Comic Con 2013: The Swag Edition

Oh yeah, here it alllll is. Look at all that swag and purchases.

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, this year felt like a pretty good year for swag. Also, I bought a lot of cool things this year, while in the past few years I haven’t really bought much of anything!

One of the coveted swag items this year was the poster set and Mockingjay pin from the Lionsgate booth. There were constantly swarms of people trying to get in line to snag those. I tried several times and was unsuccessful in even figuring out where the end of the line was. However, my boyfriend always has good look with those kinds of things, and managed to get me both! The Hunger Games: Catching Fire posters that were included in the set were absolutely gorgeous.

On the Hunger Games vein, the Smart Pop Books booth was handing out pins that said The Capitol, District One, District Two, District Three, and District Four. I managed to get all 5 of them, as well as a preview book with snippets of their upcoming books!

During the Game of Thrones panel, they  gave out tickets that could be redeemed for some pretty cool stuff (just how much did HBO spend on all this SDCC stuff??), including this super cool shirt, a Storm of Swords book (with show cover), a blank notebook, and this random cell phone screen cleaner with the logo on it.

As for the awesome stuff I spent money on, there was:

• a super cute Hulk plush - look at his little face!!
• a really soft plush of an alpaca wearing a purple hat, because why not
• Archie comic digest that I got for half price on Sunday!
• Han Solo and Iron Man Lego magnets - kind of wish they weren’t attached to that background
• Funko Pop figurines of She-Ra and Cersei Lannister - freaking awesome

Comic Con 2013: Sunday

Sunday is always a much more chill day than the others. Everyone is heading home and the day ends earlier than the others. It’s a good day to check out things you haven’t had time to do yet. One such thing, for my crew, was Con on the Lawn, sponsored by Warner Brothers. They had a Lego Bag End, which was pretty amazing. Everything was, obviously, made of Legos, but the items were even shaped like Lego items, like the cups and the flowers weren't shaped like regular cups and flowers, but like the Lego cups and flowers are shaped. Anyway, it was super cool.





They also had Batman and Robin and the Joker made up of Legos. Not quite as cool as Hobbit Legos, but whatev.

Every year, Whedonopolis.com hosts a sing-a-long screening of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode, Once More with Feeling. My mom and I are both huge Buffy fans, so of course we had to go to this!! Nicholas Brandon, who played Xander, showed up to talk a bit before hand, so it was even more amazing, and I'm so glad my mom got to be there for it! The screening is becoming a kind of Rocky Horror thing, with people yelling out things at certain times, and always telling Dawn to shut up. It's pretty hilarious!















Goodbye, Comic Con! Until next year!!

Comic Con 2013: Saturday

As I woke up at 4am for the second day in a row, it dawned on me: I’m too old for this shit. This shit, of course, being waking up super early, standing in line for 5 hours, and then sitting in a room for 9 hours while subsisting on granola bars and a smashed sandwich. For the second day in a row, at least. I had a revelation: one day of Hall H per Comic Con is plenty. Had I known I was going to come to this conclusion, I might have chosen that day to be Saturday instead of Friday, but hey, what can you do. So I went back to bed for a few hours.

Now the question was, what to do now that I had a whole day free of Hall H? Well, if there’s one thing I can’t get enough of, it’s the Exhibit Hall. Luckily, it can take a whole 4-day Con to see the whole thing, it’s so enormous. So we trekked down to the convention center and starting going

up and down the aisles. I think this was a better year for swag given out in the Hall, I feel like I got quite a lot of stuff this year. Also, I bought more stuff than I normally do. I’ll make a separate post about all the cool things I found!

Eventually I got hungry from all the walking, so Erin and I found a nice area outside with a bunch of tables and chairs set up to eat our packed lunches. One of the many great things about Comic Con is the people-watching. You can see all kinds of crazy, amazing sights that you won’t see anywhere else. For example, I saw Ash from Pokemon having a lightsaber battle with Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Not to mention, this fabulous man dressed as Ursula from The Little Mermaid. He was working those tentacles!!

Later on in the afternoon, my mom (who LOVES Lego) and I went to panel called Lego As Art Form, which was about, well, people who use Legos to make their art! One of the panelists actually makes a living from it, and has had art shows around the world, using only Legos. This picture is of the Colbert Report set made of Lego!

