There's only so much I can carry on my back, apparently.

Sunday's always the best day to finish off the dealer's room. There's never any good panels, unless you like "Religion in Comics", which I don't. Also, the retailers don't really want to carry all the stuff back home, so they'll cut you a deal.

Of course, the flip side to that strategy is that I have to carry all the stuff back home. Still, a deal's a deal! Mile High Comics knocked 40% off their Dark Horse books, and I picked up Identity Crisis and the ninth volume of Y: The Last Man, and Lisa got a ton of Liberty Meadows and various art collections and whatnot. They were heavy.

We finally met and got to talk to Kandrix, the man behind the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo, and his wife. Michael's met him a few times, but somehow Lisa and I never crossed his path in Calgary. Heck of a nice guy. We gave him copies of our print books, and he frowned at mine, trying to place my name, and asked if I had an online name. I did, which I'm always embarrassed to admit whenever anyone in the real world asks me, and that connected things for him: he remembered the post I'd written after the first Expo and thanked me for it.

We talked about Calgary's other cons, and he let us know his secret for success: first, he's a business guy; second, he does all the work himself, with the help of maybe two other people. Lisa told him that he'd never be able to stop, ever.

James and Kyle had already finished the dealer's room. James in particular was very sure that he wouldn't be spending any more money or time in there. Naturally, the last place I saw him in there was in front of a wall of graphic novels. I don't know if he bought anything. He says he didn't. I know Kyle bought the first Film Crew DVD, because he told me where it was and I bought one too. We're watching it, right now!

The dealer's room closes at five, but by 2:30 we'd had about enough. Lisa was supposed to go to the art show to claim and pay for anything she'd successfully won, lest she be entered on the Big Book Of Comic-Con Misbehaviourers. Unfortunately we forgot all about that, and wouldn't remember until the next day, by which time it'd be much too late.

We went back to our hotel to continue filling it with plastic bags of frippery, since there was still some available carpet that housekeeping had managed to vacuum, and then Kyle, James and I toured the Star of India and its associated ships, while Lisa took a nap in the room. Then it was off to Ruth's Chris Steak House, which had neither Ruth nor Chris, but it did have great Alaskan crab legs, plus whatever everyone else had. It also had a waiter who explained steak to us, which: hee hee. We told him we hail from a land where we just push cows over and eat them, but we didn't add that his spiel about the best American beef available failed to impress us.

The plan for Monday was for Gray Line to pick Lisa and me up at our hotel at 8:30, because that's what they'd said when I confirmed our reservation. (James and Kyle went off to Sea World.) The bus hadn't appeared by 9, so we went inside to call Gray Line to find out what the hell. They told Lisa that we were meant to meet the bus "behind the hotel, at 2nd and Cedar," which they'd apparently expected us to simply intuit. So, we'd missed the Rosarito bus, but they'd refund us for it and we could get on the bus to Tijuana at 1:15 instead.

We used the morning to pack up most of our stuff, and to determine that we'd need another suitcase. At 1 we walked out to behind the hotel, having assumed that 2nd and Cedar were the streets running behind the hotel. And they are, in the sense that the hotel faces the bay and the whole of San Diego is behind the hotel: eleven blocks away, specifically. We'd never make that walk in time, so we went back inside, again, to phone Gray Line and ask what the hell, again.

"Can you be out front in five minutes?" they asked. Sure, we said, and in about ten minutes a shuttle bus picked us and drove us--one block down the street to where the cruise ships launch. And then we got on a tour bus. Evidently Gray Line had gotten confused about us being at the Holiday Inn on the Bay, twice, and had given us the pickup instructions for a different hotel. Probably two different hotels. If they'd just told us to walk one block south from the outset, things would have been fine.

