SDCC 2017: The (belated) post-con rundown

I'm not big on recovery days after a vacation. There are ways to ease back in without taking up more vacation or sick time that can be used for later trips, at least if you're me. And yet I had to take a sick day on Tuesday because my god, this con took it out of me. I feel like I'm still recovering.

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.

Get It Done Day

I'm nine days out from going to California. Yay! Of course, this has also been a little nervewracking, for reasons.

Long story short, I was going to stay with a friend but that fell through, which kind of left me scrambling to find somewhere else. Well, I found a decently-priced, well-rated hotel in Bell where the staff responds to all the reviews so you know they're paying attention, and I got it through Booking.com, which means I get free cancellations/changes until the day before I get there. So in the off chance that I find somewhere else cheaper (or free) I'm not obligated to stick with it. But to be honest, I do like the freedom it affords me, especially since I know I'm going to be all over the place seeing people and trying to fit in everything possible that I can in four days. (How much In N Out is too much In N Out?)

And today's what I'm calling Get It Done Day. Sunday is my only full free day to do laundry and run errands and do things before a 10-day trip, so I sat down this morning and made myself a list of all the things I need to do, and I'm doing what I can. Mostly the logistical stuff.

I got my car rented. This was a Process because I was doing price comparisons anytime I got free time today, and while the cheapest was Fox Rent-A-Car out of LAX, the reviews were pretty scary and talked about long wait times, and especially when I have to leave LA at a certain time after dropping off the car, I'd rather spend a little extra if it means I'm not wasting time and risking it costing more if I have to get a new car or I miss out on my train. I found that booking a car with Avis through Priceline Mobile was the most cost effective way to go, and turned out not to be that much more expensive than what I would have paid with Fox.

After dropping off my car I'll catch a cab or Uber (I'm not sure how the LAX area does this now, so that's a thing to research) to Union Station to catch a train to San Diego. I know from experience that the station there is in walking distance to the hotels, because I've taken the train down quite a few times and been part of a large group of people wheeling their luggage to the downtown hotels. Unfortunately it means I'm getting in too late to bug certain San Diego friends, but the great thing about how I do SDCC is that I find ways to bug my friends anyway.

I'm packing, I've gone through and figured out what travel sizes I need, I'm prepared on things like backpacks and water bottles and camera batteries... So I'm getting there. It's going to cost a lot more than I wanted it to, but I can manage it, and it's a good thing my job requires overtime.

SDCC prep begins!

This is about to become an SDCC blog for a bit, sorry.

We're a month out from San Diego Comic Con, and right about now is where it's very easy to get obsessive about it. Checking Twitter (when you follow the right accounts, shout outs to @SD_Comic_Con, @sdccgotgirl, @Crazy4ComicCon, @ParksAndCons, @HallHLine and @Ballroom20Line) means seeing more and more tweets about what's coming, who's coming, what people want to do, what we know of the schedule... It gets hard to escape if you're online. And that makes it exciting.

Badges have shipped. Usually at the sale you can buy tickets for yourself and a couple other people, and then you'd pick the badges up onsite on Wednesday before the con. This year they shipped all the badges to the person who bought them, which might work out okay? I had a friend from one group buy for a friend from another group so there was some coordination in getting it sent to where it needs to be, and it'll take more coordination to make sure people can meet up on Wednesday to get their correct badges, but it can be managed. We'll see how well it works out.

The schedule is starting to come together. The full schedule comes out two weeks before, but things get announced early, and information trickles in. I already have some idea of what I will be doing on what day. There are some things they don't change from year to year. Certain panels always get the same time and same room, so I know that even though I gave up on The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones I'll probably sit through the panels while waiting for one I really want to see. Star Wars Day is always Friday. Sunday is family day, so younger-aimed fare goes then. My one big thing so far is that I don't really want to spend all my time waiting for one panel. Getting into something like Marvel or Star Wars requires a lot of waiting. You have to be in line to wait, you have to be there for a certain amount of time to get your wristbands, you have to sit in a room all day waiting for one specific panel that probably comes on at 5 pm, leaving others who really want to see the stuff before that in the cold. I'd much rather get out on the floor or walk around taking pictures of cosplayers or check out some of the offsite stuff, and there are ways to do that if you have a group in line that will allow you shifts so that people can leave and do their own things for a while before returning to let you do the same. But waiting in Hall H all day, with little food and sitting in uncomfortable chairs for eight hours straight can be brutal. Moreso if you try to do it two days in a row, which I might do. And if by chance I can't get into the room, then there's already plenty of stuff I'm interested in seeing instead.

