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Tiding You Over – SDCC Day 1 Pics
Posted by dre222 on July 30, 2008
So, to tide you over until I start to post on the next fun-filled days I had at SDCC, I thought I’d post some lessons learned and some Day 1 pics:
1. Do not schedule a trip return from the west coast the day before you are due back at work. Take an extra day to get over the jet lag and everyone will thank you for it. I was a real bitch the day I went back due to lack of sleep and post-SDCC depression. My second day back at work was non-existent due to the fact that my right eye had turned a lovely cherry red and streamed water for 6 straight hours until I got into the eye doctor. This made driving impossible until it stopped. Lack of sleep and exhaustion from staring at computer screens for 18+ hours a day before the trip is probably to blame. This is also contributing to my lack of SDCC posts here. I’m supposed to be resting my eyes.
2. Get a better digi-cam with super zoom and a lightning fast lens speed. Since we weren’t front row for any of the panels, many of my photos are from the huge overhead monitors, which would be great if our camera could resolve the picture fast enough to eliminate ghosting from the screens. Also, when we were fairly close something stronger than a 2x zoom probably would have given us a lot more money shots.
3. Take every type of internet connection cable/device known to man. I naively thought that most hotels had progressed to wi-fi or would provide a LAN cable if they were still on wall plugs. Not so my friends. My current laptop did not even come with such a cable, and these cables are not offered for sale within the downtown district of San Diego. Plus my battery is sucked down very easily, so the wi-fi at the convention center didn’t do me much good. So as a bonus learning for this bullet point: buy an extended laptop battery and take both. Granted that would have added more weight than I probably could have carried on my back (I was pushing my limits and even Pregremlin’s, who works out all the time), but it would have been so much better for blogging – and for checking secret booth schedules online.
4. Do not hesitate to deny anyone an “extra” cigarette. I swear that the locals must have mistaken me for the Marlboro Man. At least once a day I was asked for an “extra” cigarette, because apparently folks out there must not care that they are $1,000 per pack now, and carry spares freely for worthless bums and skater punks. I found that the best response was none at all – as in the person did not even exist in the same sphere as me. Sure it pisses them off, but then I don’t have to lie or tell them to get a job.
5. Do not buy Hasbro exclusives. As part of Day 2 I spent 1 1/2 hours in line to get a ticket to stand in a line to get in a line which then took hours to move. From 8 a.m. to noon I was either trying to buy their toys, or buying the toys, or selling the toys to a guy who didn’t bother to check his ticket time, or packing and shipping toys. This was extremely excessive and will not be repeated unless they have a diamond-crusted Millennium Falcon at the next one for $5. The bonus was getting home and seeing on Monday morning that they put every toy except for one that I bought online for anyone and their brother to order. I have lodged a complaint at Hasbro’s site, but I’m sure they received thousands and all will be ignored in the sacred quest to destroy the term “exclusive” for all time.
6. If you are a connoisseur of pop culture, YOU MUST GO TO SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON at least once. It was the best four days of my existence, thus far, and made me step back and think about how much my daily life and routines suck by comparison. To be surrounded by so much creative energy was amazing and inspiring. To hear people I have admired from afar speak about their work was worth every hour of sleep missed and every minute spent in every line. Dtrain and Aspect already bought their badges for next year and I’m working on getting myself back out there again.
So, as you can imagine, I still have a lot to process as I write these next posts. Plus I have tons of blurry photos to sift through. I’m hoping I got a few clear shots to post here, or that Dtrain got similar shots at the same panel so I can steal them for you, dear readers. Anyway, Days 2 & 3 will be posted soon and may be segmented into parts, but without futher ado, here are some pics from SDCC Day 1 and a bonus pic of my favorite moment at SDCC:
Keanu - DTESS panel
Jennifer Connelly – DTESS panel
Mark Wahlberg – Max Payne panel
Mila Kunis – Max Payne panel
Chris Bridges AKA Ludacris - Max Payne panel
Hugh Jackman - Surprise appearance to promote Wolverine
Justin Hartley (Green Arrow, Smallville) and dre222* – Booth Signing.
*My face is blurred for my protection. I'm obviously not concerned about his protection.
Trevor Danger said
You seem to be in the minority of bloggers talking about this year’s con, as most of them bitch about “jumping the shark” and the massive amounts of people there. I think my slight agoraphobia would prevent me from being able to enjoy myself fully.
Can’t wait for the follow-ups!
dre222 said
Yeah, you said something about people bitching about getting closed out of panels too. Well, for those people…here’s the deal: IT’S A GIANT CONVENTION.
You have to plan what you cannot live without seeing and stick to that plan. It leads to heart-breaking choices and means standing in line EARLY in the morning to get into a room. We ended up just picking a room that had the best programming for the morning or afternoon or picked one that had the most things we wanted to see in it. We didn’t get to see everything, but it was fairly enjoyable that way and introduced us to some new stuff. And it was very stress-free sitting on my butt for hours watching awesome people talk. I was able to even get bathroom / food / smoking passes so I could leave and come back as I liked once I was in.
The exhibit hall floor was scary to the degree of being life-threatening at points on Saturday, but that was mostly for people waiting for expensive swag to be given out or waiting for booth signings. They could definitely do a better job of planning how booths will run signings and hand out high end swag so that people are safer. You will see this in the illustrative example of the Fox Poster Tube incident that took place during the evening of Day 2. I thought it was odd that the booths didn’t require you to listen to any plugs for whatever they were pitching or even pay any attention to the booth itself to get the free stuff. At Board Game cons you have to jump through hoops for anything cool, BUT it limits the “I want free shit” people from getting in the “I’m a hard core fan who will be blogging about this later” people.
