Dragon*Con 2008 - The Dragoning
First of all, belated happy birthday sdwolfpup! You are one of the brightest spots on these Internets, and I hope the coming year brings you much happiness in your home, your friends, and your family.
* * * * *
I had a wonderful time this year at Dragon*Con. I'm still trying to make my brain work, and to catch up on LJ, but it made me really happy. I wasn't at all sure, going in, that that was going to be the case. The crowds last year were borderline overwhelming, and I was expecting even more people this year. That turned out to be true-we heard a rumor that the D*C people stopped selling on-site registrations when they hit 40,000 attendees-but I give them significant credit for realizing that crowding could be a problem and taking effective measures to make sure it wasn't. Not only did they spread the con events over four hotels this year, they also had the Marriott's giant ballroom (which hadn't been built last year, since the Marriott was still in the middle of renovations) to work with, and not having all 40,000 attendees trying to get to different places in the lower level of the Hyatt at the same time made an amazing difference. There were still long lines for almost everything, but it was a much more relaxed, less claustrophobic atmosphere; getting from place to place wasn't a struggle. People were cooperative (aside from the woman in the registration line who we were sure was about to have an aneurism ). It made a huge difference.
My favorite part though, without a doubt, was hanging out with friends. I feel lucky, in ways I can't put into words, to have met so many people on LJ with whom I get along so well in person, to have connected with such a smart, funny group of people, and to be able to go to something like this and spend, basically, three or four days solid with them and have such a good time.
That said, seeing the way different panel tracks are handled at my third Dragon*Con has solidified my desire to beat Stargate Atlanta with a shovel. To paraphrase Daniel Jackson, they need to engage in a little less My Little Pony and a little more shut the hell up. We are there to see the actors and hear them talk. There is just absolutely no excuse for taking up a quarter of the panel time with various self-congratulatory descriptions of the Stargate Atlanta track organization doings, announcements of fan awards, and discussions of (I am not even kidding about this!) the various My Little Pony-related activities they have planned for the weekend while the actors sit there twiddling their thumbs and politely trying to look interested. The organizers for the other tracks seem to understand this, since they get that stuff out of the way before the panel starts, before the actors come out on stage, so that the actual panel is a Q&A between the actors and the audience, which is what everybody is there for. And the shame is that they seem to have a pretty impressive charity arm, and they're clearly able to do the actual work of the program organizing; if they could get their panel moderation together, they might stop looking like such tools.
Anyway, on to the con report. I'm probably not going to go into as much detail about the panels as I have in the past, because a lot of them are popping up on YouTube and actual video is a better source than my fallible memory; I also collapsed into a heap on Monday night and am just now recovering the ability to think. So.
Thursday night
I arrived Thursday evening, and the MARTA train to the hotel was full of con-goers, so I knew it was going to be a big convention again this year. After I got to the hotel, asta77, thomasina75, 50mm, and I got into the first line of the convention, the one for registration. It moved pretty quickly; unfortunately, because of some issues around the way my last name is spelled and the problems that can cause with online forms, I got shunted to the problem people line, which only had one guy working it, and didn't get out of there with my badge until after 11.
We then repaired to the High Velocity bar in the Marriott, and while we waited for the hostess to seat us, I was so distracted/appalled by the awful porn star boob job the woman ahead of us in line was sporting (her nipples pointed in totally different directions) that I failed to notice that the man she was flirting with so animatedly was James Marsters until someone pointed it out to me. Michael Rosenbaum and Tim Russ were hanging out at another table while we had drinks and I ate my salad, and later on James Callis and Tahmoh Penikett came in and sat at the bar and did shots. We hadn't seen Kevin Sorbo yet, but since asta77 was with us, we were certain it was only a matter of time.
Friday 2:30 Firefly panel
(Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion)
This was actually the only panel we saw in the Hyatt. By the time we got into line at 1, the line was outside and around the building. Some guy was handing out flyers for a nearby pizza place, and 50mm asked him if they delivered to lines. They certainly would have made a lot of money that weekend if they did.