Our bus driver made it clear from the outset that we would not get shivved, probably, and how to haggle, which was going to be Lisa's department. We dropped the $100 in cash I had on me, as our Canadian bank cards apparently work in the States but not Mexico. We picked up a Hard Rock Cafe Tijuana shot glass for James (which I could only purchase if it had tequila in it, so I was forced to knock back a shot) and a velvet Elvis painting for Kyle, therefore fulfilling the instructions he gave me ten years ago to, if ever I found one, buy it for him. So it's nice to have that crossed off the list.

Shopping in Mexico is a lot different; I found myself missing the silence and surliness of Calgary customer service people. In Mexico, people shout at you and touch your arm to get you to come into their store. Both are not favourites of mine. I tried the Horizon Stare that I employ with panhandlers but they were having none of that. So, we had to talk to everyone. They seemed happy to find out that we were not Americans, but honestly that was probably just part of the patter. (Although we did witness some rude American behaviour, namely the slow shouting in English at people who do not speak it, so who knows. People who don't speak English aren't going to magically understand you if you shout slowly, and you're liable to find yourself shouted at in French by passing Canadians. "Vos! Lobes d'orielles! Sont comme! Les têtes de poissons!")

All in all, it was a great adventure and we got to do something we'd never done before: pee in a nasty Tijuana restroom. I'm sure alexisbean is very proud. Also we had actual Mexican food since, as the bus driver warned us that there were no Taco Bells down there.

We got back to the hotel at around 6:30, and we spent the evening just hanging out there, which was nice. James and Kyle didn't get back until 10:30, as they'd spent 13 hours at Sea World, which was apparently super awesome.

Today we checked out of the hotel, and Kyle negotiated a $75 reduction due to the lack of Internet and air conditioning in our room. We'd been promised that the Internet would be fixed each day by various staff. One concierge told us that equipment had been flooded in a laundry room mishap but new equipment had arrived and would be up that night; that was on Wednesday. All subsequent people we talked to had heard nothing about this, so he was probably lying. They did a lot of that there.

I don't mean to be down on the trip, because it was an awesome vacation. I don't think we'll go to Comic-Con again, but that's just because it's become so huge that it's passed into unmanageability. That's not the con's fault; it's just more successful than it's set up to handle. You can't fault it for that.

We're going to keep getting tables at the Expo, of course, and maybe once we publish more we'll branch out to other cons--APE or Wondercon, maybe. Or, we might return to SDCC if they hold it somewhere bigger. I've heard rumours about moving it to Anaheim, but I heard that two years ago too.

Right now we're sitting in the San Diego airport, because our flight to San Francisco was delayed about an hour. Since we only had an hour to catch our connection to Calgary, a very nice man moved us to a later connection in Denver, with a 45-minute connection. A darn sight better than the negative-ten-minute connection we would have had, and far, far better than two years ago, when America West let us rot in the terminal for eight hours.

By the time I'm able to post this, I'll know how much fur the cat managed to pull out. But at this time: still a mystery.

On Thursday, Lisa and I encountered the Rifftrax booth, which was being enboothed by Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett. Lisa wanted me to go get a signature, but I wouldn't be pulled. I knew that on my own I'd suffer fanboy-lock and gape and/or giggle at them.

Or even worse, I'd attempt to tell them that I really enjoyed the Rifftrax for The Matrix, particularly the part where Dozer's using the computer and Morpheus appears in the doorway behind him and the guys riff "Come to bed, honey." It's perfect: we laughed until we cried.

Naturally instead of saying all that I'd just have leaned forward, said "Come to bed, honey" in a prevert voice, possibly performed the Dance of the Turkey Lifters, and then giggled and run away.

Instead I waited for a time when Kyle and I could meet them together. Kyle had bought a Tom Servo head at the bulk candy shop in Horton Plaza, so he had them sign that. Bill Corbett wrote "What a crappy puppet" on it. Then we grinned like morons but happily did not stammer anything embarrassing.



That last panel we attended today was these guys: they're releasing DVDs of old movies with them making fun of them, under the name The Film Crew. C'mon, ease it on in there.

