I slept in a tree again?

So, where was I?

Oh, yes. Sleeping on the lawn outside Hall H on Saturday night.



I slept pretty solidly for a good five hours, which was the most sleep I'd had for the whole convention. Maybe I was getting comfortable with camping out, since I'd already done it once. Maybe I was more relaxed than the previous night because I was with people I knew. Maybe I was just exhausted.

In any case, I was surprised to find it light out when I woke up; I thought I'd be up before dawn and have time to wash up before the bathroom got busy. (And, NO, it did not rain a drop. There wasn't even any dew.) I woke up very, very stiff and sore, but all considered, I felt pretty good.

karenor, who had slept not a wink, commented that I'd slept through a lot, and I agreed that I probably had (my only memories were of being cold and wrapping up more tightly once or twice, and a little commotion when a loud vehicle passed).

I thought she was kidding when she said Nathan Fillion had visited at 3am, and I'd slept through that.

So, yeah. I wasn't too happy about that.

I admit, I am far too shy to be any good at meeting celebrities; what could I possibly say to them? And after two days of sleeping on the ground, it's not like I would've wanted to have my picture taken with him. I probably would have settled for a blurry photograph or two taken from a distance, and the ability to say "I was there for that." (Then again, it was Nathan Fillion. I might've made an exception and asked him to sign my badge or something.)

(Also, I would actually have recognized him on sight, which would make this a better story than Ian McKellen. But anything makes a better story than I slept through it.)

I don't mind having missed some of this year's serendipitous SDCC moments; you can't see everything, and there's no helping it. I was occupied, I was elsewhere, I just wasn't lucky. It happens. But this one... I was as close as I possibly could have gotten while still missing out. That was hard to take. It's the one thing that made this year's SDCC less than perfectly awesome. (But Starship Smackdown, later on, went a good way toward restoring the awesomeness. Read on!)

( Return of the revenge of Hall H, et cetera )

( The Neil deGrasse Tyson bit )

On Friday, our main goal was to see the 12:30 Firefly panel. We weren't sure we would be able to get in; more than 5,000 people had indicated interest in the panel online, and the room only holds 4,000 people. It was the most popular panel on the website (and not everybody even uses the website). And it was in the second-biggest room at the convention center.

For extremely popular panels, no matter when they fall during the day, dawn seems to be the best arrival time. Some people camp out overnight, sure, but they don't fill the rooms. But the earliest we could get downtown with public transit was 6:15, and I really wasn't sure that would be good enough. If we didn't get in, though, I figured we could always go to the Venture Bros panel that morning. (I've been to the Venture Bros panel three times, and it's always been great – I regretted having to choose between it and Firefly. But Firefly was a one-time event, and it was Firefly. So it won.)

We'd gotten home from Patton Oswalt around midnight the night before, so we were not going to get much sleep. I planned to check the #b20 hashtag on twitter as soon as I woke up so I could decide whether Firefly was a lost cause. We were half hoping it would be (sorta, kinda) because we really needed more sleep. (We'd still have had to go down earlyish for Venture Bros, of course, but not that early.)

But the line status didn't sound totally hopeless at mumblesomethingbefore5am, so off we went. We just missed a trolley, but a hastily devised alternate plan with a bus still got us there around 6:15, at which point the line was impressively huge but not mind-boggling. It swiftly became mind-boggling; they wove it through a couple of the spare tents for the nearby Hall H line, went down the sidewalk, ran out of room and started switching it back in the street. I guess the lane they were using was closed, but still, packing people INTO THE STREET FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE just seems like a bad idea.

The first panel in Ballroom 20, Community, wasn't until 10:00, but they did make things exciting by moving the line at 7am. Before that, when the line is outside the convention center grounds, it's really the everything-besides-Hall-H line. Once the building doors open, the people redistribute themselves into lines for the exhibit hall, the Hasbro tickets, autograph tickets, Ballroom 20, and whatever other things people find worth lining up for. Problem is, that redistribution is kind of chaotic. Instead of people walking calmly down the hall in the order in which they arrived, it's a free-for-all. You can't run, but when the line spreads out into a great big hallway, people start sneaking ahead of each other and that just sucks. (If everyone were like me, I suppose the convention would be dull, because everyone would show their appreciation by sitting quietly and listening. But by God we would have fair and orderly lines.)

