Dragon*Con 2011 Report, which has officially killed my brain. Part One.
I’m FINALLY finished writing this thing. Yowza. It’s not quite as comprehensive as my previous reports because I pretty much refused to write anything down while it was happening, relying instead on the powers of memory and youtube to recount the experience. But the highlights are there. (I think?) Read this if you wanna know exactly what it’s like to dress up as a man and go conventioning with my mother and sister. I’ve included very brief reviews of the panels we attended, as well as my conversations with a few minor celebrities and drunken congoers. This may be of particular interest to fans of Stargate, Star Trek, and Supernatural, but MANY fandoms are mentioned.
My reports from previous cons can be found here:
[ FX Show 2006] (This one is flocked.)
[ Dragon*Con 2006]
[ FX Show 2007]
[ Dragon*Con 2007]
[ FX Show 2008]
[ Dragon*Con 2008]
I never posted my Dragon*Con 2009 report! But the most important thing that happened is [ here].
[ Dragon*Con 2010]
Dragon*Con 2011
in which Jen sprouts facial hair, impresses Misha Collins with her mad crochet skillz, has her second date with Bill Shatner, and accidentally attends Zombie Prom. But not all at once.
Fandoms mentioned in this report: Star Trek TOS, Star Trek TNG, Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Eureka/Warehouse 13, Trueblood, Supernatural, Being Human (US), WKRP in Cincinatti, Back to the Future, Stargate Universe, Stargate Atlantis, Sanctuary, Battlestar Galactica, Boondock Saints, Harry Potter, Doctor Horrible, Outlander, omg I can’t believe I have this many fandoms, let’s get this on.
Some Relevant Pre-Con Information:
I graduated from grad school in May, but during my last semester, in order to avoid having to think about my thesis, I started crocheting. I had taught myself a couple of the basics several years ago when I was in undergrad, but the most complicated thing I had ever made was a hat. (It was a pretty great hat, though.) In February, I started making hats again, and then I moved on to making stuffed animals and finally dolls. When I found out that Misha Collins (Castiel from Supernatural) was going to be a guest at Dragon*Con this year, I decided to make a Castiel doll. He was the first doll I’d ever made, and I was super proud of him. I decided to give the doll to Misha when I met him at the con. (Actually, I was pretty conflicted about whether or not to give it to him, because I didn’t know if it would be weird of me to do that or not, but I posted about it here at livejournal, and everyone told me I should absolutely give it to him, so I decided to. You know, for you guys.)
And then I found out Joe Flanigan (from Stargate Atlantis) was coming to D*C, so since I was [sort of] planning to give Misha a doll, I figured it would only be fair to make a Colonel Sheppard doll too, so I would have something to give to Joe as well. So I made a few improvements to the Castiel doll design, and I used the new pattern to make a Colonel Sheppard doll. But while I was making Sheppard, I started watching Star Trek TNG on Netflix, and I fell in love with the character of Data. And then I found out that Brent Spiner, who plays Data, was going to be at D*C, too. So I improved on the Sheppard pattern, and I made a Data doll for Brent.
At this point, Data was the best doll I had ever made, and if you compared him to my first attempt at a Castiel doll... well, proto!Cas, as I like to call him, looked pretty ridiculous. He couldn’t even stand up on his own. I decided I had to make a better Castiel if I was really going to give it to Misha. I had posted pics of all three dolls on lj, but these are the first pics I’m posting of new-and-improved!Castiel, AKA God!Cas.
His trench coat is removable, so this is God!Cas in his spiffy black suit, looking melancholy and confused as always.
Here he is wearing the trench coat. One of the improvements I made to the design of the coat is that it is split in the back, which makes it look less like a bathrobe. I love him from the back! I love his hair.
Of course, Castiel, Colonel Sheppard, and Data were immediate best friends. Fandom crossovers FTW.
Here are some better pictures of [ Data the Yarndroid] and [ Colonel Yarn Sheppard], which I posted in my journal a while back. Unfortunately, a couple weeks before the con, Joe Flanigan had to cancel his appearance (damn him! David Hewlett did this to me last year), so only Cas and Data made the trip to Atlanta with me.
BFF, dreaming Dragon*Con dreams...
Also relevant before-the-con 411: I decided to cosplay this year as Ronon Dex from Stargate Atlantis. This decision was made before I found out that Joe wasn’t going to be there... I kinda had this idea that I would get my picture made with Joe while I was wearing my Ronon outfit, and it would be really funny. Anyway, this is what Ronon looks like:
He is 6’4, male, muscular, and beardy. Perfect costume for a short chubby girl, Y/Y?
Plus FYI: My mom watched all five seasons of Stargate Atlantis, and when I told her I wanted to be Ronon, she told her coworkers I was going to Dragon*Con as a black man. Really, mom? Really?
Oh and also, I get really anxious and anal before D*C every year, because I’m terrified that I won’t be able to do everything I want to do. There is so much! And I have so many fandoms! They usually put the schedule up on the website about a week before con, so this year I downloaded and read the whole thing, made a list of everything I wanted to do, combined it with the photo op lists, and... color-coded it. Yeah. And don’t tell anyone, but I actually did this at work.
I just had to figure out when I was going to fit in my epic sex with Shatner.
Okay, NOW I can talk about the convention.
Thursday.
AM I RONON YET?
I lied. This part isn’t the convention either. Thursday is the day before D*C officially starts, but it’s the day we finished getting ready and actually left for HOTlanta (anyone else hate it when people call Atlanta that?) and it’s also registration/picking-up-your-badge day so I figured I’d include it as well. Also, it’s the only day I actually made any notes about. Heh.
My mom and I got up pretty early (for us) to pack our stuff and to finish my costume. YEAH. I’d been working on my Ronon costume for a couple of months, but it still wasn’t done. I pretty much blame my mom for this. See, I bought a dreadlock wig online and when it came, of course, it wasn’t dreads; it was just braided. So I undid some of the braids and twisted them into what looked a little bit more like dreads to me. And then I left it alone for two months. So the night before we’re supposed to leave, my mom decides it doesn’t look enough like dreads, so we end up staying up until the wee hours trying to fix the hair that I thought was fine all along. Sigh. And we didn’t get done that night, so we got up early and started messing with it again, until I got so anxious that we would miss registration that I convinced her that we should just take the wig like it was and finish working on it in the hotel room that night. So that’s what we did.
My Ronon stuff took up over half of my suitcase, and I didn’t even wear it for a whole day. Here is the holster and boots. I packed a separate duffle bag for all my snacks and for Cas and Data, who got to know each other really well underneath a box of Cheezits.
It takes a little over two hours to drive to Atlanta from where we live. We were hoping to leave by noon, but we didn’t end up leaving until something like 2:30. So I was freaking out because we had to wait in last year’s registration line for about four hours (I just typed four houses) and I had hoped we’d get there earlier this year and maybe the line wouldn’t be as long. We stopped at the bank on the way out of town to get some cash for photo ops and autographs. I would mention here how much I withdrew from my checking account, but if I did, I feel pretty sure one of you would make it a point to mug me next year at the beginning of Dragon*Con, so I’ll just say that it was an adequate amount. And then we were on our way!
We looked at my handy-dandy, color-coded, anal-retentive schedule in the car. The problem is that so many things we want to do always happen at the same time as other things we want to do, so we have to make some pretty tough decisions. For instance, I would’ve gone to every Trueblood, Supernatural, Stargate, and Shatner panel at the whole con, but often they were scheduled all at once. SADFACE. And I only ended up at one Buffy panel. Wtf? (But at least it was the giant one.)
Every year, we park at the Kensington MARTA station because there’s cheap overnight parking, and then we take the MARTA into the convention area. This saves us about $20 a day compared to parking at the hotels, but it also means we have to take all our stuff on the train with us. The sword sticking out of my bag got some wary looks from other passengers. Also, my poor mom! She had to pee when we got to the station, but they had closed off the bathrooms, so she just had to think dry thoughts for half an hour while we MARTA’d all the way to the hotel before she could go.
This year was our first year staying at the Hyatt. We’ve stayed at the Hilton once, the Sheraton twice, and the Westin twice, so that means the Marriott is the only con hotel we haven’t stayed at yet. (We’re going to try to do that next year.) When we got to the Hyatt, it actually didn’t seem that busy. We walked up to one of the long counters in the lobby to check-in and saw a bunch of the hotel employees sort of just standing around. One girl was helping someone. So we went to another girl behind a nearby counter and stood there for a minute before she noticed us and said, “Oh, the check-in line is over there,” and pointed to a roped-off line that had no one in it. So we were like ooookay, and went and stood behind the people the one other girl was helping. The other employees continued to stand around talking, occasionally glancing our way. After a couple of minutes of standing there, one of them asked if we were there to check in. We said yes, and he said, “The check-in line is over there,” and pointed at the empty ropes again. Where NO ONE was standing. Wtf? So we were like oooookay, and confusedly dragged our luggage over to the non-line. As soon as we stood exactly there, it was like the check-in people could suddenly see us! Haha, it was so surreal. Like, I saw you looking at me earlier, but you can’t help me unless I approach from this exact spot? I actually saw a couple of other people come up to check in as well, but they didn’t stand between the ropes either, and I wanted to tell them, “These people can’t see you unless you stand right there.”
Anyhow, when the check-in girl looked at our reservation, which was for four people, and which we made last October, she said that they didn’t have any rooms left with two double beds, so we had the option of choosing a room with a queen-sized bed or a room with NO BEDS IN IT. So we were like, huh wha? And she said that in order to accomodate us, they could put four roll-away single beds in the ROOM WITHOUT BEDS, or they could put one roll-away single in the room with the queen-size. And my mom was like, but that wouldn’t sleep four people. And the girl goes, well, two people can sleep in the queen and two people could sleep in the roll-away. And my mom was like, two people in a twin bed? Seriously? And the girl sort of sheepishly goes, well they could...
I just want to emphasize here that if you stay at the Hyatt, you might actually get a ROOM WITHOUT BEDS. How does this even happen? It’s a HOTEL. But the room has a kitchen. Who rents a kitchen overnight but no bedroom?
Anyway, we fussed a little because we made our reservation almost a year ago, but the girl said they only guarantee a space, not the kind of space you get. But while we were standing there trying to decide who had to share a twin bed, the girl checked again and saw that there actually was a room with two doubles like we wanted. So we got that one instead, yay! And I guess whoever checked in after us randomly got a kitchen...?
We stayed on the 20th floor. A man pushing a big ice cart got into the elevator with us, and a girl in a tophat said to him, “ICE to meet you!” Which made things awkward for everyone. The iceman got off on floor 17 and followed a sign right outside the elevator that said something like “Guest Lounge,” which I assume is like the consuite, but for the celebrities. For the rest of the con, I wanted to go there and see if I could stalk anyone. But I didn’t get the chance.
Beds! I never thought I’d feel so lucky to have a bed in my hotel room.
Cas and Data were digging the bed too.
The way the Hyatt is set up is that there’s a huge open space in the middle surrounded by the rooms. When you come out of your room, you can walk right over to the ledge and look straight down through the middle of the hotel and see everyone on the lobby floor. Our room was in the corner, so we didn’t have a ledge immediately opposite our door, but we did have an outside balcony that was pretty cool.
Balcony!
After dropping our stuff off in the hotel room, we went to pick up our badges in the Sheraton. It was about 6:00 when we left our room. On the way down in the Hyatt elevator, we overheard two girls talking about registration. One of them said the line was insane, which made me nervous because we'd had to wait in line for so long last year, but the other girl said she’d only had to wait for about forty minutes. Also on the way to the Sheraton, I noticed that for some reason my mom had black stuff all over her. I was like, "What happened to you?" But she didn't know. We narrowed it down to something that had managed to get on her purse strap, which then rubbed all over her shoulder and back leaving the black stuff everywhere. So my mom's favorite shirt was ruined by something we couldn't identify. :(
The outside of the Sheraton was crawling with people, but there wasn’t really a discernable line. Volunteers were standing on the corners outside yelling, “Registration inside! All registration lines inside!” Which maybe would’ve been helpful if we’d thought registration would be OUTside, but why would we think that? So... we went inside.