Four years ago, when we came to Comic-Con the first time, we had to line up for everything. This year, we've had to line up for everything but the difference is that we didn't necessarily get in. It's changed. Kyle's said that he probably won't be back next year unless it's on a professional basis. Lisa and I certainly won't be back, of course, what with getting married in Cuba. It's just too big now. (San Diego, not Cuba.)

Kyle and I stood (partially sat) in line to get into Ballroom 20 for hours today. Twice, because the first time security disbanded the line, saying that the Fire Marshal had closed the room. They were lying. We did finally make it in for the Battlestar Galactica, Futurama, and Joss Whedon panels, part of the last of which I videoed.

(He's working on a number of new projects, one of which is Ripper, which will be a 90-minute piece for the BBC, and something new with Fray, and an online comic called Sugar Shock. And Buffy season 8 and Angel season 6 which isn't called that.)



(He refused to perform the Dance of Shame.)


James is conflicted about liking the boobies because he thinks he's grown up and should be beyond that. Kyle and I have no such conflict. (I'm not sure why Kyle likes snapping pictures of boobies but there you have it.) Sadly, if there's any man-candy for Lisa to look at I certainly haven't noticed it, except for Pouchy Superman, which hardly seems fair.

Three girls have smiled at me because I wore my Joss Whedon Is My Master Now t-shirt today. That is something that would happen nowhere else that is not here.

Tomorrow we finish off the dealer's room because there are no panels worth attending, and Sunday is when the best deals are because nobody wants to cart stuff home. Michael, I didn't get you the TARDIS coin bank: I got you something better.

So. Much. Walking.

Still no Internet in our room, even though they've been promising it every day we've been here. Right now I'm sitting in the lobby with the other refugees; we've dragged ourselves back to the hotel after watching the showing of Superman: Doomsday. Lisa's in the shower and James ordered room service and I think Kyle's probably pretty much horizontal by now. And it's only the first full day!

The San Diego Zoo makes our zoo look pretty sad. But it makes all zoos look pretty sad, so that's not remarkable.

Here are the zoo highlights, for now, until I have a decent Internet connection I can upload with. They can be summed up with the following three words: Kyle behaved oddly.






After we were finished killing ourselves at the zoo, we went to Preview Night to kill ourselves at a completely different venue. Preview Night was busier than I remember than previous years, possibly because they were letting the three-day-pass people in too. But, as always, Preview Night was about tearing through as much as the dealers' room as possible while it's slow. Meaning, only one hundred thousand people in it.

We had a look at the Hasbrotoyshop.com booth, because Lisa needs to pick up about seventeen Comic-Con exclusive ponies.

There's a line to buy the exclusive toys they're offering. That's not unusual. However, instead of just being able to get in the line, they're giving out tickets that allow you access to the line at a predetermined later date. And there's no lineup for the tickets; a few Hasbro employees will wander around at preset times handing tickets out to passers-by who may or may not actually be interested in buying anything the booth is selling. Come back at ten o'clock Thursday morning, they told us.

Soooo, we came back Thursday morning, at about ten-thirty, because it takes about that long to get into the convention centre and snake through the huge cattle drive of people. By that time the tickets were long gone. Come back at two, they told us.

We went back at one-thirty, and joined the huge mass of people thronging outside the booth. Hardly anyone was actually in the Hasbro lineup, of course, because they didn't have tickets. Instead, with no ticket-getting line or directions at all, they piled up outside the booth, creating a huge problem for Hasbro, the security guys, and people trying to walk anywhere near there at all.

The security guys yelled at us all to disperse, but of course no one did, and when the ticket dispersers presented themselves at 2:00, they were immediately mobbed and the tickets were gone in two minutes. Nobody was able to buy anything, and the crowd, instead of being controlled, became a giant mob of frustrated people who couldn't just buy a frickin' toy already. I don't know what they're trying to accomplish with this, but it's been a spectacular failure so far, and I'm amazed nobody got trampled or had their leg broken. Lisa will probably end up just buying a pony from hasbrotoyshop.com, where they are apparently available and not at all exclusive, and the sixteen other girls who asked her to pick one up will be disappointed.

