Around the Con

• Photo set on Flickr
• Friday Night: Running Through Downtown San Diego
• Flash Costume Sightings at Comic-Con

We saved most of our long-form writing for panel and costume write-ups (see below), but I made extensive use of Twitter during the convention. These are auto-generated digests of each day’s Twitter activity, presenting a view of the convention as I experienced it.

• Wednesday Tweets
• Thursday Tweets
• Friday Tweets
• Saturday Tweets
• Sunday Tweets

In Costume

On Friday we attended in costume as Yomiko Readman from Read or Die and Jay Garrick, the original Flash from the Golden Age (1940s). On Saturday Katie attended as Kate Austen from Lost.

• Making the Flash Helmet
• Making the Flash Boots and Shirt
• Costume component photos on Flickr
• Yomiko and the Flash
• Flash Costume Sightings at Comic-Con

Panels

• Thursday: Geoff Johns Spotlight (live blog)
• Thursday: Mad Science: The Science Behind Science-Fiction with reps from Fringe, Eureka! and Caprica
• Friday: Flash Forward Looks Incredible
• Friday: DC Nation (live blog)
• Saturday: DC Universe (live blog)
• Saturday: Lost Panel Made of Win

Reflections

• Tips for Comic-Con
• The Other Ten Essentials of Comic-Con
• Hotel Review: Holiday Inn On The Bay
• Why Las Vegas is a bad idea for Comic-Con
• New Heroes Speedster Trained in the Jedi Arts
• Flash News from San Diego

That covers all the major posts we’ve written from the start of the convention onward. There are a few minor bits, like the initial round-up that’s mostly duplicated here, or the “We’re here!” post from when we arrived in San Diego, and various posts about the build-up to the con. You can find these by looking further back in the Comic-Con 2009 category here and in posts tagged CCI 2009 at Speed Force.

Except only one of us made it onto the bus.

Missing the Bus

We’d thought about going back to the restaurant for dessert later (they had Bailey’s cheesecake), so I did something stupid and went back to check the hours. (If they were going to be closed, we’d go somewhere in the Gaslamp area like Ghirardelli.) This took longer than expected, and the shuttle arrived in the meantime.

The shuttles only run every 20-30 minutes at night, and we had barely 30 minutes to the screening. Chances were if I didn’t catch this one, I wasn’t going to make it.

I fought my way upstream through the crowd that had just gotten off the bus, saw that Katie wasn’t at the stop, and ran halfway down the block as the shuttle pulled away…and immediately stopped at a red light.

I ran to the front of the bus and knocked on the door. The driver gestured toward the back of the bus. I looked back to see if there was another door. Nothing. I knocked again. He glared at me and pointed toward the back of the bus again. It became clear he was not opening that door for anything.

Words Exchanged

So I pulled out my cell phone and called Katie, who was in the process of calling me to ask where the hell I was. Whichever call connected, I started out with something like “The &@^#*& driver wouldn’t let me on the bus!” We each fumed a bit, the light turned green, and the bus pulled away.

I wasted a precious minute trying to decide whether it was worth trying to catch a trolley or something. I figured their schedule was about as bad. Driving didn’t even cross my mind — it probably would have taken me long enough to park that it wouldn’t have helped anyway. If I’d really been thinking I would have walked around to the front of the hotel and hailed a taxi.

Maybe it was that I’d spent the day dressed as the Flash. I decided to run.

Dash!

I knew the route to get to the convention center. We’d walked it the previous morning, and it took about 25-30 minutes, so I figured if I ran part of the 1.2 miles I might make it.

View Larger Map

This photo shows roughly the first half of the route I had to take, from the Holiday Inn where I was standing, down almost to the water’s edge near that last tall building, then a turn to the left for about the same distance.

So I ran from the back of the Holiday Inn down along Pacific Highway. I passed a long block of dark, utilitarian buildings (warehouses? customs offices?). Their half-empty parking lots were surrounded by 12-foot-high chain link fence and gates labeled “This is not a gate” (seriously). I dropped into a jog or walk from time to time, and rested anxiously while waiting for traffic signals to change.

I didn’t see many other pedestrians, which might not have been a great sign. I seriously considered hopping a pedicab when I reached Harbor, but thought, “Oh, I’m close enough, I won’t need one.” And promptly got stuck at the next three lights.

Somewhere around the Hyatt I began to wonder if I’d make it in time, and when another pedicab driver came by and offered a ride, I had to ask.

“How much to the convention center?”

“10 dollars.”

“Great!”

I hopped in, and we took off at a much faster speed. Fast enough that, looking back, I really should’ve been worried about the fact that I was only a few feet from the asphalt with no seat belt. I barely had enough time to pull out my phone and text Katie to verify what room I needed to go to, when we reached the Marriott–

–and the bicycle chain broke. Or at least slipped off the gears. As if this trip needed any more obstacles! At that point, though, I was basically across the street from the convention center, so I handed the driver the cash, jumped out, and ran the rest of the way, pulling out my phone to let Katie know I was there.