Like usual, they had different colored tape lines on the floor for you to follow depending on what kind of ticket you were buying. We followed the one for people who had pre-registered for all four days of the con. The bulk of this line was supposed to be in one particular ballroom, which had waist-high curtains set up in a tight zigzag all the way to the far end of the room, where there were volunteers waiting behind registration booths. Everyone got herded back and forth between these curtains until coming out at the booths at the end. Well, because they changed the registration process this year and were using barcodes and scanners instead of one ninety-year-old man with an abacus like previous years, the line was moving really fast. So fast, in fact, that there were volunteers yelling at us to hurry through the line - to actually run through - because we were holding up the volunteers. Like they had someplace special to go? It wouldn’t have made a difference how fast we ran through the line. The volunteers were going to be there until 10pm regardless. I mean, it’s what they volunteered for.
I’m pleased that registration didn’t take long this year, but it sort of bugs me that the volunteers were yelling at us to hurry. There was absolutely no reason for that, and running back and forth down the length of an entire ballroom is just silly! If you want us to move faster, freakin take down some of the curtains, people. And everyone running from one side of the room to the other side of the room and back made the whole place seem like it was tilting to one side and then the other. Like we were on a giant boat rocking back and forth. I started getting seasick.
When I gave the girl at the booth my pre-registration card and driver’s license, she did a double-take at my license photo and then said, “Long hair looks better on you.” Which is exactly like saying, “Wow, this is a really terrible picture.” And then I thanked her. (I’ve actually lost about 25 pounds since my license photo was taken, so I’m pretty sure the fact that I look better now has very little to do with growing my hair.)
Mama picked up my sister Amy’s badge too, so Amy wouldn’t have to go all the way to the Sheraton when she got there the next day. When we walked out of the big ballroom, there were more volunteers yelling about the exits. Even though the exits are clearly marked. They were making big gestures toward the door and shouting, “Exit to your left! Here is where you leave! On your left you have the magnificent egress!” OKAY I GET IT. Wow. (Also, it is your left and my right.) I know I keep talking about the volunteers yelling, but it was something that I thought about for a long time and my mom and I actually had a whole conversation about back in our hotel room. Spouting out obvious information as loud as you can in a way that you think is clever really just annoys the heck out of everyone and is basically the same as yelling, “Look at me! I feel important! Everyone pay me some attention!” I went from being annoyed to sort of feeling sorry for these people, because it’s probably the one time in the year that they actually have anyone doing what they say.
But registration only took five minutes, yay! We were back in our hotel room within half an hour of leaving it. And we were registrated! So then we unpacked the essentials.
Yes, we do need two boxes of Cheezits. What? Also, is it weird that I brought plain bread for breakfast? I love bread. Bread is my favorite.
My sister Sara works in Atlanta, so we called her to see if she was still in town and if she wanted to go somewhere for supper, but she wasn’t available, so we ate some of the food we brought and got down to business doing Ronon’s hair. I had thought, when I first started making the costume, that building the gun would be the most tedious process of the whole thing, but that was waaaaay before I started trying to make a wig into dreadlocks. How do people even do this to real hair? I assume they put, like, hair stuff in it to make it do its thing, but the only stuff I brought for the hair was a comb and some thread. So I teased the hair into thick locks and tied it so it would stay.
This took approximately one thousand hours.
Ronon also wears a tiny skull in his hair, and I had sculpted one out of this cheap sculpting stuff I found at Hobby Lobby, so when I was finally done dreading the hair (ha), I superglued the skull into it.
Yeah, so, it glows in the dark? That was an embarrassing discovery the next day.
I remember we watched reruns of Bones on the hotel TV while the hair was happening. And my mom watched the most recent episode of Doctor Who on her netbook. And we could hear people running around whooping outside of our room. Like, literally, people running around going, “Whoop, whoop!” It was like a typical night in student housing. I will probably never understand what compels a person to go “Whoop, whoop!” Is it just excitement? Because when I get excited I just grin really big. But I guess we can’t all be whoopers. We’d go deaf at conventions.
Since Amy wasn’t going to be able to join us that night - she had to teach a night class and then drive to Atlanta from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, so she decided to spend the night with Sara and then join us at the hotel in the morning - and I wanted to be Ronon as soon as I got up in the morning, I told my mom she was going to have to draw on my Ronon tattoos instead of Amy. She freaked out about it because for some reason she has this idea like she can’t draw (?) and so we stayed up pretty late so she could go ahead and draw my arm tattoo on with a Sharpee marker. I’m glad we went ahead and did it that night rather than waiting until the morning because it took a long time, although I will admit that I accidentally marker-smudged the sheets during the night while I slept. Don’t tell the Hyatt. I’m sure that marker smudges were the least of their sheet problems by the end of con.
Friday: The Great Jen-derswap, and Zombies Kidnap my Sister
So maybe I’ll talk about Dragon*Con now, how about?
The first thing I wanted to do on Friday was a William Shatner panel that started at 10am. I knew from two years ago that the line for Bill’s panel (I call him Bill because we are lovers) would be super long and probably get cut off before the end, so I wanted to go stand in line pretty early. But also I wanted to be Ronon before we left the hotel room, so I forced myself out of bed at about 7:30am to start getting ready.
One thing I like about my Ronon costume is that it’s pretty much regular clothes. By which I mean that I didn’t have to wear a blue bodysuit and paint my face like I did last year. I just put on the clothes like a normal person. One thing I didn’t like, however, was the beardiness of it. And the ’stache. Seriously, the mustache I ordered was called “the man mustache” and actually covered my top lip the first time I put it on. I had to trim it a LOT. And also: I’m not a big fan of wearing wigs. Especially in Georgia, where September feels like the way other places feel in July.
That said, I put it on and looked AMAZING.
WHY HALLO THERE I AM RONON DEX.
AND HERE IS MY MOOSTACHE.
AND HERE IS MY NECK TATTOOOOOOO
I had my mom go over my arm tattoo with the marker again when I got out of the shower because it had faded a little, but it didn’t take nearly as long to go over it again as it had to draw it on in the first place, thank goodness. We only did two rows of triangles (sidebar: they actually represent shark fins! Isn’t that interesting?) instead of nine because most of the rows would’ve been covered up by my sweet, sweet gauntlet anyway.
So I keep trying not to think about the fact that Jason Momoa is one of the hottest men alive and I really wanted to be him, but also I can’t help feeling a little let down that I wasn’t as hot a man as he is, you know? I mean, I know I am short and chubby and female. But for some reason I had this idea like I was going to be this smokin’ hot guy as soon as I had on my Ronon costume. I do think I looked FANTASTIC, but it was a little disappointing to put on the costume and still have breasts.
Prettiest transgender alien ever. Look at my gun!
For everything you ever wanted to know about how I made my Ronon Dex costume and props, check out [ how I made my Ronon Dex costume and props], which I posted previously in this journal.
We made it down to the Shatner panel line by about 8:45, and it wasn’t too terribly long yet, but we still had to stand outside of the hotel. Luckily it wasn’t that hot outside yet, and we were standing in a little alcove that was shady. There was a girl standing in line ahead of us who was also dressed in a Stargate costume, and we acknowledged each other with a super-cool little nod of acknowledgement. A couple of minutes later I walked over and asked if I could have my picture made with her and she said yes.
I never realized how girly I stand until I saw this picture where I’m supposed to be standing manly. (“Standing Manly” is the name of my Cher cover band.)
My mom took the picture, and then she also took one with the girl’s camera. A few minutes later, my sister Amy walked up dragging her suitcase, and we gave her a key to our hotel room so she could go upstairs and put her stuff away before joining us in the line. She and my mom were both wearing their Captain Hammer groupie shirts because the Doctor Horrible sing-along was that night. I had brought my groupie shirt as well, but I wasn’t wearing it yet. (Obviously.)
There was a really annoying guy standing in line in front of the Stargate girl. He was doing that thing I was talking about earlier, where people announce stupid things in a way they think is clever. It was sad.
By the time Amy came back to join us in the line again, we had moved inside and were standing right near the room where the panel was supposed to be. I hadn’t realized this at the time, but apparently there’s a D*C morning show that airs live on D*C TV in the convention hotels every morning, and they were filming it in that room. So there were a lot of people already in there before the panel, watching them film the morning show thing. They started letting the Shatner line inside before the show was over, though, so the people who were there for that and then just stayed got really good seats.
Oh, and in the line before we went in, Amy wanted to take a picture of me as Ronon, but she wanted me to make a Ronon face. So I did this.
Turned out more like Gimli the dwarf. “AND MY ACKSH!” I think next year Amy should be Legolas and I can be Ronon again.
Amy said she sent me all her pictures from the con, but I specifically remember taking a picture of her and our mom at this point with her camera. But where is THAT picture, huh Amy? WHERE?
Lies ruin relationships. I’m just saying.
All day on Friday, every time we went to a panel, I had to get my mom or my sister to take my sword out of the loops holding it onto my vest before I could sit down, and then I had to get one of them to put it back in as we were leaving. Not terribly convenient, but we were going for looks, not practicality. When I sat down in the Shatner panel next to Amy, she turned to me and said, “Do you have a skull in your head?” And I said, “Everyone does.” Because I am a smartass.
$#*! My Captain Says
I. Love. This. Man.
Can I just say, Bill Shatner is 80 years old, and I would totally still tap that? Who is not in love with this man? I DEMAND TO KNOW WHO. And I swear he stopped aging at least twenty years ago. I wish we’d had better seats so I’d have better pictures, but I did get my picture made with him the next day, so I guess that’s all right.
Yep, he’s definitely my boyfriend.
The first question for Bill was submitted by a fan in Germany and asked by the moderator. The question was, “Now that Leonard Nimoy is retired, what are you going to do?” Which I thought was funny because it sounds like Bill only does things with Leonard. But he gave a pretty great answer about what close friends they’ve been for so long and how much he was going to miss doing conventions with him. (The last time I met Bill, [ Leonard actually crashed our picture].)
Bill didn’t sit down at all the whole time he was doing his panel. He walked back and forth across the stage in front of the table he was supposed to be sitting behind - I figure it was to be closer to me. A couple of times, he squatted down to look at this spider thing someone had put on the edge of the stage. He’s so active and sharp for an 80-year-old! And endlessly entertaining. I could listen to him go on for hours (I just typed house). He told us the story about how he kept stealing and hiding Leonard’s bicycle on the set of Star Trek TOS, and how once he hung it from the rafters on the stage and had the lighting guys put one spotlight on it, which is the same story he told at D*C a couple years ago, and it was still very funny!
He talked a little bit about the documentary he made called The Captains, where he interviewed the other people who played Star Trek captains. He said that he had to fly to London and LA and Canada and some other places, and he was concerned because he always has trouble going through airport security because he has a metal hip and the security people insist on groping him, so before he made the movie, he called the President of a particular airline to see if he could borrow a plane, and it turned out the guy was a Trekker. He was immediately like, YES TAKE MY PLANE! :D
This is a picture of one of the big screens that was partway back from the stage so the people in the back could see the man I’m they’re we’re in love with.
A guy asked Bill about what it was like to play a woman in “Turnabout Intruder,” which was the last episode of the original ST series. Bill said, “I don’t remember.” Ha. Of course he doesn’t remember; it was three hundred years ago. But then he started talking about ideals and the essence of something, and how you feel in a perfect moment, like when you hit a golf ball and it follows the exact arc you intended, or when you fire an arrow from a longbow and it hits the target (he used to go bowhunting a lot), or like when you’re riding a horse, and you and the horse are in perfect sync with each other. He said that playing a woman well was like capturing the essence of a perfect moment like that. Of course when he started talking about “the essence of a woman,” a bunch of people in the audience snickered, and he sort of laughed too and was like, “It’s improvisational speaking! You never know where it’s going to go.”
And then we had sex.
