Dragon Tales

If it weren’t already apparent, I totally lied about blogging my time at Dragon Con. Between the late nights of getting back to the hotel at 2am, early mornings, and “that one night” in which most of us had way too much to drink, it just wasn’t worth the hour or more of sleep I’d be losing each night to write up the day’s events and upload pictures. Though I’ll be honest, I got way more sleep than I ever expected.

It’s pretty easy to sum up Dragon Con in one sentence; sci-fi and fantasy themed chaos. Sure that glosses over the hundreds of hours of panels filled with science and technology experts, actors and actresses from TV shows and movies, New York Time bestselling authors, and thousands of square feet of vendors peddling everything from Firefly t-shirts, to crocheted Dr. Who figures, to leather corsets, to original paintings and sculptures. It still all boils down to 4 days of chaos. Granted, it’s mostly well organized chaos. But it’s chaos none the less.

Let’s start from the beginning. In the past I’ve heard that getting registered and getting your badge to access the convention sites was a serious pain in the ass. This year, if you pre-registered (which is a must from both a convenience and a financial standpoint) it was about 5 minutes of waiting in line and then you were done. But let’s say you decided last minute to come to the con, or maybe you completely misunderstood everyone else’s intentions and were under the impression everyone was waiting to register until the day of the con. If that was the case, and if it was you weren’t alone, it was a long and annoying process that could take an hour or more to get through. Do yourself a favor and pre-register. The earlier the better; and cheaper ($65 until 9/14, $80 until whatever the pre-reg cutoff is, and then something like $120 at the door).

Something else that really pays off to do early is plan your schedule long before you get to the con. The schedule is going to change; there will be last minute cancelations (I’m looking at you, Patrick Steward) and there will be additions, substitutions, and you’ll talk it over with friends and change your mind. Regardless, there are plenty of resources to get you organized including an incredibly useful Dragon Con app (for Android and iOS). The somewhat archaically organized website, handy though almost instantly out-of-date pocket guide, and wonderful but flawed app (a glitch in the app completely crashed the wireless at most of the host hotels and brought most of mid-town Atlanta’s cell coverage to its knees) are all freely available to give you at least an idea of what is happening where and when. With the app you can actually create a comprehensive schedule that warns you of overlaps, has access to hotel maps, can be shared with other friends that have the app, and is usually the most up-to-date resource. A schedule is the only way to keep track of where you need to be or whether or not the line running out the front door of the hotel, around the hotel, down a block, and around another corner is going to conflict with whatever is next on your list (such as the line for one of the Warehouse 13 panels). Without some sort of plan you are just going to be wandering around aimlessly from one hotel to the next (the con completely hijacks 5 hotels for its events) getting into random lines because you have no idea what you’re doing.

My plans for the things I wanted to see at Dragon Con pretty much went out the door before we even got to Atlanta. Because of some dog issues that two of our group were having, we were late leaving and thus late getting to Atlanta. (Those dog troubles actually came up again, forcing one of them to drive 3 hours back home to deal with the dogs and then drive back to Atlanta). We also underestimated the amount of time it would take to get from our hotel to mid-town where the host hotels were. Because we hadn’t planned to go to Dragon Con until a few months ago, all the host hotels in Mid-town Atlanta were booked months beforehand so we were staying at a Holiday Inn near the capital building a few MARTA stops from mid-town. It was also about a mile from the hotel to the nearest MARTA station or a 30-60 minute wait for a hotel shuttle to take us to the con hotels. We also took our time getting down registration, which meant we had already missed a few things on my list. Then it became apparent that communication was going to be difficult because it was nearly impossible to call or text anyone while within the confines of the mid-town area because coverage was pretty much nonexistent (which we later found out was largely due to that aforementioned app glitch). Add to that the fact that I somehow got silently, but unanimously voted to be group navigator it became more hassle than it was worth to try and split off from the group every time I wanted to see something that conflicted with everyone else’s schedule. Instead it became a rather easy going democratic process of choosing what panels we went to. The group dynamic worked out really well for how glued to each other’s’ sides we were for those four days. In the end we got to see a panel helmed by Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation), another panel with Michael Dorn (Lt. Worf on Star Trek: TNG), several members of the cast of Eureka (Colin Ferguson, Felicia Day, Debrah Farentino, and a few others), a Farscape panel with Virginia Hey, Gigi Edgley, and Rebecca Riggs (Zhaan, Chiana, and Grayza respectively), and I think there’s one other I’m forgetting.