I made it on time. There was even enough room that Katie had been able to save me a seat. And enough time to catch up…

Because that’s when I found out what had been going on on the bus.

Cranky

I, Katie, had an equally hair-raising, if less sweaty, experience. I’m filing it under “you get what you pay for” and hoping I never repeat it. I should have taken the hint from the departing passenger who remarked, “This guy is an awesome driver,” but his tone made it not entirely clear just how sarcastic he was being.

I got on the bus despite lack of Kelson, hoping that either he’d make it after I boarded or the driver would wait a few seconds if he saw someone running for the stop. No such luck. I heard the knock on the door at the red light, and along with everyone else did as much of a prairie-dog maneuver as I could manage, but couldn’t see what was happening. I had a suspicion that it was Kelson, which was confirmed when he called me. I told him that if I’d seen him I’d have asked the driver to let him on, but I couldn’t. I felt really dumb for getting on the bus in the first place.

Now, I’ve seen drivers of free shuttles, municipal buses, charter buses, and school buses let passengers board in odd places if it was clear to the driver that they just didn’t make it to the exact stop in time. And the bus in question was less than half full. To me, it didn’t make much sense from a service standpoint to deny passage to someone who could have boarded and sat down safely by the time the bus would be moving again. And, I admit, I was mad that the driver had pissed off Kelson. So I said, loudly enough to be sure he heard me, “That was my husband you wouldn’t let on!”

All I really wanted was to let him know he’d split a party, which most of the other drivers we’d seen had tried very hard not to do. I wasn’t expecting an answer, beyond a possible “Sorry” or “Hah, too bad.” However, someone had clearly emptied several specimen trays over this guy’s cornflakes, because he wasted neither time nor volume in responding.

“They’re called STOPS, lady! The bus STOPS at the STOPS and if you want to be on it you better be there! Don’t you yell at me! And if you give me any more trouble I’ll put you off right here!”

As this was essentially “STFU biatch,” I decided saying any more would just be labeled “trouble,” and kept quiet. But he didn’t. “If you can’t get on the bus, you don’t bang on the door, you wait for the next one! And if you have a problem with me I’ll gladly give you my card and you can take it up with Transportation.” And when I thought he was done, he went off again. I was a little shaken up by the violence of his reaction. Eight words that don’t include any curses don’t usually merit half a minute of haranguing someone you’ve threatened with substantive retaliation if they defend themselves. And dude, you’re a head taller than me and twice as big around. What kind of size do you think I need cutting down to??

When Kelson called back to report that he was making his way on foot, I answered in my Perky Customer Service voice, hoping the driver wouldn’t realize it was me. It was only as we got off the bus that I saw the observation mirror; apparently he did have a sense of what constituted “trouble” and what didn’t. He exited first, as the drivers always do (in the hope of tips, I presume, if SD shuttles are anything like Vegas ones), and announced loudly to a uniform-shirted woman standing at the curb with a clipboard, “There’s a lady on here with a complaint.” This must be Transportation. I hadn’t decided what to do until that moment, and I decided to make his characterization of me as a troublemaker look as wrong-headed as possible. As sweetly as I could, I apologized for being out of line when he was only trying to do his job, and assured him it wouldn’t happen again. He looked…confused. Which was a damn sight better than satisfied. I did consider that it was the “weak” thing to do, but what with the state I was in, I figured I wouldn’t give a very good account of myself in an official report.

Aftermath

Kelson again. Fortunately, the panel was worth it. Yes, “The Worst Cartoons Ever” were exactly what it said on the tin, but in that sort of train-wreck way that grabs hold of the brain with utter fascination.

We cleared out before Spike and Mike’s Twisted Animation and caught a shuttle back to the hotel — thankfully with a different driver (though we’d planned to simply ignore him and hope he didn’t pick a fight).

The restaurant was still open for drinks…but the kitchen had closed. They weren’t serving dessert anymore.

I arrived on the Plaza Park lawn as soon as the 8 a.m. shuttle could get me there. No one noticed I was dressed to resemble Kate, and Hurley Guy was nowhere in sight to beg for a photo. The doors opened at about 10:30 for the 11:00 panel, and on the way in we were handed pencils and fliers for “Lost University” (and I also got the “9″ card being handed out as a promo for 9). We found out what that was all about at the beginning of the panel, when a clip advertising the website (lostuniversity.org) was played. I haven’t looked at the site, so I don’t know if it’s another ARG or another fan-gathering site. But with “test” questions and “schedules” involving polar bears and hunting boars, it’s bound to be at least slightly funny.

