I’ve been posting old photos to Flickr lately, including some shots from a couple of trips to Las Vegas.
Like this shot of the Flying Saucer Mall — excuse me, the Fashion Show Mall. (I got the initials right!)
Seriously, doesn’t that view just say, “The visitors have landed?”
Maybe they’ll want some Alien Fresh Jerky.
It seems as though every year, around the time of hotel registration for Comic-Con International, people start clamoring for the con to move from San Diego to Las Vegas. More hotel rooms! A bigger convention center! Gambling! Strippers!
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. Continue reading
Continuing the write-up of our late-February vacation and trip to WonderCon in San Francisco, we left off with Friday at the con.
Note: If you want to skip straight to the photos, head over to my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set on Flickr.
Originally we’d planned to only go to the convention on Saturday, and pre-ordered one-day tickets. Then WonderCon published their schedule, and most of the stuff we wanted to see turned out to be on Friday. So we juggled our schedule around, and bought a second set of one-day tickets.
On the plus side, it ended up being slightly cheaper than getting three-day tickets and not using them all three days (which is what we did last year). On the minus side, it meant we had to pick up our badges twice. (I asked on Friday whether we could pick up both badges at once. We couldn’t.)
The crowds outside were slightly bigger, but I don’t think we had much of a line, since we arrived about an hour after the floor opened. The first real hint of fandom was a group of people dressed as Jedi and a pair of life-sized R2D2 robots on the mezzanine. Then another group of people dressed based on what I assume was an anime or video game. Then we were down the escalator, across the hall, and walking to pick up our badges again.
While we were still getting our badges ready, we spotted a trio of women in Battlestar Galactica costumes. Katie leaned over to me and said, “Isn’t that a Six?” and then one of us realized that the two with her were dressed as Starbuck and Boomer/Athena.
There were a lot more people in costumes on Saturday. If last year’s big theme was G.I. Joe, this year it was clearly Watchmen. I remember seeing the occasional Rorschach at cons a few years ago, but this year they seemed to be all over the place. I saw at least two Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectres as well (one with a somewhat more modest costume), at least one Comedian, a Laurie Silk Spectre and even a Doctor Manhattan (a brave soul who had painted himself blue and walked around in a bald cap and a speedo). The weird (or perhaps not so weird when you think about it) thing is: They were all based on the movie versions of the costumes.
I have a lot more cosplay photos up at my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set.
Actually, there were a lot more people on Saturday, period. I ended up skipping the DC booth swag line, because it was at least four times as long and not noticeably moving when I walked by. It was made worse by running past the gaming area and, as near as I could tell, through an area where the 501st Legion (or perhaps another Star Wars fan group) seemed to be doing photo ops. Speaking of which, it’s weird: 10 years ago, someone with a Star Wars Stormtrooper costume was impressive. These days, they’re so common that I hardly even notice them.
The autograph area in particular was very crowded, partly because they had big names like Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. I don’t think I ever had to resort to shuffling on Friday, but it happened a lot on Saturday.
In many ways, WonderCon resembles San Diego Comic-Con before it went insane. Actually, I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to attend a comic/pop culture convention in California, but has gotten sick of the crowds and the hotel rush and the lines and not being able to get into the events you want and everything that has made Comic-Con International so frustrating over the last few years.
What I did find frustrating about this year’s WonderCon, though, was that several people I would have liked to meet (or at least hear speak at a panel) ended up not coming because MegaCon was the same weekend. I’m not sure, but I suspect there was a regional divide, with most west-coast people going to San Francisco, and most east-coast people heading to Orlando, Florida instead. Ultimately I only added two signatures to Comic Book Tattoo, and no one involved with Flash: Rebirth was there at all.
The only panel I really wanted to make sure I attended was the DC Universe panel, though it was more a matter of obligation (Speed Force). It turned out to be mostly rehashing the previous day’s DC Nation panel. I will say one thing for Dan Didio: he certainly brings energy to the room for his panels. I expect I probably would have paid a lot more attention instead of using my phone to read about the scans_daily meltdown.