As for ‘jumping the shark’… are these reviewers still stuck in 2007? The phrase has now morphed to ‘nuking the fridge’ (the best thing to come out of Indy IV I’m told, although I enjoyed that flick) and for me the con did not do that. I was there for the TV and movie stuff though, the pop culture you might say. I enjoy many comics and spent at least an hour visiting the tiny individual start-up guys’ booths. I did think that they lacked having an overkill of comic events and celebrities, but maybe I am just not enough of a comic expert to call ‘nukers’. When there are like 50 panels devoted to GLBT issues in comics and 100 about how to become Stan Lee, you can’t tell me that they are lacking in spread and variety of ‘comic’ panels.
So those reviewers need to take off their whiny pants and think before they spew. I think you (TD) would enjoy the exhibit hall on Thursday or Preview night and like sitting in the panels all day (unless you can’t take sitting in line two hours prior to when you want to get into the room which I thought was minimal compared to Star Wars Celebrations).
Trevor Danger said
A lot of these bloggers are SDCC pros, returning for their fourth or fifth tours of duty, remarking on the exponential growth that comes with opening a once “comic-only” celebration into the pop-culture juggernaut it’s become.
The same could be said for people bitching about locked-out panels; hilariously, they blamed people like yourself for sitting through shit panels to secure seats for interesting ones, thereby locking them out. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with any viewpoints, as I wasn’t there, but it does sound like shit needs to be better organized. Perhaps clearing a room between panels, as dangerous as that may be, will help ensure people get to see more of what they want to see without sacrificing two hours or more of their lives.
Finally, the general consensus seems to be that the bubble is going to burst soon; Hollywood will eventually grow tired of pandering to mouthbreathing comic fanboys (the majority of them, sadly) and take their party elsewhere, returning the con to its roots (somewhat). Like anything that’s the hot topic of the moment, the hype will die down as soon as the superhero movie/TV show backlash kicks in.
dre222 said
As always, I think you’re spot on with your assessment of their reviews. And I hope you know that my comments were directed entirely to the folks you are talking about (I’ve been reading the same crap). I again just think it’s hilarious that someone is always upset by something that they were warned would happen. The SDCC site, program book, etc. has this kind of warning and solution info posted about 50 million times.
So these folks that go every year (which means they must like it enough to return) are itchy because things have changed and aren’t as cool to them as previous years have been. My opinion, which is mine and mine alone, is that I think the craziness itself was interesting. So maybe SDCC has outgrown its original audience and will be outgrowing its current venue. What about the thousands of other conventions devoted strictly to comics? With so many new conventions and fan events popping up every year (like WonderCon which is apparently becoming SDCC’s smaller brother), they should find one more to their specific tastes and go there. Now I know, they’d say “why should we change when we really just want people like dre222 to go somewhere else?” To quote several wise people “things change”.
I have experienced the same convention disillusionment with GenCon that these folks are going through. What used to be the oldest and most premiere gaming convention has now morphed beyond its original audience and roots to include most of the cast off vendors and events from E3. Some people are all for it. I personally did not like the video game segment coming into the con and making things (like walking and breathing) worse for other gamers. Did I condemn GenCon (besides when they ripped off Make-a-Wish and tangled with Lucasfilm Legal)? No. I decided to stop going to that convention and go to one that had more events and guests that I was interested in seeing when going to a “gaming” con. I started avoiding GenCon and going to Origins. Do I hate video games? Ask my Xbox 360 which hasn’t gone longer than a week without being played (about the time of our last trip) since it was purchased. I would just prefer to go to an almost entirely video game convention if that was what I wanted to check out.
As for clearing the rooms… way bad idea. They do that at Star Wars Celebrations and at times the people shut out of getting into a recently cleared room are to the point of inciting a riot. Every panel I was in that was declared ‘full’ still had open seats. The problem was other attendees not being forced to move to the middle of the row to make open seats visible. That is one lesson that SDCC should learn. They have enough people to walk around looking for recording devices during the panels, so they should have some of those same people go through by section during the breaks and ask people to move to the middle of the row instead of assuming people will based on a loud speaker announcement. That change I agree with. Clearing the room sets people up to wait in line for hours and still be shut out. Plus, it would make naviagting the convention center impossible. There are always people who are crazy enough to line up more than 24 hours in advance for certain panels and events. No change will stop that. At this convention at least they were good about estimating whether people would get in or not while you were still in line. Also, the 15 minutes between panels does not logistically allow for the rooms to be cleared and then refilled.
Now I know a couple of panels got screwed because of the following panels, so what could be improved there is aligning panels in rooms by target demographics. Like not putting a fanboy panel (DTESS, MP, & Wolverine) directly before one catering to 13 yr old girls (Twilight). Miraculously we made it into the panel which was the first of the day in that room by getting in line around 8 am. Obviously that kind of programming schedule is unfair and will piss people off. Here’s the schedule of one room we went into on one day that we stayed almost all day in the same room: Futurama, Simpsons, Dean Koontz, Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica, Chuck, Fringe. We started at the beginning and left after BSG. Obviously Dollhouse and BSG were full, but it’s not like the other panels were ones we weren’t interested in. Granted I’ve never read a DK novel, but after hearing him speak I might. Tons left after the first two panels, and a bunch left after DK. There were probably at least 2000 seats open when they started bringing people in for Dollhouse.
I don’t know what the real best solution is for the disenchanted, or what Hollywood will decide do to once the fad passes, but I agree that something is going to change sometime soon. Change is one of life’s only guarantees.
My favorite quote from the daily newsletters at SDCC was “Remember Comic-Con is supposed to be fun. If you’re not having fun, stop, take a few breaths, and decide whether what is keeping you from having fun is worth the trouble. If not, try something else.”