We did actually end up making it into Hall H, but not until much, much later than planned! Kevin Smith always has the last panel of the day on Saturday, and luckily, by then most of the crowd has thinned out (though it did fill up quite a bit after that!). Erin and I are both avid listeners of his podcast network, SmodCo, so we always make a point to attend this panel. He talked about Clerks 3, as well as another film he’s working on called Tusk, which seriously sounds amazing and I can’t wait to see it.

So Saturday ended up being a pretty decent day after all!

Comic Con 2013: The Hall H Day

Friday was to be our first day in Hall H. As I’m sure you know, Comic Con gets more and more crowded every year, and Hall H gets harder and harder to get into. Last year, we got in line at maybe like 7am? This year, though.... this year we went in line at 5am. And let me tell you, that extra 2 or 3 hours made a huge difference, in both good and bad ways!!

The view from our spot. As far as views go, this one isn't bad!

Waking up at 4am is something I haven’t experienced in quite a while. And, I would not want to make a habit of it. Erin and I left the condo around 5am. To get to the back of the line, from just the front of the line, took at least 10 minutes. Maybe 15. Of course, the front was all tents and sleeping bags, which gave way to people in chairs of decreasing comfortability. We parked ourselves at the end of the line on these little stools I bought on eBay. I thought it would be better than sitting on the ground (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). I brought plenty of stuff to keep myself occupied: Nintendo 3DS, Kindle, iPod. But I was so tired all I could really do was stare into space. That’s literally what I did most of the time 3 or 4 hours we were in line: look around, talk to Erin a little, stare into space.

I have to say, the staff at Comic Con improves exponentially every year in how they handle the lines. They make sure to have very specific areas for each line (for Hall H, Ballroom 20, whereever else). At a certain point in the morning, they 'compress' the line - the campers at the beginning are pretty spread out, so they have them squish together and then suddenly you in the back are much further in line than you thought you'd be. So it's important to remember that, just because you had to walk a mile or two to get to the end of the line, that doesn't mean the line is actually that long.

Anyway, we eventually got into Hall H, just barely! We were probably in the last group of 100 or maybe even 50 to get in at that time. We got seats near the back; and oddly, never were able to find closer seats later in the day. Usually, a lot of people will leave after certain panels, once they've seen whatever they came to see. But this day, almost no one left between panels. I've never really seen that before. The first panel of the day was The World's End, a movie by Edgar Wright, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. They were so gracious, even with people with dumb and overdone questions they were asked.

Next up was the Veronica Mars movie. I never actually watched the show, but I’m pretty impressed by the dedication of the fans to fund the Kickstarter to make the movie. After that was Kick-Ass 2, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Christopher Mintz-Plasse in attendance.

During the Riddick panel, my exhaustion started to set in. It ended up being the kind of Comic Con panel that I really don't enjoy and I kind of hate to see more of in Hall H. Nothing to do with the fact that I've never seen any Riddick movie nor do I plan to see this one. I've seen plenty of panels where I started out not caring about the movie, and ended up being really engaged in the conversation on stage. This one seemed more like a press conference - it sounded scripted, as though the questions the moderator was asking had already been given to the stars (and their PR teams) beforehand so they had time to rehearse a canned response. The panels I enjoy are the kind that someone like Chris Hardwick tends to do when he moderates: lively conversations and engaging, off-the-cuff talk about the movie.

Things picked up after that! I finally got to see a Walking Deal panel! Quite a few of the cast was there: Andrew Lincoln (Rick), Danai Gurira (Michonne), Steven Yeun (Glenn), Lauren Cohen (Maggie), Scott Wilson (Herschel), Chad Coleman (Tyrese) , David Morrissey (The Governor), and Norman Reedus (Daryl). Chris Hardwick was the moderator on this, and it was a marked difference from the last panel. Norman was adorable, taking selfies and not really paying attention. They showed a clip from next season and it looked really great!

I also finally got to see a Game of Thrones panel!! A lot of the cast was there for this one too: Peter Dinklage (Tyrion), Michelle Fairley (Cat Stark), John Bradley (Samwell), Kit Harrington (Jon Snow), Rose Leslie (Ygritte), Richard Madden (Robb Stark), Emilia Clarke (Daenerys), and George RR Martin. Jason Momoa (aka Khal Drogo) came out at one point, and ran over and kissed Emilia on the cheek. As he ran off, she reached after him saying 'My sun and stars!' It was super cute.



