Dragon*con and Miscellany

So. Instead of being the dutiful son and coming home for Labor Day weekend, I chose to have an uproarious time in Atlanta with Leslie, Derek, and Becky and 90,000 odd others at Dragon*con, the sci-fi/fantasy convention.

We drove down Friday morning. I missed class for it, but got all of the assignments and such squared away earlier. It was a smooth drive, relatively uneventful. Leslie does Madlibs in a custom way, simply constructing vague frames of sentences and having user input fill in nearly every word. The results are only vaguely coherent, but the word combinations are... sometimes gems. The downside is that you can only do a couple at a time, but quality over quantity is good.

We opted to use MARTA, the Atlanta public rail transit system. (MARTA is an acronym meaning something like that all jumbled up to sound like a character from Arrested Development.) Parking at one of their outlying stations was 80% cheaper than parking downtown. We stopped at one of the northern ones, got off, and went up. The rails at this point are over ground, and it's a very light, clean, lofty feeling station.

Then we went to get tickets. It was taking us a minute to look over the computer console, and it must've shown, because a guy walked up to us in a dirty white t-shirt. Homeless vibes. He said he could help us out for $5, which was technically cheaper. We were all having separate misgivings, but no one else was voicing them, so I accepted, and he performed his shady magic, checking all the cards he had (which he must've found or something) before going up to the entrance machines and (I realize this in hindsight) activating the handicapped doors by reaching around. (These doors are places where you'd swipe your ticket or your card; it's all automated and, by all appearances, unobserved.)

So he eventually split off after commenting a bit about all the crossdressers at Dragon*con and how weird that is, and we boarded the train and went on, luggage in hand. It was a nice view and feeling, going along. I would've enjoyed it more unladen and without any particular place to go, but... eh.

Arriving at the station, we try to leave and realize that you need a ticket to do so. So we ask a security officer (who sits behind her door, probably looking at camera feeds) how to get out if we no longer have our ticket. She advised us that there were handicapped exits that worked like automatic doors. Ahhh. So we get directed in the right direction and go up, up, up this long escalator, and emerge in downtown Atlanta, with our hotel half a block away.

Now, the hotel. There were already people about in costume (a situation that goes on all weekend) and with shiny pre-registered badges. We go up to the desk to check in, expecting to be quickly issued keys to a spacious room with two sizeable beds. Ah, no?

Becky was handling the negotiations, as the room was under her name, but the highlights were this: We could go a few blocks away and stay at a hotel with the first two nights' stays free, but we weren't keen on it, having already committed money budget-wise and being in this hotel being a darn convenience, as it's where the con is at! So then next they apparently explaint hat any request for a room is simply a preference, and this was a preference that could not be fulfilled. However, they do have pull-away beds that would help accomodate the required number of people, being big.

Finally we get up to our room, request a pull-away bed, and are dismayed upon seeing it, to the point of initially sending it away. It's only big enough for one person. So we try requesting two. Sorry, we only get one bed? Well, one it is. We'll make do, the final decision is, because we're tired of moving our stuff around at this point.

Now we're in a convention. What is there to do? Well, first there are panels. These are discussion areas, groups, what have you organized in a room going over a certain topic of interest. Their formality varies. Sometimes a movie or movies are being shown, sometimes a famous person or people are there, sometimes it's people discussing a topic with the attendees, sometimes it's a simple lecture, and sometimes it's people just meeting and having fun. They had different tracks of these things happening all weekend, as diverse as Corset-making, Observatories in Space, Full Metal Alchemist (an anime), a Yule ball, Battlestar Galactica cast reunion, the Dawn costume contest, and so on.

Then there are the dealer's rooms, exhibition rooms, and art rooms. The first one is self-explanatory. The second is a lot like the first one, except that a lot more companies are there actually promoting products, so it's less of a flea market feel as you're often talking directly with representatives from a certain company. The third is where individual artists sell their wares, all of varying quality and pricing. Many works were under silent auction.

