LONG overdue Botcon post
Okay ladies and gentlepersons, prepare to feast your eyes upon the delectable delight that was my experience at Botcon 2012, which for the first time I experienced without any of my normal crew.
It was rainy and rubbish as we traipsed to Heathrow after we stayed up late the night before watching episodes of Digimon because Billy (who makes stupid bets like this all the time) told me that there was no way he would like it. He liked it. I don't know why he was surprised, because exactly the same thing happened with Harry Potter last year.
This picture of Billy's face shows how tired and not with it we were when we got to Heathrow.
Luckily, a cup of tea fixed everything.
Many painful hours later, after facing US immigration (again) and a pretty hilarious shuttle ride from the airport, we made it to the hotel
where they gave us machetes for disemboweling our steak dinners.
The next day I knew we faced some hardcore queueing. This is, after all, Linecon 2012. So to prepare for the hours of standing still waiting for people to do stuff, I pumped some iron.
Hench.
Isa did the creep.
Hot sauce laser.
I'd found spacehussy, pellimusprime, justnuts, justbolts, peacewish and Justscrews. We dicked around for a bit.
Then joined the first queue, which was made infinitely more enjoyable by their presence.
Isa became hungry.
Rendezvoused with a swordage.
And then we went to a restaurant with some other cool people. It was a nice Italian restaurant in the hotel which served damn good veal. Sadly, Isa ate the waiter's tip.
That night we went on a rocking adventure and misbehaved like dudes.
It was pretty cool.
The Hall of Fame dinner was quite nice.
We spent the Sunday fantastically dicking around.
pellimusprime, justnuts and spacehussy had to leave quite early on the Sunday afternoon to get their silly flights back to their silly states. They were quite sad to leave.
I went back inside with swordage to get some plushies signed by Dan Gilvezan and Buster Jones so I can sell them for extortionate prices come Auto Assembly.
While doing this I discovered that Buster has an absolutely rib-cracking hug.
THAT IS NOT A GRIN IT'S A GRIMACE.
While with swordage I drew some fantastic art.
Which is approved of by the man himself:
I find myself kind of hoping he doesn't quite understand what "bishie" means.
Anyway, I spent most of the Sunday afternoon saying goodbye to people I know which, as peacewish pointed out in her fantabulous post about me, is pretty much everyone, so that took a while.
I drew a picture for Casey Coller and put his signature on it. Apparently it now lives in his portfolio with an incredibly high price tag despite that it is a piece of shit.
Isa had a final throwdown with Ratchet.
We rocked it.
Sadly, I don't have any photos of the Sunday night, but I will attempt to relay the awesome in wordal form.
Everyone had gone except me and ebonredseeker, and my disgusting roomie Billy had decided to go for dinner with his friends. Stuck for a food choice, I asked Casey what his plans were, and it turned out the IDW crew (at least those who weren't flying off straight away, like Chris Mowry, Livio and John Barber) were going to dinner. We went along with them.
There was us, three guys from the TFCon organising committee, Simon Furman, Casey, Josh Perez and Robby Musso, and we all traipsed in to a steakhouse that looked nice. They put together a table for us and sat us down.
We looked at the menu.
We looked at each other.
We looked at the menu again.
We all quietly decided that it would have to be something from the soups and starters section until Furman, utterly shamelessly, said that he would quite like to afford a taxi home and that we should go somewhere else. Thankfully, we escaped the overpriced place ($50 for a steak you joking bruv?) and went to the Mexican place across the street.
I was sat next to Furman and we experienced the creepiest seven degrees of seperation, ranging from the obbvious (we were going on the same flight back the next day and had travelled on the same flight out) to the downright bizarre (his wife's best friend taught me at Brookes). He offered us places in his Hasbro-paid courtesy car to take us to the airport the next day, which was cool.
After dindins, we went back to the hotel bar. ebonredseeker had some scholarly things to be getting on with, so she left us, but the rest of us stayed in the bar until it closed at 2am, then finally said goodbye to each other and went to bed.
Flight home the next day was uneventful, other than finding out that Furman lives just down the road from where I live currently. Stop it Furman.
