Comic-Con 2007

Well, I made it back from San Diego Comic-Con last night. Tired, but not as tired as I feel like I should feel. Overall thoughts this year are that there was just too much to see and do at this one. It was nuts. The crowds were crazy, moreso even than last year. In fact, they sold out of "memberships" (i.e. tickets) for all four days, which I think is unprecedented. I believe, although I don't have the facts at my fingertips, that that is 140,000 people per day. OTOH, I think they managed the crowds a lot better this year. The flow around the hall 1-6 rooms was a real pain in the ass, but I think it kept the crowds from getting too out of control. They also scheduled a lot of popular programming to run at the same time, so people had to choose what they'd go to, which is good, because even so, there was not enough space for a lot of the panels.

Daily rundown:

Thursday: Get up at 6am, fly into SAN at 9am, register at hotel, go to con, register, panels, go to screening of Stardust, get back to hotel around midnight.

Friday: Get up early to get to con by 10:30, more panels, some walking around the show floor, go to dinner at Ruth's Chris (conveniently located next to hotel), get to bed around midnight.

Saturday: Slept in until around 10. Made my way to con around noon, show up at hall 20 for Heroes, find out the hall is closed 40 minutes before the panel starts. Go to Family Guy panel instead. Come back to Hall 20 for the rest of the day for BSG, Futurama, and Joss Whedon panel. Zip out of the theater with Wendy and Eric to go see the 8:15 show of Simpsons movie. Head down the street after that to see Too Much Coffee Man: The Opera at 11pm with Wendy. Get back to hotel around 12:30.

Sunday: Get up at 7:30 to have breakfast with Noelle's mom and grandparents (and Noelle of course). Head over to con to see 4400 panel. Wandered floor for a while with Noelle, hung out with Peter Gross in Artist Alley, then went to watch the Flash Gordon panel. Con is now over for us. Head back with Wendy, Eric, and Noelle to the hotel to get our bags and it's off to the airport. Bye bye, San Diego! After waiting for the plane which was half an hour late getting in, we had to wait another half hour or so because someone at the gate had a boarding pass they thought was already used to get on the plane. So they had to check every person's ID (It's Southwest, the don't really know where people are sitting.). Finally the plane takes off and I sleep my way through the entire flight. Home again, home again, jiggidy jig.

Con highlights:

• The Paramount panel was outstanding. We got to see Jon Favreau who's producing Iron Man, which looks really good (much to my surprise). Stars Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man. We all pretty much grew to hate Paramount because the trailer has the Black Sabbath song, which we couldn't get out of our heads at con. Paramount also talked briefly about a new Star Trek movie which appears to be a reimagining of the original show. They didn't talk much about plot, but they reveal that Zachary Quinto aka Sylar on Heroes will play Spock. And then they brought out Leonard fucking Nimoy! Awesome! They also had Neil Gaiman there to promote Stardust which is coming out next month, and Beowulf. Neil was entertaining as always (he was the guest of honor at the con). Finally, they had Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, and Karen Black (along with a couple guys I didn't recognize) do a remote greeting from the set of Indy IV. The swag bag that Paramount gave out was the best one I've ever seen.


• Lots and lots of Neil Gaiman. Besides the Paramount panel, he did a signing at the CBLDF booth (where I got a nice Neil rat drawn on the back of my badge), there was a spotlight panel just for him, where he spoke extemporaneously on his times at con, and he spoke after the Stardust movie at the theater for a few minutes.


• Stardust. This is an awesome movie! Noelle and I got reserved seats to the showing by making a donation to the CBLDF (Which we did while waiting in line for the Harry Potter book last week. On an iPhone. Because we are such tremendous nerds.). This meant we actually got seats unlike the hundreds of other people who got passes for which there were no seats. I don't want to spoil the movie overmuch, but it was really great. The closest thing I can compare it to is The Princess Bride.
  If you liked that and you like Neil's writing, you'll probably love Stardust.


• Watchmen movie. They didn't have a lot to say about this movie, because it's in the early stages. The directory is Zak Snyder, who did 300. They announced a date (3-6-09, for Zak, who is bad with numbers) and a philosophy of how to approach making the movie. Basically Snyder said all the right things. He respects the source material immensely and thinks it should be shot the way it looks in the graphic novel. It's going to be R rated, because that's basically what the source material implies. He gave the studio two scripts: one for the main story, one for the pirate story. Zak Snyder says he wants to make a movie where: "I don't think this will happen, but some day after it comes out, Alan Moore will pop the DVD in and after watching will say 'Well, they didn't fuck that one up too badly.'" I have very high hopes for this movie, since I liked what Snyder did in 300.