I believe this was also where there were some clips played of “things that might happen” in an altered world of Lost. I can’t remember precisely where this bit was, because I was a good fan and didn’t take pictures of any of the videos. The lineup included a commercial for Mr. Cluck’s featuring Hurley, who had apparently bought the company and had nothing but GOOD luck since winning the lottery. The restaurant was featuring “Australian” combos to commemorate his return from his walkabout trip. Then there was a segment from a “Most Wanted Fugitives” show, letting us know that Kate was still on the run. Apparently, instead of killing her stepdad in the explosion, she’d actually killed the underling he’d sent back to the house to collect his tools.

The panel itself started with Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof saying that they planned to make this mostly Q&A, to give back to the fans. And although they wanted to give out gifts to everyone who asked questions, like they had last year, the network hadn’t given them the budget, so they’d just brought one gift that would go to whoever said the secret word. But everyone was to follow the standard rules and keep it to one question. This was followed by a montage of the best fan videos found on the web, including the infamous “Brokeback Island” and some Robot Chicken-style stuff with action figures. I’d have liked to have a list of those, to look up later and watch in full.

The first question was about how a fan had heard season 6 would be reminiscent of season 1, and how was that going to work? Apparently they’re bringing back the unpredictability that ran rampant at the beginning. To that end, they said that they’re often asked if they’re making it up as they go along, and insisted that they’re not. Just to prove it to us, each took from a “secret hiding place” one sheet of paper, and proclaimed them to be the last two pages of the series-finale script. They located a stapler somewhere, stapled the sheets together, and put them into a double-locked box, each taking a key. The box, they explained, would be taken by someone else to an undisclosed location after the panel, and on the night of the finale it would be brought to the Jimmy Kimmel set, where they’d open it and read the script, to prove that the pages did indeed contain what had just been shown. Gimmicky, but all is well and good.

Next, a guy comes up who’s apparently well-known for doing wacky stuff (not Bob Stencil, some other dude) and presents the producers with a wrapped gift. He opens it for them: a black velvet painting of the two of them with a polar bear. The guy also plugged his website: damoncarltonandapolarbear.com. (They repeated it back to him as “damonANDcarltonandapolarbear,” and he and the rest of us took great glee in correcting it.) Again…haven’t dared to look. They did accept the painting.

I believe that a bit after this is where the winner of the theme-song contest was announced. I hadn’t even known there was a contest…made me feel like a very bad fan. The crew had mocked up a credits sequence to the winning composition, which, sadly, wasn’t very clearly audible from where I was sitting. But the sequence was cool.

So then, Hurley Guy took the mike.

Only, it wasn’t Hurley Guy. It was Jorge Garcia.

Wanting to know, apparently, if having the bomb plan succeed meant the previous five seasons would have all been for nothing, because that would seem like a huge cheat. The producers explained that he’d just have to trust them. “Yeah,” he said, “but the last time I trusted you guys you said Nikki and Paolo were gonna be awesome.” Then he asked whether it being the final season meant everything was going to be answered. Like, when Jack and Sayid were torturing Sawyer over Shannon’s inhaler, but he didn’t have it…where exactly was the inhaler? Oh JEEZ, Jorge…”What happened to one question per person???”

At that point, the cheering from the front got waaaay too loud to just be about the witty banter…and soon, Michael Emerson appeared on the screen, needling Jorge about the question, his character, and everything in general. He was very much in character as Ben, and when Jorge brought this up, saying he himself was acting when playing Hurley, he responded with, “Acting. Is that what you do.” It went on for what seemed like quite a while, but I can’t remember much, except how a comment about how Hurley was played “broadly” got a general condemnatory “oooooooouw” from the audience. Jorge accused him of being jealous over not having won the role of Hurley, and he protested that he’d never tried out. And then, of course, an “audition tape” was played, during which both actors migrated to the stage.

Bob Stencil made his appearance after this, with a variation on the time-loop question, and pretended to get very confused about it and get a nosebleed. “Oh…gotta find my constant!” The producers had been expecting him and had a custom T-shirt ready for him. He was thrilled.

A fan asked the eternal question: “Does Nestor Carbonell wear eyeliner?” Cuse and Lindelof said they get this all the time (and they do; I was headdesking as best I could with a program booklet), and that Nestor was in the back right now getting ready so they’d just go to the video feed so he could answer it. The video was of him at a makeup mirror talking to himself and applying eyeliner. After ample laughter time, he looked at the pencil and said, “This is Charcoal. I never use Charcoal.” And went into what I presume is a Christian-Bale-style rant at one of the (probably imaginary) staff. When the lights came up, he was at the front table with the others.

