Dragon*Con 2012: Day 1

So, I finished my Friday post having finished Camp Nanowrimo and just about to rush off for my first day of Dragon*Con panels for this year, right? 🙂

First, a little Dragon*Con 101, to help you understand what I’m talking about, and maybe give you a feel for what going is like. Dragon*Con is organized into dozens of fan tracks like WeyrFest, Whedon Universe, BritTrack, and American Sci-Fi Media – those are the ones that I’ve been mostly following. Each track has a ‘home room’ in one of the hotels, where the smaller panels and events will be held, and will reserve a larger ballroom for bigger events, like when they have a celebrity guest Q&A. Often the larger room will be in the same hotel as the home room.

Whedon Universe and BritTrack are very ‘big’ tracks, with a lot of people attending at least a few of their events; bigger rooms, longer lines, and bigger stars, which often does mean bigger fun. Weyrfest is a lot smaller, and doesn’t often leave the Vinings room on the lowest conference level of the Hyatt hotel.

The second thing you need to understand is about the schedule. Each track sets its own schedule, and though there are exceptions, generally the schedules are synchronized on a pattern of one hour for an event, then half an hour for people to get to their next event. So you have panels from 10am to eleven, and then the next panels start at 11:30, and so on through the day until 8:30pm, and then 10pm. Each track generally runs one item in each time slot, though occasionally they’ll have a gap or two choices at the same time, and they each make their own decisions about how early they start or late they go on a particular day. There are often some late parties that run longer than an hour.

Finally, a map! I never found the maps they have in the DragonCon program to be too easy to understand, and sort of learned the layout by trial and error last year. Here’s my own map, not to scale, but it clearly shows everything important, and also gives a few street names:

 

First afternoon at Fan Expo

I’ve been inside Fan Expo for a little more than an hour now. At this point on Thursday afternoon, things are relatively quiet, but there’s still some fun stuff going on.

I left work just before noon, lugging my suitcase onto the train, and walked up Bay and Yonge streets all the way to Wellesley, sweating up a storm as I went. A nice lady checked me into my room, and I spent half an hour there organizing my stuff and cooling down before taking the subway down and figuring the right way into the convention center through crowd control – though the crowds haven’t really arrived yet.

Since I got here I’ve signed up for a Dresden Files RPG session tonight, walked most of the sales floor, and talked to a few guys at the photo sales booth about Kaylee cupcake dress pictures. Jewel Staite isn’t at this show, but I want to get that picture signed by Jewel and Jane Espenson at DragonCon. A fellow customer said that he got the picture at Jewel’s autograph table at Polaris last year, so I think I should be able to track it down in Atlanta.

I only bought two items so far – packs of trading cards, Firefly and Angel

What else? I scouted out the autograph situation a bit. Looks like John Barrowman and Juliet Landauwill be signing tomorrow, but I’ll have to wait until Saturday at least for Rose McGowan and Alan Tudyk. That helps me know what I need to bring to get signed. I’ve seen a few familiar faces around and chatted with Jason R briefly. The Toronto Browncoats fan booth isn’t where it’s marked in the programme; I wonder if they let TCON have their space for today.

It’s still more than an hour before Julie Benz’s Q&A session. I want to go find the ctv sprawl again and find out more about this ‘arrow’ show, and then maybe I’ll get in line early for Julie and read as I wait. Please excuse any typos in this post as the on-screen keyboard is not really meant for long composition.

A few pics of the convention center hall:

Some of what I’ve been watching lately

I don’t often talk much about television I watch on this blog, partly because the DVR has helped me fall so far behind on a lot of good series… but I thought at this point in the 2011-2012 season, I’d give a few thoughts on some relatively recent shows, even if I’m not up to date on all of it:

Charlie’s Angels (RIP)

After giving this one a chance, I really was hoping that it would make it. There was a very fun vibe to the series, and I liked that each case was either fighting crime that victimized women.

Myself, I almost had the sense that the original series, the Barrymore movies, and this remake were all in the same canon – Charlie Townsend stays the same, but the Angels working for him change – as do the Bosleys.

Supernatural

I’ve watched Supernatural here and there for a while, but never really followed the show – but I decided that I wanted to pick it up for this season, mostly because of the news of some prominent guest stars from the Whedonverse – Jewel Staite, James Marsters and Charisma Carpenter.

Again, it’s been a fun show so far – I’m not hugely wild about the Leviathan as the series-long Big Bads, (if they’re going to be,) but they seem to be working well so far – supernatural spirits with great appetites for blood and remarkable powers to physically blend in among humans, but completely clueless to start about the human world.

Polaris versus Tim Hortons

Just one more short Polaris story, that I didn’t mention earlier.

The Adam Baldwin Q&A session on Saturday afternoon started late, because Adam still had people who’d waited in line for his autograph, and somebody decided not to disappoint them. So, to ‘stretch’ the time for those of us waiting in the Q&A room, the MC, Larry, told us a little story.

The convention was held in a complex with a convention center, a little enclosed mall, and two hotels. Right next door was a sort of strip mall and one of the biggest businesses there was a Tim Horton’s chain coffee and donuts shop. As you might imagine, it was pretty popular with the convention-goers. We Canadians love our Tim’s.