Thanks to YouTube, you can see the first ten minutes of the panel yourself:
Nathan looked like he hadn't slept in about three days, and I wondered if he hadn't taken a red-eye to get to Atlanta, but he and Alan were in good spirits and had brought a number of items that they signed and gave out to questioners: some photos (including photos from the "smash hit Slither"), a game that they had both done voice work for, and that they accidentally signed the wrapper of, and best of all, a license plate frame of Nathan's that said "My other car is Serenity." He asked the audience if anyone was a trucker or drove for a living and gave it to one of the few people who raised their hands.
The questions weren't that great. Someone asked about pranking, and Alan told the story of cat sitting for Nathan and finally, at the end of a couple of weeks of dropping by his house to look in on the cat, picking up a pen from the coffee table, sitting next to a pad of paper, to leave a note, and getting a shock, because Nathan had set the whole thing up with a shock pen. Nathan said he liked the "slow-cookers" like that. He had kept a calendar Alan had left at his house, full of childhood photos taken by Alan's neighbor when he was a kid, and had eventually, about four years later, had them blown up and put all over the set of the bar where River has her big fight scene in Serenity for Alan's birthday.
Nathan also told a very funny story about being insecure when he was first cast, because it was an hour show and he felt like he didn't know what he was doing and someone was going to figure it out. They had originally cast someone besides Morena Baccarin as Inara, and one day Joss took him aside to say that he had something to tell Nathan, that he wanted him to hear it from Joss first, that sometimes these things just won't work out, sometimes the chemistry just isn't there, and Nathan was getting progressively more alarmed, thinking he was about to be fired, but Joss was just telling him they had to let the original Inara go.
I think this was the panel where someone asked Alan if he would have liked to be in Dr. Horrible and his reaction was that he would have liked to be in No Country for Old Men, he would have liked to be in a number of things, with the implication that his desire was not the deciding factor for stuff like that.
Friday 4:00 BSG panel
(Tahmoh Penikett, Kevin Grazier, Richard Hatch, Michael Hogan, Edward James Olmos, Aaron Douglas, Pilot #12, James Callis)
I actually don't remember a ton about this panel specifically, other than that the moderator was dressed in a Peacekeeper Special Ops vest and Edward James Olmos seemed thrilled to be there, and rather surprised by the size of the con, and credited Aaron Douglas with being something of a con evangelist to the other cast members. Pilot #12 has a name, but I'm too lazy to look it up; he apparently is a friend of Aaron Douglas's, had a couple of small speaking roles in previous episodes, and will be in some episodes in the latter half of Season 4, and Aaron dragged him to the con. Once that was mentioned, the mood in the crowd shifted to palpable nervousness at the potential for hearing spoilers, but the cast was actually very conscientious about not giving any spoilers away throughout the whole weekend, other than to tell us that the final episode is stunning and made a lot of them cry when they read it.
This might have been the panel where EJO brought up the realism of BSG as a selling point to him when he was considering the role, and how he connected that with Blade Runner, which had also been an extrapolation of a possible future but hadn't involved any aliens or improbably elements. He apparently told Ron Moore that the minute some four-eyed creature appeared on the show, he was going to faint out of the frame and walk off, and the writers could handle that however they chose, but he was not at all interested in being involved with the more speculative and creature-based areas of science fiction.
Friday 5:30 Stargate panel
(Cliff Simon, Erick Avari, Morena Baccarin, Beau Bridges, Torri Higginson, Rainbow Sun Francks)
This panel was a little disjointed, and I think in general the Stargate panels this year suffered a bit from the fact that this particular combination of guests had, for the most part, not worked together, or not worked together much. On the other hand, all of the Stargate panels were in the Marriott, and whether because of house rules or because someone finally caught a clue, nobody was serving the actors alcohol throughout the panel, and there was a noticeable improvement in the quality and thoughtfulness of the answers.
After what was probably only about 10 minutes of flogging the Stargate Atlanta My Little Pony activities-but felt like several hours-the moderator got down to business by asking the ACTORS if they enjoyed any artistic pursuits. Oh, I don't know, maybe ACTING? Christ. There was also a question about what they'd done the night before, which turned out to be pretty ordinary stuff like getting dinner and sleeping. Rainbow Sun Francks (who is, BTW, completely adorable) told the story of getting on his flight and having to buy food from the airline, and then having his Canadian money get sneered at.
