My Review of DragonCon (or “Where Did All of These People Come From?”)
Alright, here is the long anticipated DragonCon 2010 review! It's kinda lengthy, so I put it all under several cuts for your convenience.
Friday:
Nate and I arrived at the Marriott around 11:30, after a long period of driving around looking for a parking garage that wasn’t full. We decided to go ahead and park in the Marriott valet parking deck, and it seems that we did so in the nick of time, since we were the last car that they allowed in the parking deck before they filled up. After checking into the Marriott, hailing a bellhop to carry our luggage and tipping him, we arrived in our hotel room and immediately began to change into our costumes. We later discovered that our decision to wear our costumes was a bad one, however, when we arrived at registration and discovered that, for the first time in the six years I’ve been attending DragonCon, the wait time for pre-registration was four hours (in previous years, I’ve NEVER had to wait longer than two hours to pick up my badge - and two hours was considered a long wait). Basically, this is how we spent the majority of our Friday.
After this, we went to a 7:00 panel (I had wanted to go to one at 5:30, but we missed it due to the long wait for our badges) about video games, where Nate was able to make some connections with professional programmers. After that we mainly just wandered around and mingled… and discovered that our costumes were a pretty big hit!
Saturday:
We got up around 9:00, and instead of going down to watch the parade, we decided that we would try to watch it from our window. Unfortunately, it seems that we were on the wrong side of the hotel. They didn’t broadcast it on DragonCon TV, either. I guess we learned our lesson. At noon we went down to the Hyatt concourse to watch I:Scintilla perform for half an hour, which was great. After the show I bought their newest CD from the singer and told her that she sounds a lot like Cristina Scabbia (and I also told her that I hoped she would take it as a compliment). After that we went to some more panels (one was about Violent Video Games, where Nate did some more networking, and one was a panel about comics and manga in libraries, which was kinda work related for me, as well). Saturday night we went to back-to-back concerts at 12:30. The first concert was the band Black Tape for a Blue Girl, who I was really hoping that I would like, but ended up being bored out of my mind. I guess they’re not really my thing… After they finished (finally - the crowd was generally restless when they finished their set, so they decided to punish us by starting all over again from the beginning) Voltaire came on stage, and then the real show started. Here’s what I got to see for the first half of the show - four HUGE guys who were standing with their hands on their hips right in front of me. That was my Voltaire concert. Thank god they moved… eventually. I was so pissed at these guys, and I would have tapped them on the shoulders and asked them politely to move, but for one thing, I couldn’t reach their shoulders, and for another, they didn’t look like the types of guys who would just politely move if asked. Anyway, after they got out of my way, I was able to finally enjoy the show. Voltaire was funny, as usual, and he made lots of interesting remarks throughout his performance. For instance, he said “It wouldn’t be Star Trek without DragonCon… wait a minute… I’m messing up my words - that just means I’m not drunk enough” *takes a drink* “Okay, let’s start over - it wouldn’t be DragonCon without Star Trek!” Voltaire looks very different, though - apparently getting married means you stop shaving or getting hair cuts. Or so he said. Generally, though, I really wish Voltaire would have played more of his old songs, and less of his new crap (sorry, I’m not liking his newest CDs quite as much). Voltaire only performed four of his older songs (Brains, U.S.S. Make Shit Up, Vampire Club, and When You’re Evil), and one of them even had the lyrics altered (Vampire Club now has a Twilight theme).
Sunday:
On Sunday we didn’t actually do very much - we mostly just mingled and did the usual necessary activities - like spending a crapload of money in the Dealer’s Room (I will make a list of the crap we bought at the end of the review). On Sunday afternoon we went to the game room and spent the rest of the night there (and missed the Cruxshadows concert, which I wanted to go to, but it was worth it, since we were having oh so much fun). We only played two games in the Game Room on Sunday night: the first was called “Pandemic”, which was kind of boring, to be honest, and the second was called “Time’s Up”, and that game was totally awesome. It was kinda like charades, but much more fun. Part of what made the game amusing was the interaction with the other people playing the game with us. For instance, one of the other teams (we were all split up into teams of 2) got the name Dr. Livingstone. The guy who was trying to get his partner to guess the name said “the first part is the opposite of dead and the second part is like a rock,” to which his partner shouted “Dr. Alive Rock!”, which was quite amusing for the rest of the people at the table. We ended up playing this game late into the night, then headed to the hotel room to attempt to get a little sleep before having to get up early to check out.