We saw Superman: Doomsday, as I mentioned, and I saw a panel for Adam Hughes and for the upcoming movie Fanboys, and apart from that it's just been the dealer's room. James says he's spent his quota already and he's not going back in there and we'll see how long that lasts.

Tomorrow is the Neil Gaiman panel, which will involve another massive crush of people and possibly my death. Evidently my boss is telling people I've died anyway.

The busier Comic-Con gets, the less I'm enjoying it, honestly. It takes some of the fun out of doing things when you have to compete with a hundred thousand other people for them. They need to look at changing venues, or... something.

Since we hadn't gotten a full night's sleep in two days, we planned to go to bed early Monday night; unfortunately the punishing heat and Harry Potter conspired to make that not happen. We got all of our packing done, but still only toppled into bed at 11. I set my alarm to wake us up at 4:30 am; our cab was due to arrive at 5.

I don't remember what Lisa said that woke me. Probably it was "oh shit!" I rolled over to look at my clock and it was 4:54. And the cab was here! I threw on some clothes and went downstairs to let the guy know we'd be five or ten minutes. He was cool about it.

The plane connections were mostly without incident. In Vancouver my suitcase got placed on the belt wheels-down, which meant it rolled in place and didn't actually present itself at the top. Since we only had an hour in Vancouver to clear US Customs, that was worrying.

Note for travellers: you can surf around like an idiot on baggage carts. However, you can't take pictures of your friend surfing around like an idiot on a baggage cart without security officers descending on you.

We got to San Diego around noon and were startled that the weather was more mild than in Canada. Then check-in at the hotel (they didn't have any of our names on record under mfiles' reservation: a quick and expensive cellphone call cleared that up) and shopping at Horton Plaza, then dinner at the Hard Rock San Diego because skullflare collects their merchandise. You know you're at the Hard Rock when a waitress goes past you carrying a stack of T-shirts.

On waitresses: Our waitress at the Hard Rock was neither crazy nor angry, and she spoke English fluently. She was in fact astonishingly friendly and outgoing. This was so vastly different from the Calgary wait-staff experience that we mumbled shyly at our cutlery. Luckily Kyle had a half-hour phone call with the hotel's incomprehensible tech support because the wireless network doesn't work in our tower (the repeaters got flooded in a laundry mishap, the concierge told us today) that made us feel better; that's what we expect from customer service people.

Everyone here, even hoboes, seems to know we're here for the Con, even though we don't have passes yet and my shirt is so far unadorned with Batman. Kyle bought one with a rainbow that says RECRUITER, that should throw them off the scent.

Today is the San Diego Zoo! And then Comic-Con Preview Night.

This weekend we travelled to the west coast to visit Lisa's grandmother, who she hasn't seen in almost ten years. Her grandmother lives in Powell River with Lisa's Aunt Wendy and Uncle John, who Lisa met once, when she was two.



Roads don't really go there. We could have driven, but it would take about twenty-four hours of driving to get there, and also two ferry trips. So instead we flew to Comox, on Vancouver Island, and took a ferry ride back to the mainland, which was a hell of a lot faster and, as we found out when we learned how much B.C. ferries cost now, also cheaper.

( Click for pictures! )

At 10 am MST this morning I, and ten thousand of my very close friends, crashed a website.

The plan was for each of the five of us to pick a hotel and attempt to reserve a room. Three of us were going for the Westin Horton Plaza, Lisa wanted the place across the street from the convention centre, and Joel was to pick whatever other hotel appealed to him.

Michael had said that he planned to phone rather than use the Intertron. I warned him that there were a finite number of human beings to talk to and he'd probably be better off with the computers who could, in theory, handle more traffic than the call centre.

