Super Shenanigans, the Epic Nerdfest that is Dragon-Con

So I begin writing the tale of this weekend’s epic adventure in the airport waiting for my flight back to Texas. I’m going to try and summarize as much as possible, but it’s hard to condense things down as much as they need to be to not become a novel. I mean, this is 4 days worth of events we’re talking about here. So I apologize in advance for the gross generalizations and occasionally missed pictures (sorry Aaron!). We’ll try to keep this at a readable-in-one-sitting level… but I make no promises. So here goes nothing!

So the adventure begins incredibly early on Friday morning. I’m talking the 4:30am kind of early. The “it sucks, no human being should be required to be awake this early for anything” kind of early. So I got to the nice little small time airport in Texas around 5:15-5:20am. And as you can see, too damn early.

So I got on a plane, sat down to work on some writing during the flight and whooooooooooosh… 9:40am, I’m in a different time zone (Woo Time Travel!) and have managed to complete and hour and a half long flight in two and a half hours, and I arrive in Atlanta. Here’s where the story gets really boring for a while. I had to go get another copy of my Georgia drivers license, because despite the fact that they claim to have mailed me my real license at the beginning of August, it never arrived at the house. Since my awesome paper license expired in like two weeks, I kind of needed to get another paper license made and have them send me a new real license. My wife tagged along for this part of the trip and decided to use my over-kill amount of paperwork I had to save her a future trip to update her address to the house. So it took us about an hour to knock that out, causing me to miss the first panel that I had kind of pipe-dream hoped to make at Dragon-Con (but knew I wouldn’t), the 10am panel of the Writer’s track about genre mashups in Urban Fiction. Not terrible, I was expecting not to make this one, since it started at 10am and I wasn’t supposed to get into Atlanta until 9:40am. (20 minutes to make it to Dragon-Con, Park, find the hotel, find the floor, find the room, find a seat, and not miss anything? Need super powers for that one.)

So for the next leg of the journey, I dropped my wife off at the Con Hotel some of her friends were staying in that we were stealing the parking space for. So we got to park in a parking deck right next to the Con for $15/day, and could come and go as we please for that price (which is good, since we needed to leave to feed the dogs at least once a day). We dropped off a bunch of props and costume pieces for a number of people and I left my wife there to try and take care of business matter #2. I had to go to the department of taxation to try and get my car registered in Georgia and get a Georgia license plate (I told you this part was thrilling). So why did I have to do this (more want to than have to)? Because it takes forever for Virginia to mail your title to another state so they can change the registration. So I had to fax my bank back at the beginning of August, they have to send a letter requesting my title (they’re stored digitally by the DMV in Virginia), the DMV then has to print the title and mail it to the bank (which can take up to a week), then the bank has to mail/fax the title to the Georgia department of taxation… which well, of course my bank decided to mail instead of fax.

So the problem here becomes that there was no way in hell it was getting there in the two weeks I was home at the beginning of August. They also only hold onto the title for 30 days before mailing it back… so basically it was do it this weekend, or do everything all over again next year… and since everything is closed on Saturday and Monday, I basically had Friday to do it. And so did half of Atlanta. So I had to sit there and wait for almost two hours (causing me to miss two more panels I wanted to attend – a basic Steampunk costume design panel, and a “Game Design 101” panel). It took them like 10 minutes to find my registration once it was up at the counter. Then they decided to be really stupid and told me they couldn’t register my car because my insurance “wasn’t in the system” despite the fact they were staring in confusion at the hardcopy of my Georgia insurance policy, sitting in their hands. So, needless to say, I was a little unhappy. I paid a ridiculous amount of money for taxes for my car (thankfully, I will never have to give Georgia another cent for my car the rest of the time I own it. It’s a diesel vehicle, so I don’t need an emissions test in Georgia, so it’s just the silly renewal fee for the tags themselves, if I ever get them), got my title transferred to the state of Georgia, and left before the urge to maim someone or destroy government property became overwhelming.

So since it was now almost 4pm (yep), I had missed the last event I wanted to see at Dragon-Con for Friday (A 2 hour Lifecasting and Mold Making demo), so I decided to go to the house, drop my stuff (luggage) off, feed the dogs, play with them for a bit (what passes for fetch, when only one dog cares about catching the ball, and doesn’t always bring it back when he does, and definitely never drops it when he does bring it back.), let the before-mentioned feelings for the need for hate and destruction subside enough to be able to deal with Atlanta traffic… and then FINALLY… I was off to Dragon-Con!