Monday:
As previously mentioned, the first part of this day consisted of getting up early (about 10:00 a.m.) and getting ready to check out of the hotel. We JUST made it in time. Check out time was 12:00 and I checked out at 11:59 (though I think someone from the hotel had previously told me it would be okay if I checked out at 1:00 - I just didn’t want to risk it). After that we spent more time in the dealer’s room, bought more junk, etc. Then we headed back to the game room and played a game called Dominion. This game seemed to be trying to be a lot like Magic the Gathering, though I guess all card games are similar in some respects. It was an okay game, but I’ll probably want to try it again before I decide whether or not it’s worth buying in the future. After that, we didn’t spend much more time at the con. We missed “DragonCon has Talent” because we decided that very few people would actually be very talented on Monday, when they’re all hung over and stuff. When we left at about 3:30, we determined that we were officially famished, and stopped by our favorite Chinese food place on the way home for a full meal. It was here that we discovered that our high school math teacher apparently also loves Chinese food, but usually goes to the restaurant earlier in the day than we do. We discovered this, of course, because we ran into him there. THAT was incredibly awkward, because we were in post-convention zombie mode, which meant that we could only speak in grunts (fortunately, the people in the Chinese restaurant know us and already knew our order before we walked in the door).
And that’s pretty much the end of the story, Now for the fun list-of-things-I-spent-way-too-much-money-on:
• 4 CDs: two from Voltaire (To the Bottom of the Sea and the new country album), the new album from I:Scintilla, and a Cruxshadows album
• A BUNCH of DVDs from this guy who buys the master copies of old TV shows and publishes them on DVD (For myself I bought Popples and Pound Puppies, for my mom I bought the original Adam West Batman series, and for Angela, who did my hair for me, I bought Care Bears. Nate bought Reboot and Bucky O’Hare).
• A Teal’c (sp? from Star Gate) action figure for Nate’s mom.
• A $40 My Little Pony (yeah, I’m that serious about my ponies)
• Volumes 1-3 of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels
• Star Munchkin (finally)
• A Little Mermaid Sega Genesis game
• Nate also bought a Nintendo DSi XL, Dragon Quest IV and IX for DS, a Star Fox game for Gamecube, and The Matrix: Path of Neo for PS2.
Here are some of the better pictures from DragonCon. I intend to post all of my pictures on my convention website, but for now here are a few samples.
Nate as the Hero from Dragon Quest 8:
Me as Jessica from the same game:
Characters from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Me with some of the members of the Cruxshadows:
I don't think she's supposed to be anyone specific, but this was a very cool costume:
Tony Stark and the Iron Man dancers:
EDIT: Also, here's a video of I:Scintilla performing at DragonCon:
Friday:
Nate and I arrived at the Marriott around 11:30, after a long period of driving around looking for a parking garage that wasn’t full. We decided to go ahead and park in the Marriott valet parking deck, and it seems that we did so in the nick of time, since we were the last car that they allowed in the parking deck before they filled up. After checking into the Marriott, hailing a bellhop to carry our luggage and tipping him, we arrived in our hotel room and immediately began to change into our costumes. We later discovered that our decision to wear our costumes was a bad one, however, when we arrived at registration and discovered that, for the first time in the six years I’ve been attending DragonCon, the wait time for pre-registration was four hours (in previous years, I’ve NEVER had to wait longer than two hours to pick up my badge - and two hours was considered a long wait). Basically, this is how we spent the majority of our Friday.
After this, we went to a 7:00 panel (I had wanted to go to one at 5:30, but we missed it due to the long wait for our badges) about video games, where Nate was able to make some connections with professional programmers. After that we mainly just wandered around and mingled… and discovered that our costumes were a pretty big hit!
Saturday:
We got up around 9:00, and instead of going down to watch the parade, we decided that we would try to watch it from our window. Unfortunately, it seems that we were on the wrong side of the hotel. They didn’t broadcast it on DragonCon TV, either. I guess we learned our lesson. At noon we went down to the Hyatt concourse to watch I:Scintilla perform for half an hour, which was great. After the show I bought their newest CD from the singer and told her that she sounds a lot like Cristina Scabbia (and I also told her that I hoped she would take it as a compliment). After that we went to some more panels (one was about Violent Video Games, where Nate did some more networking, and one was a panel about comics and manga in libraries, which was kinda work related for me, as well). Saturday night we went to back-to-back concerts at 12:30. The first concert was the band Black Tape for a Blue Girl, who I was really hoping that I would like, but ended up being bored out of my mind. I guess they’re not really my thing… After they finished (finally - the crowd was generally restless when they finished their set, so they decided to punish us by starting all over again from the beginning) Voltaire came on stage, and then the real show started. Here’s what I got to see for the first half of the show - four HUGE guys who were standing with their hands on their hips right in front of me. That was my Voltaire concert. Thank god they moved… eventually. I was so pissed at these guys, and I would have tapped them on the shoulders and asked them politely to move, but for one thing, I couldn’t reach their shoulders, and for another, they didn’t look like the types of guys who would just politely move if asked. Anyway, after they got out of my way, I was able to finally enjoy the show. Voltaire was funny, as usual, and he made lots of interesting remarks throughout his performance. For instance, he said “It wouldn’t be Star Trek without DragonCon… wait a minute… I’m messing up my words - that just means I’m not drunk enough” *takes a drink* “Okay, let’s start over - it wouldn’t be DragonCon without Star Trek!” Voltaire looks very different, though - apparently getting married means you stop shaving or getting hair cuts. Or so he said. Generally, though, I really wish Voltaire would have played more of his old songs, and less of his new crap (sorry, I’m not liking his newest CDs quite as much). Voltaire only performed four of his older songs (Brains, U.S.S. Make Shit Up, Vampire Club, and When You’re Evil), and one of them even had the lyrics altered (Vampire Club now has a Twilight theme).