Otherwise my California schedule is coming together a little, and even though nothing is going on the weekend I am there I'm still trying to find stuff. I'm also trying to figure out when to go to San Diego, since I kind of want to go on Tuesday but Amtrak is not being helpful. I'm close enough to it to start packing (though first I need to empty out my suitcase from when I moved), and I'm training to spend a lot of time walking, and and and and and.

Starting to get excited. It's pretty neat.

Hotelpocalypse: The Return

Hotel emails started going out for SDCC today, and it is, as they say, a total clusterfuck.

What we were told was that we'd be randomized in the waiting room and then let in to select our hotels, and then what we got depended on either what time we were let into the room, or what time we hit submit on the form. Either way, you should have some idea of what you were going to get. Aaaaaand then today happened. Emails started going out around 10:00 CST, and we hunkered down to wait for ours.

It would have helped a ton if they'd let us know what the process was actually going to be. Or if Comic Con International ever once enforced any rules or policies they actually put down but let's be real, that will never happen. We were left watching Twitter and trying to figure out based on people's timestamps from Tuesday. Last year they did it by hotel, so while we were still waiting for emails at 8 pm PST, it meant that we were just in the batch that got the Manchester Grand Hyatt. There was no such organization today. There were people who'd gotten in very early on Tuesday who were getting hotels in Mission Valley. Someone who got ushered in to fill out the form without having to wait ended up at Town & Country. As the day went on and thousands of us went without emails, the more it sank in that they'd completely lied about how they'd done their process. People on Twitter would talk to OnPeak, the company doing the bookings, and get different answers, including that it was all done randomly despite what we'd been told up until that point. And once again, this is on a workday, leaving all of us freaking out throughout the day that we wouldn't have anywhere to stay for the vacation we'd already dropped a couple hundred dollars on.

One person in my group got Crown Plaza, which we think is in Hotel Circle. It's on the shuttle route, at least, so while it's not downtown, it's not the worst. Another one in my group, who got in very early on Tuesday, got Town & Country. That's about five miles away, but it wasn't that far a drive when we had to go last year, so okay. Then the emails stopped, and I'd gone from freaking out to accepting that this was what we were getting.

And then Sarah's mom, who'd helped us out by trying from another computer, got the Marriott Marquis and Marina, right next to the convention center. We got extremely lucky, especially since we've stayed there four times in the past. The rest of us got rejection emails, no wait list. We'd watch other people not get anything at all and tell Sarah to hug her mom again. I have friends who have first crack at the other rooms we got, and have our room already reserved.

I know some of my readers here are here for the SDCC talk, and if you didn't get a room, don't lose hope. A lot of hotels go up for resale. People try for rooms in groups, and if they get something then they give the others back. So there's still a chance. Keep an eye out, and good luck.

Finding hotels for my trip this weekend is going to seem so much easier now.

Hotelpocalypse: This is Why Mommy Drinks

Today was the general hotel sale for San Diego Comic Con, or as it's not-so-affectionately nicknamed, Hotelpocalypse. It's the most stressful part of the whole process, in my opinion. Where trying to get tickets is an event that takes up a few hours of your Saturday in the hopes of being able to go, there are plenty of ways to maximize your chances, and that part has never even been an issue for me since I've been going. (Getting everything I want is another story, but at least I get something.) With hotels, you can't really do that. In the past, at 9 am PST, everyone opened a link to the hotel request form. You filled out all the information as fast as you possibly could: contact info, your top six hotel choices from a list, dates of stay, the names of your roommates. It's first come, first serve, so if you couldn't do it in thirty seconds, you probably didn't get anything. And even then, you might not have gotten what you wanted. If you filled out things for six downtown hotels and couldn't get things in as fast as others, you might end up a few miles away, or still end up with nothing.

This year they decided to make things more interesting. Rather than crashing their servers by flooding the site at once, we were given a link to a waiting room, where at 9 am PST it sorted us in random order. It was also made more interesting because it was a workday. At least when they do the ticket sales, it's a Saturday. And while normally Hotelpocalypse is the most stressful minute of my year, it's a minute. Even if I had a ton of work to do, I could sneak online for a few minutes to type and then get offline. This worried me this year, because I have a job that can get super busy and Comic Con International gave us no information on how exactly the new system was going to work or how long it would take. I was worried I'd have to take my lunch at 10:45 my time in order to not be working, I worried I'd spend my whole morning keyed up when I had more important things to do... I typed a lot on an old practice form, trying to get my speed up. Anytime a screen changed I jumped. I warned my (thankfully cool) boss that she was going to see me crazy today, though she denied it. But at one point she came over to ask me a work question and then finished with, "All right, you can go back to staring at the screen now."

So how'd it go? Actually pretty good.