This was the Pre-Registration 4-Day (technically 5, since there is stuff on Thursday too) Pass.

Badge in hand, and nothing else to do while waiting for my wife to finish whatever crazy panel she was in at the time, I decided to go wander the vendor rooms. A few things to be said here:

1. There are a crapton of vendors at Dragon-Con. You can find nearly everything a nerd could possibly desire (and a bunch of things you never knew a nerd could desire and now suddenly do desire). Every show, movie, novel franchise, or nerdy passion you can think of is represented there in some capacity for autographs, posters, toys, collectables, replica props, you name it. Apparently one of the biggest sellers this year is was a Game of Thrones poster (think the kind of thing a movie theater would have hanging up on their wall to advertise upcoming movies) signed by the actress who plays Daenerys Targaryan (Emilia Clarke).
2. There are a crapton of people at Dragon-Con, 50% of which seem to be at the vendor alley at any given time. There are something like 60,000 people that attend Dragon-Con on a given day these years. It was really difficult to walk places sometimes (this will appear again several times later!). 
3. You need to bring a LOT of money with you to something like this to buy all the cool shit you want (half of which you didn’t know you wanted). I think I got out of there spending around $100 on stuff… I only bought a couple books (that call themselves magazines), and a flask and strap-dealie for said flask for a future costume. I would have spent more, but one of the replica kits I want sold out REALLY fast. So that saved me like $50. I also managed to not buy one of the awesome custom-made, “combat ready” prop lightsabers. (I will now freely admit that this is only temporary. I fully, fully plan to buy two of them in the future (How can I possibly lay claim to being ChopChopChop if I don’t dual-wield lightsabers?) but I want to be able to get the ones I want, and I can’t afford the ones I want right now, so I’m going to wait until I can.)
4. Dragon-Con hides their porn stars REALLY well. I really wanted to take a picture from one end of the row-of-porn-stars for you guys, but I never managed to stumble across the porn alley. This may be a good thing though, because apparently you aren’t allowed to take pictures there, which would have put me in an awkward dilemma.
5. Speak of pictures. EVERYONE and their mother takes pictures of Dragon-Con. And it’s impossible to catch and capture everything. I saw some really creative capturing ideas this year. The best of which was people using GoPro cameras. One person had one mounted on the end of their staff for their costume, so they’d just be holding it up over the crowds as a part of this costume and film the crowds as they walk by. I assume they then later go back and pull out individual frames of the 1080p video to use for photos. Or maybe just edit a crazy montage of costume madness. I have no idea, I might have to experiment with this next year! The best camera thing goes to the guy at the Clockwork Ball, who took a really expensive professional HD camera by Canon (one of their multi-thousand-dollar video camera people use to make real movies), added all kinds of cool steampunk tubes and stuff to it and made it a part of their costume, then ran around videotaping people in costume at the Ball.
6. Grabbing random people for posing, and photos of opportunity. These are the two methods of capturing awesome costumes. There are times when people will just post themselves up in a corner for people to take pictures of for an extended period of time. Other times, you just get a brief glimpse of them walking by and hope you can snap a good picture of them. The majority of mine were of these variety, and I will pepper some of the good ones throughout the post. I guess there’s also a third hybrid way of capturing, you happen to opportunistically walk by where someone else has asked someone to pose, and hope you can get a picture off in time… I have some of those too.

Harley Quinn trying to see what this particular booth offers on their website/business card.

Rogue, doing a little jewelry shopping.

Holy shit, was that Captain planet? (Even the Jedi was surprised. Just because it’s funny to note, Captain Planet is walking toward a chick singing the Captain Planet theme song in this picture. She broke into song upon seeing him.)

Yeah, lots of variation in the costumes. This is just a small sample. At 5, my wife gets out of her last panel and comes to find me in the- Holy crap is that Slash!?

Oh, nope, false alarm. He’s way too young. Where was I? Oh yeah, so my wife comes to find me in the vendor area and I led her to a booth I thought she’d like. Kind of funny story here. So I’m wandering around, and I see this booth offering various weird little cameos (Diamondstarhalo – Apparently they only have an Etsy store, and they’re local to Atlanta, so support local businesses!). My wife is a big fan of cameos, so I stop and say, “Do you guys have a card? My wife would love this stuff. Oh, and where is this booth located, so I can tell her where it is?” So they tell me and kind of give me the “yeah sure, whatever” treatment… well, little did they know, but I came back to the booth less than an hour later, wife in tow, and she proceeded to buy at least 3 things from them, one of which is probably her new favorite necklace. While I was there, I saw this little gem of comedy:

Why yes, that is indeed a Hello Kitty flask belt-buckle. Who wouldn’t need something like that? (Also, for those of you who aren’t fans of the comedy that is Hello Kitty, consider this just an informational awareness that belt-buckle flasks actually exist, if you didn’t know that already.) 

