Eating Out Wondercon Day 3

And so Day 3 starts with the sraping of the Spidey spooge from mine crusty eyes and marshal up the strength to face one final day of nerdery.  Although I did forget one fun little tidbit from the night before.  As I was race-drinking in the back yard, it was raining pretty good in SoCal.  And as I'm huddling beneath the awning, I notice that there seems to be a fine mist mixed in with the rain.  Seems strange, given the strength of the rain.  Then I look a little closer...they're BUBBLES!  Apparently someone used dish soap to clean the gutters, so in this rainstorm I'm surrounded by this cloud of teensy tiny bubbles, so thick that it looks like I'm a salmon swimming up a very clear stream.

At least there was a nice little pseudo-hallucination before my brief nap.  Then up and at 'em for another Wonderconful day.  This one even earlier since we had to get in early to open up the booth.  I honestly think there are gnomes who wake up once the doors close and throw parties in each of the booths.  I've got no other explanation for how cookies got in there.

Sunday was our big shopping day, being that we'd spend the last 2 days slobbering over geeky gew gaws that we didn't need and could barely afford.  Even though there was every comic I never knew I wanted available, I was looking more for viewable art that I could display to show off my eriudite tastes.  Like my Mustache Ride poster!

It was also our big panel day.  Our friend over at The Ratbox was giving his perspective on how to creatively collaborate on projects with a limited time schedule.  It was a fairly eye opening and inspirational panel.  Not so much for the theme, which was good and raised good points.  No, the gem of the panel was the faux aspergers basement troll, who apparently only came to the panel to get 6 people to all agree that they were wrong and he, Master Billy D'Twenty was absolutely correct that he could rely on being successful strictly on the strength of his work with absolutely no networking or pleasant interation with any humans at all.  Oh how he quivered with rage when they tried to gently reestablish that we were living on Earth and that there is always an ass to kiss.

And how do you follow up a potentially explosive Q&A?  Why a mixer at the Hilton lobby bar of course!  Sadly the future Ed Gein didn't show.  So instead I got to sit down and have some great conversations ranging from where Lucas went wrong with the prequel trilogy to why organic farming can't feed our current populations to why beef ranchers finish fattening a steer on grains.  And finally in the course of grabbing our gear and pay, we got to run into Tina (remember her from day 1?).  Security had "wisely" locked her out of tearing down her booths because she had left her badge behind since the event was over.  However, happily I still had my 1-shot sticker from opening that morning.  So we whisked her away to see "a guy" who'd fix everything and bestowed the sticker upon her so she could pack up for the trip back to Texas.

So after grabbing a couple more drinks at the mixer, we headed back to the pad to pack up for the final run back to No-Town.  And short of the grumpiest tweaker to ever run an AM/PM overnight, it was a thankfully uneventful drive home.  After a brief unload, I staggered into the house and proceeded to sleep for 12+ hours and wake up sometime Monday evening.  Full of great memories and a fresh creative drive to serve you, the blogly public with another year of inane rambliosity!  Next time, maybe something about food?

-Pook

Eating Out Wondercon Day 2

This exactly what my buddy looked like when he was waking me up after a whopping 3 1/2 hours of sleep on Day 2 of the Wonderconly extravaganza.  A quick bolt of coffee down the neck and we're zooming off to the Con.

Now here's a funny point...you know, placing a popular and heavily patronized convention directly next to the most heavily patronized theme park in the world...bad idea.  It took us nigh an hour just to get near enough to the convention hall just to pile out of the van in the middle of traffic in front of a rather exasperated cop.  And thank jeebles I didn't have a car to park!  I saw more than one person having a nervous breakdown shortly after dropping an exorbitant amount of cash to leave their car on a little spit of concrete.

The next pain in the ass that was destined to be the theme for the day was security goons seemingly swapping entrances and closing exits at whim.  Can't go in through this door, for 10 minutes, then they wander off to go huff paint or whatever Anaheim event staff do to remain legally incompetent.

