K-Squared Ramblings

Comic-Con Sellout

I’m floored.

Absolutely floored that 4-day passes for Comic-Con International 2010 have sold out.

I mean, it’s the first week of November, and the convention isn’t until next July!

Tickets with access to Wednesday’s Preview Night sold out a few weeks ago, but at the time, CCI didn’t provide any information about how many regular 4-day passes were left. This Monday, they posted a progress gauge at 70%. The last time I looked yesterday, it was up to 89%.

Today? Sold out completely.

I can’t help but think it would have taken longer if they hadn’t provided a gauge to let people know just how scarce a resource memberships were going to be. There’s nothing like the fear of a shortage to get people to run out and buy up what’s available (and create a shortage). But I also can’t complain, because without that feedback, we might have kept putting off plunking down the $200 for the two of us, and we might have missed our chance.

Single-day tickets haven’t gone on sale yet, so it’s still possible to go if you haven’t already bought your tickets. You can of course buy more than one, it just means standing in line each morning to pick up the next badge. (Even the more relaxed WonderCon, run by the same organization, doesn’t let you pick up a Sunday badge on Saturday, as we discovered last year.)

If you’re planning on going to San Diego next year, keep an eye on the website. Four-day passes went insanely quickly, and I would expect the one-day passes to do the same.

(Cross-posted at Speed Force)

Comic-Con 2009 Complete Index

Here’s a quick index to all of our posts about last month’s Comic-Con International in San Diego: here, at Speed Force, and on Flickr.

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.

The Other 10 Essentials of Comic-Con

You know what to pack on vacation. You know to bring your camera, spare batteries, and a bottle of water. But here are ten things you might not think of that will come in handy at a comic-con.

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.

Comic-Con 2009 Round-Up

We’re back from Comic-Con International in San Diego. As always, it was fun but exhausting. Photos are up at Flickr (most of them — there’s still a few from Saturday and Sunday panels that we need to go through).

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.

Comic-Con Hotel Review: Holiday Inn on the Bay

During Comic-Con we stayed at the Holiday Inn on the Bay. It’s sort of in walking distance of the San Diego Convention Center (we did it one morning…and I did it again one evening after an incident with the shuttle that deserves its own write-up), but at more than a mile it’s not a distance you’d want to walk with a heavy backpack, or in a costume, or carrying bags, or on a hot afternoon, or after a long day of trudging around the convention center.

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.

WiFi & Tori

Yay! Comic-Con announces free WiFi in the convention center. iGoogle should be a less annoying sponsor than Eagle Eye. #

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

Greek Theater, turned out to be a great concert!

Looking for a Good Android Twitter App

I’ve been having trouble trying to find a good Twitter app for my Android phone.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. I’m extremely happy with Twidroid, which I’ve been using since I got the phone. The problem is that I need a good second app, because I have two accounts I want to use.

I ♥ Twidroid

I keep going back to Twidroid for two main reasons:

• It lets me do everything I want to do with Twitter on my phone.
• It makes the most common tasks as streamlined as possible.

That second item is really the key. Most other Twitter apps I’ve tried tend to get in the way. Want to post something new? Hit the menu button, then choose an item from a pop-up toolbar. Want to open a link? Press and hold, then select from a big long menu.

With Twidroid, buttons for posting a new tweet, showing replies, posting/viewing direct messages, and refreshing the view are right there at the bottom of the screen. One tap and you’re posting. One tap and you’re pulling in new messages. One tap and you’re looking at replies. And you open links by tapping a message, not pressing and holding.

It’s like the “easy button” from the Staples commercials.

Twidroid also ties in to the Android OS, making it easy to share a link directly from the browser, or share a photo directly from the image gallery.

Another nice feature is that it can break down background notifications by category. If I want it to check for replies and direct messages and sound an alert, but not worry about general posts until I look, I can tell it to do so.

I Tweet

I Tweet ($2.99) is very close, and I’ve been using it as my secondary app for several months. It ties into the OS, does photo uploads and URL shortening, lets me customize notifications, etc… but it has a tendency to get in the way. The user interface is pretty, but cluttered. The things I want to do most often require multiple taps (or worse, press-and-hold, like opening a link).

The worst part is that if I don’t let it check periodically for new messages, I can’t tell it to pull in new ones when I launch it… and it won’t always retrieve older posts. If I post something before hitting refresh (which is hidden behind the menu button), it won’t pull in anything further back than the post I just made.

Trial and Error

At this point, I’ve got my personal account @KelsonV set up on Twidroid. That’s the one I have linked to this blog and to Facebook. I’ve got @SpeedForceOrg running on I Tweet. I’ve been using it a lot lately with the lead-up to Comic-Con International, and those few problems have started really bothering me.

