I'll be real from the start: this was one of my least favorite cons, and I've been to seven. Part of it was friend drama that's not going into this blog that put a damper on things, but a lot of it was that there wasn't as much there as in previous years. The schedule was heavily loaded for Saturday but then I had a lot of holes in my schedules the other days. Usually Vikings and Bates Motel take over a parking lot for offsite events. That didn't happen this year. It was a five hour wait for the Game of Thrones Experience which was severely lacking when compared to other years. I spent less than five minutes at Petco Park and deciding I didn't want to do any of the things there... In fact on Wednesday travel buddy Sarah and I went to Petco at 6:30 to see it an hour and a half after it opened, and there was one food truck and one attraction ready for people. Things were still going up around the Gaslamp, things weren't up around the marina... It was really disappointing on that front. Maybe we got spoiled, but I actually weirdly got bored at times when I'm used to having way too much to do.
And then there was stuff Comic Con International couldn't control, like the weather. My weather app said it was 73 degrees. My weather app is a motherfucking liar. It was very hot for San Diego, and humid, with large crowds of people giving off body heat, and no one seemed to be prepared for it. Most pictures of me from the weekend already have my makeup melted off. On top of that, people were littering like animals, and the janitorial staff or whoever cleans up was really bad about doing it, so things smelled and if you had to sit on the ground you had to watch where you were putting yourself, and it all led up to things just feeling gross. It's an anomaly. I've never seen it like that before. I hope I never see it like that again.
But that's enough about the disappointments, though there's a Story in here that I will get to. Despite these things I did have fun, so let me talk about what I did there:
-I stood in line for two hours on blacktop for a raffle to get Star Trek premiere tickets. I didn't even want to go. I was there to help my friends have a shot. A couple eventually got them, after going back. So glad I got the sunburn.
-I actually got out on the exhibit floor twice. It's a great place to take pictures and check out what there is to buy (though I've never spent more than $10 on myself), but usually it gets massively crowded and claustrophobic. It did that Sunday, when I was actually trying to get things for people and I had to flee because it was too much, but Thursday was a good run.
-I took insane amounts of pictures at the Star Wars booths. Like, it's a very real problem.
-While in line at about eight am on Friday, I got a call saying, "I'm watching you right now." One of my friends was in the line next to me.
-Got the hell into Hall H. More on this later.
-Had breakfast at the same place as Sigourney Weaver.
-And Anna Kendrick.
-Took part in a singalong at Animaniacs Live.
-Ate like a normal person! Mostly
-Slept somewhere that wasn't a hotel room floor! Like a hotel room bed!
-Ran into Ralph's just before closing to buy snacks to cram into a Han Solo-in-carbonite lunchbox a friend bought me in LA. For the rest of the weekend I was able to say things like "I have snacks in Han Solo," and "Do you want to look through Han Solo?" and I am bringing him everywhere from now on.
So, the Hall H line. If you've never been, the biggest room in the convention center is Hall H, which holds upwards of 6,000 people. The really big stuff goes in there. The lines are also ridiculously long to get in, and years and years of con staff not stopping people from starting lines earlier than the rules state mean that you might have to wait a day to get in. Which isn't really as bad as it sounds. One person can keep a spot in line for five people, so throughout the day you can have people come by and bring things or take a shift for a few hours so you can wander around, get food, see other things, whatever.
Iiiiiii did not have that that day. My roommates had left around 2:30 am for another room, and at 6 on Friday I woke up with a feeling that I needed to get in line. After ending up in the wrong line- again, line management sucked- I got into the Saturday Next Day Line, where I ended up back on the blacktop that I'd been in for the Star Trek tickets I didn't get. And we didn't really have a system for who would ever relieve me or when people would be around, so I basically sat there for nine hours and tried not to get sunstroke. I made friends with the women in line behind us, which got me a bathroom break and a walk into the Hyatt for blessed air conditioning, where everyone in the ladies' room said things like "You are getting pink." I'm not exaggerating about the sunstroke, either. I came fairly unprepared, not realizing I'd be on blacktop and that I'd be there for that long, so I had water and sunscreen that I applied six times and still got burned. I ended up taking off my shirt because I had a tank top on underneath and wore the shirt as a cape to try and protect more of my skin. Some friends brought me coffee and water. My amazing awesome from Kelsey came to keep me company and took a nap in the parking lot and brought me an umbrella, which I didn't realize I needed until I had it. She is my Hall H superstar.
