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Comic-Con 2006 Report, Part 2

Note: The Gameboy Advance that I thought had been thrown away has been found since the previous post, but the digital camera is still missing.

Below is a rough record of events that occured on Sunday (7/23):

12:15 AM - Ordered a combo meal at the Taco Bell drive-thru. It was the first real meal that I had in the past 24 hours. I tried to take my time eating it all, but I couldn't.

1:00 AM - Parked a couple of blocks away from the SDSU campus, heading for the Library Book Reserve room. It's open 24 hours during school, so I went in to use a computer. After checking my email, surfing around, and getting a few "this computer is for coursework only" messages, I decided to wait a little before continuing.

2:00 AM - Fell asleep at the computer that I was using. Surprisingly, I was never interrupted by the library staff or security. Neither did I wake up myself before my cellphone's alarm went off.

8:00 AM - Waking up to my cellphone's alarm, I immediately left SDSU and took the freeway back to the downtown area of San Diego.

8:30 AM - Stopped at Jack in the Box to get a burger and milkshake. As soon as I started eating, some guy came from the line saying, "If you can't understand me, learn some English, or go back to Mexico...I really don't give a fuck!".

9:30 AM - Arrived at the convention center 5 minutes late after parking a little farther away than the day before. Because I was a volunteer, I was let in instead of having to wait in line. Once all of the volunteers were gathered and given assignments, I was directed to the ballroom directly across from the meeting point, where I would spend the next three hours.

9:45 AM to 12:30 PM - Sat near the back of the ballroom in a chair with a yellow volunteer sign on it. My responsibility was only to ensure that no one tried to enter through the 'exit only' doors and to direct people through the entry door.

Around 10:15, the room got a bit livelier because someone came in. It turns out that it was the guy who plays Chekov on Star Trek (can't remember his name at the moment). After answering a lot of questions, he presented a clip of a new episode of Star Trek coming later this year (distributed on the internet), and a teaser for a currently unnamed movie. The teaser was about 4 minutes of a tiny skull surrounded by fire, growing larger over dialogue that sounds like it had to do with the persecution of witches or some such thing. Once that was over, the room was emptied for the next event.

The last hour I spent in the room was for a Marvel comics panel. We were shown the covers of upcoming issues of several series. One of the more interesting things was something called "Bullet Points", in which the identities of Marvel superheroes were changed. As I recall, because of Captain America's death, Peter Parker becomes the Incredible Hulk while on the run in Nevada, Reed Richards becomes an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D after being prevented from going into space, and someone other than Tony Stark becomes Iron Man. There was also discussion of a certain milestone concerning Ultimate Spider-Man #104 and a spoiler (which went over my head) for the next issue of The Runaways. When this event was finished, so was my volunteer work.

Between 12:30 PM and 5 PM, things went roughly the same as the day before, where I revisited some booths, others were gone (or I never found them), and saw some for the first time. I got to play New Super Mario Bros. at the Nintendo booth, which unlike last year, had only DS systems. Revisiting the Square-Enix booth, I played the Final Fantasy 3 remake on DS and a much improved demo of Final Fantasy 12. At Konami's booth, I still passed up chances to play Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, which was the only thing that interested me there.

Newgrounds was there (with the giant Alien Hominid costume) with a new game called "Castle Crashers", basically the combination of Alien Hominid's visual style with Golden Axe. I never asked if the game was going to be on something besides XBox 360, since that was the only system they had it for.

Within the last hour or two of the convention, I wandered back and forth between both ends of the main hall, coming across Keenspot, a booth selling CDs and DVDs of stuff from Japanese rock bands like Psycho le Cemu and Dir en Grey, and several racks of shirts from Stylin Online.

5:00 PM - The main hall and the rest of the convention center is officially closed, and so I had to squeeze through large crowds until crossing the street and trolley tracks.

5:45 PM - Stopped at the mall in Mission Valley to visit the arcade. Like earlier this year, they still had Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection, but newly added was Soul Calibur 3: Arcade Edition. I played two games of both, though I did far worse at Soul Calibur than I expected to.

7:00 PM - Visited the last house that I had stayed at during the school year. No one was there, but I did notice that all of my mail was outside and in the mailbox, so I took the letters that were mine and left.

9:00 PM - Left San Diego, headed back to Las Vegas after filling up with $38 of gas.

10:00 PM - After fighting off sleep and seeing things, I made it to Temecula and exited the freeway, parking by a 7-11 store and intending to sleep only until 11:30.

11:30 PM - The cellphone alarm went off, but I still wasn't rested up enough to leave. It wouldn't be until 4 AM that I would finally be ready to leave, and another 12 hours until I would be back in Vegas.

Regarding the list of costumes I saw at the convention, I'm leaving it out. Why? Because I'm too lazy to include them now, though if anyone actually reads this blog and asks, I'll list them anyway.

posted by el-chozo-loco @ 8:28 AM