And finally there's just all the random stuff going on. They had bars going on in between the three hotels this was being held in (all hotels being adjacent to one another). There were parties going on in various rooms at any one time. Tons of people congregated in the lobbies together, randomly taking pictures of compelling costumes. They had tons of game-playing going on, though I never did that part. (Some of it was card games, some role-playing, some strategy.) For food, the Peachtree Center was adjacent, with a food court and seating. It was like a city within a city.

I'm not going to go into everything I did, since I've already spent so much describing just getting there. So instead I'll degenerate into lists of some of the things I did and bought, to give a vague idea of what can be done there, though there's so much going on you couldn't do it all in 20 years.

What I bought: shiny dice (mostly blue ones, including a set of frosty ones and a D6 with the libra sign for 6), a t-shirt about English as the back-alley pilferer of other languages, a Tenchi wallscroll that I have just noticed is no longer on my wall because it fell down (Tenchi is an anime as well), a soundtrack to something that I've since learned is both pirated and not what I thought I was getting, Wanderers from Ys III for the Super Nintendo, Killer Bunnies Green Booster Deck, and a piece of art depicting the Wheel of Fortune, turned by the four seasons (?) as they pull on the wheel whose center has the Jewish kaph (כּ), which in numerology represents the number 20. No, I'm not sure what that means. Help?

I also went to several panels. Some of them include The Great Observatories (where I got a lot of cool space pictures courtesy of NASA), a Star Trek The Next Generation panel with Brent Spiner, Gates McFadden, and Jonathan Frakes (or Data, Dr. Crusher, and Riker), Hot Fuzz: The Verdict, Weird and Unusual Scientific Studies (and the Rationales Behind Them), and a Mythology and Folklore panel where Leslie and I both won free stuff (books, that is... mine being a 3 book set Tales of the Frog Princess). Oh, and there was a Cruxshadows concert. And... and... and...

I had an excellent time. ^_^

Being back is mostly good, but there are a few things I see that distress me. We've been having protesters on campus all week. Not many, probably half a dozen, wielding signs in front of the library, stirring up a racket with their preaching. They speak words of condemnation, shouting at women wearing pants or short hair, men who try to contradict them, and anything that makes them angry, people that have nothing objectionable going on at all. Their message is one where people go to hell. Because. They... say so? Of course, one of their signs (and my "favorite") is the one where it has a front with "God Says" and a whole bunch of drivel, catch-phrases and such of a certain ideological stance. (Homosexuality is a sin, abortion is murder...) On the back was "Satan Says" and things like Homosexual sex is good, abortion is okay... and it disturbs me. It disturbs me that there is this double transfer. One is that social issues are becoming political ones, not that that's new. Whether or not two partners of the same gender should be allowed to have the same legal protections as the rest of those under the umbrella of marriage, that is a legal expression of a social objection. Whether a woman should be allowed to decide for herself whether she should have an abortion (and whether her fetus is a person or not, and thus whether she should be wrong to make such a choice, given other pressures which she is undoubtedly accounting for). This is the wish, not of protecting civil order, but of guaranteeing social order. At the same time, it is personal bigotry, translated through religious means, and applied to their view of the social world, and their wishes on a political landscape. It is this great monolith of opinion, the theocratic crag, divorced from the Founding Fathers' wisdom but using their freedoms to countermand the liberties of those they oppose as sinful. I do not articulate what I fear well enough, but it's like... what if Thoreau had practiced civil disobedience because he thought slavery was right and just, because the blacks are inherently inferior to whites and must be guided for our benefit and, somehow, theirs? What if someone were advocating for that now? And what if there were a fear, a vague one, that some of these ideas were gradually being accepted? That though the half-dozen will always be the loudest voices, they will not be the only bodies, and who can resist the press of masses and masses of people?

I hope this fear is as unreasonable as the fear (or welcoming) of most apocalypses.