It was probably a good thing that I didn’t go back to DragonCon on Monday, because about noonish I realized I was coming down with a cold. It’s my first cold in over a year and a half, and I’d forgotten how much they suck. My throat hurts every time I swallow, my mental state is little better than a fugue, and it feels like there is a nascent miniature universe lodged in my right ear and trying to expand.
It’s too bad, because I really would’ve liked to have gone to the Egyptology session and the last Summer Glau thing. Still, the world is probably better off that I didn’t go, but stayed home and slept instead of spreading my germs as well as doom, gloom, and misery.
Jag har en lätt förkylning:* I have a bit of a cold. Fan annama.
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*Stab at pronunciation: yoh har en leht fuhrschulning? Or maybe not. This one isn’t in my software, and was copied and pasted from the Swedish dictionary (thus the actual umlauts).
I personally saw two booths selling region 1 DVDs for the second nouveau Doctor Who series (David Tennant); the region 2s haven’t even been released yet, and the series hasn’t yet been shown in the U.S. so is highly unlikely to have been released on U.S. DVDs. There is every reason to believe, though, that they will actually be released legitimately quite soon. I also have it on good authority that at least a couple of the anime booths were selling bootlegs of anime that’s actually licensed — and thus available legitimately — in the U.S.
This sort of thing makes me furious. This is not really the place to get into a huge monologue about copyright laws and my opinions of them, but I will say that I find selling copies of licensed shows (or things that you know full well will be licensed in the near future) is repugnant and morally unethical. Rotten bastards.
(Of course, I was too much of a wimp to complain in person. Maybe I should, if I go back tomorrow and the bootlegs are still there.)
On a non-copyrighty issue, may I just add that, if your child is still in the stage in which they like to suck on any available object presented to them, perhaps they might be too young for an inflatable sword? It’s disturbing to passersby, if nothing else.
(Edited on Sept. 9 to fix spelling of Tory’s name. Oops. ::hangs head in shame::)
Honestly, I must be getting old — shortish day today, and I still accidentally conked out on the futon about 6:00. If I hadn’t vaguely registered the sound of an incoming phone call a little after 7:00, I’d probably have been out for good.
Anyway, this’ll be short. (Well, for me.) Later I’ll probably do more in-depth analysis, as it were, of the panels I’ve seen all weekend, but right now I just want to record initial impressions.
The Serenity/Firefly panel with Alan Tudyk and Summer Glau was good, though I think they had a little more energy on Friday. (It was also nice to note that they didn’t do the same schtick as on Friday — no phone call from Nathan, no dinosaur fight; obviously they realize that many people come to see them more than once, and vary it a bit, though that didn’t stop the emcee from using the same jokes. At least the emcee admitted it, though. Presumably there’s only so many jokes you can make about finding seats in a huge auditorium; I did think he was more entertaining than the Buffy-track emcee at the Nicholas Brendon thing on Saturday.) Alan did a reading of the competition-winning eulogy for Wash, adding his own edits as he went along (mostly along the lines of inserting “sexy, sexy, sexy”[1] into all descriptions of his character) and then signing the printout for the eulogy’s author.
The other panel I saw was the Mythbusters — finally. Apparently Tory Belleci (whom I hadn’t realized would be there, so was rather a bonus — woo hoo!) had gotten in for yesterday’s panel, but the flight problem (which had, it seems, involved part of the airplane catching on fire, which Grant and Kari swore had nothing to do with them at all) meant that Grant and Kari only arrived in time for today’s. They showed a blooper reel, which was quite good, though it meant there was less time left for questions than is usual. I think my favorite bit was the ever-popular Fun with SI Derived Units (this one in particular); personally, I think that the flatus investigations could’ve been cut (pardon the pun) without losing much, but that’s just me. Give me units-based humor (e.g., fish into kilowatts[2]) over bodily functions any day.
Predictably, one and a half questions to Kari involved asking whether she would marry the questioner. She handled it well, though.