Katie caught a writing workshop run by David Gerrold, which she found quite helpful, and got into the giant room for Star Trek.
Now, the Esplanade Ballroom never managed to be as tough as the infamous Hall H in San Diego…but Star Trek was absolutely packed. Everyone’s seen the latest trailer by now, but it premiered at this panel, and Katie remarked afterward that it was the first trailer that made the movie actually look interesting, like it had an actual story and not just a bunch of ships blowing up. On the downside, no one asked Zoe Saldana any questions during the Q&A period — they were all directed to Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto.
The plan, originally, was for me to catch up with the panel for 9 in the same room. I made it about halfway through, because of the crowd issue. It wasn’t that there were no seats. It was that five million people (well, it seemed like it) left the room after Star Trek, and after crossing that torrent, I had to ind the line…and trace the line to the end. That turned out to be out the front door and down along the entire side of the convention center almost to the very back. It stayed still for a few minutes, then started moving more-or-less smoothly. As I made it up to the doors, a woman handling crowd control assured us, “There’s plenty of room, they all left after Star Trek because they’re crazy.” There was no hope of figuring out where Katie was sitting (quite near the front, as it turned out, since she got to move up when so many people left between panels), so I just grabbed an empty chair near the end of an aisle.
Anyway, Nine was just Elijah Wood and animation director Joe Ksander talking about making the film and occasionally showing clips. Someone asked Elijah Wood to compare his character to Frodo Baggins, and he remarked something along the lines of, “I’m going to be hearing this for the rest of my life, aren’t I?”
After 9, we met up again and did a final circuit of the floor, checking for anything either of us wanted to show the other, or anything one of us might want to pick up. We ended up at the SLG booth examining The Map of Humanity for something like 20 minutes, trying to spot all the real-life and fanciful place names and where they were located. (Hollywood showed up in about 5 places.) We bought a copy.
Then it was back to the hotel to drop off all our stuff and get ready to meet up with my brother and his fiancee for dinner. They took us to a fantastic Indian restaurant called Mehfil that was somewhat off the beaten path as far as the convention was concerned. Afterward we tried to go to a nearby pub, but it was really crowded (it was Saturday night, after all), so we started looking for another place to go. We ended up walking through the area where Wikimedia has its offices. Eventually we ended up back at a frozen yogurt place in Metreon, a shopping mall across the street from the Moscone convention center, and we hung out there until closing.
Continuing the tale of our late-February vacation (starting with Cambria and Hearst Castle and moving on to Monterey and Carmel, we catch up to San Francisco itself and two days at WonderCon.
Note: If you want to skip straight to the photos, head over to my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set on Flickr.
We’d been to WonderCon once in 2008 and had a great time, and while we weren’t planning to make it an annual trip, the timing worked out such that we’d be in San Francisco the right weekend anyway.
Last year we stayed at the Mark Twain, which was okay, but this year on my brother’s recommendation we stayed at the Mosser Hotel. It was quite nice, although the rooms were still extremely small by modern standards — small enough that instead of an actual desk, there’s a fold-out desk on the armchair. There’s also a flatscreen TV with both pay-per-view and video game rentals, and an AT&T wireless hotspot accessible from the room. The staff was nice, and the location was perfect. We were in a decent area of town, near restaurants, 5 minutes from the Moscone Convention Center one way, 5 minutes from a BART, MUNI & cable car station the other way, and right across the street from the official convention hotel.
After Thursday’s long drive, we slept in Friday morning and made our way to the convention center around 11:00. The “line” to get to the registration area moved quickly enough that it might as well not have been a line, and there were only a few people in front of us at the badge pick-up windows, so we made it through the whole process in only a few minutes. Then we stood in line for 45 minutes waiting for the hall to open at noon. Oh, well!
