a partial admission called LobbyCon for only $99. This means I get to be in on the streaming video session of the general and keynote addresses (on-site at the ChiBar at the Sheraton), as well as the cocktail parties, the after-parties, and the swag at the Expo. I’ll miss the breakout sessions, but that’s okay. I’d rather come for part of it that I can afford than not go at all.

Do you know anyone doing LobbyCon at BlogHer?

Since LobbyCon-goers are not involved in the breakout sessions, we have a big gap of free time during the day Friday and Saturday, all of which cannot be spent harvesting goodies at the Expo. But BlogHer is at the Sheraton Towers in downtown Chicago, close to lots and lots o’ fun, even outside of the conference! Since no official forum exists, I’m working the comment board on the one article about LobbyCon, trying to gather email addresses to at least get a mailing list together so people can share ideas.

Because, you know, we don’t get to eat lunch with the rest of you guys.

If you are interested in LobbyCon, click here for a link to an article with the details, and click here to go to the Eventbrite page to register.

And if you’re going to BlogHer, with whatever kind of ticket, I strongly recommend that you check out  “The Unofficial Guide to BlogHer ‘09″ at Guidespot.com. Jenn of Free and Flawed put that puppy together and it is all kinds of helpful, especially for first-timers like me. I learned many things, including that I need not be afraid of taking my laptop around, but I might like a sexier laptop bag with more pockets. And that my social anxiety may be assuaged if I have pretty blog cards to break the ice with new people.

So I bought this from Amazon:

and these from socialcirclecards on Etsy:

The blog cards even come with a super-cute matching case. It’s not too late to order yours!

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