Chip's Spynotebook

This year we decided to do the entire four day Dragon*Con weekend. It was fun but, man, was it tiring. We shared a room with Natalie at the Hyatt.  We were on the 6th floor which we thought was pretty cool for walking-up-the-stairs reasons but was very not cool for hearing-yelling-from-the-lobby-at-3:30 reasons. Ear plugs next time, for sure.

The theme for this year was much like last year: waiting in lines.

The pre-registration line took us at least 2 hours on Thursday night. Most every panel we went to we had to wait in huge crowds of people and a few panels we just plain skipped instead of waiting. I would have liked to have seen Patrick Stewart but not enough to wait. I was the very last person to make it in to Charlaine Harris (and that pissed off some little old ladies).

Friday and Saturday were busy. By Sunday, we were slowing down and by Monday we were just kind of wandering and staring off into space.

Friday morning was all about William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. We had great seats and those guys were hilarious. I find it both hard to believe and easy to believe that William Shatner has never seen any Star Trek series other than his own. I was just happy that he talked about making Incubus, one of the few movies ever made in Esperanto.

Later that day, we went to an incredibly awkward Buffy panel. The first half was Kristy Swanson and Felicia Day. So, you had the Buffy from the movie and one of the Potentials from the last season of the series.  Most of the questions were directed towards geek-queen Felicia about her other projects. Later in the panel, Charisma Carpenter and Julie Benz showed up and Charisma told about how much she hated Cordelia getting put into a coma and then killed on Angel. She said she would come back for Episode 100 if Joss promised not to kill her. He killed her. She sounded very sad about how it all went down.

Beth and I went to a panel on the death of mainstream media where the discussion focused on Hulu and similar online sources of entertainment. We went mainly to hear what Tom Merrit had to say because we listen to him on Buzz Out Loud every day. For this same reason, we went to see him and Veronica Belmont do their Sword and Laser podcast live that evening. They interviewed Timothy Zahn about his Star Wars novels.

I also saw Charlaine Harris talk about her Sookie Stackhouse novels that night. I have been reading those all year after seeing the first season of True Blood. She was a very polite Southern lady who happens to write about vampires and werewolves.  She seemed like she might have been one of my friend’s grandmas or something.

To top off Friday night we went to a sing-a-long version of the the Buffy musical episode, Once More With Feeling. They got the mustard out.

Slept in a little on Saturday but made it down to watch the Dragon*Con parade at 10. Bumped into several people there including Tina and Henry who had been out riding MARTA for fun. The costumes were awesome as always and the drizzly rain didn’t seem to ruin anything.

I went with Beth to see the TAPS Ghost Hunters and then I switched to comic book mode and went to a Darwyn Cooke panel and a discussion of the Buffy comic with the editor and Georges Jeanty, the artist. We met up with James after a brief rest and hit the Pulse bar in the Marriot for the Sword and Laser meetup. It was fun getting to talk to Roger Chang, Tom Merrit, and Veronica Belmont because they are all a part of my regular online viewing/listening schedule. We also hung out with Ick the Troll.

After the bar, we went to an hour with George “Space Ghost” Lowe who was entertaining enough that we went to see him on Sunday afternoon also. Sunday morning was wandering through dealer rooms and lunch with James. That night, we lined up early to get good seats for the costume contest/masquerade. The hosts were Peter David and George Perez so I enjoyed it from a comic geek point of view plus they were pretty funny.

Monday morning we did a quick packing job and put our stuff in the car and walked to our last panel. Felicia Day talked about writing and creating The Guild. They announced that Dark Horse was making a guild comic and then people asked awkward questions. Awkward as in “Can I have your number” and “Will you sign my disturbing fan fiction”. But, Felicia was a trooper and suffered through.

I was hoping to have pictures on this post but I can’t seem to embed Beth’s pictures from Flickr. Maybe later.

And  yes, we already have tickets for next year.

Why hello there.

Scrappy and I are on our way to Dragon*Con in a few hours. I’ll be flickring and twittering and all that and will probably be posting some stuff to the blog.

I am posting this mainly to see if my blog is still posting to Facebook.

If you are going to be at the con, give me a call or email/text me.