the_gneech | Jul. 22nd, 2006

First off, Happy Birthday,

iamme_uk with an underscore! =) Once again, my Forgotten English calendar is on the far side of the continent, alas.

Second off, today is "panels and whatever else we can think of" day. Unfortunately, Ray Harryhousen's only scheduled appearances that I know of were yesterday and I didn't find out until too late, but if he's still at the con, he might be findable at a panel or something.

A "collectables" company is making statues of various critters from Harryhousen's movies, notably the medusa, Caliban, and the kraken from Clash of the Titans, and they had a ginormous display statue of the medusa, roughly eight feet tall and a lotta woman. Scaly, horrifying woman, but a lotta woman nonetheless.

Oh! Something I should have mentioned in yesterday's report, is that I found Steve Purcell (creator of Sam & Max), who was selling books of Sam & Max concept art for various projects and promoting the new Sam & Max computer game. I got him to sign a copy of the concept art book and wanted to give him my card, only to discover that I'd run out. D'Oh!

I also don't have my personal badge with me, for some inexplicable reason. So I got him to sign it to "John" instead of "Gneech." He also drew a mini-sketch of Max in the book. :)

*random* Mmm, fig newtons and bottled frappuccino. Breakfast of champions! */random*

So today's big decision is, do I go to the "How to Make Compelling Webcomics" panel in the hope that it actually has something useful, or do I go to the "Brisco County, Jr." panel in the hopes of getting Bruce Campbell to autograph our copy of If Chins Could Kill?

Stupid con panels! Everything good always happens at the same time!

-The Gneech

PS: This is still making me giggle like crazy.

It's pretty bad, we're at the largest con in the U.S., and the Maritime Museum is more fun.

In a nutshell, there was no way in hell we could get in to the Bruce Campbell panel. We did get a brief glimpse of him, through the door, on the far side of a massive ballroom.

the_gneech: There's Bruce, up there at the end of the table.

lythandra: Yup. That's him.

BOTH: *look at long line of people still filing in to the already packed-to-capacity ballroom*

the_gneech: So ... webcomics panel?

lythandra: Sure, whatever.

The panel was titled "Creating Compelling Webcomics" so I figured it might be worth a shot. Instead, it turned out to be a very basic Webcomics 101 by somebody I wasn't familiar with. Bleah.

So, aside from hanging out a bit with Vince, Nekomimikun, and somebody I knew by reputation but I can't remember who it was now (it's been a long day), Laurie and I spent pretty much the whole day tromping around the waterfront in the hot sun.

What had prompted it was that as we were riding the trolley down to the convention center in the morning, Laurie spotted some tall ships at the Little Italy stop and mentioned that we should go check 'em out. As there was nothing much interesting going on at the con, we hopped on a rickshaw (on the grounds that everybody should ride in a rickshaw at least once) and went down to Little Italy to find out what was the deal.

Turns out the tall ship she spotted was the Star of India, a merchant ship built in 1862 and one of the five ships that comprise the San Diego Maritime museum. The other ships consist of the HMS Surprise (a 1970s vintage mockup ship that was used as one of the sets in Master and Commander), a Soviet B-39 submarine, the Berkeley (a steam ferry) and the Medea, a private yacht.

We had a very good (if unpleasantly warm) lunch at "The Elephant and Castle," a British pub across from the museum (not the same one Kerry told us about) and walked back from Little Italy to the convention center, which would have been a very nice walk in 70-degree weather, but left us no small amount of pooped at the end.

Anyway ... it's late. I'll probably have some more interesting stuff to say tomorrow.

-The Gneech

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