The site was already started to limp along when I first began to reload it, waiting for the starting gun. When the reservations opened up, I hit an initial snag because the Westin wasn't offering con rates from Tuesday through Tuesday, when we intended to fly. I didn't discover that on page one of the reservations site, though. I discovered that after getting to page two, and I then had to go back to page one, change the date it was quibbling about, get to page two again, discover that in the meantime Sunday had filled up as well, go to page one a third time, gain page two's tacit but reluctant approval, and continue to page three to book the reservation I'd finally managed to claim.

Page three contains a fair, but not unreasonable, amount of graphics, and several fields for user's name, address, country, etc., just like on any website. I have no idea what else page three would normally contain because that's as much as would ever load. I imagine a Submit button of some kind would have appeared, eventually, but the most I ever got was a Microsoft VBScript error.

Lisa had the same problem. It took a really long time before Kyle got onto the site at all.

And Michael, blessedly, blessedly, completely ignored my advice, called them on the phone, and got a reservation.

Which is a miracle but also pisses me off. The idea that a roomful of people with headsets functions more reliably and efficiently than a webserver is anathema to me. I always prefer Internet to Phone, and Computer to Human, which is a policy that works staggeringly well at my bank, where the human tellers cannot understand putting X amount of a given cheque into account A and Y amount (the remainder) into account B.

Well, at least we have somewhere to sleep in San Diego. I guess that's what's important.

"Why not drive to Montana ourselves to buy Weird Al?" Lisa suggested.

Hell of an idea! I'd never been to Montana before, and it only costs $31 to rent a Budget car for a day.

However, by 9:30 all the cars were gone, so they gave us a Pontiac Montana (an SUV now sold only in Canada) with a tank filled with gas and irony.

We like to rent various vehicles so that we know what we like when it's time to buy one. We're sure not buying a Montana. Like the Ford Freestyle, shoulder-checking is impossible because you can't see out of the rear side windows. The Freestyle was fun to drive, though, and the Montana isn't--I wore its cockpit like an uncomfortable and poorly supportive coat. The sides hit my calves. The interior is all-around small, and yet the exterior of the vehicle is very large somehow, like some kind of reverse TARDIS.

Also, the passenger side door latch was half off.

After driving the Montana from Budget back to our house, Lisa didn't want to drive it any more at all, but I asked her to drive the leg between Vulcan and Milk River. After that stint she really didn't want to drive it again.

( Vulcan )

We stopped in Milk River, just before the U.S. border, to eat the ham sandwich lunch we packed. Milk River is a tiny-ass town out in the middle of nowhere. I tried to use my bank card to buy a bottle of water and two chocolate bars, and discovered that my bank card has been set to deposit-only, because I've used it at a place known for swiping cards. My card hasn't been swiped, but they've locked it for my protection, they said, twice. Which of course means for their own protection.

"Too bad you can't tell me where I used it that you don't like," I observed to the customer service woman. Naturally she couldn't. However, I don't work for the bank, so I can tell you that the last two places I used it were HMV and Manchu Wok in TD Square, and you can make of that what you will.

Luckily I have my brand-new TD Visa card, or the trip would have become very problematic at that point.

( Alien Customs )

( Montana )

And, of course, we accomplished our primary mission.

It may seem like a lot of effort to go to to get an album that I could sort of gotten here at home, but it was worth it. We played the album in karaoke mode, and from that we learned that we should never go to a karaoke bar ever ever. How can you put a price on that kind of experience? You can't.

Also, it took me an hour to extract the DualDisc from my MacBook's slot drive--since they're slightly thicker than normal discs, it got stuck inside the slot. I was only finally able to get it to eject by sliding a piece of paper into the drive on top of the disc, to keep the disc from hitting the top of the slot on the way out. And so I learned not to put DualDiscs into my computer. Priceless.

This is probably a pretty long way to drive for the new Weird Al CD. But we're going to do it on Saturday. So, uh, does anybody need anything from the United States? Softwood lumber or something?

*We're stopping in Vulcan so Lisa can see the Trek stuff, but I don't know how to make Google reflect that.