One major complaint: the Science track people need to work on managing lines. People standing in the lobby just joined in and merged into the room with people who’d been standing in line for an hour or more. Seriously. Lots of them. I’m astonished no one got hurt. At least the Serenity/Firefly people are aware that this can happen and take serious measures against it, so if you’re 114 people back in line, you’re pretty sure you’ll be the 114th person through the door, or pretty damned close, and not the 653rd. The lab-coaters definitely need to hire some minions to take care of this sort of thing in future.
I actually tried going to a third session today, with just Mira Furlan as the guest, but the people there creeped me out: they weren’t ordinary cool geeks, but were largely of the basement-dweller type. Also significantly older — mode age was probably around 50. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but after a while at cons, you do tend to pick up whether a crowd is likely to be your sort, or will just proceed to annoy the trousers off you for the next hour.) My theory is that the audience drawn by pop-culture tracks is quite different from those drawn by traditional geek genres, and that this particular panel (”How I Went from Space to an Island” or something) was more Lost-oriented than B5-oriented. I was more interested in her than in Lost, which I stopped watching after Sawyer’s frog incident, and decided that it wasn’t worth it to sit for an hour with people who creeped me out, listening to questions about a show I no longer follow. (To give you an idea of how weird the crowd was, there were probably 60 or 75 people in the room when I left, and I don’t remember a single costume among them. No spandex, wings, horns, or capes; several Sansabelt trousers were in evidence, though. What the hell these people were doing there is beyond me.)
I don’t know whether I’ll make it in tomorrow. There’s an Egyptology thing at 10:00 (despite their problems with real-life line management, I’d like to go to more Science-track things in future), and a Summer Glau-only thing at 11:30; however, I can’t do both, because I’d need to be in line at least an hour ahead of time for anything Firefly-ish. A lot of it depends on how whiney I feel in the morning, and whether Sarah’s going; it was fine going to sessions and standing in line by myself today, but in between I felt a little at a loss. Another influencing factor is how badly I need to do laundry, and dishes. Both are beginning to pile up.
Side note: While I was waiting in line for Mythbusters, I swear that Nicholas Brendon walked by on the phone not five feet from me. He was wearing the same, um, festive hat that he’d worn in Saturday’s session,[3] with it pulled kind of low over his face; same features, same body type, same Xander-ish walk. It was either him or someone in a very good costume put together after seeing the hat on Saturday. (I wish I’d had the presence of mind to get a photograph as he passed, but it happened so quickly, I didn’t have time.)
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[1]I shudder to think what typing that has just done to my search string hits. It was startling enough when I got, erm, specialized-interest hits after I got my hair caught in Nigel’s retractable leash. All well and good if that’s what you enjoy, I’m sure, but I’m afraid you’re not likely to find much of what you seek here. Sorry.
[2]Okay: the scene is a charming coworker, who shall remain nameless, trying to convert the I-P original “x tons of refrigeration per ton of fish” into its SI equivalent. Tons of refrigeration obviously go to kilowatts in SI; however, the coworker apparently stopped reading after the second “ton” and failed to notice the all-important “of fish,” so he was trying to convert into kW/kW instead of kW per tonne or megagram. Could happen to anyone — I’ve done it myself, when you expect the units part of the sentence to be over but they sneak in extra units without numerals — but this one just killed me. (I probably should get out more.)
[3]Pics will be posted after I take a stab at cleaning them with Photoshop, which will require either lunchtime or after-work time, so Tuesday evening at the very earliest. You’ll see that it is a very memorable hat.
Addendum to this evening’s earlier post: the “Praise Seitan” t-shirt gathered fewer comments than yesterday’s Heroes/FBI Files one, but, then, the DragonCon crowd is probably more aware of overly intrusive government actions than it is of vegan protein substances. Three or four people did get it, though, and usually seemed quite amused by it — either that, or something had gone wrong with my underpinnings. I think it was probably the shirt, though.
This guy paused as he was passing and said, “And praise you right back!” I’m not entirely sure whether he was joking or whether he’d misread the shirt, or assumed it was a typo; either way, though, it was very considerate of him. Polite demons are always such a pleasure, aren’t they?
Right. Really going to go get a drink now before I keel over.
