K-Squared Ramblings

Comic-Con: Filling in the Gaps

Some random thoughts & anecdotes about Comic-Con that didn’t make it into other posts:

It’s amazing that out of (reportedly) 140,000 people, you’re virtually guaranteed to run into people you know. For instance, I knew in person 8 people besides the two of us who were definitely going to the convention. Without planning, I ran into 6 of them, as well as 2 people who I didn’t know were attending. Katie and I even accidentally ran into each other once. I’m sure I ran into people I’ve met online, but just didn’t recognize them on sight.

Overheard near a coffee shop one morning in San Diego:

20ish man #1: I’m so wasted. I can’t work like this.
20ish man #2: Dude, you make coffee!

Nothing as drastic as Aeire’s story of nearly getting trampled, but I sustained a number of minor injuries over the course of the event:

• Left knee, bruised while walking into a traffic barrier concealed by the flow of people (Wednesday).
• Right forearm, bruised twice catching a backpack strap (Thursday).
• Left hand, bruised (unknown).
• Also, Katie: Left thumbnail pulled back and bleeding, catching a backpack strap (Friday).

Conclusion: Backpacks are dangerous

I walked out onto this balcony Friday afternoon and took some pictures looking out across the street. At the time, there were some teenage girls sitting on that ledge off to the left. It’s maybe 4 feet deep, and some of them had scooted out past the balcony, one of them standing up. When I came back later to get a picture of the ledge (how creepy would I have looked taking a picture of a group of teenage girls?), the door to the balcony was locked. I’m guessing security wasn’t happy.

When eating out at a restaurant, ask about the portion sizes before you order. The food at Bandar was very good, but we were each served enough food for three people. With no refrigerator or microwave in our hotel room, we couldn’t save the leftovers. The waste was saddening.

Panels I attended:
Thursday: TwoMorrows, Paramount Pictures, Lost.
Friday: Spider-Man cartoon (2nd half) and Neil Gaiman Spotlight. Babylon 5: The Lost Tales.
Saturday: Quick Draw, Buffy 10^th Anniversary Screening. (edit: fixed link)
Sunday: My Dad Makes Comics (2nd half), Fables.

Panels Katie attended:
Thursday: Making Fiends, Paramount Pictures, Lost.
Friday: The Mist/Halloween, Jim Henson, Babylon 5: The Lost Tales.
Saturday: Pushing Daisies, tried to get into Heroes but got locked out, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy screening.
Sunday: Cages Talk Comics, Right at Your Door/Dragon Wars, Pathology.

*whew!* Almost done. I just need to post quotes and oddities. Well, and finish labeling the photo gallery.

Artist Encounters

Wednesday morning before we left for San Diego, I made a last-minute addition to my small stack of stuff to get signed: Sergio Aragonés’ issue of Solo. During my first half-hour at Comic-Con on Thursday, I found myself at the Groo booth, face to face with the artist. When I asked him to sign it, he asked me whether I’d had a chance to read it yet. (I guess with the Groo 25^th anniversary and drawing the cover of the con schedule, people were tracking down his stuff?) I told him I’d read it when it first came out. (I posted about the story “Heroes” on St. Patrick’s Day.)

I dropped by the Studio Foglio booth a couple of times, with the intent to get my latest Girl Genius trade signed. (It arrived in the mail earlier that week. How could I pass it up?) After collecting the individual issues to start with, I ended up buying the first two or three books direct from the source at Comic-Con a few years ago, and Phil Foglio was kind enough to sign the whole set as he sold them to me. So as the newer books have come out, I’ve brought them to cons to get them signed.

This year I managed to find Phil Foglio on Friday. He was talking with someone about site issues (which I assumed were about last month’s downtime), and apparently it’s banned in China as being “too racy.” His assistant encouraged me to just interrupt, and I got him to sign volume 6. I made sure I linked to them in that night’s con report, without realizing that the site had gone down that morning due to bandwidth issues. *sigh* Of course I took the book out of my backpack that night… but on Sunday, I wandered by the booth again, and this time Kaja Foglio was there. If I’d still had it, I could have had both of their signatures. Again, *sigh*. We talked for a bit about the switch from pamphlet-to-book to web-to-book, and about some of the T-shirt designs, and about how far ahead they had story material (years).