Oh yes, and Furman was attacked by a vast predatory bird on the Monday, which came down twice and smacked at his head. Literary justice.
It was rainy and rubbish as we traipsed to Heathrow after we stayed up late the night before watching episodes of Digimon because Billy (who makes stupid bets like this all the time) told me that there was no way he would like it. He liked it. I don't know why he was surprised, because exactly the same thing happened with Harry Potter last year.
This picture of Billy's face shows how tired and not with it we were when we got to Heathrow.
Luckily, a cup of tea fixed everything.
Many painful hours later, after facing US immigration (again) and a pretty hilarious shuttle ride from the airport, we made it to the hotel
where they gave us machetes for disemboweling our steak dinners.
The next day I knew we faced some hardcore queueing. This is, after all, Linecon 2012. So to prepare for the hours of standing still waiting for people to do stuff, I pumped some iron.
Hench.
Isa did the creep.
Hot sauce laser.
I'd found spacehussy, pellimusprime, justnuts, justbolts, peacewish and Justscrews. We dicked around for a bit.
Then joined the first queue, which was made infinitely more enjoyable by their presence.
Isa became hungry.
Rendezvoused with a swordage.
And then we went to a restaurant with some other cool people. It was a nice Italian restaurant in the hotel which served damn good veal. Sadly, Isa ate the waiter's tip.
That night we went on a rocking adventure and misbehaved like dudes.
It was pretty cool.
The Hall of Fame dinner was quite nice.
We spent the Sunday fantastically dicking around.
pellimusprime, justnuts and spacehussy had to leave quite early on the Sunday afternoon to get their silly flights back to their silly states. They were quite sad to leave.
I went back inside with swordage to get some plushies signed by Dan Gilvezan and Buster Jones so I can sell them for extortionate prices come Auto Assembly.
While doing this I discovered that Buster has an absolutely rib-cracking hug.
THAT IS NOT A GRIN IT'S A GRIMACE.
While with swordage I drew some fantastic art.
Which is approved of by the man himself:
I find myself kind of hoping he doesn't quite understand what "bishie" means.
Anyway, I spent most of the Sunday afternoon saying goodbye to people I know which, as peacewish pointed out in her fantabulous post about me, is pretty much everyone, so that took a while.
I drew a picture for Casey Coller and put his signature on it. Apparently it now lives in his portfolio with an incredibly high price tag despite that it is a piece of shit.
Isa had a final throwdown with Ratchet.
We rocked it.
Sadly, I don't have any photos of the Sunday night, but I will attempt to relay the awesome in wordal form.
Everyone had gone except me and ebonredseeker, and my disgusting roomie Billy had decided to go for dinner with his friends. Stuck for a food choice, I asked Casey what his plans were, and it turned out the IDW crew (at least those who weren't flying off straight away, like Chris Mowry, Livio and John Barber) were going to dinner. We went along with them.
There was us, three guys from the TFCon organising committee, Simon Furman, Casey, Josh Perez and Robby Musso, and we all traipsed in to a steakhouse that looked nice. They put together a table for us and sat us down.
We looked at the menu.
We looked at each other.
We looked at the menu again.
We all quietly decided that it would have to be something from the soups and starters section until Furman, utterly shamelessly, said that he would quite like to afford a taxi home and that we should go somewhere else. Thankfully, we escaped the overpriced place ($50 for a steak you joking bruv?) and went to the Mexican place across the street.
I was sat next to Furman and we experienced the creepiest seven degrees of seperation, ranging from the obbvious (we were going on the same flight back the next day and had travelled on the same flight out) to the downright bizarre (his wife's best friend taught me at Brookes). He offered us places in his Hasbro-paid courtesy car to take us to the airport the next day, which was cool.
After dindins, we went back to the hotel bar. ebonredseeker had some scholarly things to be getting on with, so she left us, but the rest of us stayed in the bar until it closed at 2am, then finally said goodbye to each other and went to bed.
Flight home the next day was uneventful, other than finding out that Furman lives just down the road from where I live currently. Stop it Furman.
Oh yes, and Furman was attacked by a vast predatory bird on the Monday, which came down twice and smacked at his head. Literary justice.