One other funny story he told had to do with learning a voice recognition program so that when he wrote his books, he wouldn’t have to type, because he hates typing and isn’t very good at it. The creator of the program was showing him how to use it, and so Bill said into the mic something like, “I’m Bill Shatner and I’m standing here with the inventor, Ray [I forget his name].” But the computer typed, “I’m Bill Shatner and I’m standing here with the inventor, Ray Shjhgnlsjeda.” Or something. Anyway, it was obviously misspelled. So Ray goes, “Say delete,” and Bill says, “Delete,” and then the computer types, “Delete.” So Ray goes, “Say Delete delete,” and Bill says, “Delete delete,” and then the computer types, “Delete delete.” Bill said the whole thing just degenerated from there until the inventor started to cry. Poor dude. Heh.
Oh, and also, Bill said when he first started doing conventions he assumed everyone “was here to see... me!” But then he did a documentary about a Star Trek convention, and he realized everyone was actually there to see each other. Which was humbling. But I think both reasons are correct - fans do like to meet up with each other at cons, but they also want to see the Shat. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t?
I think we walked out of that panel talking about how much we liked Bill Shatner. He’s seriously so fun to listen to. Here is an example:
Fried eggs and onions.
That clip didn’t come from the Friday morning panel, but it did come from Dragon*Con this year, so I wanted to include it. It’s so sweet! (And yes, I do stalk youtube for tidbits like this after I get home from cons.)
The next round of panels started at 11:30, so we had about half an hour to get to where we were going next. I had marked on my schedule that there were two panels at 11:30 that we’d want to see: True Blood and Back to the Future. Amy really wanted to go to the True Blood panel, which had Kristen Bauer, Jim Parrack, Joe Manganiello, and Charlaine Harris on it (the actors who play Pam, Hoyt, and Alcide, and the creator of the book series the show is based on) because True Blood is her favorite current TV show. But the Back to the Future panel had Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson on it, and there were only going to be two BttF panels all con, and they were both going to happen at the same time as True Blood panels anyway, so we decided to skip this True Blood panel and go to the Back to the Future one instead. Which means we had to high-tail it to the Westin.
The Peachtree Ballroom, which was the only room in the Westin where we attended any panels, was on the eighth floor. You walk into the Westin on the fifth floor, so we went up the elevator to floor 8 to get in line. Well, the line at that time was already so long that it zigzagged all around the eighth floor, down the stairs, all around the seventh floor, and down the stairs again. We actually got in line on the sixth floor, and it was pretty confusing, because the line seemed to branch into two different directions, and we went left while some of the people who were behind us went right, and I don’t think those people ended up getting in.
Also while we were racing down the line to try and find the back of it, this one girl stopped me for a picture. Her friend was calling for her to hurry up, and she was like, “But I HAVE to get a picture of RONON!” I pointed my gun at her.
I actually heard my name called a lot while I was dressed as Ronon. Well, heard his name called, I mean. People would go, “Hey, Ronon!” and wave. I had a lot of people acknowledge my costume without wanting pictures, but there were some who wanted pictures too. But mostly what would happen is I would pass someone and hear them say to whomever they were with, “Hey, check it out, that was Ronon.”
When we finally got to the back of the line, I took a picture of Mama and Amy. They were doing the weird stuff, as you can see.
You can also see the people in line on the next floor up.
And then Amy took another picture of me.
This is me trying to stand more manly than before. (“Stand More Manly” is the name of my k.d. lang cover band.)
Back to the Future
Great Scott! (Give my regards to your mother.)
When we got into the Peachtree ballroom, the entire room was filled all the way to the back, and we had to sit on the very back row. They turned away a lot of people who were still in line behind us, but then they started adding more rows of chairs behind the back rows. Unfortunately, since a lot of people had already been turned away, most of the chairs they added in the back didn’t fill up. Not sure why they hadn’t added all the extra chairs before letting people in... it would have made more sense, right?
Right as we were sitting down, someone said that Lea Thompson got held up somewhere and wasn’t going to make it to this panel but would be at the other Back to the Future panel. It was disappointing, because we already knew we wouldn’t be going to the other Back to the Future panel because it was also up against True Blood, so we wouldn’t be able to see Lea at all during the con.
Christopher Lloyd and James Tolkan. Since this panel was in the Alternate History track, the moderator was kind of steampunky.
Amy and I weren’t sure we were going to enjoy the panel without Lea there, but it turned out to be kind of interesting. Christopher said that the third Back to the Future movie was his favorite one, which I’d always suspected, because he got to ride horses and have a love interest. The coolest thing he said about it, though, was that they spent two nights shooting the dance scene, and ZZ Top was the band at the dance, and in between takes, they would just sit there and jam for all the cast and crew. Sounds pretty awesome.
I don’t know if it was because Christopher and James were both pretty old, or if it was because of where they were sitting, or what, but neither one of them could hear the questions being asked. Every time someone asked something, they would both turn and look at the moderator, and he’d repeat the question. At one point, someone asked if they’d had any suspicion that Crispin Glover wasn’t going to be able to stick around for all three BttF movies, and the moderator paused for a second and then said, “Are you asking if they knew he was crazy?”
Also, someone asked if Christopher Lloyd would ever consider buying a Delorean, and he said no way because they looked good but they kept falling apart. He said they’d had five different Delorean stunt cars, and the stunt drivers were always taking parts from the other cars to fix theirs and that they hated driving them. So there go my plans to buy the sweetest looking car ever made. Guess I’ll just have to keep my flux capacitor in my mom’s Buick.
I think Amy’s favorite part of the panel was when this woman told Christopher that his character on Taxi, Reverend Jim, was her mother’s favorite character and that a particular song that was playing during one of his scenes always reminded her mother of her. She went on to ask a question, I think, and then Christopher answered it, and just as she was walking away from the mic, he said to her, in this sort of sinister voice that wasn’t meant to be sinister but sounded that way anyway because it was Christopher Lloyd’s voice saying it: “Give my regards to your mother.” It sounded so creepy, haha! He was just trying to be nice, but it was really weird, and Amy and I cracked up and like, cackled from the back row. I almost choked on a peanut M&M. Of course, Amy kept saying that for the rest of the weekend. But the way Amy is, is that she wants to repeat something that’s funny, but she’ll forget exactly how it’s worded, so all weekend she was saying things like, “Tell your mom I send my regards” and “Regard your mother from me,” but in like this really creepy, low voice. This is probably not funny to anyone else, but even thinking about it now is making me giggle.
Here is a link to the first part of Friday’s [Back to the Future Panel]. I think there are three complete parts, uploaded by the same person.
After this panel, Mama and Amy and I agreed that it was good, but that we were all really distracted by the couple sitting in front of us. For the entire panel, the woman had her arm around the man, and her hand was like, playing with his hair and stroking his ear. The whole time! It looked like she was giving him [oo-mox]. I would be so annoyed if someone did that to me while I was trying to listen to someone else talk. Also, it looked weird. Like, her fingers dancing on his ear looked weird. And! There was another couple two rows ahead of them who were doing the same thing. I wonder if they demonstrate alien PDA everywhere they go or just at sci-fi cons.
So the Back to the Future panel ended around 12:30, and I had marked five different things I wanted to do at 1:00. GAH. So we skipped Battlestar, Buffy, The Guild (with Wil Wheaton), and a Gareth David Lloyd Q&A in favor of going to the Being Human panel at the Marriott. We chose this because 1. All three of the stars of the US version of Being Human were supposed to be there; 2. I’m slightly in love with Sam Huntington, and 3. The only other Being Human panel at D*C this year was in direct conflict with a Eureka panel that had Wil Wheaton on it, which I knew I had to go to.
I grabbed a copy of [The Daily Dragon] from an information booth on the way out of the Westin. That’s the newsletter that comes out every morning of the con, which lists all time changes and cancellations and additions. This one had listed every panel Eliza Dushku was going to be at (she wasn’t listed in the program guide because she was added as a guest at the last minute), and I was pleased to see that I had already planned to go to two panels that she’d been added to. What was sad to me was that Misha Collins and Jim Beaver had been removed from the Supernatural panel that day at 2:30, right after the Being Human panel. :(
When we got to the Marriott to line up for Being Human, the line was curving out of the building and winding around some big potted plants (but hadn’t started going down the stairs yet, which meant we would be able to see without looking at the screens in the Atrium Ballroom). Almost as soon as we lined up, a big guy came over and asked for my picture, so I drew my gun. After he snapped the photo, he said, “I think beards are sexy!” And I said, “Me too!” And then he grinned really big, which was when I noticed his beard and felt awkward because what I’d actually meant was that I thought MY beard was sexy.
Being Human
We’re gonna hug it out.
My sister had never seen or heard of Being Human before, so I gave her a brief synopsis of the first season once we sat down. The basic idea is that a male werewolf, a male vampire, and a female ghost are roommates, and they’re trying to act normal and live normal human lives despite their supernature. The premise seemed kinda cutesy to me when I first started watching, and I didn’t really get into the first few episodes, but towards the end of the season, I was really liking it. I love Sam Huntington! He plays Josh the werewolf, who is so adorable and funny (if a bit neurotic). Sam Witwer plays the vampire Aidan, and Meaghan Rath plays Sally the ghost. I don’t love Sally, and I think Aidan is kinda funny-looking, but the chemistry between the actors is pretty good, and the dialogue is sharp (mostly). I’ll admit I probably wouldn’t have continued watching after the first four or five episodes if it hadn’t been for my mom talking about how much she liked it and knowing that all three of them would be at D*C this year, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I’ll definitely watch season two when it comes out.
We had really good seats in the panel - on the first row of the second section, right in front of where the video camera was set up. We could see perfectly, but I still had to put on my glasses, which was kind of embarrassing to do as Ronon. I kept reminding myself that Jason Momoa often wears glasses in real life, which made me feel a little bit better about wearing them during all the panels.
Anyway, the first thing Sam Huntington said when he came out was, “Witwer’s not here, guys,” in this apologetic way, and then a guy shouted out, “We came to see you!” Which, heck yes. And then Sam pointed at the guy and said enthusiastically, “I came to see YOU, sir! Just you. We’re gonna hug it out.”
Sam was so cute in his little hat!
He said that there had been some confusion about the filming and pick-up schedule for Witwer, and he’d had to work until six that morning, which is why he wasn’t there, but he’d be there for his next panel. My mom was disappointed that Sam Witwer wasn’t there for the Friday panel, but like that one guy said, I came specifically to see Sam Huntington, so I wasn’t super upset or anything. The first thing I ever saw him in was an episode of Veronica Mars, and I’ve thought he was so cute ever since then. He also played Jimmy Olsen in Superman and was in the movie Fanboys - again with Kristen Bell. He was so entertaining and positive and polite and funny during the panel. He actually fielded most of the questions. Luckily, there was a moderator there to keep the discussion going for the whole panel, because they ran out of fan questions pretty early on, but it never seemed to get awkward, and they filled the time with interesting conversation. You can tell Sam and Meaghan are friends, which I love seeing. (It’s weird in a panel when you can tell [the actors don’t get along].)
Someone asked if Meaghan was Latina. She’s not.
There have only been thirteen episodes of Being Human so far, and according to the actors, the US version has stuck pretty close to the UK version, but in the second season, they start to veer off in a completely different direction. That doesn’t mean much to me because I have never watched the UK version, but they seemed pretty excited about it, although they admitted that none of them had watched the UK version either because they didn’t want it to influence their portrayal of the characters of Sally, Josh, and Aidan. I think that makes sense. They couldn’t say much about the second season without spoiling everyone, but Sam said he was really excited about where Meaghan’s character was going. They also said that since the house burns down at the end of season one, there are some fun burnt props they get to have in their new place in season two, including this one weird statue that didn’t burn up and that none of them could tell whether it was a cat or a dog. Heh.
A fan asked them something like, “If you were us, who would you be here to see?” And Sam was like, “We ARE you!” and told a story about how he and Meaghan had been in the elevator earlier when one of the True Blood guys got on and she totally freaked out. Sam was all trying to get her to talk to him, but she wouldn’t because she was too embarrassed. And she was like, “He looked so hot.” I told Amy it must have been Joe Manganiello (Alcide), but it turns out she was fangirling over Jim Parrack (Hoyt), haha. Sam said he would be that way over Sigourney Weaver or anyone from the Alien(s) movies.
