DragonCon Day One

What's your process for picking your con schedule?

Whatever your method, DragonCon's pocket program is 92 pages of 6pt single spaced type. OK, the pages are half size, and there are the occasional graphics and paragraph breaks. But it is a substantial amount of programming.

There are 32 separate tracks of programming, ranging from American Sci-Fi Classics to Young Adult Literature. The Main track includes the opening and closing ceremonies, awards, robot wars, film premiers, various stargazing panels (not the astronomy type stars), and anything else of which there wasn't enough to make a track of its own.

Elysa is going to spend a lot of time at the film festival. I hope they will sell a DVD of what they have here. It's amazing. About 27 hours of material will be presented, ranging from animation to fan produced movies.

I'm going to be doing some gaming, and I plan to go to the science, space, and EFF tracks. Perhaps some others. Elysa and I will watch the parade together, and we've got tickets to the banquet. Besides that we may well end up experiencing two entirely different cons. It's been that way in the past. Later we can compare notes. It's like getting two conventions for the price of one.

Michael Stackpole has panels on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I hope to corner him on one of those occasions.

Those are the plans. Here's the execution.

Went to bed too late. Got up later than we intended to. Discovered that some ants have made their home in our rental car, so we made a detour to Publix to buy some ant spray. Off to Dunwoody, park, and catch the train. Elysa took along a pillow because last year the seating was uncomfortable. As we walked to the train I realized I didn't know where our badges were. We were already back to our car when I think to look in my lunch sack, and there they are.

Eventually we got to Peachtree Center. I somehow felt a sense of solidarity with all those other geeks who got off the train with us. The Peachtree Center Foodcourt was already crowded with con goers. Elysa went off to buy a lanyard for her badge, and I went to find gaming registration.

The trouble with a large convention is that you have to departmentalize, and departmentalization leads to compartmentalization. That means that I never actually met any con staff who knew what I was looking for until I found it. Ditto places to put the HorrorCon flyers and bookmarks. I eventually dropped small stacks of them here and there, and if I find tomorrow that some spots were not so good I'll move them around a bit when I have a moment.

I signed up for three gaming sessions on Sunday. There's too much else going on I don't want to miss.

I went to an art panel (digital coloring line drawings) and then to the art show where I ran into Jessica Douglass. We first looked at each other like "that person looks familiar but are they who I think they are?" and then gave a hug and Jessica introduced me to her dad.

Anyway, the art show consisted really of two parts. There were panels, of course, about twice as many as we manage to put up for CONduit (which should tell you all we have a very respectable art show in Salt Lake City), and sales tables where artists were selling their wares directly. One woman had about 10 panels of her art, and it was clear that she used herself as the model for all of the big eyed elfin creatures she painted, some in the altogether. She was sitting at her sales table wearing a very small bikini top, and for some reason a lot of people wanted to talk to her.

And I bought another teeshirt.

The crowds were insane. I took some video walking around the fan area where various music groups where selling CDs and people were showing off their costumes. (I had a link, but took it back out when I realized the video was mostly of the ceiling.) I took some pictures of the most remarkable ones. Not all of them are of nearly naked girls.

I went to see some anime (Death Note, a fairly good adaptation of the manga) and then I was going to see our Dr Stephen Howe talk on antimatter. Except no sooner am I on my way across the street to the Hilton (programming is spread over three adjacent hotels) than my phone gets a signal and I get a message from Elysa. I try to find her, but somehow managed to overlook her where she was watching the Asian independent films. After a while I gave up and went back to anime, since Dr Howe's panel was half over by then.

When I finally hear from Elysa again she is waiting for me at the Dairy Queen, pretty upset because the crowds at the Hyatt had literally pushed her into the street and she couldn't force her way back in. When I tried to make my way back up to the foodcourt I found the fire marshal had closed the Hyatt's lobby (too many people), so I went across the street to the Marriott, and from there to Peachtree Center.

Elysa and I decided we'd had enough for one day and went to catch the train. It turned out the Northsprings line was still running, but packed with people because both the Braves and the Jaguars or whatever they call the football team had finished their games. We jammed in there, found out the Braves had lost, and tried not to fall over in the crowd.

Tomorrow Elysa will leave the pillow behind, because the seating is comfortable enough without it.