And so 6pm was rolling around and it was time to go feed the dogs. So we left and while walking back to the car, we witnessed this… a Steampunk Big Daddy (kind of redundant, since all Big Daddys are Steampunk, basically). There will be more about this guy later too, I actually talked to him for a while a couple nights after this, but that’s later. So the news is grabbing random people walking into one of hotels and interviewing them for the evening news about Dragon-Con weekend. This one was particularly funny, because with the helmet on, the news person had no idea where to put the microphone… held it up to various port holes and just had to live with the muffled response. Great costume, but not a great one for recorded conversations.

So on we went to feed the dogs (obviously) and then we went to feed ourselves. Neither of us had anything we particularly wanted to eat, so I did what I always do in these situations… consult with the food oracle that is Urbanspoon (one of these days, I’ll post a quasi-tutorial about the seemingly failsafe process of doing this that I use, but that is for a later day). So we end up here, at the The Brewhouse Cafe:

A football (Soccer) and rugby bar barely a mile from our house. So we sat down, ordered a couple drinks. The wife got a Strongbow, and I grabbed a Sweetwater “Waterkeeper Hefeweizen” (no fruit, you never fruit beer. If there was supposed to be fruit in beer, the brewer would have put it in there when he brewed it. – Caveat: It’s okay to put fruit in Corona, because Corona isn’t beer.) The Hefeweizen was pretty good for a Hefeweis. Middle of the road, pretty smooth. My wife even said she thought she could drink a glass of it (she’s not a beer person, so this is a minor miracle), even without squeezing multiple orange slices into it (we can mostly forgive her for this, but only mostly).

Then came the food:

The wife got a burger with some kind of onion rings and barbeque sauce on it and sweet potato fries that were pretty damn badass with their little hint of cinnamon. Pretzels were good, actually made their, not some crappy pre-frozen pretzels woefully served at other otherwise fantastic restaurants in the area (I’m looking at you Brick Store Pub, I love you, but your pretzels suck compared to everything else you do). My plate, you ask? Why yes, those are some delicious-looking (and tasting) tater tots. And those crusant-looking things? Oh, don’t mind those, they’re just self-contained pot-pies of doom (!!!). I’ve been told and assured they were “spicy” pot pies. But my Sriracha tolerance is pretty strong these days, so I didn’t even notice any spiciness at all (but my wife will assure you they had some kind of kick in the aftertaste). However, they were delicious, both with gravy and without. (I ate most of mine without).

So after this we closed out our day at Dragon-Con by wandering around the various hotels just strolling around to look at people’s costumes and attempt to find friends. We spent various amounts of time with various groups of my wife’s friends, I had a group of friends from DC there, but somehow our schedules just never seemed to cross the right way. But next year, things will be different and we’ll make it a point to run into one another next year. Which should be a lot easier, since we’re planning to get a hotel and dog sitters next year. 

Not a lot to say about the end of the evening. Some neat costumes to be seen, but really bad lighting. Since I don’t have an amazing SLR camera, only a couple of mine really came out well. First we have, what was probably one of the best done female costumes I saw this year. How good was it? So good that her boyfriend started getting a pissy/jealous of everyone oggling her. What makes this one really good compared to other versions I’ve seen… there’s no strings or lines anywhere, it’s all taped/glued in place. And she rocked it.

Sorry it’s a little blurry, the other one I have is worse-lighted. You can see the boyfriend beginning to enter douche-mode. Or at least he looks like he is, he may well have been completely cool with it all. I hope he was, because his girlfriend (spouse?) kicked the shit out of that Witchblade costume.

Then came one of my favorites, waiting in line to get into an Avengers-themed party:

Yeah, I had to do a double-take just to make sure it wasn’t actually Kevin Smith.

So after a long day, knowing we had a longer one ahead of us, we wrapped things up and got home around midnight. Thus ended day one of Dragon-Con. 

Day 2 is much less exciting in the food department, but much more full of crazy activities. I’ll try to get it up to speed as quickly as I can. I have to get the slate clean before this coming weekend, and there’s a lot more story to tell. Stay tuned, this week should be packed with posts!

Until next time.