So I tried a bunch of others this weekend.

• Twitli – I used this one for a while a few months ago, but it was kind of buggy. The last straw came when I was trying to upload a photo during WonderCon, and I switched the account to Twidroid for the duration of the con. I only gave it a glance this time around.
• Loquacious – nice w/ multiple accounts & photo integration, but incomplete. No notifications, can’t share a link from browser — heck, no settings at all other than login+password and filters. Either that or the demo is crippleware in addition to being time-limited. Also, suffers from press-n-hold syndrome like I Tweet.
• Twitta – too basic.
• Twit2go – Photo uploads worked decently, and it was able to do notifications the way I wanted, but it didn’t hook into the OS as well as Twidroid or I Tweet. And it was yet another case of press-and-hold to open a menu that includes opening links. I decided to stick with it for a few days, though, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it did pull new messages automatically when opened, so I wouldn’t have to worry about missing anything. Gave up on it when I tried to retweet a post that ended up being too long, and rather than let me edit it down to size it just cut off the end…which happened to be the link.

So I’m back to Twidroid and I Tweet for now. I’ll probably end up swapping the accounts again and putting SpeedForceOrg on Twidroid, since that’s the one I’m likely to be using most during the con. *sigh* Why do I have to make things more complicated for myself than they have to be?

Update: A few months after I wrote this, Twidroid released Twidroid Pro, which adds several features on top of the free version…including multiple accounts!

Why I Want a Netbook (and why I’m not letting myself get one)

I have to confess: I’ve started seriously thinking about a netbook.

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.

San Diego: Enlarge Your Convention Center

San Diego is getting worried about the size of their convention center #

Hotel Rush, Volcano, IE8 & Frak

• IE8 to be released at the same moment that San Diego Comic-Con hotels go on sale. (12pm EDT, 9AM PDT) What are the odds? #
• So yeah, I got through on the ComicCon hotel line after 1:20h & left my top 5 choices. They’ll call back later to tell me which one I got. #
• Weird: got interviewed by a reporter about the Comic-Con hotel reservation experience. #
• Via @BadAstronomer: South Pacific Tsunami warning near Tonga; Big Picture has pix from last week’s volcanic eruption. #
• Amused that Wikipedia has a serious article about the word Frak w/ variant spellings & similar words. #

Comic-Con Hotel Block Opens March 19, 2009

Comic-Con International finally announced the opening of this year’s convention block in San Diego hotels: March 19.

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.

Being a Nexus

As Comic-Con International strains at the boundaries of the San Diego Convention Center, it’s begun spilling over into the city. Go back 4-5 years, and the most you would see would be the occasional street light banner or bus stop advertisement. Now, there are people handing out flyers as far out as the trolley stops, and walking around the Gaslamp in ridiculous mascot costumes (the sandwiches a few years ago, the donuts this year). There are displays near the trolley stops. There are buses wrapped with full advertisements for movies and TV shows, shuttle vans labeled U.S.S. Enterprise — there was even an ice cream truck parked for several days on 5th street with a Eureka ad on the side (and probably something inside it, but I was always on the other side of the street when I saw it).

It’s mainly the TV and film studios (except for the flyers), and it ties into something that author Robert J. Sawyer mentioned at his spotlight panel: Convention-goers are nexuses (well, nexi). We’re the people who are so into movies, TV, games, comics, etc. that we’ll put in the effort, time and expense to go to this kind of event, and we’re likely to talk about it. They’re counting on us going back to our offices or dorm rooms, hanging out with friends, blogging, posting on Twitter, or otherwise telling everyone we know about how cool this and that new movie is going to be.

In short: It’s an advertising blitz designed to kick off word-of-mouth hype, aimed at the crowd that’s both most primed to receive it and most likely to spread it.

With the massive convention floor and unbelievable crowds, they’re doing everything they can to stand out. So we get the viral marketing, like the ads for TruBlood, the Humans-Only Restrooms signs, the army of people in Quarantine outfits, the Neighborhood Watch–style sign for The Spirit. We get the swag. We get the celebrity appearances. We get displays of terra-cotta warriors to advertise The Mummy and replicas of the Owlship from Watchmen.

All that brings in more people, which of course makes the event more attractive to the studios, so they put in more effort, which brings in more people, and they start promoting movies that have nothing to do with comics, sci-fi, fantasy or horror, the genres that used to be the main focus for the con. (I remember thinking that Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was an odd choice to promote at Comic-Con. This year, the sequel blended right in.)

The con seems to have reached an upper limit in terms of the number of people it can handle at the current venue, which is contracted through 2012. I wonder whether Hollywood will demand bigger crowds — which would probably be best handled by spilling into neighboring hotels — or be satisfied with the numbers it’s got.