**Okay, actually two Weird Al CDs.

Last week I asked mister_sable to send me an art proof early, as I was going to be in the woods this week.

"Literally?" he asked.

"Sure, we're going camping," I said.

"That's crazy!"

"What?" I asked. "It's a thing. That people do!"

On Saturday we picked up our rental car, a Ford Freestyle. It's not a station wagon, it's not an SUV, it's not a van--it's the Ford Breaststroke! My initial impression of it was not great, as its visibility is limited: there's a lot of metal between the windows, and what little you can see through the rearview mirror is blocked by the headrests and the kid-pacifying DVD player. However, once we got used to that, we came to really like it: it has the fuel economy and overall handling of a car, but it's taller so it doesn't wreck my knees climbing out of it. We want one.

Our destination this year was 100 Mile House, BC, the crappy two-stoplight town Lisa had grown up in, so named because it's one hundred archaic units of measurement that Canada doesn't use away from someplace else. It's between 83 Mile House and 103 Mile Ranch. Naming things is so tedious, I find.

( Pictures )

Hooker? We Didn't Even Know Her!

On Thursday night, we had just left the Wendy's near Horton Plaza, and were heading north to the hotel, when an attractive (but not unreasonably so) woman asked Kyle and Justin if she could walk with us. So as not to get shanked, she said. She walked next to Justin and Kyle in the front, and Michael walked in the middle, and Lisa and I were last because Lisa has the shortest legs.

She didn't talk that much, but it's hard to talk as much as Michael. At one point she let us know "oh no, they don't shoot WHITE people," which horrified our Canadian ears, because it implied that not only do they shoot non-white people, but that they do it because nobody cares. Calgary was horrified last summer when a purse snatcher menaced downtown, because he rode a BIKE and someone might get run over and HURT.

She didn't seem to be on her way to anywhere in particular. When we turned west we asked if that was far enough for her, and where she was going. "To where people are," she said diffidently. And we went our separate ways from there.

"I think she was a hooker," Lisa said to me later.

"A hooker? Nooooo," I said, surprised. "Why?"

"Her behaviour was weird. First, a girl on her own downtown at night is weird. It makes sense for her to want to walk with a group for safety--but to approach a group of GUYS? Weird. And a girl finding herself in a strange group of people would have hung next to the OTHER girl, for safety, but she didn't even look at me. She walked next to Justin."

"That does seem weird," I said, "you would have appeared to be the least threat. Well, either you or the obvious flaming homosexual. But wouldn't a hooker have made an overture to Justin?"

"I didn't say she was a good hooker. Maybe she was waiting for him to invite her. In case he was a cop or something."

"Huh. Well, better not tell him," I said. "He'll be very disappointed."

The guys told him at some point, so on Monday as we were waiting in the airline line, they argued about it. "It's like we're in a Friends episode!" I whispered to Kyle and, giggling, he videoed some of it.

There was also this comic book convention thingie that went on.

( Canadiana )

( Photos )

Back to Canada!

We were supposed to get back Monday night at 11:30 pm. That didn't happen, as our 3:40 flight from San Diego to Phoenix never flew, because its secondary power supply didn't work. (Which is what grounded the space shuttle, I think.) America West put us in a hotel Monday night, and we finally got back into Calgary at 3:30 today. We already weren't going to be working today, but it meant that Lisa spent most of her birthday waiting pointlessly in an airport.

Nothing makes you appreciate home like not being able to get back to it.

We made it back in one piece, with the exception of Kyle's signed Clive Barker plushie and my shampoo bottle, which were both damaged when my suitcase experienced what appears to have been a WWE elbow drop. My cat and fish both survived (thanks Jason and Shonna!) and Lisa's aquarium is minus two gourami and the snail--though by the looks of the snail's remains, he was dead before we left. Ew.

I will post a longer entry with more pictures later, but this should hold you in the meantime. The DeLorean wasn't part of Comic-Con, it was just sitting around where any idiots could take fun pictures of it. It was also for sale for $18,500 US. Tempting!