But enough of the whining, there's still a full day of Contastic fun ahead!  Naturally we first check in at the t-shirt booth and set about hawking and spreading the love.  And of course the lovely people of Orange County were nothing but receptive and kind to a hulking longhaired maniac in overalls, flinging sharp edged pieces of paper at their lily-soft hands.  Okay, they mainly stared at me in terror and stutter stepped away, clutching my flyers in their bleeding hands, thankful that they narrowly avoided a ride on the Deliverance Experience.

And there was yet more fun to be had.  You see, the Transformers had teleported in from Cybertron for a very special photo-op!  And what goes better with a photo-op than a photobomb?  After only miniscule amount of prodding, I find myself successfully dared to go ape at the windows behind the noble warrior-bots.  So I get into my perfected Wild Okie Amble and proceed to appear dazzled and more than a little aroused by the massive metal forms before me.  When I realize that I'm seeing quite a bit of pink jiggly activity out of the corner of my eye.  And I turn to see that I'm about 3 feet from the ass of the most scantily clad Moral Kombat chick-ninja I've ever seen in my life.  I mean, like I could see what she ate for breakfast scantily.  And so with an uproar of outrage and laughter echoing behind me, I scuttled far away from any potential security conflicts or nerdrage moments.

At this point it was wisely decided to downshift on our excitement of the day.  So, we set out to do some browsing and wandering.  We stopped by the autograph alley to get a peep at Lou Ferigno and the very first playmate (GILFtastic!  Polydent and support hose all the way!).  And then we went around to scope out all the toys we could never afford.  I was really quite taken by the fez vendor's designs and the quality of construction.  A fez is a hat for life after all.  Also the designs over at Steam Crow were extremely witty and drew more than a couple guffaws as we perused.

Saturday cosplay was decidedly stranger.  With the gender bending costumes going from say girl Boba Fett, to Ron Jeremy as Wonder Woman.  The brain bleach is on backorder, but I'll be using vodka until then to try and wipe the memories from my mind's eye.  Plus, it being St. Patty's, you got to see things like Chewbacca with green hair extentions and a kelly green bowler.  But sadly, no demented leprechauns to be tackled for their wee gold coins.

As the Con wound down, we again met up with some SoCal chums and headed back to the pad.  Upon arrival we then set about savaging a fabulously Filipino beef curry over rice.  Could have been a little spicier, but it was certainly a restorative that got me through the rest of the evening.  Which consisted of sitting paranoid in a pickup at a grocery store parking lot on St. Pattys until 1am.  Sober.  You read those hated words right.  Dead, bloody, sober.  I did my best to make up for it by glugging until 4:30am.  But I could feel St. Pat's disdain at my not getting puking drunk on his blessed day.  Alas!  There is still day 3 to come!

-Pook

Eating Out Wondercon Day 1

So what a wild and wooly weekend!  A good friend and creative cohort over at Ratbox Productions hooked us up with a gig selling t-shirts for GeekdomWear.com.  And to top it off, gave us a ride and put us up with family!  We'll get back to that soon, but now on to Friday.

So it's always fun to see an event waking up and getting ready for the public.  We started off having smokes and coffee at an exit patio while we waited for logistics on getting our badges.  While we were cooling our heels, we got to see the early ebb and flow of the con folks as they steeled themselves for the onslaught they've committed themselves to.  So when a couple folks approach shamefacedly looking to bum a final smoke before they weld themselves to their booths and exhibits, I'd be a churl to accept their offered dollar.  And you know someone seriously wants a smoke when they're offering a greenback for whatever you've got.

And thats how we made our first Wondercon friend, Tina.  More about her later.  First was my initial impression of my first real sizeable comic book convention.  It's BIG!  I'm sure Comicon is many times larger, but even Wondercon is far to vast to be able to take it all in on your initial viewing.  There is a riot of vendors with every geeky, dorky knick knack you've never known you coveted, displays and demos of all shapes and sizes.  And it wasn't until day 2 that I finally saw any of the artist areas.