Something I found really interesting about this panel was how positive and enthusiastic both Meaghan and Sam were about the SyFy network, and how SyFy has been so supportive of their show. I’m wondering if SyFy is so supportive of them because they are the only sci-fi show still airing on the network that hasn’t been canceled yet. Or maybe Sam and Meaghan only think SyFy is being supportive because they haven’t been canceled yet. Or, hell, maybe SyFy really is being great to them. It was just so weird to hear that since so many other panels I’ve gone to at cons had the actors really bashing SyFy as a terrible network to air on. But apparently the wife of the president of the network is a huge fan of the show, so maybe they’re getting so much support because he has a personal interest in it.
You can watch Friday’s [Being Human panel] on youtube, which I recommend doing just so you can see Sam Huntington being so likeable.
After the panel was over, Sam and Meaghan hung around talking to fans who had walked up to the stage to meet them. I think that’s so nice of them.
I told Amy to run up and take a picture.
I had been planning to go to the Supernatural panel at 2:30, but since Misha and Jim had (according to the Daily Dragon) canceled their appearances at that panel, I didn’t see much point in going anymore. It was just going to be Samantha Ferris (Ellen), Mark Sheppard (Crowley), Julie McNiven (Anna), and Christopher Heyerdahl (Allistair). I’d already seen Mark Sheppard several times at other cons, and I was going to see Chris in a Sanctuary panel later on and Julie in another Supernatural panel, so I spent some time agonizing over which panel to go to instead of the Supernatural one. There was a Stargate Atlantis Q&A with David Nykl that I was interested in and a Boondock Saints panel with both Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus that I wanted to go to as well. But Amy and Mama wanted to - get this - eat lunch.
Excuse me? Lunch? At con? What do you call all those M&Ms we ate earlier, hmm? They were peanut! That’s almost like meat, amiright? But I took pity on my hungry family and gallantly led them toward food (read: grumbled as I followed them to the consuite).
Oh, and when we came out of the Being Human panel, a Captain Hammer cosplayer wanted his picture made with the groupies. They were photobombed by Doctor Horrible, but you can hardly see him. He’s in the back shaking a menacing fist.
<---I’m standing over there being surly and holding their stuff.
Lunch
As if we need food to survive or something.
So the Consuite is located in a hidden corner of the third floor of the Hyatt. I have to believe that most people don’t know about this place because there’s no way they could feed all 40,000 conventioneers every day, so I like to think of it as a secret hideout with free food and drinks. Kind of like the kitchen in your own home. This year they had Pepsi products instead of Coke products in the fountain, but I forgive them because it’s all free and I kind of like Mountain Dew Code Red.
I’m trying to remember what they were serving at the time that we showed up. I know they had cheese cubes on toothpicks and turkey rollups (I think it was turkey; I didn’t get one) and peanut butter and jelly sandwich triangles, and I think they also had tuna sandwich triangles and maybe some kind of sub-sandwich squares? And chips and salsa, because they always have chips and salsa, no matter when you go. I also picked up a fortune cookie.
Connected to the Consuite, there’s a room full of tables with a TV that shows cartoons, so we took our food in there to eat and watch Transformers. The table we sat at had something wet spilled across it. This is when I found out that besides making any sort of facial expression involving the lower half of your face, it is also extremely difficult to eat while wearing a glued-on beard and mustache. (I just want you to know that any time I type “mustache,” I am pronouncing it “moostache” in my head.) Because it was so difficult to actually get pieces of food inside my mouth without my facial hair coming unglued, I didn’t eat much. I ate like five cheese cubes and a pb&j triangle, and I deposited a few chips with salsa into my mouth like coins going into a slot, but that’s pretty much it. Oh, and my mom had carried some Cheezits in her backpack in a ziplock bag, so I ate some of those because they were easier to get in my mouth. At the time, I remember wondering how men ate this way, but then it occurred to me that their facial hair isn’t glued on; they just have hairy faces. Which is a whole different kind of weird.
While we were eating, we saw a guy dressed as Superman who looked exactly like the Christopher Reeve version. Seriously, it was uncanny. The hair! With the curl! Too bad we didn’t take a picture.
After we were done eating (or wishing we could, in my case), we had over an hour before the next panel we wanted to go to, which started at 4:00. It was a Eureka/Warehouse 13 crossover panel, and, oddly, we had absolutely nothing else conflicting with it on my neurotic color-coded schedule. I figured it was as good a time as any to go buy my Misha Collins photo op ticket for the next morning, so we headed over to the Hilton to do that.
The Supernatural folks and the Sanctuary and Stargate Universe folks were all, for some reason, being handled by different representation from everyone else, which meant that they were signing autographs in a separate room beside the Walk of Fame, where everyone else was, and they were also having their photos made by a different photographer from the one everyone else used. Most of the Stargate people were set up this way last year too (except Paul McGillion) and so I ended up not getting my picture taken with any of them because it was too confusing. But this year I was determined to meet Misha Collins, so I headed over to the Illumina Productions booth to see what I had to do.
I got in line behind a guy who was being helped by someone sitting at the booth. I was just standing there waiting patiently when a man wearing a kilt tapped me on the shoulder. As soon as I turned around, he demanded, “What do you want?” Uh. Aren’t you the one who tapped me, guy? What do YOU want? I was confused for a second because I had no idea how I was supposed to respond, and then I saw him look pointedly at the booth and back to me, so I said, “I’m trying to buy a photo op for tomorrow.” So the guy goes, “Well, she can help you.” And he didn’t literally push me forward, but I got the distinct feeling he wanted to, so I hurried out of the line and up to another person sitting at the table. Awkward.
I bought Misha’s Saturday morning at 10:15 photo op, and they gave me a ticket for it. It was $60, which I thought was a bit excessive considering that many of the guests do photos for about $30. And later I bought one with two actors in it for $55, but that was from Froggy Photos, not Illumina. I also asked how much it would be to have my photo with Louis Ferreira and David Blue together, but it was $99, so I had to pass on that. (I was able to meet them both later anyway.) The woman who helped me was trying not to laugh the whole time, and I realized as I was walking away that it was probably because my mustache had come loose. Stupid lunch! Someone also asked me for a photo, and I was paranoid that the ’stache was floppy in the photo, but I held it against my skin with my hand for a while, and it sort of grabbed back on.
I found Mama and Amy again, and we took a few minutes to walk through the big Walk of Fame room and check out all the stars. Poor Beau Bridges didn’t have anyone at his table. Amy wanted to go see the True Blood actors, so we peeked at them around their lines. Jim Parrack had a mustache! That was unexpected. Then again, I had one too, which was arguably more unexpected than his. All three of us melted over Joe Manganiello. Er, me and Amy and Mama did, not me and Amy and Jim Parrack. (FYI, the whole time we were at the con, we couldn’t figure out how to pronounce Joe's last name. We’d start out strong and then fade off, like, “Manga... nee... yellow...?” We finally started calling him Joe Mangina-low, which I’m fairly sure isn’t accurate.)
We eventually walked back over to the Marriott to get in line for the 4:00 Eureka panel. When we got there, we were shocked to see how long the line was! I mean, Eureka’s a great show and everything, but I really didn’t expect there to be so many people lining up for the panel. We had to go outside, downstairs, and around two corners of the hotel to get in the line. But of course, Colin Ferguson was there, and he’s the main star (and a hottie), so it makes sense that there would be more people there than expected. Also, Eddie McClintock from Warehouse 13 was there, and I don’t think Warehouse 13 had any panels specifically for it, so those fans came to this panel too. (I have never seen Warehouse 13, but it’s been on my “to watch” list for a while. I’ve heard great things.)
While we waited in this line in the heat, I struggled to keep my mustache from completely detaching itself. I was holding it in place and trying not to make any facial expressions, but my mom and my sister kept making me laugh. They were totally doing it on purpose. And when I was like, stop! My moostache! Mama started talking about sweaty lips, and I just lost it. By the time we went into the Atrium Ballroom and sat down, the ’stache had come off, and my face felt naked. Luckily, I had brought a tiny bottle of spirit gum with me, so I was able to reattach it before the panel started. While I was painting my upper lip with the spirt gum, I glanced over and saw Amy staring at me like she was fascinated. Just reapplying my hairy lip, weirdo. Move along, nothing to see here.
Eureka/Warehouse 13 Panel
I hope Colin’s naked scenes make the DVD special features.
I’ve met Colin Ferguson before - I actually had the good fortune to be at the very first convention he and Jordan Hinson ever did - and I got his autograph then, so I didn’t feel especially compelled to meet him this con, but I had forgotten how attractive he is! I don’t just mean physically (although yowza when he pulled his shirt up in another panel), but he is just about the nicest, funniest, most charming guy I’ve ever encountered in real life. (Does this count as real life?) He’s so entertaining and likeable! Seeing him reminds me of those experiments where they gave a bunch of chimps the option of eating food or looking at pictures and videos of the more popular chimps in the group, and the chimps always chose to watch the more popular chimps instead of eat. Which isn’t to say that Colin would be really popular among chimps - although I’m sure he would - but that I would probably choose to watch him rather than eat food. If we were chimps, I mean.
Anyway, I like him.
Colin Ferguson, Chris Gauthier, and Eddie McClintock: A threesome I’d be down with. (And so would Chris, I think.)
I remember that in this panel, Colin said that Eureka being canceled wasn’t SyFy’s fault, but was a decision made by Comcast. (Actually, first he pretended like he’d not heard yet that Eureka had been canceled, heh.) And he said that it was still possible that they could be picked up by someone else. Which was heartening, and everyone cheered. This was the second panel I’d ever gone to where the panelists actually made positive remarks about SyFy as a network. It made me wonder if the network is maybe under new management, or if the actors from certain other shows were just bitter after being canceled.
I can’t remember if it was this panel or the other Eureka panel I went to in which Colin gave a pretty detailed explanation of why shows get canceled and how much SyFy really wanted to hang on to them. I think it’s a good idea to let the fans know this stuff because otherwise they’re going to go around (like me) thinking that SyFy is a big patoot when really SyFy is weeping silently on the inside and trying to put on a brave face while their previously beautiful network is crumbling to the ground around them and being replaced with wrestling and ghost hunting reality shows. For instance.
Someone asked what clips ended up on the cutting room floor that the actors really wished had made it into the episodes they were cut from. Of course I remember this question because Colin said that he likes to do at least one scene in the nude for every episode, and those always seem to not make it into the final cut. (Honestly: can NOT imagine why. Ratings boost, anyone?) Also, they said they were rolling, but the cameras don’t look like they’re on, and no one’s here... and I’m in my trailer... but those were some of my finest performances! And then he said that what usually gets cut for time is the setups to jokes, and that it breaks his heart because it makes the joke less funny when the setup and dramatic pause isn’t there.
Oh, and Eddie said that he likes to wear t-shirts with inside jokes and shoutouts on them while filming Warehouse 13, as like a little nod to his friends. Which I think is sweet. Although Colin pointed out that it was labor-intensive and wouldn’t it be easier to just call them, to which Eddie responded that they don’t answer when he calls, and Colin mimed being stuck inside a TV. :D
The first ten minutes of Friday’s [Eureka/Warehouse 13 Panel] is on youtube, though I don’t know if the uploader is planning to add any more or not. I hope so, because I’d love to watch it again. Instead of eat.
Jordan Hinson was also there. And Kevin Grazier, who works for NASA and is a science consultant for television shows. Is it sad that the most I can say for them was that they were there? I don't remember anything they said. Oh, wait! I remember that someone asked why Eureka sent a manned mission to Titan, and Kevin said one of the producers (or writers, maybe?) called him on the phone, and when he answered, the guy said, "What's cooler than Mars?" And Kevin said, "Titan." And the guy said, "Okay," and hung up. So that's why they went to Titan.