The real Hurley Guy came to the mike after this, both to ask a question and to thank Jorge and the show for giving him a character he could identify with. At that point, Cuse and Lindelof decided it was time to give us clues about the secret word, which no one had yet said. “Think…blonde. Pregnant.” The audience of course started yelling “Claire” but we were reminded that it could only get you a prize at the mike. Surprisingly, the next question asker didn’t work it in; I guess he really wanted to ask the question he wanted to ask. But the next guy did it, and cleverly. His prize was a seagull statue, to commemorate the bird that Claire had been interacting with in one episode.

There was one final guest to bring out, and we would get a clip intro for a clue. Jack? Kate? Nope, Sawyer. Audience just about melted. (And with good reason, if you fancy him; the clips were calculated for their hotness factor.) Josh Holloway came out and sat next to Lindelof, and started up what sounded like an innocuous conversation about their “making it up” bit with the box. Then he pulled out a small object and said, “You know what this is?”

“Looks like a taser,” says Lindelof.

“Yeah! Wanna see if it works?”
He shoves the thing into Lindelof’s shoulder, and the sound system plays a buzzing noise…about two seconds after the spasming act is over. So then, after grabbing the key, he threatens Cuse with the taser, saying he’ll meet the same fate as his friend JJ Abrams. “That’s not JJ Abrams. That’s Damon Lindelof.” “Lindel…Linda who?”
And he stuck Lindelof’s hand in the pitcher of ice water.

Of course, Josh gets both keys and extracts the script pages from the box, with plenty of Sawyer-style nicknames and snark, then stands there and looks at the pages in confusion. “You can’t read!” crows Cuse, and Emerson grabs the pages and puts on Ben-like glasses.
“Sylar and Parkman stand beneath the big top…” Half the audience is confused; the other half, including me, is laughing too hard to hear much.

“You have to go on, Parkman…you’re the last Petrelli.”

“What the f**k is this?”

Finally, they played an “In Memoriam” montage of a bunch of characters who’d died over the course of the show, starting with the guy who got sucked into the engine (forgot his name) and ending with a rather long bit about Charlie. Having heard what had happened at the Flash Forward panel on Thursday, I began to get suspicious and got my camera ready. Sure enough, surprise!Dominic Monaghan came out onstage. He was there for all of 30 seconds and didn’t get to say anything; and of three pictures I managed to take, one’s blurry, one doesn’t let you see who he is, and in the third he’s behind Josh. Figures. (I picked the blurry one.) But I’m not complaining. If they wanted to give a gift to the fans, this panel was a good one. Thanks, guys.

• Millions of people die, worldwide, in the space of moments. Cars and airplanes crash, people standing on staircases or ladders fall to their deaths, swimmers drown, etc.
• The survivors know exactly what they’ll be doing for a two-minute slice of time in the future…but they don’t necessarily know why.

It’s based on the novel Flashforward by Robert J Sawyer, which I reviewed at Speed Force last December. It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it. The focus seems to be different, though: the book follows the scientists whose experiment accidentally triggered the event, in which everyone sees visions of 21 years in the future. The TV show is following, to start with anyway, an FBI agent investigating the event.

So where the book is mostly philosophical science fiction, the show looks like a mix of action, mystery and drama.

Both have, as their major theme, a single question: If you knew what your future was going to be, what would you do? Would you try to change it? Would you try to make it happen? If you saw a future you wanted, would you slack off, confident that things would work out in the end, or would you put in extra effort knowing you’d succeed?

To start with, they brought out the producers of the show, had some discussion, then ran the first two acts of the pilot episode.

Read on for a write-up and photos from the panel.

The Show

I’ll try to keep this as minimally spoilery as possible.

It starts out with Joseph Fiennes’ character crawling out of a multi-car pileup, trying to make his way through the chaos, then jumps back to “four hours earlier.” It introduces a number of characters: Fiennes’ FBI agent. His wife, a surgeon (Sonya Walger). One of her colleagues. Their daughter, the daughter’s babysitter, and the babysitter’s boyfriend. Fiennes’ AA sponsor, and finally his FBI partner (John Cho) and boss (Courtney B. Vance).

It follows each character through the morning – tailing a terrorism suspect, prepping for surgery, climbing up onto a utility pole, and in one case going out to the pier to shoot himself. Then the flashforward hits, you see Fiennes’ vision (a big bulletin board with case notes, drinking, some sort of shoot-out in the office), and then he’s back at the multi-car pileup.

From there the chaos just sort of expands — you see their immediate location, with Fiennes and Cho trying to figure out what the heck is going on, and it pulls out to bigger and bigger pictures. The show checks in with the other characters…like the surgeons who all blacked out during surgery. There’s a stunning shot of downtown Los Angeles. Let’s just say…imagine what the freeway would look like if every driver on the road blacked out at the same moment.

Discussion

The cast came out next – Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, Courtney B. Vance, and Christine Woods, and the panel turned into a discussion followed by a question and answer session.