We started by making a beeline to the BOOM! Studios booth to pick up several copies of the Farscape #1 WonderCon exclusive variant — one for us, and several more for people at the Terra Firma message board. Series writer Keith R.A. DeCandido was there signing them, and we chatted a bit with him and with another Farscape fan. After that I got in line for the DC booth, and Katie went off to explore. I picked up a bunch of random swag from DC, some of which I want to keep and some of which I’ll probably offer to people on Speed Force.
Next I headed over to Artist’s Alley to track down some of the artists connected with Comic Book Tattoo for signatures. I’d gotten a few of them (including Tori Amos herself!) at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, but took the massively heavy lead weight book back to my hotel room at the first opportunity, not thinking that I could catch up with more of the creators. So now I’m trying to fix that.
I found David Mack first, and he had a whole spread of Kabuki material. As we talked, I admitted that I’d never read any of it, and he not only offered me a few issues of the latest series for free, he signed them!
I wandered the floor a lot, picked up some cheap trades, scarfed down a small pizza and eventually went up to a panel on “The Real Archeology Behind Indiana Jones.” It was run by an archeology professor from some college out near Lake Tahoe, and he had this talk about the major artifacts in the four films — what is known about the Ark of the Covenant, where people are looking for it, (or in some cases, claim they’ve found it but won’t let anyone see) — the actual stories behind the Sankara stones and the Thugee cult — legends around the history of the Holy Grail, and where people think it might be — the history and legends of the various crystal skulls, none of which can be verifiably traced to an actual excavation.
Then I hit DC Nation, Katie hit panels on 2D visual effects and the shift from a cowboy metaphor to a super-hero metaphor in US Politics (all those Obama-as-Superman images), we met up at the BOOM! panel, and finally went to the Wonder Woman screening.
Friday was, overall, really laid-back. The crowds were light, people in line were patient, and there weren’t even too many people in costumes. Even DC Nation was relaxed, though that’s probably in large part because Dan Didio was at Megacon and Ian Sattler was running the panel.
We had no trouble getting into the Wonder Woman screening, and managed to get seats maybe 10 rows back. I noticed a woman I recognized in a WW outfit (someone I’d seen as WW at other cons). Oddly, they kept calling it the movie’s premiere, even though it had premiered at New York Comic-Con a few weeks earlier, so at best this was the west coast premiere. Still, the movie was very good and amazingly epic for a 90-minute animated film. (Reviews are all over the place now that the DVD is out, so I’ll skip the details.)
After the screening there was a discussion panel with producer Bruce Timm, screenwriter Michael Jelenic, actress Virginia Madsen (Hippolyta), director Lauren Montgomery, and executive producer Gregory Noveck. They talked about making the film for quite a while, then took audience questions until their time was almost up.
Then they ran the trailer for the next DC animated project: Green Lantern: First Flight. I’m not a huge Green Lantern fan, but this looks suitably cosmic in scope and sci-fi in tone, and frankly, that’s the way I prefer the character, so it looks promising!
After the discussion, we cleared out. Neither of us wanted to watch a bunch of Star Wars fan films at this point (I would have 10 years ago, but these days? Not a priority.), and we were hungry. So we headed back to the hotel to change and went out to look for someplace to eat dinner. We ended up at a very good steak restaurant in the Marriott, then went back to the hotel where stayed up way too late uploading photos and dashed off a first impressions post of the con.
Update: On the way out, though, we stopped at the mezzanine walkway, which has a long glass-enclosed view into the main floor. It was eerie to see all the booths set up, fully lit, but with covers thrown over tables, and the aisles empty except for (as far as I could see) one person.
Continued in Saturday at WonderCon.