So we ended up somewhat grumpily in the Ballroom 20 line, in a half-assed rough approximation of where we should have been. And then we settled down to wait. We were... something like 3500th in line, I think. The "approximate wait from here is n people" signs were hard to interpret. All I know is that the line went through a bunch of tents and down the steps and THEN there was us. But we weren't all the way out in the marina, so there was that.

THIS GUY HAD A 10TH DOCTOR BACKPACK. I mean, I know it isn't, but it is.

This is the view from the terrace behind the convention center. I think some of that line may be for the Indigo Ballroom at the Hilton; it got very confusing at times, with all the lines converging. But it kind of blows my mind. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE IS A LINE. (It's most effective at the Large 1600 size, I think.)

You see those tiny people in the distance? That's the end of the Ballroom 20 line. Seriously. I don't know how much of the foreground is really for B20 – and there was plenty of B20 line you can't see here – but that's the end of it. Someone estimated 10,000 people in line. They might have been full of shit, but it's not totally implausible either.

Those people were not getting in for Firefly.

( But we were. )

( You can skip straight to the Ian McKellen story, but I have to tell you, it's not THAT exciting. )

One day of it, at least. I've only uploaded Thursday's pictures so far. So here we are:

Day one: Thursday

( Read more... )

This is the first third of my pictures. That means there will probably be two more of these. Pace yourselves.

( Forty great big honking images -- 7MB total. Some are very wide, but that's me being unwilling to cut Julie Gardner off. Thank you for your patience :). )

When a thousand-odd shrieking people showed up at the Doctor Who/Torchwood screening Saturday night, presumably on the off-chance that David Tennant, John Barrowman and RTD would spend five minutes introducing it (and they did!), I started to worry about how insane the crowd would be at the panel itself Sunday. We were all around the convention center till 10:30pm; would people just sleep over? Were they that crazy? (Was I that crazy? Maybe, but I had nobody to wait with, nothing to sleep on, and I wasn't sure it would be necessary.)

So I (a bit reluctantly) went home for the four hours of sleep I had planned. I did not get them, of course; I slept for maybe two hours and tossed for the rest of it. I finally got up and got ready at 3:00, and karenor arrived promptly just before 4:15. (She had fabulously offered to give me a ride; since I don't drive, I couldn't get downtown earlier than 7:30 on a bus. I'd probably have started walking before then.) We picked up another friend on the way downtown, actually got street parking just a few blocks from the convention center (amazing what you can do pre-dawn on a Sunday) and found the line.

( Where we spent the next five hours. )

Home, tired, hungry, happy. I got absolutely everything I wanted out of Comic-Con, after a month of ceaseless fretting and planning and worrying and hoping. Pictures, many of them, will come later. Right now I need dinner, a shower, and about a million hours of sleep. Since 5am yesterday, I've had about two hours of sleep. I think that's called a nap.

Must go take care of these things now, if I can work up the energy.

Day 3 of my increasingly erratic photodiary.

(By the way, I've barely been skimming my friends list -- I'm no doubt missing a lot. I'll try to catch up gradually when the chaos is over, but it may take some time.)

Also, I'm hurrying, so my post-processing kinda sucks.

( Read more... )

I got everything I wanted at Comic-Con tonight. Stood in line longer than I really needed to, but I wanted to be on the safe side and get a feel for the place again. The exhibit hall wasn't really too mobbed, except in the giant network/movie studio area. I ventured over there for one thing, accidentally stood in line for a shitty freebie for a few minutes, found where I needed to go, did what I needed to do there and then discovered that I literally could not leave because of the press of people. So I took a couple of pictures while I waited for an opening.

( Read more... )