I'm having a great time at the con, all my panels are fun, the place is crowded, blah blah blah. You know the drill by now. I always have a great time, all my panels are fun, the place is always crowded. I'm getting as bored with writing these con reports as you are reading them.
I will say though that despite the fact that today was sold out and that Saturday is usually the elbow-abrasion day of them all, the hall didn't seem that crowded. That is, if you were smart enough to avoid certain aisles. At one point, I had to go to a meeting at a booth in the 5400 aisle and I — logically but foolishly — assumed that was somewhere near the 5500 aisle, which I could see was the absolute rear of the convention hall. I walked all the way back there only to discover that the 5400 aisle was in the absolute front of the hall, from which I had just come. It's a dumb numbering system but my point is that it didn't take long to walk through the entire convention twice that way. And on a Saturday, no less.
Apparently, there has been some exciting news in the Hollywood front, with monumental film projects and castings announced. But I don't care about that stuff and neither, if you have an ounce of sanity in your soul, should you. I mean, by all means go see the movie if it interests you but I refuse to go all atwitter because some big film may be shot next year and released in Summer of '09. I wish the film buying public could find some way to say to the film studios, "Look, we'll promise to buy tickets if you'll stop trying to get us worked up about the movie two years before it hits the Cineplex."
Last night were the Eisner Awards, and you can probably find a zillion websites (this one, for instance) that'll tell you who won. So I'll just tell you that it was an amazing ceremony — amazing in length (three hours and twenty minutes) and for the fact that most of the audience had such a good time that they didn't mind. The presenters were generally entertaining, especially Jonathan Ross and Neil Gaiman, who took the stage at the very end, at an hour where you'd figure the crowd would be asleep or yearning to be, and tore the place apart with a hilarious presentation. If I tried to describe it here, it would all sound like it was in very bad taste, and that would be misleading because it was actually in very, very bad taste. That doesn't always equal funny but when it does, it really does.
I got a lot of nice comments on this here weblog but as is inevitable I guess, I had one nasty encounter with a guy who wanted to debate my politics, then and there on the convention floor as people dressed like supporting players from the Batman franchise swarmed around us. He seemed to be under the impression that all would become right with the U.S. effort in Iraq, and that the 70+% of Americans who think it's a misguided effort would line up behind George W. Bush if only the guy who writes Groo the Wanderer could be brought around to his side. I'll tell you about our brief but enlightening discussion some time when I'm not dozing here between sentences.
I want to post this before Midnight so it'll have a Saturday time stamp instead of Sunday, which means I'd better wrap things up. I have three more panels tomorrow and then it'll be over for another year. The more crowded with activities that four days is, the faster it seems to go. It's a shame that the good times work like that and the bad ones drag on forever instead of the other way around.