But the air conditioning in this particular Tim’s location was broken, and apparently the head office hadn’t done anything about it in over a week – because no customers had complained to them. Larry was quite upset about this, mostly on behalf of the employees there, and I rather saw his point. Customers aren’t terribly inconvenienced by the heat in the little time it takes them to line up and get their order, but it’s much harder on somebody working an eight-hour shift in a kitchen without air conditioning during a hot spell.

So, Larry not only got the number for head office and the details on what store number was having the problem – he shared them with all of us and invited us to complain as often as we liked, to entertain ourselves by using funny voices and impersonating our favorite TV stars, and so on.

I was intrigued by the idea, but didn’t actually get around to calling. The next day, before Jewel Staite’s Q&A, there was an update – a vice-president of something-or-other from Tim’s head office had been to the store on Sunday morning and was doing what she could to make sure that the AC would get fixed as soon as possible.

Even if I didn’t place a call, I’m pleased that I got to hear about that story. So that’s why I’m passing it on to you.

Final Polaris round-up.

Okay, my sleep schedule’s a little wonky at the moment, work stuff kept me up last night, but I’ll share some of my favorite moments from Sunday at Polaris 25, after I signed off from yesterday.

The writing workshop with Julie Czerneda was really cool – it was oriented for beginners, but I learned some cool stuff – working in groups to come up with science-based ideas, develop them, and then start to add in protagonists, settings, emotional reactions for the reader, and figure out how to explain the science to the reader. I also thought it was interesting that she didn’t see much value in writers critiquing other writers.

The meeting with the other writers from Ad Astra was nice – hi guys, if any of you are dropping by to catch up on my blog!

And then, there was the Jewel Staite stuff – she had a fun Q&A, didn’t want anybody recording video or sound so that she could ‘trash talk’ without fear of it coming out to haunt her. I actually asked four questions:

• What were you thinking of when filming the strawberry scene? (She said that she had cheeseburgers on the brain when Joss told her to imagine it was the tastiest thing ever – and that he really loved the very first take she did.)
• What was your favorite outfit of Kaylee’s? ‘Not the birthday cake dress!’
• Favorite episode of firefly? ‘I really loved filming The Message, even though we’d found out we were cancelled by then, because we decided to have a great time and make as much fun for ourselves as we could.’
• If Firefly came back, what would you like to have happen next in Kaylee’s life? ‘I’d love to see her and Simon have a baby together, I think Kaylee would be a really great mom.’

And I got a picture signed, and also had her sign the ‘Those Left Behind’ comic book, which is starting to accumulate nearly as many Big Damn Signatures as the Firefly Blueprints Book.

After going through the signature room again, in only 20 minutes or so, I hit a few panels, covering Starship captains and Smallville season ten, (which I haven’t finished watching, and got spoiled on a few details, but what the heck?) Then it was time for the Geek-off Championships, where I scored a single point, which meant I was in a four-way tie for fourth place or something like that.

Then my brother had arrived to drive me home, and I drove half-way myself, along Lakeshore road from Oakville through Burlington, and then across the Burlington lift bridge.

Polaris diary – day 3, morning

Okay, not that much has happened since my last update. Went to sleep, had a fire alarm in the middle of the night, overslept because I set my ipod alarm for the wrong day (stupid interface, grr,) and went to volunteer up at Ten Forward, where I mostly just looked for make-work because the guy in charge was oversleeping too.

A few thins from yesterday evening that I didn’t mention in the last update. The constellations awards ceremony was great – funny, and a touching moment when Jewel Staite presented Adam Baldwin with the award for best male actor in a tv show. It also ran long by about half an hour, which means that I didn’t get to see much of the costume masquerade before having to head down to the Geek-off.

Today, I’ve got scheduled:

• A two-hour science fiction ‘writing workshop’ with Julie Czerneda.
• Lunch, not at the buffet, (but possibly the same restaurant, just ordering off the menu.
• Meeting with two other writers from the Ad Astra critique circle sign-up list – the first meeting that we’ve been able to organize!
• Jewel Staite’s Q&A, and getting a new autograph from her.
• A few more ‘potluck panels.’
• And the Geek-off championships, where I don’t have high hopes, and will not be playing out of my own universe.

Then my brother should be picking me up for the ride back to Hamilton.

Before any of the things on that list, I’ll need to pack up and check out of the room, so I should post now and get packing! Talk to you again soon

Wizard World Toronto Comic Con flashback

I’ve mostly finished packing for Wizard World, starting tomorrow, and so I’d like to spend a little time down on memory lane with my memories of Wizard World last year, since I wasn’t blogging then to tell you all about it.

Wizard World Toronto Comic Con 2010 was the first fandom convention I ever went to, really. I won the weekend pass at one of the Toronto fan clubs – I can’t even remember if it was Buffy or Firefly, and I loved the whole trip.

Possibly the highlight of the entire weekend was meeting Magda Apanowicz, who I’d never really heard of before I got there. I attended the Galactica/Caprica panel on Friday night because it sounded like fun, though at that point I had only:

1. Seen the miniseries and a few episodes of S1 of Battlestar Galactica (still true, though it’s a few more by now.)
2. Not even started watching Caprica
3. Forgotten to set my DVR to record Caprica half the time, because I wasn’t used to actually going up to the Space channel when looking to see “Hey, it’s Friday night, is anything good on?”
4. Particularly forgotten to set the DVR to record Caprica before I left for work Friday morning the day that Wizard World started.