There were just as many, well really more, panels that we didn’t get to make because of timing, lines, or this unusual need to eat food. One thing that did disappoint me was that it seemed you had to choose between attending panels with the stars or getting autographs with those stars. Autograph sessions were typically after their respective panel and while you were sitting and listening to behind the scenes tales of who was the best cast member on Star Trek to make out with, there were hundreds of people already in line outside somewhere else waiting for the autograph session. Or if there was an autograph session specially dedicated to a person, say author R. A. Salvatore, you needed to get in line at least (at LEAST) an hour before it actually started – even if It was scheduled to last 3 hours.  That said, I got absolutely no autographs during the entire con since we all seemed to unanimously choose listening to the people talk instead of getting a piece of paper signed. I still would have liked to have MacGyver sign my roll of duct tape…maybe next year.

After our first full day hanging around the hotels and seeing a few panels, the celebrities really became a secondary thing to attending the convention. The atmosphere, the vendor stalls full of cool and/or totally useless junk, the thousands of people walking around in sad, funny, awesome costumes really took center stage. Sunday night we ended up hanging out on a busy corner for at least 2 hours just shooting the shit and taking pictures of all the chaos of people. It could easily be worth it for someone who had no desire to see famous people and buy useless crap to spend the weekend in Atlanta during Dragon Con just for the top notch people watching. At the very least, that’s exactly what many residents of Atlanta did. Even the cops, who were out and about with high presence and visibility the whole time, were entertained.

Even though I never really took advantage of my new blogging setup I will take a moment to mention the pluses and minuses of a few things. First off I deeply regret not taking some sort of zoom lens for my camera. Trying to take shots from the back of a crowded conference center with no real zoom to speak of is pointless. All you end up with is a shot full of the backs of people’s heads and maybe a smudge that represents to actual person you’re trying to photograph. I should also mention that at some point during the weekend I just stopped taking pictures (which I only slightly regret) because there were 4 or 5 of us that were all taking the exact same picture at the same time. The slight regret came in when we realized that most of those shots were blurry from bad lighting and too much movement and there was usually only one of us with a clear shot of something cool. In general I’m a bit let down by my camera, but some of that was my lens choice, lighting, lack of tripod, my insistence on NOT using my flash, and host of other things. I am trying to turn this into justification for buying a new one, but it’s an internalized uphill battle still. 

The iPad on the other hand did great. I had the Dragon Con app on it and could whip it out to check the schedule, the Eye-fi card (which wirelessly transmits pictures from my Nikon to the iPad) worked great, the battery held up to only being charged twice during the weekend, and it was light and easy to carry. I didn’t miss having a laptop. My little hatchet job of a keyboard didn’t work, but I’m fairly certain that was because of my hatchet job and can be fixed. It worked fine before the hatchet, so I’m probably to blame. The cell phone situation was a bit of a nightmare. Keeping 4 or 5 people together across town or just up and down the escalator in one of the hotels was challenging and the times we got separated it came down to luck and an slowly evolved process of always having at least one person stay where they were and try uselessly to call the others while someone else went searching for them. We have talked seriously about taking walkie-talkies next time.

This brings me to the conclusion - next time. We all agreed that regardless of how few panels we got to attend, the complete lack of autographs, and vast compromises we all made for the sake for keeping together that it was a blast. An overwhelming, exhausting, sweaty, but fun as hell blast. Which means we are all planning for next time. By now we should have all pre-registered, we’re already keeping an eye on when hotels will start taking reservations for Dragon Con (though one of them is ALREADY sold out), and making plans to be off next year. Even if we don’t get any better at getting into panels, communicating, or not passing out drunk in places we shouldn't, it should still be a lot of fun.