Key points:

The first season is working up to the day of the visions: April 29, 2010. At that time we’ll see the context of what’s really going on, how people ended up in very different places from the beginning of the show, and whether the future can be changed. (That last is a huge question in the book.) They are hoping to air the first part of that story on the actual date! (Babylon 5 had a couple of good examples of how a vision of the future can be perfectly accurate, but misleading. The best is Londo’s vision of how he’ll die, in what appears to be mortal combat with G’Kar.)

They do have plans for where to go after they catch up to the visions, so future seasons won’t just be flailing around for ideas. Someone mentioned the 21-year timespan of the book, and Courtney B. Vance kept joking about how he planned to be on this show for 21 years.

There is a “game changing” moment around episode 7 or so. My guess: either that’s the point where they find out what caused the blackout, or they find out conclusively whether the future is or is not mutable.

One of the main characters did not have a vision, implying that he’ll be dead by the end of the season unless they can change the future.

Even though they’re writing a completely different story around the novel’s central concept, Robert J. Sawyer has been involved in the show and will be writing an episode.

They kept giving Joseph Fiennes grief over the fact that he wasn’t wearing baggy shirts and riding a horse.

Virtual Presence

At the end of the panel, they ran a short video montage introduced by Sonya Walger, sitting on a director’s chair in a living room wearing a bathrobe. Walger explained that she had two choices this weekend: get married, or go to Comic-Con. She made some remarks about the spandex quotient (though all the while people dressed as Spider-Man and other super-heroes were wandering around in the background) and not having to answer questions about Penny on Lost, and told us to enjoy the clip. Then she stopped talking to the camera, stepped off the chair, dropped the bathrobe to reveal a Wonder Woman costume, and shouted, “All right! Where’s my *bleep* tiara!”

The clips hinted at what other characters had seen in the future, including one who didn’t see anything, and finished with Fiennes threatening Jack Davenport, who appeared to know something about what actually happened, who then said something about his partner…at which point Dominic Monaghan (long rumored, but not up to this point confirmed) stepped into view. What he said was lost in the general squee, but that was the end of the clip–

–And then Dominic Monaghan walked into the room. To more squeeing. Unfortunately they were running a bit over, and he was only there for about a minute before they had to end the panel. Long enough for him to sit down and say, “I play Simon.” and that was about it.

1. Medical tape – preventing blisters from costume shoes. (Also, repairs in a pinch)
2. Extra lanyard for your camera
3. Umbrella for outdoor lines
4. Costume-appropriate bag
5. Insoles – you’ll be walking a LOT
6. Burt’s Bees Res-Q Ointment for sunburn in case your sunscreen wears off or otherwise fails
7. Safety pins
8. Reliable writing surface (in case you have paper but not a notebook)
9. Napkins or paper towels (especially if you’re bringing your own food)
10. Extra shirt to go over tank tops to prevent sunburn or backpack friction

Read more Tips for Comic-Con.

Costumes

For the first time in six years, we both wore costumes during the con. Back in 2003 we went as Riff and Gwynn from Sluggy Freelance. Since then, Katie’s picked one or two days to go in costume (pirate, Sylar victim, and Yomiko Readman from Read or Die), but I’ve stuck with shorts and a t-shirt every day.

So this year, on Friday, Katie repeated her Yomiko costume from last year (only without the trench coat), and I went as the Golden-Age (1940s) version of the Flash (a.k.a. Jay Garrick). On Saturday, Katie went for subtle, and dressed as Kate Austen from Lost.

Liveblogging

I did a lot of posting through Twitter and my other blog, Speed Force, where you can find write-ups of three panels:

• Thursday: Geoff Johns Spotlight
• Friday: DC Nation
• Saturday: DC Universe

There’s more running commentary on the posts tagged CCI 2009 at Speed Force.

Coming Soon

Over the next few days we’ll both be posting about the trip, about some of the panels we attended, and about interesting things that happened while we were there.

It’s located on the bay (of course), near the San Diego Maritime Museum where they have several classic ships permanently anchored and available for tours. If you happen to have an upper-floor room, the views are quite nice. (We were on the second floor, so our view was of the roof of the hotel’s conference center. It’s funny how quickly we got used to the sound of the air conditioner.)

It’s an easy walk to Little Italy (we went out to one of our favorite San Diego restaurants, Indigo Grill, on Wednesday) or the trolley, and on the convention shuttle route.

The rooms were nice, clean and spacious (absolutely huge, compared to the last few places we’ve stayed in San Diego). The bed was comfortable, and they had pillows with two different levels of firmness, so neither of us had any trouble getting to sleep. The hotel restaurant/pub, the Elephant and Castle, is quite good. There’s also a Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in one tower, and a deli next door. And for those looking to save money on breakfast, the in-room coffee service is a single-cup disposable-basket setup, so that if you want plain hot water for tea or oatmeal, it won’t taste like coffee! Wireless internet access is complimentary, and easy to set up. Our room had locked doors to adjoining rooms on both sides, so a large group could presumably link together at least three rooms into a suite.

