Dragon-Con Part 3 – The Conclusion!

So here we go, closing out the epic story that is the trip to Dragon-Con. We’ve got 2 days to cover (thankfully, Monday is pretty short), so let’s dig right in.

We wake up late on Sunday, and the wife is still not feeling entirely well, so I offer to go get us some breakfast. Where do I go exactly? Why one of the best places in Georgia to get breakfast.

Once upon a time, I was in Afghanistan, playing on the internet and I decided “Well, since I’m going to be living somewhere near Decatur, let me look for local businesses in Decatur on Kickstarter that I can help support. And at the time Revolution Doughnuts had a Kickstarter, and seriously, go watch the pitch video and tell me that doesn’t look amazing? How amazing does it look?

What? Pumpkin Doughnuts? Caramel icing? Damn right. See, I couldn’t even take a picture of it before taking a bite out of it.

Boom, standard chocolate yeast-style doughnut. These things are huge, filling, and delicious. My wife had a pumpkin doughnut as well, and an apple fritter (those are her favorites). We also had pumpkin spice latte’s. Delicious.

When you get downtown for Dragon-Con and you don’t stay down in one of the hotels used for the Con itself, how do you orient yourself in the bigass city of Atlanta? As my wife told me the first day on how to find her, “Look up, find the Westin, walk toward it.”

The view from just outside of the hotel we were parking at. So walk that way.

So after missing a couple panels we wanted to see due to the late start (one about costuming to get “amazing looks from household materials without having to sew a thing”, and one a panel for a show my wife enjoys (which can be occasionally entertaining), Lost Girl), but we made it in time for something both of us wanted to see. A Panel called “The Desperate Steampunk.” Here’s the byline: “Learn how to turn flea market finds and cast-offs into top-drawer steampunk costuming with no-sew shortcuts.”

It was pretty fun. Panelists talked about their tips and tricks to find stuff in flea markets and thrift stores. Taking every-day stuff and turning it into neater-looking stuff. Repurposing and other fun things.   The end of the panel was really awesome, because each one of the panelists showed off some of their most-proud budget crafts… and they were awesome. One of the guys made a diving helmet out of a giant plastic cheesy-poofs jug. It was amazing. Needless to say, this was kind of step one leading toward the tipping point of making me interested in actually doing Steampunk instead of just enjoying the aesthetic. I was inspired to go out and start putting together ideas (Hint: This is what I’ll be doing this weekend for part of my Saturday Shenanigans!). But more on that in a later post.

My wife wanted to go to a costuming panel originally (for drafting costumes), but decided she didn’t feel like running way the hell to the other side of the Con to get to the class… so instead we decided to wander a little through the Vendors and then leisurely stroll over to the next thing we wanted to go to (which was much closer), a beginners Leatherworking panel. And this is a perfect segway to show off the watch pendant thing my wife bought the day before:

She’s a fan of owls. 

It also gives me an excuse to show off another costume. This time for you Lord of the Rings fans. The man in this picture is the owner of The Griffin Works, a leather goods store with the motto: “If it’s not Griffin Works Leather, it’s just another dead animal!” 

The woman is just a random fan. The leatherwork was pretty good (good enough for me to grab a card). I’ll keep an eye out for his booths down the road.

So we went to the Leather crafting panel and it was pretty informative. Gave us both a bunch of ideas. And I honestly think that given a little practice, I’m pretty sure I could do some solid basic stuff. No crazy engraving or whatever, but I think I could make something decent. What they did let us onto though, is using thick foam to “prototype” patterns so you don’t waste expensive leather. Which gave us the idea: “For simple, quick stuff, why not use the foam to make the shape, and then just upholster it in a thinner, less expensive leather, since we’re not planning to use it as armor?” I’ve further deviated from this theme in the project I’m currently working on for a costume (which I fully plan to detail later). But yeah, some good take-aways from these classes. (If you want me to post my notes from any of these, just mention it in the comments and I will.) 

So after this, I had a Marketing for Writers panel I wanted to go to, so the wife decided to run home and take care of the dogs. Before leaving the Leathercrafting Panel, I gave the wife what we both thought was everything she needed to leave for the house (Foreshadowing!), and made my break from the Hyatt to the Hilton (see the last post for the Dragon-Con map). On my way there, I went through the Mariott and had plenty of time (25 minutes) to make it to the panel, so I took the opportunity to take care of some personal business.