• Blade Runner: The Final Cut. At the Warner Home Video panel, they talked (among other things) about the upcoming Final Cut release of BR. Ridley Scott was there, Syd Mead, one of FX guys, Joe Turkel, James Hong, Joanna Cassidy, and Sean Young were there as well. Turkel and Hong were really animated and fun to listen to. There will be a limited theatrical release of the Final Cut (which is what Ridley would have done with the Directors Cut, if he had had the money at the time) and several versions of it will be released in November of this year. The ultimate one (which is of course on my Christmas list) comes in a Voight-Kampf style briefcase, complete with the spinner. It has five discs, including the workprint, a three and a half hour long documentary, the final cut disc, and I am hoping the theatrical release. Looks great for Blade Runner nerds such as myself.


• Futurama is back, baby! They gave us a futurama comic before the panel started. Then Matt Groening and the cast of Futurama (including Katey Seagall, Billy West, and John Dimaggio) came out and read through the comic. Super fun! The show will be airing new episodes in January on Comedy Central and there will be four feature length DVDs released as well.


• Too Much Coffee Man: The Opera. I have been a huge fan of TMCM for years and seeing Shannon Wheeler at con has always been a great pleasure. This year, they put on several performances of the opera based on the comic on during the convention. They had real professional singers and a libretto which was about what I would expect from a combination of opera and TMCM. It was great fun.


• I got to meet Mike Carey, one of my favorite comic writers this year. He was on a couple panels and I ran into him on the show floor, which was pretty cool. Carey has written for (among other things) Lucifer and Hellblazer.


• Family Guy panel: This year Seth McFarland made it to the show (as well as others). The notable thing is that the opening episode this season will be a one hour long Star Wars episode with the regular characters playing SW parts (e.g. Peter plays Han Solo).


• Ray Bradbury came within two feet of me.

Connnnnnnnnnn!

Going to Comic-Con in San Diego tomorrow, er, today. Strangely, I appear to be pretty much packed and ready to go and it's not even 4am. Huh. Anyway, I hope to have more news later of the great nerd out of 2007.

Ted Stevens Eyed By FBI

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens (you may remember him from "The Internet Is A Series of Tubes") is getting the hairy eyeball from the FBI, who are wondering if the contractor who remodeled Stevens' home did it in return for some form of quid pro quo. Now, given that some of his business partners have made hundreds of millions of dollars off of sweet government contracts or a city of 8000 got their own $315 Million Bridge to Nowhere, it might seem hard to believe that Ted would be inappropriately using his office, but stranger things have happened.

Duke Paper Brings Shame To Federation of Planets

Here is an actual letter to the editor at Duke University, where the author (president of Duke Association for Greater Gaming Education and Recreation (DAGGER)), is clearly upset because a recent article referred to the cloaking device the Enterprise, which obviously the Enterprise didn't have as it would be a clear breach of The Treaty of Algeron. Oh yes. He brought it. I just about wet my pants after reading first the letter, and then the delicious fark commentary.

Just to redeem my nerd credentials, here's some Star Trek trivia.

Internet Radio Activism

I did something today I've never done before: I called my Congress(wo)man and my Senators to try and affect legislation. Perhaps a weird thing to call about, but the Copyright Royalty Board recently ruled that internet radio websites have to pay for each song they stream, rather than a percentage of their revenue. This seems very unfair to me, since radio broadcasters do not pay for every song they broadcast that is received by every radio. A Washington state congressman has crafted a bill to remedy this situation: the Internet Radio Equality Act. Basically it would require that webcasters would pay a fraction of their overall revenue, rather than on a per song basis.

If you are interested in doing the same you can find your senators' phone numbers here and your representatives' phone numbers here (find your representative from the popup menu).

Chris Cornell

I went to the Warfield with Nancy and Jon last night to see Chris Cornell. I had expected that he would stick to his solo material, but I was pleasantly surprised to see him do a ton of Audioslave and Soundgarden material as well. His voice is so awesome and he sings so effortlessly. It really makes me jealous. He mostly just sang, although he played a few acoustic guitar numbers (including an impressive cover of "Billie Jean"). The band he had with him was pretty talented too, although neither of the guitarists is a Kim Thayill or a Tom Morello. Highlights included Rusty Cage, Spoonman, Burden In My Hand, Cochise, Show Me How To Live, and a sonic tsunami I've never heard before called Jesus Christ Pose (old Soundgarden song). All in all a phenomenal show. Even the sound was good (we were sitting right behind the sound board), which is unusual at the Warfield. The only downside was Noelle couldn't come because she hurt her back last weekend. :-(

