Based on experience from the last few San Diego Comic-Cons, here are a few recommendations:

1. Pre-register, as early as possible! Not only will it save you money, but the line to pick up badges is always much shorter than the line to sign up. (If you’ve ever stood in line to register, you know what I mean. If you haven’t — well, let’s just say you might not get in until afternoon.)
2. Go for at least two days. One day is no longer enough time to see everything.
3. Do not set foot on the convention floor on Saturday. Go to panels instead.
4. Stay somewhere nearby, preferably with convenient trolley, bus, or shuttle access. Barring that, leave really early so you can find parking.
5. If you’re getting a hotel, reserve your room early. Perhaps as much as six months early. Otherwise you’ll end up paying way too much to stay at the Super 8.
6. Get a Day Tripper bus/trolley pass. You can get one for 1-4 days, and you can even order it online and have it mailed to you. There are two trolley stops in front of the convention center (yes, it’s that big): Convention Center (of course) and Gaslamp Quarter. In downtown San Diego, trolleys run every 15 minutes during the day, every 30 minutes in the evening, and run until around midnight (later on weekends).
7. If you’ve got a good costume, this is the place to wear it.
8. Don’t forget to bring a camera and lots of film/memory!
9. Bring a change of clothes so that you can wear your T-shirt or costume at the con and then go to a nice downtown San Diego restaurant for dinner.
10. Speaking of dinner, make reservations! This is A) downtown in a major city, B) a weekend, and C) during a convention with 100,000 people, most of whom will be looking for a restaurant. Alternatively, look for dinner as far away from the convention center as possible.
11. Pre-register for next year, if you plan to come back. We saved $25 each.

(Note: the target audience for this list is the type of person who has already mastered the concepts in Aubrey’s Guide to Con Hygiene.)

• Sightseeing, panels, and exhibits
• Hall Costumes / Cosplayers

Edit: Our 2009 Photos are up too!

Peter David: Getting Ink for the Fund – yes, Peter David has gotten a tattoo to raise money for the CBLDF. He follows up: “What have you done for the CBLDF lately?” Well, I’ve plugged it on my website and bought a T-shirt… (Edit: It seems Neil Gaiman just missed this by not answering his phone. Also, Newsarama has posted a follow-up story with photos)

The Great Custom 404 Page Adventure – comparing the sometimes helpful, sometimes hostile, sometimes humorous “file not found” messages at various websites. Update: Ironically, the site’s gone 404 itself…

Indispensable Mac OS X products – ’nuff said.

Pir(l)ouettes – a commentary on Adobe’s history of the ampersand.

ACLU – Pizza – a funny/chilling animation of what might go on if a pizza place could cross-reference your health, library, and banking records while you were on the phone.

Our hotel was located within walking distance of the Little Italy trolley stop. Diagonally across from a coffee shop (”It’s a Grind”) that we frequented during our stay was this restaurant:

Katie informed me that one of the Indigo Girls has, in fact, opened or invested in a restaurant, but this doesn’t seem to be it.

Here’s another restaurant (or more likely a bar) that we spotted, this time in Downtown San Diego:

This was Friday night with Sean, when we were wandering around the Gaslamp District and environs looking for a place to eat. We found ourselves wondering… was this a martini made with Ranch dressing? A place where martinis grazed and rustlers had to watch out for stampedes? Did they serve a crispy ranch martini with bacon?

Actually, “Grand Admiral” Sean should take the credit for the next one: I don’t remember if it was this year’s con or a past one, but he was on one of the escalators with Timothy Zahn, who remarked that the view always reminded him of the view inside the Death Star cannon. Inspired, I checked out that particular escalator, and Zahn’s right: it does look like the Death Star cannon!

And, in closing, an image from our hotel room this morning. It seems that Salvador Dali had somehow gotten into our room and transformed our soap:

(Continued in Volume 2.)

Last in the Comic Con preview series: Serenity, the feature-film spinoff of Firefly. Joss Whedon showed up, explained he wouldn’t waste any time since they didn’t have much, and that he “had something to show [us].”

Let me just say that, even if I hadn’t just finished watching Firefly, I’d be interested in seeing Serenity. If The Peacekeeper Wars closes the current chapter of Farscape, it looks like Serenity is designed to open a new chapter of Firefly.

After they ran the preview, he said he had something else to show us — “actually nine things.” The whole place screamed (the program had said only “surprise guests”), and out walked the entire main cast of the show! Like the Farscape group, these people are great fun to watch. (Edit: quotes are now available) Unfortunately, most of the audience questions were directed at Joss. It’s a comic book convention after all, and he writes comic books — plus there are lingering Buffy and Angel questions. To make sure they were included, Joss directed some questions of his own to the cast. Some of which were, shall we say, “interesting.”