You see, a long time ago when I first went to Dragon-Con to meet and hang out with a bunch of players (and the owners) of an online game/RPG (MUD) I play Threshold RPG. They had a booth for the Con and showed off and demo’d the game there. One of the things we did one night was go see a weird little goth musician because his blend of music sounded pretty unique, so we were curious. That night was my first experience listening to Voltaire. 

Fast forward from 1999 to 2012, and I dragged a couple of my friends (who are also fans), to go see Voltaire play at a Steampunk Cabaret in Austin, Texas. Before he played Voltaire was hanging out at his Merch booth, so people could stop by and talk to him. I mentioned to him (while my friend Sean was somehow rendered near speechless (if you know Sean, you know how amazing of a feat this is) by nerding out over getting to meet Voltaire) that I’d seen him in 1999 at Dragon-Con, and he stopped me in my tracks, asking me how certain I was of the year being 1999. I told him I was really damn sure, since the only year I’d ever been to Dragon-Con was 1999. And he said that if I was correct, he was wrong about the number of years in a row he’s played at Dragon-Con, because he thought his first year was in 2000. So I told him that I still had the program in Virginia, so I could verify for him. He told me to do so and let him know. So I had the information verified, and let him know on Facebook.

So I swung by his merch booth at Dragon Con in the Mariott and scored this little gem:

I reminded him of our conversation in Austin, and told him that I wanted to show it to him, so he could see for himself. It was kind of awesome to watch Voltaire read his Bio’s from 1999 in a kind of wondrous amazement. Like it was this crazy, surreal experience for him. Then I asked him to autograph the cover after he’d finished reading, and that’s what he wrote, “My first Dragon Con!” Score!

So with plenty of time to spare, I thanked Voltaire, and ventured forth to my marketing panel. I waited around for like 10 minutes at the door of the ballroom, for the people to get there and for the doors to open for the panel to begin. I get my notebook out and get ready to take notes when the panel starts… and about 5 minutes before the panel starts, my wife suddenly appears beside me. I look at he in all kinds of puzzlement, because the only thing I could think is, “Did you decide to not go feed the dogs and wanted to sit in on this panel?” And then she catches her breath and says, “You have the parking ticket.”

Doh.

Sure enough, in my wallet, the ticket from the parking deck. Which she needs to get validated to be able to get out of the parking deck without having to pay money. I felt really bad, because she’d almost made it back to the parking deck before realizing we never exchanged the ticket. So despite us going over multiple times to make sure I’d given her everything she needed to get back home and feed the dogs… nope. We forgot something. She blames it on lack of sleep and the weird/altered sleeping schedule.

So she left me to the panel, and went to go feed and take care of the dogs for real this time, and I enjoyed the panel. This is where things kind of really sank in that I’m in tune with how things are currently flowing in the publishing world right now. No one as big named as Jim Butcher or Laurell K Hamilton at this one, but it was a wide spectrum of authors from major publisher to smaller ones, and all genres from fantasy to sci-fi, erotica, and even non-fiction. But I pretty much knew the answers to all the questions poised by both the panel and the audience. Makes me feel pretty good about stuff. Woo! Motivation!

After the panel, I met up with the wife and her friends back at the hotel room, where they were all preparing for the Mechanical Ball, the big Steampunk themed party for Dragon-Con. So I grabbed an unused cane (from the combat scene the day before) and a top hat, and set out to be my wife’s handler for the evening at the party. For those who don’t know, a handler basically carries stuff, helps with costume maintenance, and keeps an eye out for people wanting to take pictures of someone in costume. A good example is the girl leading around Pyramid Head from the last post. So I helped the wife navigate the crowd and not hit people with her wings, and kept her from moving around too much when people were taking pictures of her wings from behind her (and she had no idea they were there).

So who makes an early appearance at the Ball?

The Big Daddy from the news report the other day. I had a chance to talk shop with him for a bit later in the evening. His awesome dive helmet? A plexi-glass sphere, with some stuff glued to it to look like port-holes and a covered with copper masking (think the copper version of the aluminum tape used on air conditioning ducts). It’s pretty badass. Also, check the air hoses that run from the airtank into the front of the helmet in the chest area? Yeah, in the airtank, he has a camelback full of ice, and some fans that blow air over the ice and through those hoses… so he’s carrying around his own air conditioning so he doesn’t die in that costume. Pretty awesome. While I was talking, I also helped reattach one of his hoses that had come undone. That’s what a handler does.

Hard to see in the lighting, but this is a Steampunk Darth Vader.