Sunday:
On Sunday we didn’t actually do very much - we mostly just mingled and did the usual necessary activities - like spending a crapload of money in the Dealer’s Room (I will make a list of the crap we bought at the end of the review). On Sunday afternoon we went to the game room and spent the rest of the night there (and missed the Cruxshadows concert, which I wanted to go to, but it was worth it, since we were having oh so much fun). We only played two games in the Game Room on Sunday night: the first was called “Pandemic”, which was kind of boring, to be honest, and the second was called “Time’s Up”, and that game was totally awesome. It was kinda like charades, but much more fun. Part of what made the game amusing was the interaction with the other people playing the game with us. For instance, one of the other teams (we were all split up into teams of 2) got the name Dr. Livingstone. The guy who was trying to get his partner to guess the name said “the first part is the opposite of dead and the second part is like a rock,” to which his partner shouted “Dr. Alive Rock!”, which was quite amusing for the rest of the people at the table. We ended up playing this game late into the night, then headed to the hotel room to attempt to get a little sleep before having to get up early to check out.
Monday:
As previously mentioned, the first part of this day consisted of getting up early (about 10:00 a.m.) and getting ready to check out of the hotel. We JUST made it in time. Check out time was 12:00 and I checked out at 11:59 (though I think someone from the hotel had previously told me it would be okay if I checked out at 1:00 - I just didn’t want to risk it). After that we spent more time in the dealer’s room, bought more junk, etc. Then we headed back to the game room and played a game called Dominion. This game seemed to be trying to be a lot like Magic the Gathering, though I guess all card games are similar in some respects. It was an okay game, but I’ll probably want to try it again before I decide whether or not it’s worth buying in the future. After that, we didn’t spend much more time at the con. We missed “DragonCon has Talent” because we decided that very few people would actually be very talented on Monday, when they’re all hung over and stuff. When we left at about 3:30, we determined that we were officially famished, and stopped by our favorite Chinese food place on the way home for a full meal. It was here that we discovered that our high school math teacher apparently also loves Chinese food, but usually goes to the restaurant earlier in the day than we do. We discovered this, of course, because we ran into him there. THAT was incredibly awkward, because we were in post-convention zombie mode, which meant that we could only speak in grunts (fortunately, the people in the Chinese restaurant know us and already knew our order before we walked in the door).
And that’s pretty much the end of the story, Now for the fun list-of-things-I-spent-way-too-much-money-on:
• 4 CDs: two from Voltaire (To the Bottom of the Sea and the new country album), the new album from I:Scintilla, and a Cruxshadows album
• A BUNCH of DVDs from this guy who buys the master copies of old TV shows and publishes them on DVD (For myself I bought Popples and Pound Puppies, for my mom I bought the original Adam West Batman series, and for Angela, who did my hair for me, I bought Care Bears. Nate bought Reboot and Bucky O’Hare).
• A Teal’c (sp? from Star Gate) action figure for Nate’s mom.
• A $40 My Little Pony (yeah, I’m that serious about my ponies)
• Volumes 1-3 of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels
• Star Munchkin (finally)
• A Little Mermaid Sega Genesis game
• Nate also bought a Nintendo DSi XL, Dragon Quest IV and IX for DS, a Star Fox game for Gamecube, and The Matrix: Path of Neo for PS2.
Here are some of the better pictures from DragonCon. I intend to post all of my pictures on my convention website, but for now here are a few samples.
Nate as the Hero from Dragon Quest 8:
Me as Jessica from the same game:
Characters from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Me with some of the members of the Cruxshadows:
I don't think she's supposed to be anyone specific, but this was a very cool costume:
Tony Stark and the Iron Man dancers:
EDIT: Also, here's a video of I:Scintilla performing at DragonCon:
Click to view