The Great Below, Revisited

So Noelle, Dave, Esther, and I took a trip down to Monterey Saturday morning to try a dive at the Breakwater. It was kind of exciting because I've never been on an unsupervised dive before. Noelle manned the ground stations while the rest of us dived, which was very cool of her. We had some technical difficulties (Esther's first BC didn't work and later her dry suit leaked) and I managed to lose my weight belt ($$$), and we had to abort the first dive, but we managed to get another dive in. The water was pretty murky, probably 5-10 feet of vis, but it wasn't super cold (at least to me, with a 7mm wetsuit on). We swam around the kelp forest and I even saw a jellyfish underwater! On the surface there was a dolphin/porpoise a squad of otters, and I think I got buzzed by a harbor seal. Esther was out after that dive because she was pretty cold from the leaky drysuit. Dave and I were thinking about going in once more, but we decided not to after we spent half an hour in neoprene and neither of us warmed up at all. A pretty good start to diving sans instructor, but it showed how pathetically out of shape I am. I had all kinds of aches and pains after that, especially in my legs, and they don't seem to have let up much since then.

July 4th Recovery

Whew, I am finally feeling a little less tired after the big Transformers movie/Independence Day BBQ. Noelle and I had around 30 people over to see the fruits of our labors on the house and back yard and to partake in our barbeque feast. Noelle manned the grill and I made sure people had enough sangria, food, etc. Well, I did until about the fourth mojito. Then my recollection becomes fuzzier. Of course that was the day that it was fiendishly hot out. Thankfully we have a covered patio and Noelle even had an excuse to break out her pavillion style sun shade. After three hours or so of food, drink, and general merriment, about half of us went over to Saratoga 14 to see Transformers, the Movie. Given the generally poor quality of Michael Bay's movies, this was like watching Shakespeare in comparison. The human lead was generally engaging as a character and the transformer animations were spectacular. There were a lot of jump cuts and shaky-cam style shots that prevented you from seeing most of the details of the transformations, but I think that added to the mystery. After getting out of the (strangely) hot theater, we went downtown to watch fireworks. Other than being surrounded by a sea of hot, annoying humans, the fireworks show was great! All in all, a great July 4th. But exhausting. I was dragging all day yesterday. I feel much better now. Is it the weekend yet?

iPhone Phollies

So Mike was sitting in line at Valley Fair on Friday, hanging with a friend who was waiting to get an iPhone. As it turns out, Mike didn't actually want an iPhone (he's more of 2nd gen kinda guy). So I ended up going to the mall after work, where I met up with Mike and Noelle and some friends of Mike's. I basically took his place in line at around 5:15pm. He'd been there since 10. Woz had been there since around 2am. About an hour later, I had two snazzy new iPhones in hand (and an autograph from Woz!) and we headed off to Maggiano's for dinner.

That was the easy part.

Well, for me, anyway. Noelle and I didn't actually try to activate our phones until Saturday night. Her activation was easy-peasy. Took about 3-4 minutes. Mine, well, I got the "Your activation will take additional time to complete." message around 11pm. That night, around 4:30am (according to the mail I got), I was notified that my plan was "incompatible" with the iPhone. I had a TDMA phone, which I am a bit sad to say goodbye to (it gets great reception in the williwacks), but AT&T has been pestering me about the fact that they're dismantling the TDMA network for some time now. Anyway, I called the number I got in the bad news e-mail. They can't help. They take my info and transfer me to the people who need to switch my old plan over to the new plan. The people I get transferred to don't know anything about this and in fact deny that they can switch over my plan. I have to call yet another number, which is only open Mon-Fri. So, on the off chance I can find someone at a physical AT&T store who actually can do something, I take a walk over to a nearby store. There I meet Scott. Scott says he can change over the plan, no problem and doesn't understand why the people on the phone can't. Anyway, that took about 5 minutes and I was on my way. When I get back, though, it's still no go. So I call the store back. Phone tree - no fucking way am I wandering through a phone tree to talk to people at a physical store. So I call the help line. The woman there says my account appears to be switched over (which is probably why the old phone can no longer call out) and it should be a matter of me waiting for activation. She also gives me a number to call if that doesn't happen. Well, twelve hours later it hadn't. Happily, however, I got the "your phone is now activated" e-mail this morning when I got up.

Spiffy phone. I really like the web browsing experience (no flash or java, notwithstanding). The pinch-zoom metaphor seems to work pretty well. I got all my old numbers and addresses and e-mail addresses into my address book this morning, which is now synched to the phone. Now. If I could only figure out how to sync music from different computers. :-p