I need to catch up on this show! I remember I used to like it a lot, but I stopped watching after season two because I never knew when it was on. *adds to Netflix cue*
Okay, wow, LJ is telling me the post is too long now, and I'm only halfway through Friday! I haven't even met Shatner and Misha and Brent and the Trueblood and Stargate guys yet! If you want to see
MOAR
click [ this link] for the rest of my report, including Zombie Prom, pictures of Misha and Brent with their dolls, getting to second base with Shatner, and a dirty autograph from David Nykl!
My reports from previous cons can be found here:
[ FX Show 2006] (This one is flocked.)
[ Dragon*Con 2006]
[ FX Show 2007]
[ Dragon*Con 2007]
[ FX Show 2008]
[ Dragon*Con 2008]
I never posted my Dragon*Con 2009 report! But the most important thing that happened is [ here].
[ Dragon*Con 2010]
Dragon*Con 2011
in which Jen sprouts facial hair, impresses Misha Collins with her mad crochet skillz, has her second date with Bill Shatner, and accidentally attends Zombie Prom. But not all at once.
Fandoms mentioned in this report: Star Trek TOS, Star Trek TNG, Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Eureka/Warehouse 13, Trueblood, Supernatural, Being Human (US), WKRP in Cincinatti, Back to the Future, Stargate Universe, Stargate Atlantis, Sanctuary, Battlestar Galactica, Boondock Saints, Harry Potter, Doctor Horrible, Outlander, omg I can’t believe I have this many fandoms, let’s get this on.
Some Relevant Pre-Con Information:
I graduated from grad school in May, but during my last semester, in order to avoid having to think about my thesis, I started crocheting. I had taught myself a couple of the basics several years ago when I was in undergrad, but the most complicated thing I had ever made was a hat. (It was a pretty great hat, though.) In February, I started making hats again, and then I moved on to making stuffed animals and finally dolls. When I found out that Misha Collins (Castiel from Supernatural) was going to be a guest at Dragon*Con this year, I decided to make a Castiel doll. He was the first doll I’d ever made, and I was super proud of him. I decided to give the doll to Misha when I met him at the con. (Actually, I was pretty conflicted about whether or not to give it to him, because I didn’t know if it would be weird of me to do that or not, but I posted about it here at livejournal, and everyone told me I should absolutely give it to him, so I decided to. You know, for you guys.)
And then I found out Joe Flanigan (from Stargate Atlantis) was coming to D*C, so since I was [sort of] planning to give Misha a doll, I figured it would only be fair to make a Colonel Sheppard doll too, so I would have something to give to Joe as well. So I made a few improvements to the Castiel doll design, and I used the new pattern to make a Colonel Sheppard doll. But while I was making Sheppard, I started watching Star Trek TNG on Netflix, and I fell in love with the character of Data. And then I found out that Brent Spiner, who plays Data, was going to be at D*C, too. So I improved on the Sheppard pattern, and I made a Data doll for Brent.
At this point, Data was the best doll I had ever made, and if you compared him to my first attempt at a Castiel doll... well, proto!Cas, as I like to call him, looked pretty ridiculous. He couldn’t even stand up on his own. I decided I had to make a better Castiel if I was really going to give it to Misha. I had posted pics of all three dolls on lj, but these are the first pics I’m posting of new-and-improved!Castiel, AKA God!Cas.
His trench coat is removable, so this is God!Cas in his spiffy black suit, looking melancholy and confused as always.
Here he is wearing the trench coat. One of the improvements I made to the design of the coat is that it is split in the back, which makes it look less like a bathrobe. I love him from the back! I love his hair.
Of course, Castiel, Colonel Sheppard, and Data were immediate best friends. Fandom crossovers FTW.
Here are some better pictures of [ Data the Yarndroid] and [ Colonel Yarn Sheppard], which I posted in my journal a while back. Unfortunately, a couple weeks before the con, Joe Flanigan had to cancel his appearance (damn him! David Hewlett did this to me last year), so only Cas and Data made the trip to Atlanta with me.
BFF, dreaming Dragon*Con dreams...
Also relevant before-the-con 411: I decided to cosplay this year as Ronon Dex from Stargate Atlantis. This decision was made before I found out that Joe wasn’t going to be there... I kinda had this idea that I would get my picture made with Joe while I was wearing my Ronon outfit, and it would be really funny. Anyway, this is what Ronon looks like:
He is 6’4, male, muscular, and beardy. Perfect costume for a short chubby girl, Y/Y?
Plus FYI: My mom watched all five seasons of Stargate Atlantis, and when I told her I wanted to be Ronon, she told her coworkers I was going to Dragon*Con as a black man. Really, mom? Really?
Oh and also, I get really anxious and anal before D*C every year, because I’m terrified that I won’t be able to do everything I want to do. There is so much! And I have so many fandoms! They usually put the schedule up on the website about a week before con, so this year I downloaded and read the whole thing, made a list of everything I wanted to do, combined it with the photo op lists, and... color-coded it. Yeah. And don’t tell anyone, but I actually did this at work.
I just had to figure out when I was going to fit in my epic sex with Shatner.
Okay, NOW I can talk about the convention.
Thursday.
AM I RONON YET?
I lied. This part isn’t the convention either. Thursday is the day before D*C officially starts, but it’s the day we finished getting ready and actually left for HOTlanta (anyone else hate it when people call Atlanta that?) and it’s also registration/picking-up-your-badge day so I figured I’d include it as well. Also, it’s the only day I actually made any notes about. Heh.
My mom and I got up pretty early (for us) to pack our stuff and to finish my costume. YEAH. I’d been working on my Ronon costume for a couple of months, but it still wasn’t done. I pretty much blame my mom for this. See, I bought a dreadlock wig online and when it came, of course, it wasn’t dreads; it was just braided. So I undid some of the braids and twisted them into what looked a little bit more like dreads to me. And then I left it alone for two months. So the night before we’re supposed to leave, my mom decides it doesn’t look enough like dreads, so we end up staying up until the wee hours trying to fix the hair that I thought was fine all along. Sigh. And we didn’t get done that night, so we got up early and started messing with it again, until I got so anxious that we would miss registration that I convinced her that we should just take the wig like it was and finish working on it in the hotel room that night. So that’s what we did.
My Ronon stuff took up over half of my suitcase, and I didn’t even wear it for a whole day. Here is the holster and boots. I packed a separate duffle bag for all my snacks and for Cas and Data, who got to know each other really well underneath a box of Cheezits.
It takes a little over two hours to drive to Atlanta from where we live. We were hoping to leave by noon, but we didn’t end up leaving until something like 2:30. So I was freaking out because we had to wait in last year’s registration line for about four hours (I just typed four houses) and I had hoped we’d get there earlier this year and maybe the line wouldn’t be as long. We stopped at the bank on the way out of town to get some cash for photo ops and autographs. I would mention here how much I withdrew from my checking account, but if I did, I feel pretty sure one of you would make it a point to mug me next year at the beginning of Dragon*Con, so I’ll just say that it was an adequate amount. And then we were on our way!
We looked at my handy-dandy, color-coded, anal-retentive schedule in the car. The problem is that so many things we want to do always happen at the same time as other things we want to do, so we have to make some pretty tough decisions. For instance, I would’ve gone to every Trueblood, Supernatural, Stargate, and Shatner panel at the whole con, but often they were scheduled all at once. SADFACE. And I only ended up at one Buffy panel. Wtf? (But at least it was the giant one.)
Every year, we park at the Kensington MARTA station because there’s cheap overnight parking, and then we take the MARTA into the convention area. This saves us about $20 a day compared to parking at the hotels, but it also means we have to take all our stuff on the train with us. The sword sticking out of my bag got some wary looks from other passengers. Also, my poor mom! She had to pee when we got to the station, but they had closed off the bathrooms, so she just had to think dry thoughts for half an hour while we MARTA’d all the way to the hotel before she could go.
This year was our first year staying at the Hyatt. We’ve stayed at the Hilton once, the Sheraton twice, and the Westin twice, so that means the Marriott is the only con hotel we haven’t stayed at yet. (We’re going to try to do that next year.) When we got to the Hyatt, it actually didn’t seem that busy. We walked up to one of the long counters in the lobby to check-in and saw a bunch of the hotel employees sort of just standing around. One girl was helping someone. So we went to another girl behind a nearby counter and stood there for a minute before she noticed us and said, “Oh, the check-in line is over there,” and pointed to a roped-off line that had no one in it. So we were like ooookay, and went and stood behind the people the one other girl was helping. The other employees continued to stand around talking, occasionally glancing our way. After a couple of minutes of standing there, one of them asked if we were there to check in. We said yes, and he said, “The check-in line is over there,” and pointed at the empty ropes again. Where NO ONE was standing. Wtf? So we were like oooookay, and confusedly dragged our luggage over to the non-line. As soon as we stood exactly there, it was like the check-in people could suddenly see us! Haha, it was so surreal. Like, I saw you looking at me earlier, but you can’t help me unless I approach from this exact spot? I actually saw a couple of other people come up to check in as well, but they didn’t stand between the ropes either, and I wanted to tell them, “These people can’t see you unless you stand right there.”
Anyhow, when the check-in girl looked at our reservation, which was for four people, and which we made last October, she said that they didn’t have any rooms left with two double beds, so we had the option of choosing a room with a queen-sized bed or a room with NO BEDS IN IT. So we were like, huh wha? And she said that in order to accomodate us, they could put four roll-away single beds in the ROOM WITHOUT BEDS, or they could put one roll-away single in the room with the queen-size. And my mom was like, but that wouldn’t sleep four people. And the girl goes, well, two people can sleep in the queen and two people could sleep in the roll-away. And my mom was like, two people in a twin bed? Seriously? And the girl sort of sheepishly goes, well they could...
I just want to emphasize here that if you stay at the Hyatt, you might actually get a ROOM WITHOUT BEDS. How does this even happen? It’s a HOTEL. But the room has a kitchen. Who rents a kitchen overnight but no bedroom?
Anyway, we fussed a little because we made our reservation almost a year ago, but the girl said they only guarantee a space, not the kind of space you get. But while we were standing there trying to decide who had to share a twin bed, the girl checked again and saw that there actually was a room with two doubles like we wanted. So we got that one instead, yay! And I guess whoever checked in after us randomly got a kitchen...?
We stayed on the 20th floor. A man pushing a big ice cart got into the elevator with us, and a girl in a tophat said to him, “ICE to meet you!” Which made things awkward for everyone. The iceman got off on floor 17 and followed a sign right outside the elevator that said something like “Guest Lounge,” which I assume is like the consuite, but for the celebrities. For the rest of the con, I wanted to go there and see if I could stalk anyone. But I didn’t get the chance.
Beds! I never thought I’d feel so lucky to have a bed in my hotel room.
Cas and Data were digging the bed too.
The way the Hyatt is set up is that there’s a huge open space in the middle surrounded by the rooms. When you come out of your room, you can walk right over to the ledge and look straight down through the middle of the hotel and see everyone on the lobby floor. Our room was in the corner, so we didn’t have a ledge immediately opposite our door, but we did have an outside balcony that was pretty cool.
Balcony!
After dropping our stuff off in the hotel room, we went to pick up our badges in the Sheraton. It was about 6:00 when we left our room. On the way down in the Hyatt elevator, we overheard two girls talking about registration. One of them said the line was insane, which made me nervous because we'd had to wait in line for so long last year, but the other girl said she’d only had to wait for about forty minutes. Also on the way to the Sheraton, I noticed that for some reason my mom had black stuff all over her. I was like, "What happened to you?" But she didn't know. We narrowed it down to something that had managed to get on her purse strap, which then rubbed all over her shoulder and back leaving the black stuff everywhere. So my mom's favorite shirt was ruined by something we couldn't identify. :(
The outside of the Sheraton was crawling with people, but there wasn’t really a discernable line. Volunteers were standing on the corners outside yelling, “Registration inside! All registration lines inside!” Which maybe would’ve been helpful if we’d thought registration would be OUTside, but why would we think that? So... we went inside.