Someone got up and, rather than asking an actual question, requested that nobody talk about Ark of Truth or Continuum for those who hadn't seen them yet. Whether by coincidence or design, the rest of the questioners ended up honoring that request over the weekend and I thought that was a shame, considering Cliff Simon was there. However, obviously, I wasn't so disappointed that I actually tried to ask a question. *cough* We did find out, though, that Cliff Simon was a competitive swimmer (I did not know that!) and has two CD projects out, one a deep breathing and meditation and changing-your-life-through-positive-thinking deal and one where he talks about his feelings about America as a new American citizen. A woman from the audience asked the question about his projects as an obvious way to get him to flog them; she asked the same question at pretty much every Stargate panel over the course of the entire con, and I doubt Cliff Simon had planned that, since he seemed as weirded out about it as the rest of us were by the end. He made some interesting comments about playing Baal, and how his first time was something of an audition, since the writers were looking for a new major bad guy and had a bunch of System Lords in the episodes (I think this must have been "Summit"/"Last Stand" he was talking about), and how he'd tried to play against type by playing Baal as someone who was having a lot of fun.
Morena Baccarin was much sharper-edged than I expected; she was also incredibly nice, but she seemed to have a snarky sense of humor.
Readers of this journal know that I'm no General Landry afficianado, but Beau Bridges was very well-spoken and seemed to be as blown away as Edward James Olmos had been by the size of the con and the various costumes and the whole experience of being there.
After the panels, I went out to dinner with my brother and finally got to meet his fiancee, which was exciting. They were in town for some football game that was happening quite close to the convention; we ended up seeing some football fans-very confused-looking football fans-in the hotel on Saturday night. Then I met up with everyone and sugargroupie, who had just gotten in, and we wandered and talked and generally did not watch any of the many DVDs we had all brought for the weekend. Still no Kevin Sorbo, but it was just Friday night and the con was young...
Coming soon: Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. In that order, even!
* * * * *
I had a wonderful time this year at Dragon*Con. I'm still trying to make my brain work, and to catch up on LJ, but it made me really happy. I wasn't at all sure, going in, that that was going to be the case. The crowds last year were borderline overwhelming, and I was expecting even more people this year. That turned out to be true-we heard a rumor that the D*C people stopped selling on-site registrations when they hit 40,000 attendees-but I give them significant credit for realizing that crowding could be a problem and taking effective measures to make sure it wasn't. Not only did they spread the con events over four hotels this year, they also had the Marriott's giant ballroom (which hadn't been built last year, since the Marriott was still in the middle of renovations) to work with, and not having all 40,000 attendees trying to get to different places in the lower level of the Hyatt at the same time made an amazing difference. There were still long lines for almost everything, but it was a much more relaxed, less claustrophobic atmosphere; getting from place to place wasn't a struggle. People were cooperative (aside from the woman in the registration line who we were sure was about to have an aneurism ). It made a huge difference.
My favorite part though, without a doubt, was hanging out with friends. I feel lucky, in ways I can't put into words, to have met so many people on LJ with whom I get along so well in person, to have connected with such a smart, funny group of people, and to be able to go to something like this and spend, basically, three or four days solid with them and have such a good time.
That said, seeing the way different panel tracks are handled at my third Dragon*Con has solidified my desire to beat Stargate Atlanta with a shovel. To paraphrase Daniel Jackson, they need to engage in a little less My Little Pony and a little more shut the hell up. We are there to see the actors and hear them talk. There is just absolutely no excuse for taking up a quarter of the panel time with various self-congratulatory descriptions of the Stargate Atlanta track organization doings, announcements of fan awards, and discussions of (I am not even kidding about this!) the various My Little Pony-related activities they have planned for the weekend while the actors sit there twiddling their thumbs and politely trying to look interested. The organizers for the other tracks seem to understand this, since they get that stuff out of the way before the panel starts, before the actors come out on stage, so that the actual panel is a Q&A between the actors and the audience, which is what everybody is there for. And the shame is that they seem to have a pretty impressive charity arm, and they're clearly able to do the actual work of the program organizing; if they could get their panel moderation together, they might stop looking like such tools.