The midtown parking lot people have finally wised up to DragonCon weekend. In the past, weekend parking has always been free, because the lots usually just run during the business week; this time, however, they’re all charging their special “event parking” fees, which means that the prices have gone up to at least $10 (well, unless you’re willing to trek five blocks or so — not a problem on foot, but as much as I hate driving in midtown, I’d be in murderous hysterics before I managed to find something that many streets away). This, in addition to the fact that g&ts at the noncarpety hotel are $8, is proving to be a major unexpected expenditure. Bastards.
Not having expected to pay for parking, I wound up being late for the parade — I wound up having to go find a cash machine so I could park the damned car. (Next time, I’m just going to get a really good bike lock and ride my bike down there if I can’t carpool.) The Spamalotters were just going down the street as I approached, so I think I missed about half of it. Still, I got a few semi-decent pictures — nothing artistic, but a few that were in focus, not too blurry or appallingly badly framed.
I also scored a pic of the guy in the Badger costume.* Woo! Villains are always more fun . . . and the people inside the costumes tend to be rather nice. There was a very sweet Imperial officer (sorry, not sure of his exact rank or branch) who posed with me; Sarah’s picture of it is here. (As usual, I look like a complete goofball.)
I’m posting my parade shots and the interior shots I took in good lighting; the closeups, however, all turned out rather grainy today (including my closeup of the nice Imp). I’m going to try to resample them in Photoshop, to see whether I can smooth that out, so they’ll be posted in a few days. These will include a couple from the Nicholas Brendon session, and the Babylon 5 panel (Mira Furlan, Stephen Furst, Peter Jurasik, and Julie Caitlin Brown); all of them came out as grainy as my Anthony Daniels photos. I’m blaming it on the lighting conditions: at the Firefly panel, the room was dark and the guests were well lit, and the photos were comparatively clear, even at maximum zoom. It’s when the entire room is of roughly equal ambient illumination that the zoomy pics come out grainy and oddly primary-colored. (I don’t really like doing much to my photos beyond cropping and slight corrections for color balance and darkness, unless absolutely necessary for clarity, but in this case it’s necessary. Nicholas Brendon is only slightly grainy, but the B5 people are nearly indistinguishable. It’s pathetic.)
Tomorrow’s plan is another Firefly/Serenity panel, because the first one was just so good, and Mythbusters. Also possibly a Star Wars thing at 10:00, if I manage to get up early enough and get my act together in time. At least this time I’ve got cash for parking!
Good gods, I’m tired, though. Wired, but exhausted. Also very thirsty. All I’ve had today was a homemade soy latte and half a diet Coke . . . though, come to think of it, all I’ve eaten was a chocolate-orange Lara bar, a Tofurky sandwich, and some grapes. Hmm. I should probably go drink some water and have something green and leafy.
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*I looked for the red-coat guy but didn’t see him. I did see another guy dressed as the same character, but his coat was less sharp and he was wearing a yellow wig instead of spraying his actual hair into spiky submission.
Not nearly as cool.
One of my favorite pictures from yesterday: Alan Tudyk (Wash on Firefly/Serenity). Today, I think the schedule is for Nicholas Brendan, and then the Babylon 5 cast panel — and the parade, of course. I’m bringing two sets of fully charged batteries as backup, and plan to do some aggressive culling in my spare time: my camera’s memory stick only holds about 100 or 120 pictures. (The 50 mm lens for my new-to-me film camera hasn’t come in yet, so I’m still entirely digital.)
8:30 now. Must go get ready now. I’m supposed to meet Sarah, Cindy, and Darren at 9:30 for the parade, and though I’m only about 10 minutes from the hotels, I am appallingly bad at navigating through Midtown. I’ve been reduced to hysterical tears at DragonCons past.
I’m rather tired, having little tolerance for crowds (and Fridays are usually less crowded, so that doesn’t bode well for my mood over the next few days) so I’ll try to keep this short. Basically,
Right. Exhausted from crowds and the stupid narrowing-in-the-middle Staircase of Doom traffic hazard at the hotel with the fancy ceilings. Going to go collapse.