Like usual, they had different colored tape lines on the floor for you to follow depending on what kind of ticket you were buying. We followed the one for people who had pre-registered for all four days of the con. The bulk of this line was supposed to be in one particular ballroom, which had waist-high curtains set up in a tight zigzag all the way to the far end of the room, where there were volunteers waiting behind registration booths. Everyone got herded back and forth between these curtains until coming out at the booths at the end. Well, because they changed the registration process this year and were using barcodes and scanners instead of one ninety-year-old man with an abacus like previous years, the line was moving really fast. So fast, in fact, that there were volunteers yelling at us to hurry through the line - to actually run through - because we were holding up the volunteers. Like they had someplace special to go? It wouldn’t have made a difference how fast we ran through the line. The volunteers were going to be there until 10pm regardless. I mean, it’s what they volunteered for.
I’m pleased that registration didn’t take long this year, but it sort of bugs me that the volunteers were yelling at us to hurry. There was absolutely no reason for that, and running back and forth down the length of an entire ballroom is just silly! If you want us to move faster, freakin take down some of the curtains, people. And everyone running from one side of the room to the other side of the room and back made the whole place seem like it was tilting to one side and then the other. Like we were on a giant boat rocking back and forth. I started getting seasick.
When I gave the girl at the booth my pre-registration card and driver’s license, she did a double-take at my license photo and then said, “Long hair looks better on you.” Which is exactly like saying, “Wow, this is a really terrible picture.” And then I thanked her. (I’ve actually lost about 25 pounds since my license photo was taken, so I’m pretty sure the fact that I look better now has very little to do with growing my hair.)
Mama picked up my sister Amy’s badge too, so Amy wouldn’t have to go all the way to the Sheraton when she got there the next day. When we walked out of the big ballroom, there were more volunteers yelling about the exits. Even though the exits are clearly marked. They were making big gestures toward the door and shouting, “Exit to your left! Here is where you leave! On your left you have the magnificent egress!” OKAY I GET IT. Wow. (Also, it is your left and my right.) I know I keep talking about the volunteers yelling, but it was something that I thought about for a long time and my mom and I actually had a whole conversation about back in our hotel room. Spouting out obvious information as loud as you can in a way that you think is clever really just annoys the heck out of everyone and is basically the same as yelling, “Look at me! I feel important! Everyone pay me some attention!” I went from being annoyed to sort of feeling sorry for these people, because it’s probably the one time in the year that they actually have anyone doing what they say.
But registration only took five minutes, yay! We were back in our hotel room within half an hour of leaving it. And we were registrated! So then we unpacked the essentials.
Yes, we do need two boxes of Cheezits. What? Also, is it weird that I brought plain bread for breakfast? I love bread. Bread is my favorite.
My sister Sara works in Atlanta, so we called her to see if she was still in town and if she wanted to go somewhere for supper, but she wasn’t available, so we ate some of the food we brought and got down to business doing Ronon’s hair. I had thought, when I first started making the costume, that building the gun would be the most tedious process of the whole thing, but that was waaaaay before I started trying to make a wig into dreadlocks. How do people even do this to real hair? I assume they put, like, hair stuff in it to make it do its thing, but the only stuff I brought for the hair was a comb and some thread. So I teased the hair into thick locks and tied it so it would stay.
This took approximately one thousand hours.
Ronon also wears a tiny skull in his hair, and I had sculpted one out of this cheap sculpting stuff I found at Hobby Lobby, so when I was finally done dreading the hair (ha), I superglued the skull into it.
Yeah, so, it glows in the dark? That was an embarrassing discovery the next day.
I remember we watched reruns of Bones on the hotel TV while the hair was happening. And my mom watched the most recent episode of Doctor Who on her netbook. And we could hear people running around whooping outside of our room. Like, literally, people running around going, “Whoop, whoop!” It was like a typical night in student housing. I will probably never understand what compels a person to go “Whoop, whoop!” Is it just excitement? Because when I get excited I just grin really big. But I guess we can’t all be whoopers. We’d go deaf at conventions.
Since Amy wasn’t going to be able to join us that night - she had to teach a night class and then drive to Atlanta from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, so she decided to spend the night with Sara and then join us at the hotel in the morning - and I wanted to be Ronon as soon as I got up in the morning, I told my mom she was going to have to draw on my Ronon tattoos instead of Amy. She freaked out about it because for some reason she has this idea like she can’t draw (?) and so we stayed up pretty late so she could go ahead and draw my arm tattoo on with a Sharpee marker. I’m glad we went ahead and did it that night rather than waiting until the morning because it took a long time, although I will admit that I accidentally marker-smudged the sheets during the night while I slept. Don’t tell the Hyatt. I’m sure that marker smudges were the least of their sheet problems by the end of con.
Friday: The Great Jen-derswap, and Zombies Kidnap my Sister
So maybe I’ll talk about Dragon*Con now, how about?
The first thing I wanted to do on Friday was a William Shatner panel that started at 10am. I knew from two years ago that the line for Bill’s panel (I call him Bill because we are lovers) would be super long and probably get cut off before the end, so I wanted to go stand in line pretty early. But also I wanted to be Ronon before we left the hotel room, so I forced myself out of bed at about 7:30am to start getting ready.
One thing I like about my Ronon costume is that it’s pretty much regular clothes. By which I mean that I didn’t have to wear a blue bodysuit and paint my face like I did last year. I just put on the clothes like a normal person. One thing I didn’t like, however, was the beardiness of it. And the ’stache. Seriously, the mustache I ordered was called “the man mustache” and actually covered my top lip the first time I put it on. I had to trim it a LOT. And also: I’m not a big fan of wearing wigs. Especially in Georgia, where September feels like the way other places feel in July.
That said, I put it on and looked AMAZING.
WHY HALLO THERE I AM RONON DEX.
AND HERE IS MY MOOSTACHE.
AND HERE IS MY NECK TATTOOOOOOO
I had my mom go over my arm tattoo with the marker again when I got out of the shower because it had faded a little, but it didn’t take nearly as long to go over it again as it had to draw it on in the first place, thank goodness. We only did two rows of triangles (sidebar: they actually represent shark fins! Isn’t that interesting?) instead of nine because most of the rows would’ve been covered up by my sweet, sweet gauntlet anyway.
So I keep trying not to think about the fact that Jason Momoa is one of the hottest men alive and I really wanted to be him, but also I can’t help feeling a little let down that I wasn’t as hot a man as he is, you know? I mean, I know I am short and chubby and female. But for some reason I had this idea like I was going to be this smokin’ hot guy as soon as I had on my Ronon costume. I do think I looked FANTASTIC, but it was a little disappointing to put on the costume and still have breasts.
Prettiest transgender alien ever. Look at my gun!
For everything you ever wanted to know about how I made my Ronon Dex costume and props, check out [ how I made my Ronon Dex costume and props], which I posted previously in this journal.
We made it down to the Shatner panel line by about 8:45, and it wasn’t too terribly long yet, but we still had to stand outside of the hotel. Luckily it wasn’t that hot outside yet, and we were standing in a little alcove that was shady. There was a girl standing in line ahead of us who was also dressed in a Stargate costume, and we acknowledged each other with a super-cool little nod of acknowledgement. A couple of minutes later I walked over and asked if I could have my picture made with her and she said yes.
I never realized how girly I stand until I saw this picture where I’m supposed to be standing manly. (“Standing Manly” is the name of my Cher cover band.)
My mom took the picture, and then she also took one with the girl’s camera. A few minutes later, my sister Amy walked up dragging her suitcase, and we gave her a key to our hotel room so she could go upstairs and put her stuff away before joining us in the line. She and my mom were both wearing their Captain Hammer groupie shirts because the Doctor Horrible sing-along was that night. I had brought my groupie shirt as well, but I wasn’t wearing it yet. (Obviously.)
There was a really annoying guy standing in line in front of the Stargate girl. He was doing that thing I was talking about earlier, where people announce stupid things in a way they think is clever. It was sad.
By the time Amy came back to join us in the line again, we had moved inside and were standing right near the room where the panel was supposed to be. I hadn’t realized this at the time, but apparently there’s a D*C morning show that airs live on D*C TV in the convention hotels every morning, and they were filming it in that room. So there were a lot of people already in there before the panel, watching them film the morning show thing. They started letting the Shatner line inside before the show was over, though, so the people who were there for that and then just stayed got really good seats.
Oh, and in the line before we went in, Amy wanted to take a picture of me as Ronon, but she wanted me to make a Ronon face. So I did this.
Turned out more like Gimli the dwarf. “AND MY ACKSH!” I think next year Amy should be Legolas and I can be Ronon again.
Amy said she sent me all her pictures from the con, but I specifically remember taking a picture of her and our mom at this point with her camera. But where is THAT picture, huh Amy? WHERE?
Lies ruin relationships. I’m just saying.
All day on Friday, every time we went to a panel, I had to get my mom or my sister to take my sword out of the loops holding it onto my vest before I could sit down, and then I had to get one of them to put it back in as we were leaving. Not terribly convenient, but we were going for looks, not practicality. When I sat down in the Shatner panel next to Amy, she turned to me and said, “Do you have a skull in your head?” And I said, “Everyone does.” Because I am a smartass.
$#*! My Captain Says
I. Love. This. Man.
Can I just say, Bill Shatner is 80 years old, and I would totally still tap that? Who is not in love with this man? I DEMAND TO KNOW WHO. And I swear he stopped aging at least twenty years ago. I wish we’d had better seats so I’d have better pictures, but I did get my picture made with him the next day, so I guess that’s all right.
Yep, he’s definitely my boyfriend.
The first question for Bill was submitted by a fan in Germany and asked by the moderator. The question was, “Now that Leonard Nimoy is retired, what are you going to do?” Which I thought was funny because it sounds like Bill only does things with Leonard. But he gave a pretty great answer about what close friends they’ve been for so long and how much he was going to miss doing conventions with him. (The last time I met Bill, [ Leonard actually crashed our picture].)
Bill didn’t sit down at all the whole time he was doing his panel. He walked back and forth across the stage in front of the table he was supposed to be sitting behind - I figure it was to be closer to me. A couple of times, he squatted down to look at this spider thing someone had put on the edge of the stage. He’s so active and sharp for an 80-year-old! And endlessly entertaining. I could listen to him go on for hours (I just typed house). He told us the story about how he kept stealing and hiding Leonard’s bicycle on the set of Star Trek TOS, and how once he hung it from the rafters on the stage and had the lighting guys put one spotlight on it, which is the same story he told at D*C a couple years ago, and it was still very funny!
He talked a little bit about the documentary he made called The Captains, where he interviewed the other people who played Star Trek captains. He said that he had to fly to London and LA and Canada and some other places, and he was concerned because he always has trouble going through airport security because he has a metal hip and the security people insist on groping him, so before he made the movie, he called the President of a particular airline to see if he could borrow a plane, and it turned out the guy was a Trekker. He was immediately like, YES TAKE MY PLANE! :D
This is a picture of one of the big screens that was partway back from the stage so the people in the back could see the man I’m they’re we’re in love with.
A guy asked Bill about what it was like to play a woman in “Turnabout Intruder,” which was the last episode of the original ST series. Bill said, “I don’t remember.” Ha. Of course he doesn’t remember; it was three hundred years ago. But then he started talking about ideals and the essence of something, and how you feel in a perfect moment, like when you hit a golf ball and it follows the exact arc you intended, or when you fire an arrow from a longbow and it hits the target (he used to go bowhunting a lot), or like when you’re riding a horse, and you and the horse are in perfect sync with each other. He said that playing a woman well was like capturing the essence of a perfect moment like that. Of course when he started talking about “the essence of a woman,” a bunch of people in the audience snickered, and he sort of laughed too and was like, “It’s improvisational speaking! You never know where it’s going to go.”
And then we had sex.
One other funny story he told had to do with learning a voice recognition program so that when he wrote his books, he wouldn’t have to type, because he hates typing and isn’t very good at it. The creator of the program was showing him how to use it, and so Bill said into the mic something like, “I’m Bill Shatner and I’m standing here with the inventor, Ray [I forget his name].” But the computer typed, “I’m Bill Shatner and I’m standing here with the inventor, Ray Shjhgnlsjeda.” Or something. Anyway, it was obviously misspelled. So Ray goes, “Say delete,” and Bill says, “Delete,” and then the computer types, “Delete.” So Ray goes, “Say Delete delete,” and Bill says, “Delete delete,” and then the computer types, “Delete delete.” Bill said the whole thing just degenerated from there until the inventor started to cry. Poor dude. Heh.