Continuing the write-up of our vacation along the Central California coast from the last week of February, we started out with Cambria/San Simeon and Hearst Castle, then wrapped up Wednesday night in Pacific Grove. That brings us to…
We checked out of our hotel Thursday morning and drove down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Then we drove past it, past Cannery Row (which is now a shopping area), up one street, down another, and finally past a bunch of streets with NO LEFT TURN signs trying to find a way into a parking garage. Eventually we ended up on a highway that took us into the main part of town until we could finally turn around and make our way back to the Cannery Row area. *whew*
So we made it to the aquarium shortly after 10:00, which meant we got to see them feeding the penguins. It was about 15 minutes of introducing the black foot penguins, handing them fish, and asking kids in the audience to be “penguin heroes” by doing things like saving water.
I’d been to the aquarium twice before — once when I was around 10 with my parents, and once when I was around 20 with friends on a road trip, so it seems I’m on a roughly 10-year schedule. I’m 90% certain that half of the current building wasn’t there the first time I went. And I’m not so sure how much was there last time.
I missed the next two shows, feeding the sea fish and feeding the animals in the kelp forest, due to a tech call from work (the only one all week, thankfully), but Katie caught them both. I got to see a lot of an outdoor terrace on the third floor, which at least had a nice view of the bay, though it was cloudy all morning. Afterward she took me over to the outer-bay tank and showed me the way the anchovies (or was it sardines? neither of us can remember) school together and form this silvery shimmering cloud.
We took in about 3/4 of the aquarium during the rest of the morning and early afternoon, then went looking for lunch in Cannery Row. We ended up at a crepe place near where we parked, which wasn’t terribly good (they used pre-made crepes and some of the fillings that should have been hot were still cold when they were served), then went over to the Ghirardelli shop. Because ever since they closed the shop in South Coast Plaza, I can’t go to a city with a Ghirardelli shop and not go there. (Seriously, that was the way I could handle the stress of shopping in South Coast Plaza.) I had the Mint Bliss sundae. Katie just had the square of chocolate that they put on the sundae. And it was seriously good. Also, check out the picture of one of the tables they had outside.
So after stopping for chocolate & ice cream, we made our way out to Carmel By-The-Sea to check out Mission San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo. Anyone who grew up in California in the last few decades will remember learning about the Spanish colonial period, and the emphasis on the chain of missions founded by Junipero Serra. Both of us had visited a number of the missions on family vacations, but somehow Katie’s family had missed this one, or at the very least she didn’t remember it. So we spent an hour or two exploring the grounds and the museum.
Something I hadn’t remembered was that this mission had collapsed during an earthquake in the 1800s, and was left in ruins until an early 20th century project to rebuild it from surviving structures, drawings and descriptions. Also interesting: it’s an active church, with a school on the grounds (which seemed to let out while we were there). Talk about living history!
Finally we went out to visit my aunt on her ranch up in Carmel Valley. We’d never been there, so it was kind of a surprise to see just how off the beaten path it was. It’s the kind of place where directions involve going to a certain mile marker, then looking for a one-lane road and following it up into the hills.
We only stayed for an hour or so, because we had to be in San Francisco that night, but we got to see the place (which has a fantastic view!) and catch up a bit before getting back on the road.
The next time I plan a trip I’m going to have to remember that driving estimates from Google Maps are not sufficient. Aside from traffic, you need to factor in late starts, stops for sightseeing or bathroom breaks, stopping for lunch, etc. We’d hoped to make it to San Francisco for dinner, but ended up taking the first exit in Gilroy, looking for someplace to eat. Amazingly the street proved to have only a small pizza place and the occasional bar, so we finally turned onto a side street and found ourselves… back at the freeway. Once we pulled out a map, it became clear that the road we’d taken actually paralleled Highway 101 except for the one spot where it turned a little diagonal and crossed. We ended up just eating at Chevy’s, rationalizing that the locations near us had long since closed, so it was still a restaurant we couldn’t go to at home!
It was around 10:30 at night by the time we checked into the Mosser Hotel in San Francisco. We’d picked the hotel based on my brother’s recommendation, and were quite happy with our three-day stay there.
Continued in Friday at WonderCon. More photos on Flickr in my California Coast photo set.