The only annoyances were:

Internet access during the convention was absolutely swamped. Sometimes pages just wouldn’t load, and the Flickr uploader actually gave up several times. This would have been less of a problem if I hadn’t been so determined to post photos and blog during the con, though at least with photos it turned out I could (usually) start them before going to bed and let them run overnight. The one night that it just gave up, I tried when we got up at 6 AM and they posted extremely quickly.

The bathroom had a sliding door that didn’t seal. Like the room at the Omni, it blocked light but not sound or airflow. On the plus side, it was actually big enough that we could brush our teeth at the same time.

Overall, though, we really liked it, and agreed that it would be near the top of our list when it came to hotels on the shuttle route. Though if possible I’d really prefer something close enough that we wouldn’t have to rely on the shuttle or other transportation.

Some interesting moments:

After they talked about the ethics of interrogating a corpse, one of the guys from Fringe (I think Rob Chiappette) remarked that he wanted to see a Law & Order: Fringe show. I think I’d watch that!

One of the reps from Eureka revealed that they’d planned an episode that would take the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes concept and play it seriously, but it didn’t make it. Jamie Paglia said “It’s so good we didn’t do that episode.” Either Glenn Whitmann or Rob Chiappetta remarked immediately, “You’ll see it on Fringe!”

Phil Plait asked why there wasn’t more astronomy on Fringe, and Glenn Whitmann explained it was because it was a horror show, and it’s easier to creep people out with biology & neurology than astrophysics.

A fan asked the panelists whether they had ever done something dangerous on their show that made them worry about people trying the experiments at home (”Don’t try this at home, kids!”) For the most part they figured the level of technology, gadgetry and genius that their characters had made things impractical to imitate, though Rob Chiappetta added, “If you see Walter [Bishop] do something on screen, don’t do it!”

Another audience member mentioned that he worked in robotics, and was concerned about the way robots were portrayed as good or evil. If too many robots were portrayed evil, he might lose funding… Jane Espenson explained that “Killer robots are a lot more fun to watch.”

And of course Phil Plait plugged his book, Death from the Skies! “I love having a microphone!”

Photos will be on my Flickr account later tonight, once they trickle through the incredibly-slow hotel wifi. Update: They’re up! The trick was apparently waiting until 6am when no one else was using the wifi.

Missed the opening act, but here in plenty of time for @TheRealToriAmos #

Greek Theater, turned out to be a great concert!

Not that I actually need a netbook. I’d only really end up using it for conventions that I’d want to post live (which would probably boil down to Comic-Con International), and I have the ability to do that using either my G1 or the laptop.

Long-time readers (all five of you ) may remember that last year I agonized over upgrading my phone to something with real web capability until they announced wifi, and I just lugged the laptop around. Which worked fine, but it was heavy, especially the day I was also carrying around Comic Book Tattoo.

Of course, now I can use the G1 to post to my blog, or Twitter, or Facebook, or (almost) anywhere else even without wifi.

Except…

• Typing on that tiny keyboard is slow. Not as slow as the onscreen keyboard, but still a lot slower than typing on a full-sized keyboard. Then again, netbook keyboards are also smaller than standard, so it might not be much of an improvement.
• There’s no easy way to transfer photos from another camera. I can only think of two ways other than using a computer as an intermediary: use a Micro-SD card with adapter in the camera, or get a card reader that will clone data from an SD to a Micro-SD.

The camera issue shouldn’t bother me. Chances are I’d just end up doing what I did for WonderCon this year: post the occasional phone pic to Twitter and then upload the good photos to Flickr each evening. Just like I’d mostly be writing brief posts from the convention and detailed posts at the hotel.

But then I remember the post I made on the Tori Amos signing last year. After the signing I was so hyped that I found a table, set up the laptop, banged out a blog post, hooked up the camera and added a couple of photos…and the post ended up getting linked on a major Tori fansite, producing a traffic spike so big that not only is the following day still this blog’s busiest day ever, but that post, even though traffic fell off over time, is the 8th most-viewed post on the site over the past year.

Still, the promise of another 15 minutes of blogfame isn’t enough to justify several hundred bucks. (Though the < $200 models that pop up on Woot from time to time have been tempting.) So I’m making an effort to practice typing with the G1, both the physical and on-screen keyboards. I’ve got Twidroid and I Tweet for posting to two Twitter accounts. I’ve got wpToGo to simplify blogging. I’ve got a plugin that will automatically liveblog using Twitter, which I still need to test.

It’s just a matter of making full use of the tools I have, rather than running after the latest cool toy.