I also kept looking for Joshua Middleton, since I wanted to get his All-Flash cover signed and show him the wallpaper I made for my cell phone, but I never saw him any of the times I went into Artists’ Alley. His table was there, but he wasn’t, and all I could think of was walking past his table at Wizard World LA back in March. Not that I had anything to get signed at the time, but still…

Of course there are always tons of booths run by small press trying to promote their works. The only one that stands out in my memory is Alcatraz High by Bobby Rubio. I talked with him, he showed me a preview issue which was funny, and I bought the first issue of the comic (figuring I’d get the next two if I liked that one), which he signed with a sketch. Unfortunately, this being several days into the con, my brain had turned to mush and I didn’t think to ask whether the story I had read was actually in #1.

After Final Crisis

OK, DC’s next big event is called Final Crisis. Does anyone believe they’ll simply stop with the events? They might actually stop putting the word “crisis” in the title, I suppose, but what will they call the next event after?

• Final Crisis II
• Post-Final Crisis
• Final Crisis X-2
• Final Crisis Leopard
• Final Crisis Vista
• Son of Final Crisis
• Finaler Crisis
• Final Crisis Again
• Final Crisis: The Final Chapter

(List put together at the Ghirardelli ice cream shop late Saturday evening after three long days of Comic-Con.)

Comic-Con Hotel Review

During Comic-Con we stayed at the Radisson Harbor View again, on the cusp between Downtown San Diego and Little Italy. The hotel was in the process of being converted into the Doubletree Hotel San Diego Downtown. This meant that our room had been recently remodeled, with new carpeting and furniture. Unfortunately, it was really new—we had to air out the wardrobe and dresser to get rid of the smell of varnish. And they’d taken out the old towel hooks, and hadn’t put in the new ones yet. So that was a bit of a mixed bag.

They were still working on the lobby when we checked in, so they had moved the reception desks onto little plywood stands over on one side. One of the clerks accidentally knocked the power cord out while we were checking in. By Saturday morning they were done. The painters and plastic tarps were gone, the desks and furniture were in their places, the fountain was running.

Meanwhile, we kept coming back to our room to find that yet another item had had its Radisson logo removed or replaced with a Doubletree logo. And then there was this bulletin:

Hotel Plusses:

• Near trolley stop (Little Italy/County Center)
• Shuttle stop
• Near coffee (It’s a Grind)
• Near restaurants
• Nice rooms
• Free wireless internet (though the wired port didn’t work)
• Just remodeled, so everything’s new

Hotel Minuses:

• Shuttle has to go through traffic
• Trolley requires transfer unless you get the red line (special event service)
• Won’t be an issue next year, but we were there during the transition

Factor in waiting for a shuttle or trolley, and you can figure on 40 minutes to get to or from the convention center.

I’d stay there again, though I think next year I’ll try to get something a bit closer. Of course, I tried that this year, and by the time I got through, everything closer was either full or way too expensive.

Comic-Con Photos are up for 2007!

Whew! I’ve been sorting and labeling all evening, and I finally posted this year’s San Diego Comic-Con photos!

• Comic-Con International 2007 Photos

I’m still adjusting the descriptions and titles and such, so the text will change a bit over the next day or two, but all the photos are up! 293 pictures of costumes, convention sights, San Diego and more!

Pirates vs. Sylar

I’m still attending Comic-Con in civvies, but Katie wore two costumes this year: another update of her pirate outfit on Friday, and a Sylar victim with a telekinetic slice across her forehead. Saturday, of course, for the big Heroes panel.

She did the makeup from scratch, using latex and fake blood, and got a lot of attention. In fact, while waiting in line two hours to get into the panel, series director Allan Arkush walked past, stopped… and took her picture!

Sadly, even after waiting two hours she wasn’t able to get into the room, which was about half as big as it needed to be for the audience. Lots of people left at that point, but she was among the group that stayed hoping to get into the Battlestar Galactica panel afterward (which she did). While bored in line, she and the fan next to her posed as Sylar and victim. Edit: we have a copy of the photo, and permission to post it!

So you can see the result of the traumatic experience of the day:

She got her revenge, though. After we went to see the Buffy the Vampire Slayer 10th anniversary screening of “Once More With Feeling” (described in my Saturday guest post at Comics Should be Good), we went out to the Ghirardelli shop in the Gaslamp District. She got a dark chocolate raspberry sundae, and the raspberry sauce was dripping around the edge of the glass, just so…

Flash Sightings at Comic-Con

I saw quite a few Flash T-shirts in San Diego this year (more than I’m used to seeing at Comic-Con, actually), but only two people dressed as the Flash. Interestingly, both were women.

