Friday, March 23, 2012

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