Anyway, on to the con report. I'm probably not going to go into as much detail about the panels as I have in the past, because a lot of them are popping up on YouTube and actual video is a better source than my fallible memory; I also collapsed into a heap on Monday night and am just now recovering the ability to think. So.
Thursday night
I arrived Thursday evening, and the MARTA train to the hotel was full of con-goers, so I knew it was going to be a big convention again this year. After I got to the hotel, asta77, thomasina75, 50mm, and I got into the first line of the convention, the one for registration. It moved pretty quickly; unfortunately, because of some issues around the way my last name is spelled and the problems that can cause with online forms, I got shunted to the problem people line, which only had one guy working it, and didn't get out of there with my badge until after 11.
We then repaired to the High Velocity bar in the Marriott, and while we waited for the hostess to seat us, I was so distracted/appalled by the awful porn star boob job the woman ahead of us in line was sporting (her nipples pointed in totally different directions) that I failed to notice that the man she was flirting with so animatedly was James Marsters until someone pointed it out to me. Michael Rosenbaum and Tim Russ were hanging out at another table while we had drinks and I ate my salad, and later on James Callis and Tahmoh Penikett came in and sat at the bar and did shots. We hadn't seen Kevin Sorbo yet, but since asta77 was with us, we were certain it was only a matter of time.
Friday 2:30 Firefly panel
(Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion)
This was actually the only panel we saw in the Hyatt. By the time we got into line at 1, the line was outside and around the building. Some guy was handing out flyers for a nearby pizza place, and 50mm asked him if they delivered to lines. They certainly would have made a lot of money that weekend if they did.
Thanks to YouTube, you can see the first ten minutes of the panel yourself:
Click to viewNathan looked like he hadn't slept in about three days, and I wondered if he hadn't taken a red-eye to get to Atlanta, but he and Alan were in good spirits and had brought a number of items that they signed and gave out to questioners: some photos (including photos from the "smash hit Slither"), a game that they had both done voice work for, and that they accidentally signed the wrapper of, and best of all, a license plate frame of Nathan's that said "My other car is Serenity." He asked the audience if anyone was a trucker or drove for a living and gave it to one of the few people who raised their hands.
The questions weren't that great. Someone asked about pranking, and Alan told the story of cat sitting for Nathan and finally, at the end of a couple of weeks of dropping by his house to look in on the cat, picking up a pen from the coffee table, sitting next to a pad of paper, to leave a note, and getting a shock, because Nathan had set the whole thing up with a shock pen. Nathan said he liked the "slow-cookers" like that. He had kept a calendar Alan had left at his house, full of childhood photos taken by Alan's neighbor when he was a kid, and had eventually, about four years later, had them blown up and put all over the set of the bar where River has her big fight scene in Serenity for Alan's birthday.
Nathan also told a very funny story about being insecure when he was first cast, because it was an hour show and he felt like he didn't know what he was doing and someone was going to figure it out. They had originally cast someone besides Morena Baccarin as Inara, and one day Joss took him aside to say that he had something to tell Nathan, that he wanted him to hear it from Joss first, that sometimes these things just won't work out, sometimes the chemistry just isn't there, and Nathan was getting progressively more alarmed, thinking he was about to be fired, but Joss was just telling him they had to let the original Inara go.
I think this was the panel where someone asked Alan if he would have liked to be in Dr. Horrible and his reaction was that he would have liked to be in No Country for Old Men, he would have liked to be in a number of things, with the implication that his desire was not the deciding factor for stuff like that.