Update: I posted this last night, but somehow it ended up backdated to the day I started it on May 20. I think wpToGo must have set a publishing date when I posted the draft. Yes, I started this post on my phone.

It makes me want to headdesk.

Now, I don’t hate Vegas. I’m not ZOMG in love with it, but I’ve been there more than once and I don’t think it should be removed from the face of the earth. What I believe about Vegas is that it is a law and a destination unto itself, and that everyone should be able to choose whether they go based on the merits of the place, not on the merits of what else might be going on there that isn’t a usual part of the location. Please keep this in mind as I present my list of Reasons Not to Move CCI to Las Vegas:

1. Weather. San Diego may be incredibly hot some years, but it’s coastal. There are breezes a lot of the time, and it’s often quite bearable. Vegas is inland desert and is 99% guaranteed to be nasty hot in July/August. Part of the crazy fun of CCI is seeing costumes on the street, which would become darn near impossible for a lot of people given the temperature.

2. Distance. I’m not talking about the distance for people to get there (though I will in a bit), but the distance between things. It can take over half an hour to get from the front door of one hotel to the front door of the next one over. In San Diego, it’s pretty easy to leave the convention center, go find food that’s not jacked up in price for an inferior product, and come back. In Vegas, unless you take the monorail, that’s a pipe dream, especially given that the convention center is off the Strip and not really near a lot of hotels. Keep reading for more.

3. No public transportation. Well, not NO transportation. There’s the monorail, and there are buses. But the monorail only goes down one side of the Strip, and the traffic on the Strip itself, where the buses run, is a nightmare 24/7. The monorail is not convenient to get to; it runs down the backs of the hotels, and getting to the stations from the street, or vice versa, can take 20 minutes just by itself. (We timed.) Lots of hotels do have shuttle service, but it’s not huge, it’s not universal, and it’s not fantastic. Based on the masses of humanity I’ve seen at the SD Old Town trolley station, I doubt the monorail has enough cars to pack the schedule as full as they’d need to, and I doubt the shuttles will satisfy fans wanting to get to places at specific times. There would need to be charter buses, the way SD does it, but because this is Vegas, they would want either tickets or tips…probably both. Which brings me to:

4. Pay For Play. In Vegas, the dollar is still almighty. You can get a hotel room for $50 a night if you play it right, sure, but you don’t get the perks that identify you to the hotel’s amenities providers as a Good Customer. In some places, if you just want people to be polite to you, you have to pay them. In others, you just get dirty looks if you don’t tip. It’s been said that CCI wouldn’t make a dent in the normal daily Vegas people-traffic; if that’s true, then we’d all be running into this. Think it’s maddening to get slow service because a restaurant in the Gaslamp is full, or because you think you’ve been pegged as a low tipper? Try being in Vegas where they know whether you have spare change. Doesn’t matter if the place has only two parties in the section; if one of them is a Vegas regular and has paid to be part of their Premier Club, he’ll always get better service than the other party. I’m imagining the cheaper hotel restaurants being overrun with congoers who don’t understand the ethos (if you can even call it that); the saddest part is that if they voice any displeasure, they simply won’t be heard because all that’s happened is that they’ve run into how Vegas deals with those they perceive as cheapskates. They discourage you from coming back until you’re ready to spend. And,

5. Everything costs more. More accurately, it’s a case of the substandard being cheaper and the quality merchandise being more expensive. You can get a lot of pure crap for very little money, but you have to be willing to accept really crappy crap. Most stores are either souvenir dives or designer boutiques. I’d bet even the toothbrushes in most of the dives are emblazoned with “LAS VEGAS.”

And the food. Every megahotel in the vicinity of the Strip has a restaurant hierarchy. There is at least one posh place, one just a bit below it, one just a bit below that, a buffet, a theme bar, and a taco/burger/coffee stand. Most of the “nice” restaurants in SD are comparable in price to the lowest-price nice places in Vegas, and there aren’t nearly as many tony upscale spots. Not only that, but the cheap places are much greater in number in SD, and easier to get to (see #2 and 3 above). If there are more restaurants in a megahotel, there is usually a theme place that may be either very posh or very casual, followed by a doubling of one of the lower-priced ranks. They’ll also have bars around the casino floor(s), and occasionally a cookie or ice-cream shop. If the hotel is not a new “mega” type, they’ll have a coffee shop and a nice place, and some coffee/ice cream/burgers. The Stratosphere is the best for cheap eats, but it’s not close to anything. (The biggest souvenir shop in the city doesn’t count.) And at the other end of the Strip, the MGM Grand isn’t bad for it either, though their counter service is tucked away into the winding halls at the back of the place. Sure, there’s fast food dotted around here and there, but chances are that you’re not going to want to make the 45-minute trek to the McDonald’s when you can go a monorail stop away and find the cheap food in the hotels on the monorail line. Which will be mobbed, because nobody’s going to want to take the time to hike across the street and hunt through a megahotel for something they can afford.