Comic-Con 2008 Photos are Up!

Here they are: Comic-Con 2008 Photos.

I’ve only got the first page or so labeled for now, but the photos should finish uploading by the time I post this. I’ll fill in the captions and titles over the next few days.

Back from Comic-Con

Saturday night we met up with my parents after the con for dinner. On the way to the restaurant, Chopahn — very good Afghan food, another one we’d definitely recommend — a mob of people made up as zombies came shambling up the street. We decided to hang back and wait for them to pass.

Sunday morning we got up early so we could check out of the hotel and move the car. (We left most of our luggage stored at the hotel, but they wanted all the cars out of their valet lot by noon to make room for a new round of guests.) I was amazed that we managed to get a space in a lot literally right across the train tracks from the convention center. Of course, it was around 7:00 AM, and the con didn’t open until 9:30. Neither of us needed to get in immediately today, and standing in line for 2½ hours didn’t seem appealing, so we tried to find something else to do.

We went back to Cafe 222 for breakfast (it seems appropriate that we did it twice), then wandered the Gaslamp district a bit — which is a little creepy at that hour, when very little is open aside from coffee places and restaurants that serve breakfast, and few people are out and about aside from people working at deliveries, taking out trash, etc. and homeless people. Once the William Heath Davis House opened, we went into the museum and took a self-guided tour.

Back to the convention, we both spent the morning combing the floor. I focused on the artists’ area, and ended up getting another sketch, this one of Iris West II by Freddie Williams II. Eventually I made my way to the second DC Nation panel, dashed off a blog post, and discovered that my writeup of the Comic Book Tattoo panel and signing had hit Undented and at least half a dozen other blogs and forums. The 24 hours from 5pm Saturday to 5pm Sunday (midnight to midnight in UTC) had the highest traffic this blog has seen since I installed WP-Stats, something like a year and a half ago.

Katie hit the Cartoon Voice acting panel, during which room staff moved her purse without telling her. She stood up at the end of the panel and it was gone. We spent the next hour and a half talking to event staff (run by a different organization, so they didn’t actually talk to each other), filing a missing property report, reporting her credit card lost, and looking for the purse itself, until I went back into the room and checked with the tech table — and there it was.

We had just enough time to make it to the sing-along screening of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode, “Once More With Feeling.” It was different from last year, since it was a much bigger room and the sound was turned up too high to really hear the audience sing, but still a lot of fun.

Afterward, we wrapped up the weekend with ice cream at the Ghirardelli shop. Then we picked up the car and the luggage, and started the long drive home.

Comic-Con: Autograph/Sketch Tally

Some years I find myself spending most of my time at Comic-Con attending panels. Some years it’s looking for books. Sometimes I end up mostly looking for people with interesting costumes. This year, the theme seems to have been collecting sketches and autographs, and in fact, I spent just about all of Saturday on one event.

Sketches:

• Impulse by Todd Nauck (Young Justice).
• Iris West II by Freddie Williams II (The Flash).
• Aubrey by R.K. Milholland (Something Positive)

Autographs (Kelson):

• Phil & Kaja Folio on complete set of Girl Genius volumes 1-7. (I’d gotten Phil’s signatures on volumes 1-6 in bits and pieces over the last few years, but Kaja was never at the booth when I had the books. So I made an effort to catch up.)
• Phil Foglio on the edition of Myth-Chief for which he did the cover.
• R.K. Milholland on Super Stupor.
• Colleen Doran on A Distant Soil vol.1, Orbiter, Reign of the Zodiac #1 and Comic Book Tattoo. (I went to her table 3 times over the course of the con.)
  
• Sergio Aragonés on “Day of the Dead” (because I forgot to bring something for him to sign, and I looked for stuff at his booth that I hadn’t seen before)
• Tori Amos on Comic Book Tattoo (see the full story)
• Rantz Hoseley, Hope Larson, and (I think) Jason Levesque on Comic Book Tattoo (they were all at the table when I picked up the book)
• Rantz Hoseley and two people whose names I can’t make out on a poster-sized print of the Comic Book Tattoo cover.

Autographs (Katie):

• Naomi Novik on the new Temeraire novel, Victory of Eagles.
• Keith Knight on The K Chronicles and Red, White, Black and Blue.

I ended up not spending much time looking for comics, because of the whole low-grade Golden-Age problem. But I did pick up a couple of new items — like the Tori book, and the new Halo and Sprocket, and such. I was looking in the fantasy art area this morning, and there was actually a painting of Red Sonja that I really liked (she was wearing practical clothes — leather armor, not the usual chainmail bikini), but couldn’t think what I’d do with a print, and it seemed kind of weird to pick up a print of a specific character whom I didn’t normally follow.