Also we were next to the poor man's version of the Abigail from Fear the Walking Dead, which played zombie noises for two hours behind me.
I got a two hour break when my roommates got out of their last panel. I got to eat, shower enough to rinse off the sweat and gross, and then after seeing a tweet that they were handing out wristbands, we headed back down to the line. We didn't need to. Someone had mixed up the time they were going out that day and so the line was packed again early. Thanks, person who didn't know what they were doing.
The way this works is: in order to get into Hall H, you need a wristband. People are joined by the friends they were saving a spot for, and everyone has to be in line when they hand them out, or you're out of luck unless you want to try on the actual day of those panels. They have A, B, C, and D, all color coded, and once you get your wristband you can go home and sleep, and the next day you'll be able to rejoin the line at the back of your color group. Or you can sleep in line and keep your space. We had a couple people sleep in line, which was a good call since there were reports that the line people were ignoring the color groups and sending everyone who returned the next morning to the back of the wristband line regardless of where they should be. This was not the biggest problem there.
In the morning we had some really great line guys, who offered to get me coffee if I gave him the money, who walked the lines making sure they knew everyone and just being friendly. Then while I was finally on my break, they had a shift change, and things went to hell. We were next to the ferry, and a bored ferry worker on her phone kept directing people through the Next Day Line to get there. And while the guys in the morning were great, they hadn't roped off the lines. When wristbands started going out and everyone stood, the back of the line smushed so that people couldn't tell where the line actually was in an attempt to jump ahead. I'm pretty sure people were using the ferry misdirect in order to hop in line, and the line monitors we had now did not care. They were utterly clueless. People were getting upset, and while we were checking the @HallHLine twitter account to see where they were on wristbands, we'd see a lot of tweets saying "Security is needed at the parking lot." It was a lot like being in a zombie movie where you can hear it all right behind you but you're just too ahead of it to see what's going on. The mess was very close to us, and I'm very grateful for the feeling that told me to get up and get in line when I did.
Wristbands stopped for a while. The people in charge of the line people, called blinky blinks (they wear blinkers), came over and started questioning things. They pulled people up to just behind us out of the parking lot and next to the boats, where we were given wristbands and then stopped again. And when I say we were close to it, I mean that my group got out of the parking lot, as did the three women behind us, and two guys behind them, and then they shut things down until they got the line settled. And then we were stuck waiting for a little while, until they moved us ahead to get in place to sleep. Now, we really should have been under the tents based on when I got in line, but we weren't. They moved us near them, next to a couple of generators, and then moved us back, right under the lights of the Adult Swim carnival, which I think stayed on all night. And that was where people had to sleep. I stayed long enough to claim a place in line, because they tend to compress things too much and then when people rejoin there's no room, and once people were crawling into sleeping bags, I went back to my room to sleep in a bed.
In my opinion, Hall H was worth it. I'm not sure my roommates would agree, but I may have to do this again next year. We saw the Star Trek anniversary panel (eh), the Aliens anniversary panel (fine), Women Who Kick Ass (good), and then all the movies Warner Brothers presented, and then Marvel. We got wands given to us by Eddie Redmayne, who literally ran around Hall H in a heavy sweater in San Diego in the summer, in order to do some kind of light trick for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. We saw Will Smith take over the Suicide Squad panel, which was fine with me because he's Will Smith. We got the Wonder Woman trailer, which I didn't get to see because at the time I was behind both a tall guy and a tall guy with an Afro. We got Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy footage and saw the casts of movies and by the time we got to Marvel, the energy in the room was amazing because that's what everyone was really here to see, so people went nuts over everything, and then there was a whole mess while we had to wait for them to hand out hats. Which I could have skipped out on but most certainly did not.
So, as a whole, SDCC this year wasn't my favorite. Next year'll be better.
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