Actually, there is one thing that doesn’t cost more: alcohol. Three guesses why.

6. No commuting. To those who come in from, say, Virginia, this may not sound like a big deal. But it’s just plain fact: there are fewer people living within 2 hours’ drive of Vegas than within 2 hours’ drive of SD. With the con in SD, people can even stay with friends (or in cheaper hotels) in LA, OC, or even Riverside, and take a train or other mass conveyance into town for the con. Not so easy in Vegas. Which means that a lot more people would be staying in town, filling up services and probably driving up hotel prices out of sheer demand. Another consideration: Hollywood is not close enough to Vegas for big-name stars to come out by bus for just one day. There’d have to be planes involved, or hotel stays; and with the way insurance works, the cost might be too great for the perceived benefit…especially considering how many lowlifes decide it’s their right and privilege to post exclusive footage to YouTube five minutes after it’s been aired. Dragon*Con suggests that there would still be plenty of star power, but such things as bringing in large portions of new movies’ casts might become much less feasible.

In the interest of fairness, there are a few reasons Vegas would be superior to SD for a giant con of any type:

1A. Parking. Vegas has parking. Acres of it, all over the place, for a lot less than you pay in SD. Anyone driving in would be able to park, for as long as they wanted, probably even wherever they wanted. Then again, #6 above might mean fewer people wanting to park in the first place.

2A. More floor space. The LVCC has nearly four times the floor space of the SD facility. To someone who’s been stuck in foot traffic on the floor at least once every year, this sounds like absolute heaven. Even if the con used only half the floor space available, prospects might be a little brighter for those of us slogging through the whole thing. On the flip side, they don’t have much more in the way of meeting room space; chances are, there’d be a bunch of exhibit space being used as the equivalent of Ballroom 20 and the 6A-F rooms. I’m not sure from the floor plan whether any of the large floor divisions is set up to be the equivalent of Hall H; I may need MeetingMatrix to find out. (Because only a meeting planner could ever possibly have a legitimate desire to know the details of the center.) Also, there are multiple small convention/event centers in Vegas; one of these could easily be used for, say, an exclusive screening of something at night. Ticket sales for 12,000 seats in the Mandalay Bay center would probably cover the rental cost and the rights, with some left over for the Cause of the Day.

3A. More hotel rooms. The Vegas visitor site boasts “over 140,000 hotel rooms,” which sounds fantastic. Throw in the fact that many congoers share rooms, and you have a recipe for much easier reservations than can be had in SD. Downside: the same room can vary in price by as much as $300 from Tuesday to Friday night, so you can bet they’ll be picking a more middling point on their scale for con-block reservations. And this is Vegas, so see #5 above. They’re going to do everything in their power to be sure their Premier Club regulars are able to get rooms if they want them.

If Las Vegas wants CCI, it’s in the way Irvine wants a university: they want the benefits without having the necessary people around. Congoers for CCI, by and large, are not well-heeled yuppies with expense accounts, and we are not there to spend our money at the blackjack tables. The Vegas I know is not enthusiastic about our kind of congoer overrunning its streets and its bars, and it has a much higher threshold for good financial behavior than San Diego—where we already fall short. Let’s do ourselves a favor and start looking for better solutions to the crunch.

The weird thing about the phone reservation system is that I don’t actually know which hotel we’ve gotten yet. They took my name, contact info and top 3+ choices (I gave them 5), then handed the info to their processing center. They’ll call back (later, I assume, after the rush is over) to let me know which hotel I got. I do have a backup that I reserved directly, but the convention discount is significant, especially when you add up four days.

It was interesting watching commentary streaming by on Twitter (search for “comiccon,” “comic-con” or “comicon”) as people started out commenting, then complaining, and eventually celebrating (after about an hour) when they finally got through. Or really letting loose when the system dropped them.

Update: Got an email confirming our reservation. It’s farther out than the backup, but it’s ~$100 cheaper (over the course of 4 days – possibly more, depending on how much the other hotel charges for internet access) and there’s a shuttle. Now to weigh ~$100 vs. walking distance and figure out which room to keep and which to free up for someone else who needs one.

Cross-posted at Speed Force

This time last year, they’d already gone on sale and sold out.

As recently as three (or maybe four) years ago, they’d have sent a postcard by January. They used to include a full list of hotels in the winter newsletter with distance and prices. I could swear I remember them going on sale in January.

Of course, five years ago you could still book the Little Italy Super 8 only a month in advance. Now the discounted rooms are in such demand that they sell out in a matter of hours.

Like last year, they are only selling tickets in advance, so if you plan on attending, you should order them online.