A picture of the wife’s wings, while people are talking to her about their mechanics and how they work.

One of the professional photographers taking a picture of her with the wings in their operational mode, extended.

This Steampunk Storm Trooper was pretty badass. The little pack thing at the small of the stormtrooper’s back had little smoke stacks coming out of it. The vents in his mask have vacuum tubes coming out of it. Blaster modified to be a tesla gun. And the best touch of all, the ironic goggles.

A fellow Steampunker with operational wings. They talk shop and swapped wing plans and operational mechanisms. Of course, we have to have before and after pictures:

Both open.

The other wings. Pretty geniusly simple.

Once it rolled around to 11am, we made our way to the Voltaire concert. The line was *HUGE* it was also being confused with another line on the same sidewalk for a Hentai viewing party. So at one point people were standing in the middle of the sidewalk gesturing to one line and calling out, “Voltaire!” Then pointing to the other line and calling out, “Tentacle Porn!”

We stood in line for almost an hour before we get let inside. The concert was awesome. About half of the songs he played were songs he did NOT play in Austin. Notably, he played the Ex-Lover’s Lover’s Drinking Game. Which is one of my favorite songs by him.

By the end of the show, it was REALLY late. Our trip home delayed even more by some ridiculousness at the McDonald’s Drivethrough where it took us almost 30 minutes to get from the speaker where we make our order to actually having our food in our car. So we didn’t get to sleep until after 3am.

So Monday rolls around and it’s the last day of the Con. It got off to a late start and my wife decided she didn’t care about the two panels she’d thought about going to that morning. So we decided to stop by Voltaire’s booth again (I promise I wasn’t stalking him), because my wife wanted to meet him and thank him for writing one of his songs that she’s used for multiple presentations over the years. While we were there, we bought a couple things. The wife bought a Candy Claws for her office:

And then we grabbed a couple Voltaire Signal Corps patches:

I decided to only go to one of my two panels today, so we both went to my “Writing for Videogames” panel. Also fairly informative, and if you want notes, let me know. A lot of it was about not over-writing, being willing to write by committee, make concessions for the betterment of a project, and write threaded scenes that can exist both independently of one another and as a cohesive whole. A bunch of the guys on the panel worked for Bethesda, Bioware, or Violition. So, one of the guys had been with Violition through the entire Saints Row series, which is hilarious. It was pretty awesome, and hilarious. My wife even laughed through most of it, and she didn’t know the majority of the games being talked about.

After this, we decided to stroll through the vendor booths and do some last minute shopping before we had to leave and go back by the house before I flew back to Texas. We made a lap of the whole floor, since she hadn’t seen the majority of it and we both made several last minute purchases. I also picked up a ton of cards and fliers so we can look up stuff and buy stuff later. So it was pretty productive. 

Steampunk bronze hair dealie (chignon) my wife bought from Circle Works. There was some interesting hair stuff at the booth for you ladies who like interesting hand-made hair stuff.

Me, I bought a flask for future use in costuming, so I can always have a drink on me.

Belt mounted flask and holder dealie. The leather construction is pretty simple, I’m pretty sure I can at least partly replicate this one. I would link the people who made it, but they don’t have a web presence at all. No website. No store. No online schedule. They just travel from Con to Con and Renn Faire to Renn Faire, plying their wares at ridiculously cheap (for custom-made leather) prices. (One of the workers told me they make $40 on a $400 jacket the size of a duster, which has over $300 of leather in it.) I’d love to link them, and I’ll definitely keep an eye out for them at future Dragon-Cons.

And thus wrapped up my DragonCon weekend. We went home, let the dogs out, got some last minute things from the house and took me to the airport. I flew back to Texas and went to work crafting this summary of the events. 

I hope you enjoyed it.

Tune in next week (in a couple days!) for the next adventure. Back to our regular schedule, of sorts. I continue my list of Brew Pubs with a brewpub I’d like to believe is named after one of my favorite guitar amplifier companies Black Star Co-Op Brewpub. Also I begin my shopping quest to put together a Steampunk costume in time to go to Realms Con in October… to… go… see… Voltaire… perform… (really, I swear I’m not stalking him.) I’m also going to go to as many writing and Steampunk/costuming panels and demos as I possibly can while there. So we’ll see how it all goes! But the search for costume components begins tomorrow. Me vs 14 Austin-area Thrift Stores. 1 Day. Challenge Accepted.

Until next time.