At 9 am PST the waiting room changed to the queue, where we were given numbers. I was 11232, which wasn't great but not as bad as some people I'd seen. My friends got in before me, and some were done before I even started, so that's good. And because the numbers counted down, I was able to do some light work while waiting for my turn and didn't have to take it as my lunch hour. When I got to the form, though, I did screw up a little. You choose your hotels by selecting from a drop down menu, but a lot of them have similar names. If you type "Westin," there's one in the Gaslamp district and one downtown, and so I'd have to scroll down to select the one I wanted. I also made the mistake of typing more than the H in "Hilton San Diego Bayfront" and it took every available H hotel and added it to the remaining spots on my list, which meant I had to remove several and then select what I actually wanted. So I didn't do as well there as I would have liked, but it could have been much worse.

Afterwards it sort of ends up like the SATs, where you and your friends text or message in order to compare where you were and how you did and try to figure out what this means for your chances. There's adrenaline pumping, so as always the best way to deal with that is to babble endlessly with likeminded people about what you all just experienced, as if you all don't already know. And now the next step is to wait until I guess Friday, when emails will go out telling us what, if anything, we managed to get and whether we have a hotel room for our vacation.

SDCC: the only vacation that really fucking makes you work to go.

Change of plans

When it rains, it pours. Or at least it feels that way during a really stressful week at work when you've already worked nine hours and there's no end in sight.

I was going to have a post next week about how SDCC's Hotelpocalypse goes... and then we got the word that they're changing things this year. Usually we just have to completely stress out and then hit the website at a specific time and then try to get your list of six preferred hotels in as fast as humanly possible. If you can't do it in 30 seconds, you probably didn't get anything. This year, they're still doing that, but with a randomized waiting room, so that you have no control over when you get to start typing and you have to be ready to go immediately when you're able. It's also happening on a Tuesday, which means work will be an issue. I'm one of those people who's sort of sickeningly optimistic about change. If I have a life motto, it's probably "Let's see how it turns out first." But I'm really worried about not getting a hotel, or getting something very far away. So that was that.

And then today Nick and I decided that since his job is picking up, we can't do South Dakota. It's too far a drive in a short amount of time with his schedule right now. Which means we're going to try again this summer sometime and we're going to Nashville next weekend instead.

Let's see how it turns out! (See what I did there?)

Five things that happened at SDCC (and one thing that might have)

Open registration for San Diego Comic Con is this Saturday, February 20! If you want to go but don't have a member ID yet, well, you're out of luck this year. There's always next year. I was going to do a whole thing on what SDCC is really like, but frankly SDCC Unofficial Blog covers all this way better than I ever could, so I'm just going to link you as a reference. Instead, I'm going to talk about things that I've seen and done at SDCC.

1. My first year, someone got stabbed at a Harry Potter panel. I heard about it on the train back, when someone near me had been in the room. The story I heard was that someone had left to go to the bathroom, and someone else took their seat, and the first guy responded by stabbing him with a pencil. (After a few years of trying to get into Hall H I understand this better.)

2. My friends have done the Walking Dead Zombie Run a couple times, and once I went along as a spectator. They'd come running through the halls of Petco Park, while we were cordoned off to watch them as they ran by, and could watch below. While we were waiting, there were people acting as zombies wandering around and being menacing at us. I have a zombie phobia, which I think one guy dressed up as an army zombie got, and so every time I turned around he was reaching out to grab me.

It took maybe two minutes for everyone to actually run through the halls, dodging zombies, and as soon as they passed, the staff tried to make us head lower. Since we'd paid to watch the whole thing, we were determined to stay... until they moved the barriers keeping the zombies from us. I turned around and there was the military zombie literally right behind me.

And that was how I learned that in the zombie apocalypse I will be the person that yells "NO!" in a zombie's face and walks away quickly.

3. My first year we were staying at the Embassy Suites, and there were fireworks coming from somewhere one night. We stepped onto the balcony to see them, and someone looked down. So, we might've seen some people getting it on in the hot tub way below us. We're not really sure but saying we did is a way more interesting story.

4. I'm a big fan of Rifftrax, and they were going to be showing their new riff of Sharknado 2 at a theater in Horton Plaza. When my friend and I got there, there were two guys in the middle of the aisle talking. We couldn't really see who they were, so it wasn't until the blond guy said they would be taking pictures in the lobby and headed out that they passed by and I realized it was Ian Ziering. I tried to get a picture as he walked, and my friend Kelsey said, "Just go take a picture with them!" and now I'm only two degrees away from my childhood hero Brenda Walsh.

5. In 2014 I was determined to camp out in the Hall H line to try to get into the Marvel panel, but my friends who were going to do it with me dropped out, and it's not really something I wanted to do alone. But there's a playback room at the Omni, where they play the popular panels from the day, minus the footage and clips and such. I went with one of the aforementioned friends, where we sat through several panels, and got to see the panel we really wanted!