While all four of the major Flashes have been men, DC has published a number of female speedsters, including several alternate-reality Flashes and two who have worn the Flash symbol in-continuity: Lady Flash and Jesse Quick.

I also found it interesting that both costume designs incorporated sunglasses, reminiscent of one of Jesse’s later costumes and of the Kingdom Come version of Iris West II.

Update August 3: Wallyoeste and West both pointed out CBR’s 3rd Photo Parade, which includes two pictures of a couple in Flash costumes. Part 4 has a picture of a DC group with a fifth. This brings it up to at least 5 Flashes at the convention: 3 women and 2 men.

Comic Cons Should Be Good

My San Diego Comic-Con reports are up at Comics Should Be Good for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. (edited as posts went up)

We’ve got tons of photos between the two of us, and we’ll post them (including the weird stuff) when we get back. (Edit: photos are up!) And I still hope to post more here, like the two perspectives on Wednesday, if I can get a chance when I’m not totally exhausted.

Wednesday in San Diego

We made it to San Diego after a longer than expected midday drive. (Traffic between Carlsbad and the San Diego city limits was a nightmare.) After checking into the hotel, we stopped for a snack and then headed out to the convention center to pick up our badges for Comic-Con. It went a lot more smoothly than last year, probably due to actually having confirmation notices. (Though I did end up having to run around looking for the press desk for the CBR gig.)

One note: For the first time in four years, we were actually asked to show our trolley tickets. You have been warned.

We had tickets to see Avenue Q tonight, so instead of staying for Preview Night with everyone else (and there were lots of people waiting to get in at the time we left, about half an hour before the doors opened at 6), we went to dinner at Dussini, the Mediterranean restaurant that replaced the Spaghetti Factory a couple of years ago.

Then we walked over to the Spreckels Theater, which was interesting. It’s inside an office building, and you get from the lobby to the balcony by taking the regular office elevators to the third floor. Then they check your tickets.

Anyway, good show, highly recommended if the idea of raunchy puppets doesn’t disturb you.

Tomorrow we go to the con proper, and my con report should appear at Comics Should Be Good.

Side Blogging: Comic-Con and Opera

I’ll be doing something a bit different with San Diego Comic-Con posts this year: I’ll be guest blogging the “fan experience” at Comics Should Be Good. I’ll still be posting here, but probably not as much as last year. After it’s all done (and I have time), I’ll make the usual photo posts and post-con write-ups here.

I’ve also posted my list of 5 things I want to see in the Opera Browser over at “Confessions of a Web Developer.” I’ve kind of been out of the loop with all the stuff going on in Flash, so I’ve skipped the tagging aspect and just posted my thoughts.

Coffee Shops in San Diego

So, you’re going to Comic-Con, you want coffee, but you don’t want Starbucks. Maybe you don’t like their coffee, maybe you don’t like their size, or maybe you don’t like the fact that they sued a comic book artist over a parody several years ago.

I’ve been to a couple of It’s a Grind locations over the past few years, and decided to do some Internet searching for other coffee places in Downtown San Diego.

First, the chains:

It’s a Grind - highly recommended.

• 1603 India St. (India & Cedar in Little Italy, near trolley stop)*
• 690 First Ave. (1st & G, across from Ralphs, near Horton Plaza)
• 10th & J St. (marked as Coming Soon on website)

Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf

• 160 W. Broadway (Broadway & Front, near Horton Plaza)
• Also inside the Ralphs at 1st and Market

No sign of Kelly’s or Peet’s, and of course Diedrich is gone. Though Starbucks has 15 locations plus the Seattle’s Best in the Gaslamp Borders.

I found a couple of lists at San Diego Coffee Houses and String Beans. I’m not sure how many of them are actually downtown, but these appear to be:

Seaport Coffee and Fudge Factory

• 849 West Harbor Drive

Twiggs Coffeehouse*

• 702 Ash Street (Ash & 7th)

Brickyard Coffee & Tea

• 675 W G St (between 6th Ave & 7th Ave at the Seaport Village trolley stop)

If you get out to Old Town San Diego, I highly recommend stopping by the San Diego Coffee and Tea House. Seriously consider picking up a bag of Highlander Grog to take home.

* Not near convention center, but still downtown & near hotels.

So, are there any San Diego natives reading? Any suggestions–especially for places within walking distance of the convention center?

