| I-Con 27!! (finally) |
[Apr. 16th, 2008|09:57 pm] |
Ok all, here it is, finally, the Official Report of I-Con 27 attended by myself and sanfam . The con took place on the campus of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook on Long Island, about 45 minutes from Sanfam's home in Lloyd Harbor, from April 4th-6th, 2008.
As this was the first real con for both of us, we made several stupid n00b mistakes we will be sure to not make again such as not pre-registering (my fault) and losing over an hour to the register-at-the-door line and not checking to make sure the actors were charging for an autograph before deciding not to bother getting one. :P
ANYWAY...
Day One The con officially opened at 6pm on Friday. Due to serious traffic and last minute stops at Borders and Best Buy for books and DVDs to get autographed, we ended up getting there a bit late. We had only a small map of the campus and the con was not apparently allowed to put up too many signs so we had a bitch of a time finding appropriate parking only to find ourselves at the end of a VERY long line. Though we found many lovely costumes to amuse ourselves with.
We made it into the building about 7:15, rushed around the dealer room floor snapping a few photos and hastily grabbing an autograph from Peter S. Beagle (not realizing he was going to be around for the whole weekend) and rushed off to see Harlan Ellison and Peter David.
Now, the Harlan and Peter hour and subsequent book signing ate up the rest of our first night, for various reasons. After a hilarious hour of Harlan and Peter telling jokes and stories, we all got in a line to get books signed. Assuming it was only going to take 30 minutes or less, we just waited. When it was taking longer than that, Sanfam ran down to save a space in line for the 10pm Galactica premiere that was fortunately right below us.
By 9:55, the line still hadn't moved. I found out later that a few people had brought 20-some-odd books and were having poor Harlan sign, date, and annotate all of them in several places. He made a joke to the rest of us about throwing the person over the railing when he was done and I was seriously tempted. I couldn't believe how inconsiderate and rude those people were.
In the end, Sanfam rejoined me in line and we waited, missing Galactica. Of course, as luck would have it, by the time Galactica was done, the line STILL wasn't gone and we realized we could have gone to see Galactica and come back to the line without missing anything. *sigh* Oh well. Apparently the audio in the screening room wasn't so hot so it wouldn't have been a terrific viewing anyway.
We were delayed again by my shyness at asking for photographs so that by the time we actually got out of there it was midnight. So much for the first day.
VIDEO: Collected video of the Harlan and Peter Hour and autograph queue chaos.
Day Two Day two was more fun. A lot more fun. We got as early a start as we could, though we still missed the first half of Michio Kaku's lecture on "Physics of the Impossible." Ridiculously, I also managed to miss his book signing an hour later even though we were right near there. So much going on around me, it just slipped my mind. I was miffed about that the rest of the day.
We did however manage to visit with Peter S. Beagle some more (writer of the book The Last Unicorn which was made into my favorite cartoon movie ever).
VIDEO: Talking to Peter S. Beagle
Anyway, after that, we wandered around the dealer floor taking pictures of costumes and interesting things, then headed up to one of the gyms for two Q&A sessions: Jeffrey Combs (Weyoun on DS9) and Tim Russ (Tuvok on Voyager). They were both pretty cool and funny. Jeff gave one the best impressions of original series Captain Kirk I have ever seen and Tim read a hilarious script for his wacky version of the Voyager finale. We caught it both on video, though it's hard to understand what they're saying thanks to the horrible echo in the place.
VIDEO: Jeff's Shatner impression. VIDEO: Tim Russ reading his hilarious version of the Voyager series finale.
After those we hit a panel called "So You Want to Be a Voice Actor" with Billy West, Amy Howard Wilson, and Kristen Nelson. So many people showed up in the tiny room they had scheduled it in that they had to make an emergency search for a much bigger room. Other people took much better video of this than we did.
After this, we went to a couple of things on video games. One was about video game mascots, past and present, and their impact, i.e. what made Mario successful and not Bubsy, is there still a place for mascots, etc. The other was a preview of the upcoming game "Spore" which Sanfam was so bloody excited about he thought it was worth missing Tim Russ sing in the Cabaret. (Other people again saved us here)
We hung around for a bit of Caberet and then left to find the Masquerade so we could see all the lovely costumes. Well, the party was apparently at the hotel which was over a half hour away from I-Con itself and took us quite a while to find. Luckily, we didn't miss it and had a fantastic time looking at awesome costumes and taking long-exposures of the light shows, watching Aerosith play, a wacky costume contest, watching real Jedi do their stuff, and dancing with a bunch of crazy dancers that included Daniel Logan (young Boba Fett from Star Wars II and III) and Jay Acovone (Kowalski from Stargate SG-1). Yes, there are pictures to prove it. :D
I sucked down a Red Bull and went all "Thursday-night-at-Vertex" on everyone. Fortunately, I just happened to be wearing my Thursday night sports bra. :D We got out of there very late and VERY exhausted, but before we went to bed, we downloaded and watched the Galactica premiere. :D
VIDEO: Aerosith performing. VIDEO: The New York Jedi group.
Day Three Day three was shorter, there was less going on, fewer lectures of interest so we slept in and didn't get there until noon, once again pulling in behind the Ghostbusters' Ecto Van we'd been accidentally following for most of the con.
We mostly just wandered around the dealer floor and above it in the autograph track taking pictures of things below and more costumes and such.
We visited the celebrities again, handing out CDs of the Masquerade photos to Daniel and Jay, getting more photos and some more autographs. We unfortunately missed our chance to get a photo with Tracy Scoggins (Captain Lochley from Babylon 5), though we did get her autograph on our DVDs.
We also took some random shots while waiting in line for Tim Russ and Ray Park and at our post-con dinner at J&R's Steakhouse.
The only discussions we caught on Sunday were the I-Con gripe session, where we were able to tell the con management about our problems with finding parking and signage and such, and an interesting discussion run by John Sheehan, a web-comic writer, on how Hollywood screws up so badly when turning comic books and novels into movies.
All-in-all, not a bad way to spend three days and about $200. :D |
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