Comic-Con: Day One (Preview Night)

After a night of essentially no sleep, nipped off to the airport around 8am yesterday. This guy comes up behind me in line and proceeds to talk in a very loud voice about how "most of the company is underperforming. Anne is smart and runs her organization pretty well. Carly seems like a good person. The only group that's really performing well is the printing and imaging group. Dell is kicking their ass in the PC group." And on and on and on. He rambles on behind me for something like 20 minutes. I go to the end of the plane (it's SouthWest) to get away from him. He sits about two seats ahead of me. I have a very strong urge to shout: "Dude, the rest of us do not give a shit about HP's position in the market! Speak more quietly!" But somehow, I restrain myself (I am capable of restraint, despite what some people think). The plane takes off and I almost immediately fall asleep. Or pass out. However you want to look at it. I wake up just before the plane lands, ears ringing from equalizing on their own. San Diego is below us. An actual city, not like the giant burb I live in. I make my way to the Westin, which is one of the nicer hotels I've stayed in (They sell their beds, pillows, and bedding, if you like it enough. Beats the polyester blankets and pillowcases I'm used to.). They want to charge you for everything, though. Four bucks for a liter of water??? Insanity. Although, the water from the tap is really foul, almost like they want you to have to buy their diamond-water. Anyway, I crash for about three hours because I'm dead on my feet. Get up around 3:30, shower, and then mosey down to the convention center. It's big. Like they could lose an aircraft carrier in it big. And there's a line of people that goes practically to Tiajuana. This line is for people who have already registered and are just there to pick up their badges. Noelle and Carl meet me about a third of the way through after their trek by car from the northlands. We get inside and... more line! The line, in fact, doubles back on itself and eventually one gets to the badge printing area, which is roughly at the location I started, only transposed a few hundred yards. After getting badges we go... to get into another line! And Chris was like, WTF? We have registered, we have our badges, but we still can't just go right where we want to go. I don't get it. I guess it must either be a.) incompetence or b.) some creepy form of access control so the comic book nerds don't crush themselves to death trying to get inside. I hope it's a.), since that could theoretically be fixed. Anyway, after about 75 minutes, we finally get inside. It's Nerdvana! I can't really describe well the contents of the hall. Acres and acres of booths with comics, comic artists, toys, bootleg videos (I saw some VHS copies of weird old tv shows like Quark and the UFO Investigators), comic-related clothes, anime, manga, film cels (Carl scored another Akira cel for his collection. Seemed a bit pricey to me.) and the great unwashed (and I mean that in a tragically literal sense, kept hitting waves of man-funk) nerd masses. It was really hard to take in, especially since I was still really tired. I will have to go back on the floor some more, there was so much to see. And we only got through about half of the booths. Did see the the keenspot booth. I'll have to go there again tomorrow, since Aeire (Queen of Wands creator will be there doing sketches. High point of the evening: met Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man fame. I adore that comic! And he signed three comics for me. And drew little pictures on them! Afterwards we met up with Kevin, Steph, and Nancy. Steph was nice enough to drive us to dinner (Flavor Thai) which was pretty good, especially after the cinnabon and two pluots which made up my food intake for the day. Then back to SD and bed. Now I have to get ready for Day Two and panels and artist sketches.

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Listening to: My Evil Twin from the album Apollo 18 by They Might Be Giants