…and the Wizard

After the “Weird Al” concert we explored the fair a bit, then left to go to Borders to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Katie had reserved the book at the new one that just opened at The District. And by “just opened,” I mean Wednesday. Her confirmation number was 7. I kid you not.

We got there about 10 past midnight, and they were distributing books, but the line was already all the way down one side of the store. I ended up getting coffee at the in-store Seattle’s Best, talked to the baristas about just what’s open so far, and we both browsed a bit. Finally they called her wristband color, and we had the book in our hands by 12:50.

We went home. I went straight to sleep (despite the coffee!), while Katie stayed up to read the first few chapters.

The Weird…

Last night we went out to the Orange County Fair to see “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert (the Straight Outta Lynwood Tour). I don’t remember how we managed it, but we got tickets for the fifth row, putting us about 10 feet from the stage. We were off to the side, maybe 20–30 feet from Al’s microphone, but still, it was the closest we’d ever been at a stadium concert.

(Being off to the side put us right by the speakers, which was an odd experience, as the drum beats resonated at the frequency of the human ribcage. On percussion-heavy songs, it was sort of like having an audio pacemaker.)

As always, he put on a fun show. If you haven’t seen him in concert before, all the major songs are done in full costume, with comedic video clips (mostly from his mid-1990s TV show) running between sets to allow time for costume changes. In the middle of the show, he always does a medley of other songs, just to get as much in as possible into a 2-hour concert.

As for being near the front, thankfully he didn’t come to our section for the audience-walk during “Wanna B Ur Lovr,” (a truly annoying song). We did get covered with red and white streamers at the end of “Canadian Idiot,” and (speaking of Monopoly money) fake $100 during “I’ll Sue Ya.”

One surprise: A couple of minutes into “White and Nerdy,” he suddenly stopped, said, “There’s no reason to do this song. Radio, Radio”—and the band proceeded to do a straight cover of Elvis Costello’s “Radio, Radio.” During the encore, he explained they’d had some technical difficulties, and did the song from the beginning (though without the costumes and the Segway).

Another surprise: He performed “Albuquerque.” All 10 minutes of it. *shudder*

After the concert we explored the fair a bit, then left to go to Borders to pick up Harry Potter, leading to the second part of this story…

For now, I’ll leave you with this final thought: We all have cell phones, so come on, let’s get real.

Waiting for the Wizard

I walked over to the nearby Barnes & Noble at lunch just to see whether anyone was lined up for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yet. At 1:00 there were two people sitting in front of the door with camp chairs, one with a book and the other with a laptop, but that was all.

It was nowhere near the level of the iPhone launch last month, but then there are many more places you can buy Harry Potter, and there’s little risk of the book selling out.

#100 Covers

While putting together a list of Flash comic books with variant covers, I remembered the #100 covers DC did back in 1995. Several of the series that were relaunched after Crisis on Infinite Earths hit #100 that year. DC made the issue number larger than usual, and put it on a ribbon design. They also released the issues with alternate covers featuring a black background, a tagline relating to the story in large, holofoil letters, and a colored silhouette of the hero. I can’t remember how many there actually were, but looking through GCD I found these 5:

• Flash #100: The Quick and the Dead (April 1995)
• Wonder Woman #100: Fall of an Amazon (August 1995)
• Justice League America #100: Return of a Hero (June 1995)
• Superman #100: The Death of Clark Kent (May 1995)
• Green Arrow #100: Where Angels Fear to Tread (September 1995)

Does anyone know of any others?

Fantasy Film Follow-Up

Saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I thought it was better than the fourth film, and up there with Prisoner of Azkaban, though Katie liked Goblet of Fire better. The main thing I would really have liked to see more of: Hogwarts in rebellion. “It unscrews the other way.”

We agreed that the preview of The Dark is Rising looks terrible. It looks like they’re turning it into an action movie. Will Stanton with magic powers?!?!? It’s sad, since Christopher Eccleston seemed like perfect casting for the Dark Rider.

Saw a second preview of The Golden Compass, though, and it looks even better than the first one we saw. They could still screw it up, but I at least have high hopes for this one. The visual look is dead-on (which was my first reaction to the very first Fellowship teaser), and it looks like they’ve stuck with the book’s concepts.

Tips for San Diego Comic Con

So, you’re thinking about going to Comic Con International this year, or you’ve already got your tickets, but you’re a bit apprehensive about some of the stories you’ve heard, and you’re not sure where to start with a convention this size.

If so, this post’s for you.