As to the future of the Buffyverse: Angel, as a TV series, is dead. But it could eventually come back as a movie or TV movie. And while Buffy has run its course, there’s always the possibility of another spinoff (although clearly some people in the audience haven’t caught on to the fact that Eliza Dushku is busy right now).

Let me just say that the upcoming Farscape miniseries looks incredible. They ran a trailer they had just finished — not the one that’s just started airing, but one they’ll start showing later on — and it looks like it may be the most intense four hours of Farscape ever. They’re very cagey about the actual plot, but the clips show a level of danger, action, and drama at least equal to Farscape at its best.

The stated goal is to “bring this chapter of Farscape to a close” — to tie up the major dangling storylines and leave things open for other miniseries, feature films, comics, spinoffs, etc. Who will be around by the end is unclear, but it’s clearly going to be a heck of a ride.

They opened the floor for questions from the audience, and let me just say, hilarity ensued. I’d never seen any of this group at a convention before, but when anything funny comes up, David Kemper, Claudia Black, and Ben Browder just run with it. (Edit: quotes are now available.)

Actually, there was a funny story Claudia told. Apparently security was very tight where the script was concerned, down to being printed on red paper with the recipient’s name on each copy. She was driving through Sydney, when someone opened her car door. She was moving, so she had all kinds of things in her car, and she went into self-defense mode, shouting in the lowest voice possible, “No! Get the [frell] out!” By this time the guy had grabbed her purse and just ran off. But what was in her purse? The script! At the point she was filing the police report, they asked her what was in the bag, and she explained there was a script, and they asked for clarification and she said she was an actor, working on Farscape, at which point the police dispatcher said something like “Oh, Ms. Black, we’ll have to catch him and make sure nobody posts spoilers all over the Internet!”

Panelists David Kemper, Rockne O’Bannon, Brian Henson, Claudia Black (standing), Ben Browder, and, uh, the Sci-Fi Channel guy

MirrorMask came about when Sony noticed that while Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal didn’t do very well in theaters, over the years they’ve become strong, steady sellers in the home video market. So they went to the Jim Henson company and asked if they could do a fantasy film in the same vein, on a budget. So Lisa Henson called up Neil Gaiman by way of asking for Dave McKean, and explained the situation: They only had a $4 million budget, but they wouldn’t have any studio interference. They went on to say they knew they couldn’t afford Neil to write the screenplay, but could he at least come up with a story, at which point he said (Edit: corrected quote) “If Dave’s directing it, I’m writing it.”

The story (what we know of it) is reminiscent of Labyrinth as well as Gaiman’s Coraline and Sandman: A Game of You: A teenage girl, Helena (who wants to run away from the circus and join the real world!), dealing with parental issues (in this case her mother being in the hospital), dreams her way into another world. At least, she thinks it’s a dream. But she realizes that, whether it’s a dream or whether it’s real, she still needs to complete the quest set before her.

Most of the sets and non-human characters are being done with computer graphics, which means they can really let loose. If you’ve ever seen Dave McKean’s work (he did all the Sandman covers, among many, many other projects), you know what to expect. The clips they showed look exactly like Dave McKean illustrations set in motion.

There was a screening the night before (with scenes switching into bluescreen action from time to time), with one of the Sony execs reportedly saying, “That was like Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast… on acid… for kids!” (Edit: more quotes are available)

They kept the shots with actors to a minimum, probably to keep the story under wraps, but what was there looks good.

Current plans are for an art-house release sometime next spring, if post-production is finished by then. I know I’ll be in line.

And reportedly George Lucas has stated that this time, “revenge” is staying in the title.

Neither of us had ever been to Comic Con on a day other than Saturday, and my experience with conventions tends to be that Thursdays are very light. Not so! It didn’t seem any lighter than last year… though we were to find out today that yes, there is a difference! This could be seen in our comparative success in getting into a restaurant last night vs. tonight. Last night we ended up at T.G.I. Friday’s mainly because we were in shorts and T-shirts.

It’s nice not to have to worry about parking. Our car hasn’t left the motel parking lot since Wednesday, and we’ve just used the trolley system the last two days. Given how bad parking has been the last few years — and how bad it clearly is this year — it’s entirely possible we might have had to park as far away as the hotel anyway.