We took it pretty easy for day 1.  There were some basic munchies, most of which I completely forgot about once I realized we were also sharing space with Brianna Garcia.  You might not know the name, but you should certainly seen her artwork passed around the social media scene.  Check on my first celebrity of the day.  Rapidly followed up by Kaja Foglio of Girl Genius fame and Kevin Grevioux from Underworld.  Naturally I'm such a rube, I'm turning to my friends and exclaiming "Isn't that the dude from the..."  And I'm answered with a much suffering "Yes..." and a look that tells me that I'm still a jackass at heart.

Friday at a con in a new town is fairly slow....I'm told.  Still, I saw probably 2 or 3 thousand people file past our booth alone during the hours I was passing out flyers. Many of them were folks working the con and taking their one opportunity at a slow time to walk the floor and get a feel for the event.  Still, folks with exhibitor badges were quite kind to the smelly weirdo with bloodshot eyes shoving a card in their hand and decrying his wares as the cutest at the convention.

As the day wound down, we beat feet from the convention center towards Mom's house, with a quick pitstop for some sanity defending beers.  Upon arrival at the place I was doomed to get a maximum of 4 hours sleep in, we immediately tucked into some delicious breaded and baked trout filets accompanied by a deliciously spicy shrimp gumbo.  The red bell pepper had a pleasant front seat in the gumbo's flavor profile, with the seafood flavor of the shrimp peeking up from the cajun seasoning.  And the trout just had an outright clean and mild flavor that stood well against the seasoned breading.

I was irritably dragged from my plodding enjoyment of dinner for a coffee gab at a local corporate diner with some associated local friendlies as well as keeping our booth bound artist friend up well past her pumpkin hour.  But great and fun conversation was had, discussion of the unrealistic expectations of female anatomy in funny books was made and general goofery and fun was had by all.  My night ended tucking in with some PBRs and a nice Warhammer 40k novel until inebriated exhaustion crossed my eyes too much to read.  Meemees now.  Day 2 tomorrow.

-Pook

Eating Out A New...Wait, It's frigging March!?

Great galloping snack cakes!  It's been 3 bloody months!  Where the hell have I been?!?

Well, the truth of the matter is I've been pretty much nowhere.  Nothing awful, thankfully.  Although we did just lose our beloved cat Knickerbockers after nigh 19 years.  She was a wonderful and beloved cat and will be missed.  Her life of general awesomeness reaffirms my solid belief in rescuing your pets rather than purchasing them. 

But enough of the griefly topics.  The top end of the year has also seens some pleasantness as well.  I've got my pepper babies a-gestating on top of the fridge!  This year I'm going for a full rack of 54 fatali peppers along with 18 trinidad scorpions, 9 bhut jalokias and another 9 of the awesome mystery tutti fruitti peppers we had last year.  I'm hoping that I might be able to get a small plot of land to experiment with a larger scale growing operation in soil.  Maybe I'll even have enough to sell through a Farmers Market vendor.  Or, barring that, I'll be looking to dry tons of 'em and have all the chili powder a boy could dream for.

Of course, the Rogue Festival has just passed for the year.  Alas, I was still too broke to attend any of the wonderful shows this year.  But I did at least get the opportunity to film 2 performances of The Bright Side of Total Doom for Scurvy the Prophet for Profit at Veni Vidi Vici.  This year he shed his Captains coat and cast of beloved mutants for a more intimate one man performance of his innovative self actualization program to smile your way through the coming apocalypse.  Truly an innovative method of finding the joy in everyday suffering.  It's more of a thinking mans comedy, while your sides are splitting from the absurdist humor, you're also left pondering why we participate in the puppetry of the modern world.

And the most recent big event though has to be our attendance at Wondercon 2012 in Anaheim!  A good friend of the blog was able to secure us a gig pimping t-shirts for Geekdomwear.com at their booth.  Which, by the by, I would like to thank them again for the opportunity and all of the fun that came with it.  And being that it was a whole weekend of thrills and spills it deserves it's own little post.  So, methinks that's what we'll do....and not three months later

-Pook