Till they started showing footage of Age of Ultron and suddenly the screen went black! The whole room went full on Skywalker "NOOOOOOOO!" at once, and when they came back to the panel, moderator Chris Hardwick was literally like, "I never say stuff like this but HOLY SHIT THAT WAS THE GREATEST THING I'VE EVER SEEN!"

:/

6. In 2015 my friends and I (mostly them, though I tried) camped out to go to the Star Wars panel. Thanks to some amazing connections, we were certain to get in really easily, and the morning in line was kind of a party. Everyone was excited, if tired, and JJ Abrams sent over coffee and Dunkin Donuts to the line. (Sometimes stars and such will visit the lines overnight, too.)

It was a 5:00 panel, and we got into the room at 10, which meant we spent seven hours sitting in uncomfortable chairs with nothing but nachos and snacks we'd brought down from the hotel room to eat. We were headachey and tired, and before our panel we had decided to go out to dinner immediately following this. Then the panel happened, where they brought out the cast of The Force Awakens, and it was super exciting, and then Chris Hardwick (it is always Chris Hardwick) told us that to close out the panel, they were taking us to a concert. A line of stormtroopers came out onstage and then into the audience, leading all 6,000 of us in the room out of the convention center and down over to the outdoor symphony nearby, with workers at the convention center honking and waving at us as we passed. Once we got there we were given lightsabers for free, and got to watch the San Diego Symphony play the best-known music over clips of the movies. Once the fireworks started going off, you got to see and hear a few thousand grown adults lose their minds like kids, only with more astonished cursing.

And then we ate.

A personal history with San Diego Comic Con

Flights go down in price on Tuesday and Wednesday, so every Tuesday and Wednesday I've been scouring all my apps and airline websites to see what it's looking like. Because while I've so far been talking about Disney here, my other all-encompassing vacation is San Diego Comic Con.

While I'm an unabashed geek, I'm not really a convention person. Friends took me to a couple and it's not really my thing. But while I was living in LA, a whole two hours north of San Diego, I had friends from Illinois and DC going, and I hadn't seen them in a long time. So on a random day in February 2010, I looked at the website and saw that there were still a couple Sunday tickets available, so I bought one. Then in July I took the train down on a Saturday, met up with my friends at the hotel, and spent Sunday mostly walking the floor and taking pictures of cosplayers (to this day, my favorite thing to do there). That day one of my roommates dragged me to buy tickets for next year onsite. At the time I was a little upset that I missed hanging out with another friend for a while, but it was a damn good thing I bought my ticket then, because it was the last time I'd ever be able to do that.

The very next year, a convention that had started getting bigger and bigger started getting massive. The Twilight fans ruined it for everyone by lining up days in advance, making the 6000-seat Hal H extremely difficult to get into for high-profile panels. Registration now meant going into the website to buy tickets in two waves: presale for returning con-goers, and open registration for newbies or for people who didn't get everything they wanted in the first go. There is no guarantee you'll get anything anymore. Everything is bigger, the crowds are awful, comics get outshined by big Hollywood movies...

And I love it.

I have two groups I go with now. I room with the friends I originally started going to see, and spend a lot of time meeting up with others. I've also met people there who fall into the "my life is better for knowing them" category. If I didn't have all of them, maybe I wouldn't go. But maybe I would.

SDCC is not for the faint of heart. Recently I mentioned to a friend that I train for SDCC and she was stunned. But dude, it's a lot of walking, a lot of time either sitting or standing in one place, it's a lot of stress and trying to make a schedule and you spend more days than not waking up at 4 am after going to sleep at midnight. So yeah, I train. I'll spend a solid hour on the treadmill in the weeks leading up to the con, I'll slowly cut back on sleep so it's not as much of a shock when I get there. I'll also drink every bit of orange juice I can get my hands on because I try really hard to avoid con crud (the clinical name for the cold you get after sharing smallish spaces with 13,000 other people for five days). It's a lot of stress, and I try to make it as easy on myself as possible. I'm sure there are people who can have a low-key con, but they have to be people who don't mind if they miss things and don't get overwhelmed easily.

The weird thing is that I have to do it differently this year. In the past Sarah would come visit a week before, and then we'd either take the train to San Diego. The last couple years I sent Sarah on ahead and would leave my car at a friend's house, then stay there a couple days to save money, then drive back up alone while Sarah flew gack home. This year I don't live in LA. I'm planning on flying out there Saturday before and spend a few days catching up with people in the area before either taking the train or bumming a ride from a friend headed down there. I'll stay in the hotel the whole time, and then fly back home from there. After six years of doing this, it's going to be so messed up for me.

You'll hear a lot more about this over the next few months. The general sale and dreaded Hotelpocalypse is coming up, and there comes a point where it takes over my brain. Good thing I have a public outlet now!