Other interesting panels followed: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, Mortal Instruments, Robocop. And then the big one at the end of the day: The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Andrew Garfield was there, dressed up like Spider-Man - or rather, pretending to actually be Spider-Man, as a consultant to the film about himself. He's so adorable - he's just so excited to be there and to have the chance to play Spider-Man. There's no artifice in how he talks about making the films. They showed some footage, including some with Jamie Foxx's Elektro, and it looked pretty awesome.

Comic Con 2013: The Thursday Edition

The Hard Rock Cafe, as seen from outside the convention center.

Thursday ended up as kind of mixed bag of experiences. Erin and I volunteered in the morning, a Comic Con first for both of us! We worked in Artist’s Alley, which I’ve never really looked at before, so it was a double first! Mainly all I did was walk up and down the rows of artwork, helped an artist put up some of his artwork, and guard an exit. Super exciting stuff. After a very long 4 hours, it was over, and we went back to the condo for lunch.

In the afternoon, my mom, aunt, and bff went off to explore the Gaslamp District, the area in front of the convention center that is full of hotels and condos, restaurants and bars, and companies both large and small trying to market their products to passers-by. It’s gotten so extensive in recent years that it’s almost a whole separate experience outside of, though still complementary to, Comic Con. Sega, for instance, had a whole gaming experience set up, where you could try out all of their new games in the comfort of their air conditioned arcade. (Nintendo had a similar thing in the hotel next to the convention center.)

HBO went full throttle with their Game of Thrones experience there. There were artists that would sketch your portrait into. They had areas where you could try out their new X-Box and Facebook games, and check out their Funko Pop exclusives, like this headless Ned Stark. You could also get a shirt customized with your name, which I thought was the coolest part!

The one panel I went to on this day was about a documentary called I Know That Voice, made by John DiMaggio (more commonly known as the voice of Bender from Futurama, and Jake from Adventure Time). Tom Kenny, Rob Paulsen, and other actors whose voices but not faces you would know were on the panel, talking about the doc. They talked about how voice acting is not taken seriously by some, as though it's not 'real' acting, but rather something they do until they become a real actor, like being a waiter.

Comic Con 2013: Critter Dropping

A couple weeks before Comic Con, I read about this woman, called the Geeky Hooker, who crochets these little amigurumi creatures and hides them around Comic Con and leaves clues to their location. The critters were adorable, and a treasure hunt of sorts sounded fun, so Erin and I decided to look for the critter drops as often as we could during during the Con.

The first drop happened on Preview Night -  an adorable little crocheted Hulk. As soon as I got the notification from her Twitter that there was a drop, we ran over there. She posted what I thought was just a picture (later I realized it was actually a video, which would have made it a bit easier!)  So we ran down to the lobby she said it was in, and used powers of deduction - “it looks he’s on a black table, behind a white stand” - to figure out his location. By the time we got there, someone had already snatched him up! It was so much fun trying to hunt him down that we decided we definitely had to make this a priority.

There he is!!!

The next day, there was an update that said she was scouting a location around Lobby F and G. We went down there to wait until she posted a video of the location. As we were waiting, I walked over to a nearby stand to grab an updated guide. A woman was already standing there, and as she walked away, I looked down and realized it must have the Geeky Hooker, because she had left a 1-Up Mushroom right there!! I immediately snatched him up and held him aloft, Lion King-style. Like 10 seconds later, someone else came up looking for him, and then more and more people starting running up, frantically looking around. I was shocked that there were so many people also doing this search, and by how quickly they showed up!

Taking a seat in Hall H!

We missed out on the next few, but for one of the last ones, a Totoro one, we were stuck in a line. It was so unfortunate, because that drop was actually right near our condo. My mom and aunt had just gone back there, so I texted and asked if they’d be willing to go look. They sprinted over to the location and started searching through the trees, along with some other con-goers/critter hunters. My mom found a discarded gray sock on the ground and actually grabbed it, thinking it was the critter! We later went back to the same place and the sock was still there. It was the exact same shade as a Totoro, so she wasn’t far off, I guess!

The critter drops ended up being one of the highlights of my Comic Con. Not only is my 1-Up Mushroom super cute, but the hunt itself was a ton of fun! I can’t wait for next year’s!

Comic Con 2013, Part the First

Okay, rather than make a huge long post about all the Comic Con goodness, I’m going to spread it out and write about one day each day. Starting with Wednesday:

View from the balcony of our beautiful condo.