We went in around lunchtime today (when you’ve got 3-4 days, there’s much less of a rush to see-everything-now!) and started with the dealers’ room for a while. We got to the Real Life booth while Greg and Liz were on break, with the booth staffed by Cliff, who was pushing Dr. Devious vs. Lincoln High — which we will have to check out once we’re back on a regular-speed connection. (We’re using the modem over the hotel phone line. I had really forgotten what that was like! I’m seriously considering going on another optimization kick…). After a while we split up to hit several different panels, and I dropped by the CBLDF booth to pick up a Barry Ween “@#!%$%! Censorship!” T-shirt.

I went to the Mirrormask panel, which featured mostly Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean talking about the film, plus a few clips. McKean and the editors had put together a sort of trailer-like clip, and there were a few other clips (including the creepiest rendition of “Close To You” I’ve ever heard). It’s hard to get a sense of the story so far, but what I’ve seen and what Neil has described sounds not only reminiscent of Labyrinth (which in part inspired the film), but also very much like Coraline and Sandman: A Game of You. Visually, it looks like a Dave McKean illustration come to life. It’s hard to tell how well the whole thing will come together, but I definitely want to see the finished product!

One more tidbit: The Death movie has been picked up by New Line.

Oddly, as MirrorMask was letting out, a woman in the row in front of me turned around and said, “You’re Lee’s son, aren’t you?” “Uh, yeah.” She then introduced herself and her two friends… apparently they’re part of the same circle of Scapers my mom’s in.

We met up again after MirrorMask along with Sean. The three of us went back to the Real Life booth, I talked to Greg and got a (signed!) copy of the book, and then we all headed over to the New Line upcoming movies presentation. Blade III at least looks interesting, Harold and Kumar go to White Castle… well, used to look like one of those films that could be either wonderful or horrible, but now it looks more like the latter… and Celllular looks like a standard action flick and not much more. Then, the moment everyone was waiting for: previews of the Return of the King Extended Edition, coming in December with 50 minutes of additional footage, including Eowyn and Faramir in the Houses of Healing, Aragorn using the Palantir, the final confrontation with Saruman, and the Mouth of Sauron. They showed a few scenes, and brought out several people from the production staff as well as David Wenham and Billy Boyd. Unfortunately there was a huge contingent of Nazgirls up front, who screamed every time one of the actors spoke. (Edit: we’ve posted quotes from the panel.)

It was maybe 7:30 when that let out, and the three of us went looking for someplace to eat in the Gaslamp district. We initially figured on Star of India, which had about an hour and a half wait, so we went looking around… and of course everything else was packed. We finally came back to the Indian place, which by now had a shorter wait at least, and finally got out around 10:30.

Then Katie and I returned to the hotel via the trolley of vomiting drunks, which was a strange experience… But that is another tale, and will be told another day.

The other thing about cons that makes me want to exercise is seeing how the medians of the demographics play out. You have the younger contingent, who are mostly good-looking and relatively thin. You have the really old people, who are using hand-carved canes and usually there because they’re connected with actually producing something, and who are generally moving pretty well. Then you have two basic groups of middle-aged fans: the ones who are really skinny and nerdy-looking still, and the ones who put the “middle” in “middle-aged.” It’s wonderful motivation to lose weight when you see a forty-year-old Arwen on a Lark. (Please understand that I’m not trying for a cheap shot. I consider myself lucky that I’m able to lose weight when I want to, and I wish everybody were that fortunate. It’s just kind of heartbreaking in a weird empathetic way.)

So I’ve been on a real veggie kick the last couple of days, and I only just figured out what was up with that this afternoon at Subway. (Found out they’ll give you spinach on your sandwich if you ask nicely. Score!) And all things considered, it could be worse. I could be on a steak kick in the middle of India.

Day 2. The pillows from the unused bed are stacked on the side of the bed we slept in. We laugh, and move the pillows atop the other set. *sleep*

Day 3. The bed is made… with the pillows already double-stacked! (They’re learning!)

For example, when we walked into our hotel room, we found a pizza flyer shoved under the door, and the following stand-up card on our table:

OK, so they have deals with some places, but come on! Garage operations with “unsafe” pizza?! I suppose it’s possible, though.

For those Babylon 5 fans, here’s an excerpt from the dining guide:

And we encountered another relative of Boba and Jango Fett at dinner:

While driving back to the hotel, we missed a turn and ended up driving through the seedier part of town (we passed no less than three nudie bars). We also spotted a restaurant calling itself “Extreme Pizza” (which might explain the card in our room) and a movie theater with an interesting cross-section of Hollywood:

• Hellboy
• Kill Bill
• Passion of the Christ

Sadly, we didn’t have a chance to capture either on fil– uh, pixels.