Friday 4:00 BSG panel
(Tahmoh Penikett, Kevin Grazier, Richard Hatch, Michael Hogan, Edward James Olmos, Aaron Douglas, Pilot #12, James Callis)
I actually don't remember a ton about this panel specifically, other than that the moderator was dressed in a Peacekeeper Special Ops vest and Edward James Olmos seemed thrilled to be there, and rather surprised by the size of the con, and credited Aaron Douglas with being something of a con evangelist to the other cast members. Pilot #12 has a name, but I'm too lazy to look it up; he apparently is a friend of Aaron Douglas's, had a couple of small speaking roles in previous episodes, and will be in some episodes in the latter half of Season 4, and Aaron dragged him to the con. Once that was mentioned, the mood in the crowd shifted to palpable nervousness at the potential for hearing spoilers, but the cast was actually very conscientious about not giving any spoilers away throughout the whole weekend, other than to tell us that the final episode is stunning and made a lot of them cry when they read it.
This might have been the panel where EJO brought up the realism of BSG as a selling point to him when he was considering the role, and how he connected that with Blade Runner, which had also been an extrapolation of a possible future but hadn't involved any aliens or improbably elements. He apparently told Ron Moore that the minute some four-eyed creature appeared on the show, he was going to faint out of the frame and walk off, and the writers could handle that however they chose, but he was not at all interested in being involved with the more speculative and creature-based areas of science fiction.
Friday 5:30 Stargate panel
(Cliff Simon, Erick Avari, Morena Baccarin, Beau Bridges, Torri Higginson, Rainbow Sun Francks)
This panel was a little disjointed, and I think in general the Stargate panels this year suffered a bit from the fact that this particular combination of guests had, for the most part, not worked together, or not worked together much. On the other hand, all of the Stargate panels were in the Marriott, and whether because of house rules or because someone finally caught a clue, nobody was serving the actors alcohol throughout the panel, and there was a noticeable improvement in the quality and thoughtfulness of the answers.
After what was probably only about 10 minutes of flogging the Stargate Atlanta My Little Pony activities-but felt like several hours-the moderator got down to business by asking the ACTORS if they enjoyed any artistic pursuits. Oh, I don't know, maybe ACTING? Christ. There was also a question about what they'd done the night before, which turned out to be pretty ordinary stuff like getting dinner and sleeping. Rainbow Sun Francks (who is, BTW, completely adorable) told the story of getting on his flight and having to buy food from the airline, and then having his Canadian money get sneered at.
Someone got up and, rather than asking an actual question, requested that nobody talk about Ark of Truth or Continuum for those who hadn't seen them yet. Whether by coincidence or design, the rest of the questioners ended up honoring that request over the weekend and I thought that was a shame, considering Cliff Simon was there. However, obviously, I wasn't so disappointed that I actually tried to ask a question. *cough* We did find out, though, that Cliff Simon was a competitive swimmer (I did not know that!) and has two CD projects out, one a deep breathing and meditation and changing-your-life-through-positive-thinking deal and one where he talks about his feelings about America as a new American citizen. A woman from the audience asked the question about his projects as an obvious way to get him to flog them; she asked the same question at pretty much every Stargate panel over the course of the entire con, and I doubt Cliff Simon had planned that, since he seemed as weirded out about it as the rest of us were by the end. He made some interesting comments about playing Baal, and how his first time was something of an audition, since the writers were looking for a new major bad guy and had a bunch of System Lords in the episodes (I think this must have been "Summit"/"Last Stand" he was talking about), and how he'd tried to play against type by playing Baal as someone who was having a lot of fun.
Morena Baccarin was much sharper-edged than I expected; she was also incredibly nice, but she seemed to have a snarky sense of humor.
Readers of this journal know that I'm no General Landry afficianado, but Beau Bridges was very well-spoken and seemed to be as blown away as Edward James Olmos had been by the size of the con and the various costumes and the whole experience of being there.
After the panels, I went out to dinner with my brother and finally got to meet his fiancee, which was exciting. They were in town for some football game that was happening quite close to the convention; we ended up seeing some football fans-very confused-looking football fans-in the hotel on Saturday night. Then I met up with everyone and sugargroupie, who had just gotten in, and we wandered and talked and generally did not watch any of the many DVDs we had all brought for the weekend. Still no Kevin Sorbo, but it was just Friday night and the con was young...
Coming soon: Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. In that order, even!