Dragon*Con 2009

This is not really so much a review, as much as a recount­ing of lessons learned. Dragon*Con was mostly a fail­ure, but not because the Con wasn’t cool or there wasn’t stuff to do.   I’ll try to work in what things we did see along the way, though.

Plan­ning errors were our biggest down­fall. I knew there were events in down­town Atlanta, but I was actu­ally using this as a way to get away from col­lege foot­ball — specif­i­cally the Alabama/Virginia Tech game. See, my brother Lau­ren was all about Alabama foot­ball, and he was liv­ing in Hokey ter­ri­tory. It was a badge of honor to him to piss off Tech fans around him. This game was some­thing we’d been look­ing for­ward to for most of the year. So, I was glad I’d be at a con­ven­tion and a base­ball game, to avoid that first hard game of the sea­son.  Yeah, guess where they played? The Geor­gia Dome, because that’s a nat­ural venue for that game. But you already knew this, didn’t you? This is what I get for avoid­ing the news. I started see­ing Vir­ginia Tech jer­seys every­where. It was like a sledge­ham­mer to my gut.  An emo­tional booby trap.

There were other issues, of course. We shouldn’t have taken the kids, or should have taken them straight to the day­care ser­vices. There were a mil­lion peo­ple there, and the kids were well behaved, but con­stantly on the verge of being lost or tram­pled. I shouldn’t have allowed us to get dou­ble booked with the ball game, because we had the bright idea of avoid­ing the 10 min­utes a block traf­fic and hoofed it to Turner Sta­dium. We should have tat­tooed a map of down­town Atlanta to one of us. I mean, there were henna artists right there. They’d have done it for no more than $20.

The line was long, and we should have brought more cash to pay for tick­ets. That would have saved us two hours. In fact, we should have started out with cash and credit, because we finally found our­selves a park­ing space and it took credit.  All in all, we missed out on a hugely fun time because the expec­ta­tions were too high, we didn’t plan well enough, and we kept wan­der­ing in cir­cles and try­ing to keep the kids from being bored to death. Also, because I kept burst­ing into tears and apol­o­gis­ing for being an angry, bro­ken person.

I hate that I don’t have much shiny stuff to tell every­one, but I know peo­ple want to know what I saw. We went to one pre­sen­ta­tion by Lucas­film, which was very excit­ing for the boys.  It high­lighted the upcom­ing Sea­son 2 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the Old Repub­lic MMORPG com­ing out soon. That looked really wicked.

The cos­play was col­or­ful and var­ied.  For a bunch of intro­verts, I saw tons of skin and self-confidence.  There were steam­punk, anime, comic book, period, and any other types of cos­tumes you can think of.  There were even two Cora­lines that I saw.  No, we don’t have a lot of pic­tures.  Refer back to me try­ing to keep the kids from being tram­pled and gen­eral crowd panic.

There were some really cool ven­dors.  We wanted to find some dice, but there were no Game­Science any­where.  In fact, the only dice to be had were Ches­sex.  I wouldn’t be caught rolling those things, but they didn’t have a decent col­lec­tion of dice­bags, either.  That was a big dis­ap­point­ment.  Maybe next year I can rep­re­sent Game­Science, and if I learn to sew or leather­work between then and now, I can pro­vide those as well.  There was cer­tainly a mar­ket for them that wasn’t filled.

There were some spec­tac­u­lar artists, my favorite being Kevin Dyer.   His art­work is made of cast paper, and he relies heav­ily on Celtic themes.  I’ve never seen any­thing quite like it, but I loved all the Celtic Knots and drag­ons and trees. I want one of every­thing, and a house big enough to house it along with my Ansel Adams prints that I will own one day.

OH!  I do have one encounter with some­one nifty in par­tic­u­lar.  I had to say “excuse me” because I almost bumped into this dude in a pink dress, with a white mohawk and black corset that matched his com­bat boots.  I think it was Mal­colm McDow­ell, from A Clock­work Orange and Heroes.  So that did send my tummy swim­ming a bit.  For a few moments I was very excited.  But then Red Chief almost plowed into him and I thought the earth was going to swal­low me whole, so we walked away.

Next year we’ll be much more pre­pared, and I’ll regale you with all sorts of sto­ries.  If any­one else went, I’d love to know more of what hap­pened around the Con.  I know that there were four build­ings and days of events, so we missed out on a lot.  I’d love to hear about it.