Oh, and also, Bill said when he first started doing conventions he assumed everyone “was here to see... me!” But then he did a documentary about a Star Trek convention, and he realized everyone was actually there to see each other. Which was humbling. But I think both reasons are correct - fans do like to meet up with each other at cons, but they also want to see the Shat. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t?
I think we walked out of that panel talking about how much we liked Bill Shatner. He’s seriously so fun to listen to. Here is an example:
Click to viewFried eggs and onions.
That clip didn’t come from the Friday morning panel, but it did come from Dragon*Con this year, so I wanted to include it. It’s so sweet! (And yes, I do stalk youtube for tidbits like this after I get home from cons.)
The next round of panels started at 11:30, so we had about half an hour to get to where we were going next. I had marked on my schedule that there were two panels at 11:30 that we’d want to see: True Blood and Back to the Future. Amy really wanted to go to the True Blood panel, which had Kristen Bauer, Jim Parrack, Joe Manganiello, and Charlaine Harris on it (the actors who play Pam, Hoyt, and Alcide, and the creator of the book series the show is based on) because True Blood is her favorite current TV show. But the Back to the Future panel had Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson on it, and there were only going to be two BttF panels all con, and they were both going to happen at the same time as True Blood panels anyway, so we decided to skip this True Blood panel and go to the Back to the Future one instead. Which means we had to high-tail it to the Westin.
The Peachtree Ballroom, which was the only room in the Westin where we attended any panels, was on the eighth floor. You walk into the Westin on the fifth floor, so we went up the elevator to floor 8 to get in line. Well, the line at that time was already so long that it zigzagged all around the eighth floor, down the stairs, all around the seventh floor, and down the stairs again. We actually got in line on the sixth floor, and it was pretty confusing, because the line seemed to branch into two different directions, and we went left while some of the people who were behind us went right, and I don’t think those people ended up getting in.
Also while we were racing down the line to try and find the back of it, this one girl stopped me for a picture. Her friend was calling for her to hurry up, and she was like, “But I HAVE to get a picture of RONON!” I pointed my gun at her.
I actually heard my name called a lot while I was dressed as Ronon. Well, heard his name called, I mean. People would go, “Hey, Ronon!” and wave. I had a lot of people acknowledge my costume without wanting pictures, but there were some who wanted pictures too. But mostly what would happen is I would pass someone and hear them say to whomever they were with, “Hey, check it out, that was Ronon.”
When we finally got to the back of the line, I took a picture of Mama and Amy. They were doing the weird stuff, as you can see.
You can also see the people in line on the next floor up.
And then Amy took another picture of me.
This is me trying to stand more manly than before. (“Stand More Manly” is the name of my k.d. lang cover band.)
Back to the Future
Great Scott! (Give my regards to your mother.)
When we got into the Peachtree ballroom, the entire room was filled all the way to the back, and we had to sit on the very back row. They turned away a lot of people who were still in line behind us, but then they started adding more rows of chairs behind the back rows. Unfortunately, since a lot of people had already been turned away, most of the chairs they added in the back didn’t fill up. Not sure why they hadn’t added all the extra chairs before letting people in... it would have made more sense, right?
Right as we were sitting down, someone said that Lea Thompson got held up somewhere and wasn’t going to make it to this panel but would be at the other Back to the Future panel. It was disappointing, because we already knew we wouldn’t be going to the other Back to the Future panel because it was also up against True Blood, so we wouldn’t be able to see Lea at all during the con.
Christopher Lloyd and James Tolkan. Since this panel was in the Alternate History track, the moderator was kind of steampunky.
Amy and I weren’t sure we were going to enjoy the panel without Lea there, but it turned out to be kind of interesting. Christopher said that the third Back to the Future movie was his favorite one, which I’d always suspected, because he got to ride horses and have a love interest. The coolest thing he said about it, though, was that they spent two nights shooting the dance scene, and ZZ Top was the band at the dance, and in between takes, they would just sit there and jam for all the cast and crew. Sounds pretty awesome.
I don’t know if it was because Christopher and James were both pretty old, or if it was because of where they were sitting, or what, but neither one of them could hear the questions being asked. Every time someone asked something, they would both turn and look at the moderator, and he’d repeat the question. At one point, someone asked if they’d had any suspicion that Crispin Glover wasn’t going to be able to stick around for all three BttF movies, and the moderator paused for a second and then said, “Are you asking if they knew he was crazy?”
Also, someone asked if Christopher Lloyd would ever consider buying a Delorean, and he said no way because they looked good but they kept falling apart. He said they’d had five different Delorean stunt cars, and the stunt drivers were always taking parts from the other cars to fix theirs and that they hated driving them. So there go my plans to buy the sweetest looking car ever made. Guess I’ll just have to keep my flux capacitor in my mom’s Buick.
I think Amy’s favorite part of the panel was when this woman told Christopher that his character on Taxi, Reverend Jim, was her mother’s favorite character and that a particular song that was playing during one of his scenes always reminded her mother of her. She went on to ask a question, I think, and then Christopher answered it, and just as she was walking away from the mic, he said to her, in this sort of sinister voice that wasn’t meant to be sinister but sounded that way anyway because it was Christopher Lloyd’s voice saying it: “Give my regards to your mother.” It sounded so creepy, haha! He was just trying to be nice, but it was really weird, and Amy and I cracked up and like, cackled from the back row. I almost choked on a peanut M&M. Of course, Amy kept saying that for the rest of the weekend. But the way Amy is, is that she wants to repeat something that’s funny, but she’ll forget exactly how it’s worded, so all weekend she was saying things like, “Tell your mom I send my regards” and “Regard your mother from me,” but in like this really creepy, low voice. This is probably not funny to anyone else, but even thinking about it now is making me giggle.
Here is a link to the first part of Friday’s [Back to the Future Panel]. I think there are three complete parts, uploaded by the same person.
After this panel, Mama and Amy and I agreed that it was good, but that we were all really distracted by the couple sitting in front of us. For the entire panel, the woman had her arm around the man, and her hand was like, playing with his hair and stroking his ear. The whole time! It looked like she was giving him [oo-mox]. I would be so annoyed if someone did that to me while I was trying to listen to someone else talk. Also, it looked weird. Like, her fingers dancing on his ear looked weird. And! There was another couple two rows ahead of them who were doing the same thing. I wonder if they demonstrate alien PDA everywhere they go or just at sci-fi cons.
So the Back to the Future panel ended around 12:30, and I had marked five different things I wanted to do at 1:00. GAH. So we skipped Battlestar, Buffy, The Guild (with Wil Wheaton), and a Gareth David Lloyd Q&A in favor of going to the Being Human panel at the Marriott. We chose this because 1. All three of the stars of the US version of Being Human were supposed to be there; 2. I’m slightly in love with Sam Huntington, and 3. The only other Being Human panel at D*C this year was in direct conflict with a Eureka panel that had Wil Wheaton on it, which I knew I had to go to.
I grabbed a copy of [The Daily Dragon] from an information booth on the way out of the Westin. That’s the newsletter that comes out every morning of the con, which lists all time changes and cancellations and additions. This one had listed every panel Eliza Dushku was going to be at (she wasn’t listed in the program guide because she was added as a guest at the last minute), and I was pleased to see that I had already planned to go to two panels that she’d been added to. What was sad to me was that Misha Collins and Jim Beaver had been removed from the Supernatural panel that day at 2:30, right after the Being Human panel. :(
When we got to the Marriott to line up for Being Human, the line was curving out of the building and winding around some big potted plants (but hadn’t started going down the stairs yet, which meant we would be able to see without looking at the screens in the Atrium Ballroom). Almost as soon as we lined up, a big guy came over and asked for my picture, so I drew my gun. After he snapped the photo, he said, “I think beards are sexy!” And I said, “Me too!” And then he grinned really big, which was when I noticed his beard and felt awkward because what I’d actually meant was that I thought MY beard was sexy.
Being Human
We’re gonna hug it out.
My sister had never seen or heard of Being Human before, so I gave her a brief synopsis of the first season once we sat down. The basic idea is that a male werewolf, a male vampire, and a female ghost are roommates, and they’re trying to act normal and live normal human lives despite their supernature. The premise seemed kinda cutesy to me when I first started watching, and I didn’t really get into the first few episodes, but towards the end of the season, I was really liking it. I love Sam Huntington! He plays Josh the werewolf, who is so adorable and funny (if a bit neurotic). Sam Witwer plays the vampire Aidan, and Meaghan Rath plays Sally the ghost. I don’t love Sally, and I think Aidan is kinda funny-looking, but the chemistry between the actors is pretty good, and the dialogue is sharp (mostly). I’ll admit I probably wouldn’t have continued watching after the first four or five episodes if it hadn’t been for my mom talking about how much she liked it and knowing that all three of them would be at D*C this year, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I’ll definitely watch season two when it comes out.
We had really good seats in the panel - on the first row of the second section, right in front of where the video camera was set up. We could see perfectly, but I still had to put on my glasses, which was kind of embarrassing to do as Ronon. I kept reminding myself that Jason Momoa often wears glasses in real life, which made me feel a little bit better about wearing them during all the panels.
Anyway, the first thing Sam Huntington said when he came out was, “Witwer’s not here, guys,” in this apologetic way, and then a guy shouted out, “We came to see you!” Which, heck yes. And then Sam pointed at the guy and said enthusiastically, “I came to see YOU, sir! Just you. We’re gonna hug it out.”
Sam was so cute in his little hat!
He said that there had been some confusion about the filming and pick-up schedule for Witwer, and he’d had to work until six that morning, which is why he wasn’t there, but he’d be there for his next panel. My mom was disappointed that Sam Witwer wasn’t there for the Friday panel, but like that one guy said, I came specifically to see Sam Huntington, so I wasn’t super upset or anything. The first thing I ever saw him in was an episode of Veronica Mars, and I’ve thought he was so cute ever since then. He also played Jimmy Olsen in Superman and was in the movie Fanboys - again with Kristen Bell. He was so entertaining and positive and polite and funny during the panel. He actually fielded most of the questions. Luckily, there was a moderator there to keep the discussion going for the whole panel, because they ran out of fan questions pretty early on, but it never seemed to get awkward, and they filled the time with interesting conversation. You can tell Sam and Meaghan are friends, which I love seeing. (It’s weird in a panel when you can tell [the actors don’t get along].)
Someone asked if Meaghan was Latina. She’s not.
There have only been thirteen episodes of Being Human so far, and according to the actors, the US version has stuck pretty close to the UK version, but in the second season, they start to veer off in a completely different direction. That doesn’t mean much to me because I have never watched the UK version, but they seemed pretty excited about it, although they admitted that none of them had watched the UK version either because they didn’t want it to influence their portrayal of the characters of Sally, Josh, and Aidan. I think that makes sense. They couldn’t say much about the second season without spoiling everyone, but Sam said he was really excited about where Meaghan’s character was going. They also said that since the house burns down at the end of season one, there are some fun burnt props they get to have in their new place in season two, including this one weird statue that didn’t burn up and that none of them could tell whether it was a cat or a dog. Heh.
A fan asked them something like, “If you were us, who would you be here to see?” And Sam was like, “We ARE you!” and told a story about how he and Meaghan had been in the elevator earlier when one of the True Blood guys got on and she totally freaked out. Sam was all trying to get her to talk to him, but she wouldn’t because she was too embarrassed. And she was like, “He looked so hot.” I told Amy it must have been Joe Manganiello (Alcide), but it turns out she was fangirling over Jim Parrack (Hoyt), haha. Sam said he would be that way over Sigourney Weaver or anyone from the Alien(s) movies.
