The San Diego Comic Convention starts Thursday, and once again, I will be attending all four days, plus the Wednesday preview night. 2008 is the first year that all four days have completely sold out before the thing even starts, which means that downtown San Diego will be overrun by 125,000 Stormtroopers, Orcs, midget Spider-Men and fat black Wonder Women every.. single… day. And I will be in the thick of the Goddamned thing, sticking out like a sore thumb, what with my shameful and abnormal alcohol tolerance, personal hygiene and girlfriend.
You might be saying to yourself, “Rob, attending Comic-Con sounds like fun to me. What should I do to prepare in the event I want to attend it myself?” To which I would reply: “Absolutely nothing! Just hop a flight and show up,” because I sincerely dislike you and want terrible things to happen to you.
Planning to attend Comic-Con starts in the first week of February with booking a hotel room: a simple task that you will find to be impossible. Several weeks prior to the opening of Convention-rate hotel booking, the Comic-Con Web site will announce the date and time that said booking will ensue. On that exact date and time, approximately a quarter million geeks will simultaneously log onto that Web site and click a link to the hotel booking site, which is apparently hosted by Geocities on a 386 by a person who thinks that broadband Internet is for liberal spendthrift maniacs.
You will eventually get through, provided you’re not deterred by minor frustrations like 405 server crash errors or the need to ever urinate, and you will find that your first, second and fifth choice hotels are completely booked by Todd McFarlane and his entourage of fawners, yes-men and ball-handlers (What? The man collects baseballs). You will be able to get a room at your last choice… but not for Saturday, meaning that you will need to resign yourself to either staying home or chowing cock in a convention center toilet in exchange for a piece of stranger’s floor.
(Editor’s note: there is a way around all of this to guarantee yourself a room, but I’m not telling you what it is, since I don’t want you competing with me, and I don’t like going into the Con-Center restrooms for any reason, let alone blowjobs. Trust me: if you’d seen a fat guy dressed as Elektra dropping a deuce in a doorless stall after three days of Convention food, you’d chug Kaopectate and shit when you got home, too).
Plus, I have learned from experience that, if you want to survive the Comic Con experience, you’re gonna need some specialized equipment. For example, the flight from Boston to San Diego takes six hours, plus two hours toadying to high school dropouts with ironed-on “badges” who can’t even spell TSA, which means I’ll be spending eight hours in a crowded non-smoking area… assuming nothing goes wrong. And since, after maybe three hours of this experience, I’ll less want to read John Grisham than I’ll want to stab him in the face, Allow me to introduce you to the Archos 605 WiFi.
This little fucker has 160 gig of memory, plays DVD MPEG2, Divx and Xvid video with pure, crystal clear stereo sound. The video is in 800 by 480 pixel full DVD resolution, and it’s the size of a deck of smokes. And while I realize that there may be some cinephiles out there who are looking down their nose at me wondering why I would want to watch a movie on such a small screen, please remember that it’s difficult to enjoy movies on a big screen after I’ve dug out your eyeballs with a red-orange Cheez and Crackers spreader in an airline aisle and leave me the fuck alone.
Hauling a laptop across the country along with six days worth of clothes is a pain in the ass, so the first year I did Comic Con I said fuck it and went computer free. This was a terrible mistake. Have you ever seen a human being go through a week of Internet withdrawal? Not just a simple, “I should probably check my email” kind of thing, but a full-on, Keanu Reeves / Johnny Mnemonic, “I need a computer!” tweaking meltdown? I have.
I spent my first Comic Con watching for security while my girl hacked the computers at the Sci-Fi Channel pavilion to got to the outside Internet (A security hole they fixed with extreme prejudice after about 100 minutes), and apologizing for her staring holes in the back of some poor kid’s Naruto headband while he surfed the one computer in the convention center Kinko’s booth. She fingered her cell phone in ways I couldn’t get her to do to me even with Long Island Iced Teas.
And I learned from the experience, hence the Asus Eee PC. It weighs two pounds with the battery, leaving enough room in the backpack for Long Island Iced Tea fixings.
By now you may be saying to yourself, “Wow, Comic Con sounds like fun, Rob! I believe I’d like to attend and meet you for a drink. Where will you be drinking?” And the simple answer to that question is: everywhere.
If I’ve learned one thing about Comic Con, it’s this: the San Diego law has to deal with 125,000 invaders, many of whom are wearing masks, and if they’re not carrying cudgels painted to look like lightsabers, they’re carrying replica blasters that look like Mac-10s… or even worse, they’re carrying actual swords.
The cops have better things to deal with than a guy in jeans and a t-shirt quietly nipping off a flask of Jack Daniels and giggling quietly and respectfully while Aragorn with the white tube socks gets tasered into submission. And the Comic Con personnel could give a fuck, since it’s impossible to take leaked video to stick on You Tube with a flask.
Hopefully this is all the information you’ll need to realize that I’ve been trying to distract you from the fact that it’s far too late for you to go to Comic Con, and you’ll give up, making my line for beer that much shorter. In the meantime, I’ve got a plane to catch.
[tags]San Deigo Comic Con 2008, Nerd Prom[\tags]
Go get ’em sparky!