Tag: SDCC

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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.

Update 2019: Seeing how surprised I was is almost nostalgic, now that the entire con sells out within minutes every year. This was the tipping point.

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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

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.

The Paper and the Flash

In Costume

Katie as Yomiko Readman (The Paper) and Kelson as Jay Garrick (The Golden Age Flash). Katie cosplaying as Kate from Lost.

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.

Panels

Reflections

That covers all the major posts we’ve written from the start of the convention onward. There are a few minor bits, like 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 SDCC 2009 at Speed Force.

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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.

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During Comic-Con we stayed at the Holiday Inn on the Bay (not to be confused with the Holiday Inn Bayside). 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.

Holiday Inn RoomThe 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.

Note (2014): This hotel is now the Wyndham San Diego Bayside.

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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. Update: This is no longer a problem (see end).

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!