Something I found really interesting about this panel was how positive and enthusiastic both Meaghan and Sam were about the SyFy network, and how SyFy has been so supportive of their show. I’m wondering if SyFy is so supportive of them because they are the only sci-fi show still airing on the network that hasn’t been canceled yet. Or maybe Sam and Meaghan only think SyFy is being supportive because they haven’t been canceled yet. Or, hell, maybe SyFy really is being great to them. It was just so weird to hear that since so many other panels I’ve gone to at cons had the actors really bashing SyFy as a terrible network to air on. But apparently the wife of the president of the network is a huge fan of the show, so maybe they’re getting so much support because he has a personal interest in it.
You can watch Friday’s [Being Human panel] on youtube, which I recommend doing just so you can see Sam Huntington being so likeable.
After the panel was over, Sam and Meaghan hung around talking to fans who had walked up to the stage to meet them. I think that’s so nice of them.
I told Amy to run up and take a picture.
I had been planning to go to the Supernatural panel at 2:30, but since Misha and Jim had (according to the Daily Dragon) canceled their appearances at that panel, I didn’t see much point in going anymore. It was just going to be Samantha Ferris (Ellen), Mark Sheppard (Crowley), Julie McNiven (Anna), and Christopher Heyerdahl (Allistair). I’d already seen Mark Sheppard several times at other cons, and I was going to see Chris in a Sanctuary panel later on and Julie in another Supernatural panel, so I spent some time agonizing over which panel to go to instead of the Supernatural one. There was a Stargate Atlantis Q&A with David Nykl that I was interested in and a Boondock Saints panel with both Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus that I wanted to go to as well. But Amy and Mama wanted to - get this - eat lunch.
Excuse me? Lunch? At con? What do you call all those M&Ms we ate earlier, hmm? They were peanut! That’s almost like meat, amiright? But I took pity on my hungry family and gallantly led them toward food (read: grumbled as I followed them to the consuite).
Oh, and when we came out of the Being Human panel, a Captain Hammer cosplayer wanted his picture made with the groupies. They were photobombed by Doctor Horrible, but you can hardly see him. He’s in the back shaking a menacing fist.
<---I’m standing over there being surly and holding their stuff.
Lunch
As if we need food to survive or something.
So the Consuite is located in a hidden corner of the third floor of the Hyatt. I have to believe that most people don’t know about this place because there’s no way they could feed all 40,000 conventioneers every day, so I like to think of it as a secret hideout with free food and drinks. Kind of like the kitchen in your own home. This year they had Pepsi products instead of Coke products in the fountain, but I forgive them because it’s all free and I kind of like Mountain Dew Code Red.
I’m trying to remember what they were serving at the time that we showed up. I know they had cheese cubes on toothpicks and turkey rollups (I think it was turkey; I didn’t get one) and peanut butter and jelly sandwich triangles, and I think they also had tuna sandwich triangles and maybe some kind of sub-sandwich squares? And chips and salsa, because they always have chips and salsa, no matter when you go. I also picked up a fortune cookie.
Connected to the Consuite, there’s a room full of tables with a TV that shows cartoons, so we took our food in there to eat and watch Transformers. The table we sat at had something wet spilled across it. This is when I found out that besides making any sort of facial expression involving the lower half of your face, it is also extremely difficult to eat while wearing a glued-on beard and mustache. (I just want you to know that any time I type “mustache,” I am pronouncing it “moostache” in my head.) Because it was so difficult to actually get pieces of food inside my mouth without my facial hair coming unglued, I didn’t eat much. I ate like five cheese cubes and a pb&j triangle, and I deposited a few chips with salsa into my mouth like coins going into a slot, but that’s pretty much it. Oh, and my mom had carried some Cheezits in her backpack in a ziplock bag, so I ate some of those because they were easier to get in my mouth. At the time, I remember wondering how men ate this way, but then it occurred to me that their facial hair isn’t glued on; they just have hairy faces. Which is a whole different kind of weird.
While we were eating, we saw a guy dressed as Superman who looked exactly like the Christopher Reeve version. Seriously, it was uncanny. The hair! With the curl! Too bad we didn’t take a picture.
After we were done eating (or wishing we could, in my case), we had over an hour before the next panel we wanted to go to, which started at 4:00. It was a Eureka/Warehouse 13 crossover panel, and, oddly, we had absolutely nothing else conflicting with it on my neurotic color-coded schedule. I figured it was as good a time as any to go buy my Misha Collins photo op ticket for the next morning, so we headed over to the Hilton to do that.
The Supernatural folks and the Sanctuary and Stargate Universe folks were all, for some reason, being handled by different representation from everyone else, which meant that they were signing autographs in a separate room beside the Walk of Fame, where everyone else was, and they were also having their photos made by a different photographer from the one everyone else used. Most of the Stargate people were set up this way last year too (except Paul McGillion) and so I ended up not getting my picture taken with any of them because it was too confusing. But this year I was determined to meet Misha Collins, so I headed over to the Illumina Productions booth to see what I had to do.
I got in line behind a guy who was being helped by someone sitting at the booth. I was just standing there waiting patiently when a man wearing a kilt tapped me on the shoulder. As soon as I turned around, he demanded, “What do you want?” Uh. Aren’t you the one who tapped me, guy? What do YOU want? I was confused for a second because I had no idea how I was supposed to respond, and then I saw him look pointedly at the booth and back to me, so I said, “I’m trying to buy a photo op for tomorrow.” So the guy goes, “Well, she can help you.” And he didn’t literally push me forward, but I got the distinct feeling he wanted to, so I hurried out of the line and up to another person sitting at the table. Awkward.
I bought Misha’s Saturday morning at 10:15 photo op, and they gave me a ticket for it. It was $60, which I thought was a bit excessive considering that many of the guests do photos for about $30. And later I bought one with two actors in it for $55, but that was from Froggy Photos, not Illumina. I also asked how much it would be to have my photo with Louis Ferreira and David Blue together, but it was $99, so I had to pass on that. (I was able to meet them both later anyway.) The woman who helped me was trying not to laugh the whole time, and I realized as I was walking away that it was probably because my mustache had come loose. Stupid lunch! Someone also asked me for a photo, and I was paranoid that the ’stache was floppy in the photo, but I held it against my skin with my hand for a while, and it sort of grabbed back on.
I found Mama and Amy again, and we took a few minutes to walk through the big Walk of Fame room and check out all the stars. Poor Beau Bridges didn’t have anyone at his table. Amy wanted to go see the True Blood actors, so we peeked at them around their lines. Jim Parrack had a mustache! That was unexpected. Then again, I had one too, which was arguably more unexpected than his. All three of us melted over Joe Manganiello. Er, me and Amy and Mama did, not me and Amy and Jim Parrack. (FYI, the whole time we were at the con, we couldn’t figure out how to pronounce Joe's last name. We’d start out strong and then fade off, like, “Manga... nee... yellow...?” We finally started calling him Joe Mangina-low, which I’m fairly sure isn’t accurate.)
We eventually walked back over to the Marriott to get in line for the 4:00 Eureka panel. When we got there, we were shocked to see how long the line was! I mean, Eureka’s a great show and everything, but I really didn’t expect there to be so many people lining up for the panel. We had to go outside, downstairs, and around two corners of the hotel to get in the line. But of course, Colin Ferguson was there, and he’s the main star (and a hottie), so it makes sense that there would be more people there than expected. Also, Eddie McClintock from Warehouse 13 was there, and I don’t think Warehouse 13 had any panels specifically for it, so those fans came to this panel too. (I have never seen Warehouse 13, but it’s been on my “to watch” list for a while. I’ve heard great things.)
While we waited in this line in the heat, I struggled to keep my mustache from completely detaching itself. I was holding it in place and trying not to make any facial expressions, but my mom and my sister kept making me laugh. They were totally doing it on purpose. And when I was like, stop! My moostache! Mama started talking about sweaty lips, and I just lost it. By the time we went into the Atrium Ballroom and sat down, the ’stache had come off, and my face felt naked. Luckily, I had brought a tiny bottle of spirit gum with me, so I was able to reattach it before the panel started. While I was painting my upper lip with the spirt gum, I glanced over and saw Amy staring at me like she was fascinated. Just reapplying my hairy lip, weirdo. Move along, nothing to see here.
Eureka/Warehouse 13 Panel
I hope Colin’s naked scenes make the DVD special features.
I’ve met Colin Ferguson before - I actually had the good fortune to be at the very first convention he and Jordan Hinson ever did - and I got his autograph then, so I didn’t feel especially compelled to meet him this con, but I had forgotten how attractive he is! I don’t just mean physically (although yowza when he pulled his shirt up in another panel), but he is just about the nicest, funniest, most charming guy I’ve ever encountered in real life. (Does this count as real life?) He’s so entertaining and likeable! Seeing him reminds me of those experiments where they gave a bunch of chimps the option of eating food or looking at pictures and videos of the more popular chimps in the group, and the chimps always chose to watch the more popular chimps instead of eat. Which isn’t to say that Colin would be really popular among chimps - although I’m sure he would - but that I would probably choose to watch him rather than eat food. If we were chimps, I mean.
Anyway, I like him.
Colin Ferguson, Chris Gauthier, and Eddie McClintock: A threesome I’d be down with. (And so would Chris, I think.)
I remember that in this panel, Colin said that Eureka being canceled wasn’t SyFy’s fault, but was a decision made by Comcast. (Actually, first he pretended like he’d not heard yet that Eureka had been canceled, heh.) And he said that it was still possible that they could be picked up by someone else. Which was heartening, and everyone cheered. This was the second panel I’d ever gone to where the panelists actually made positive remarks about SyFy as a network. It made me wonder if the network is maybe under new management, or if the actors from certain other shows were just bitter after being canceled.
I can’t remember if it was this panel or the other Eureka panel I went to in which Colin gave a pretty detailed explanation of why shows get canceled and how much SyFy really wanted to hang on to them. I think it’s a good idea to let the fans know this stuff because otherwise they’re going to go around (like me) thinking that SyFy is a big patoot when really SyFy is weeping silently on the inside and trying to put on a brave face while their previously beautiful network is crumbling to the ground around them and being replaced with wrestling and ghost hunting reality shows. For instance.
Someone asked what clips ended up on the cutting room floor that the actors really wished had made it into the episodes they were cut from. Of course I remember this question because Colin said that he likes to do at least one scene in the nude for every episode, and those always seem to not make it into the final cut. (Honestly: can NOT imagine why. Ratings boost, anyone?) Also, they said they were rolling, but the cameras don’t look like they’re on, and no one’s here... and I’m in my trailer... but those were some of my finest performances! And then he said that what usually gets cut for time is the setups to jokes, and that it breaks his heart because it makes the joke less funny when the setup and dramatic pause isn’t there.
Oh, and Eddie said that he likes to wear t-shirts with inside jokes and shoutouts on them while filming Warehouse 13, as like a little nod to his friends. Which I think is sweet. Although Colin pointed out that it was labor-intensive and wouldn’t it be easier to just call them, to which Eddie responded that they don’t answer when he calls, and Colin mimed being stuck inside a TV. :D
The first ten minutes of Friday’s [Eureka/Warehouse 13 Panel] is on youtube, though I don’t know if the uploader is planning to add any more or not. I hope so, because I’d love to watch it again. Instead of eat.
Jordan Hinson was also there. And Kevin Grazier, who works for NASA and is a science consultant for television shows. Is it sad that the most I can say for them was that they were there? I don't remember anything they said. Oh, wait! I remember that someone asked why Eureka sent a manned mission to Titan, and Kevin said one of the producers (or writers, maybe?) called him on the phone, and when he answered, the guy said, "What's cooler than Mars?" And Kevin said, "Titan." And the guy said, "Okay," and hung up. So that's why they went to Titan.
I need to catch up on this show! I remember I used to like it a lot, but I stopped watching after season two because I never knew when it was on. *adds to Netflix cue*
Okay, wow, LJ is telling me the post is too long now, and I'm only halfway through Friday! I haven't even met Shatner and Misha and Brent and the Trueblood and Stargate guys yet! If you want to see
MOAR
click [ this link] for the rest of my report, including Zombie Prom, pictures of Misha and Brent with their dolls, getting to second base with Shatner, and a dirty autograph from David Nykl!