Actually, okay, starting with Tuesday night because that’s when I got to San Diego, and that’s when Comic Con officially starts, when you enter San Diego. In hindsight, I should have taken a half day at work, because it would have been a lot nicer to drive during the daylight hours. Instead, I left at 5 as usual, and left my apartment at 7:30. I had to take 4 loads of stuff down to the car, that’s part of why it took so long to get going. With a quick stop to drop off my bunny, I ended up getting to San Diego around 10:45. We (meaning me, my mom, my aunt, my best friend, and my boyfriend) rented a condo in the Gaslamp District, just a couple blocks from the convention center. I can’t stress enough how nice it is when the convention center is just a couple minutes away, rather than having to worry about waiting for a bus or train!! Not to mention, it’s nice to be able to go back to the condo for lunch, or to take a quick breather away from the crowds.

On Wednesday morning, my mom and my aunt and I went to pick up my bff Erin from the airport. Shortly after that, we took a several mile trek to the Town & Country hotel to get our badges. As there is no rest for the wicked, we then immediately went over to the convention center to sign up for our volunteer time. We strolled into Preview Night a short time after it had already started. It was, as usual, packed like a sardine can. Some highlights of Preview Night include:

• This super cute Lego Yoda:

• The Big Bang Theory artwork area:

• This super happy Hulk I bought:

• Also, something called a Critter Drop, which warrants a whole separate post!

We didn't stay until the end of the night (9pm!) like we were planning because walking that whole exhibit hall area is probably the equivalent of like 5 miles. At least 5. And it was SO crowded, which is to be expected, of course, but that doesn't make it less exhausting! Also? There's no real way to prepare for that. You can walk a bunch to get in shape, wear comfortable shoes, but you just can't experience the crush of 25,000 people in very many other places.

Animal Crossing!

I’m SO completely addicted to my new Nintendo 3DS game, Animal Crossing. OMG I love it so much and I’ve been playing it nonstop since I got it.

I’ve played two previous iterations of this game: Wild World on my old Nintendo DS, and City Folk on my Wii. This new version is definitely the best yet. The graphics alone are so beautiful, much more sharp and detailed than any of the others. Some of the gameplay is the same, but there are new elements, such as the public works ordinances, which allow you to choose projects to build around town, some of which are functional and some of which are just aesthetic. Also, there’s a new store called Re-Tail, which serves the same function as Tom Nook’s store in previous games, where you can sell your items to the owners of the store, as well as put them up in a flea-market space.

There are tons of ongoing things to do, like catching bugs, fishing, planting trees and flowers, digging for fossils, swimming in the ocean, doing favors for villagers, decorating your house, customizing your furniture. There’s so much to do, you can’t even get bored. The possibilities really are endless.

RIP Google Reader

See you in hell, Google Reader. I really don’t understand why Google had to kill it, I truly don’t. I also don’t know why more people don’t utilize RSS readers. How do you keep up with all your blogs??

Well, in a post-Google Reader world, Feedly is my new go-to for an RSS reader. I checked out Feedly shortly after Google announced they would be shuttering Google Reader, and wasn’t really impressed. However, about a week or so ago, I checked it out again, and I actually really liked it. There’s a lot of customizable options, so that I can see either the full blog posting, a picture and a partial paragraph, or just a headline, and I can change it for each blog I’m subscribed to, which is seriously amazing. GR didn’t have that kind of awesomeness. So for some blogs that I really just want to skim through the headlines to see if there’s anything worth reading, I just have the headlines viewable, and for others, I have the ‘Magazine View’, which I find not only helpful, but also aesthetically pleasing. I also like how the blogs with updates are the only ones shown on the sidebar (though you can hit 'see more' to see the rest).

I think things are going to be okay after all, thanks to Feedly.

Um, BTW, this wasn’t a sponsored post or anything. I just really dig Feedly.

Girls on HBO

I binge-watched both seasons of Girls this weekend. I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy it, because I didn’t really like Lena Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture, and since Girls was purportedly similar, I didn’t have my hopes up. But... I ended up loving it!! It’s more relatable than I thought it would be. I’m not a New York girl in my early twenties... an LA girl in her late twenties is a slightly different animal altogether! But as I watched, I found myself almost cringing at how some things hit home for me, hard.

Not knowing what you're doing with your life, trying to navigate confusing interpersonal relationships - I guess these things are all pretty universal to people in their 20s. Maybe 30s too.

Also, Shoshanna seems like she should be super annoying to me, but I found her hilarious:

“Do you know that part on your resume where they ask if you have any special skills? Well, it’s the thing where they ask you to list like, ‘yoga, Spanish, water skiing, Photoshop.’ I feel like I don’t I have any special skills."