We’ve previously posted 11 Suggestions for Comic-Con. Some highlights: Go more than one day if you can, and do the main floor on some day other than Saturday. Don’t forget your camera, with lots of film/memory and a spare battery. Get a trolley pass so you won’t have to drive around downtown. Plan ahead for dinner: make reservations early.

Comic Coverage is about halfway through A Newbie’s Guide to Surviving San Diego, which is shaping up well.

Also, if you’re there for 3 or 4 days, get out a bit. You’re in a major city. Take an afternoon (or even a whole day—Saturday is usually packed) off to explore Old Town San Diego or the Gaslamp District. Tour the historical ships at the Maritime Muesum. Go to the beach. Visit Sea World or the zoo. See a play, like Avenue Q or the Too Much Coffee Man opera. If you’re wearing a costume, wear it to dinner at a nice restaurant.

One more thing: if you haven’t already ordered your tickets for the 2007 con, buy them now. For the first time in the con’s history, they’ve sold out of 4-day memberships. So head over there to the con website and sign up! Update (July 23): The Beat is reporting that Saturday has sold out as well. Thursday, Friday and Sunday are still available, but who knows for how long?

Happy Fence

You know how tarps stretched across fences will often have holes cut in them to allow the wind to pass through, rather than turning them into sails? This fence around a construction site had half-circles cut into each segment. Someone with a sense of humor had altered several panels, though:

Which brings me to this sign spotted on the ring road at UC Irvine a few months ago:

My best guess was “No bored vampires,” but that didn’t seem likely. After walking to the other side, it became a bit more clear:

Aha! No skateboarding! Though it could easily be “No flat dollies.”

Vanishing Realm

Every Friday, a script verifies all the links on this website. I usually check the results that evening, or sometimes during the day at work, and see which dead links I can fix.

Strangely enough, this week 3 links on “What the heck is a Hyperborea?” have dropped off the face of the net. I checked the rest of the links manually, and 2 more turned up broken sites with internal errors!

The first was easy. It’s an excerpt from the book, Arctic Dreams: Imagination And Desire In A Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez. I just pulled up the Archive.org copy, picked a sentence to search for… and found the same excerpt at another URL. (A classic college website issue: moving faculty pages from a specific server to a more general site.)

The other two that actually reported errors are both role-playing games. The MUD Darkwind has moved to its own domain. Epiphany: The Legends of Hyperborea is a little trickier. It’s missing from its publisher’s website, but there are references to it online. I figured I could link to the sourcebook at Amazon, or maybe to a review, but the most informative page I could find was on archive.org.

Now to the sites that lied and reported “200 OK” instead of an error code. One was a page describing Clark Ashton Smith’s book, Hyperborea. The site had a search box on the home page, making it easy to find the new location. (It would have been nice if they’d actually removed the old script instead of letting it break. A 404 or even a 500 would have helped me catch this earlier.)

That leaves a Conan reference site, which is shut down, the domain name listed for sale. I went looking and found a site with maps of the world in which Conan takes place, showing Hyperborea near Cimmeria.

It’s just odd that three links would vanish from the same page at more or less the same time.

Linobot

Hit the Spectrum again for lunch, and walked up to the ATM next to the movie theater. There was one guy already waiting in line for the 8:00 showing of Transformers…two days from now.

Edit: I stand corrected. They’re showing an advanced screening tonight, so he was only in line about 7½ hours ahead. Not terribly noteworthy, at that point.

Pumpkin Moon

We were driving home from visiting relatives this evening, and noticed a dull orange ellipse on the horizon, appearing and disappearing between trees. It didn’t take long to realize it was the moon, just beginning to rise.

As the freeway twisted and turned, and we went through areas full of houses, retail centers, and trees, we lost and regained sight of it. The moon illusion was in full effect, making it look huge, plus the bottom edge was flattened, just like the sun at sunset—only you can look at the moon much longer. (Well, except when you’re driving.)

It rose through a bank of clouds or haze, climbing through dark bands, and slowly turned from orange to yellow, then turned paler. By the time we got home at 10:00, it had assumed its normal circular shape (with a tiny bit shaved from the upper right, since it was a day past full), and didn’t look particularly bigger than usual.

We don’t get to see the moon so close to the horizon very often. For one thing there are mountains to the east, but more importantly there are buildings all around. As we saw with the drive home, it doesn’t take much height to block the horizon from view. By the time we got home, roughly an hour past moonrise, it was just visible over the tops of the nearby buildings from our balcony.