Bad Date Comix

Last weekend my girlfriend dragged me to Arisia (Boston’s resident Sci-Fi convention). I descended into the belly of the beast with a fistful of minicomics and a .357 magnum loaded with one bullet–for use if a furry bit me. But try as those Lovecraftian beasties might, they couldn’t get close enough and ultimately I survived the weekend. Along the way I attended panels ranging from mildly informative all the way down to completely asinine and ate a truly epic breakfast buffet.

One of the few useful panels I attended was about blogging for publicity, so I’m putting some of their suggestions into action. Anyway, I’d rather have something to say, and I’ve got a lot of bitching to do, so I’ll get my whine on right now.

The first thing that struck me while registering and carrying my shit to the hotel room was how devoid of Battlestar Galactica related activities the whole thing was. This was a supposed sci-fi convention and the aforementioned show was returning after a nearly year long hiatus… I assumed that there would be posters plastered everywhere advertising BSG parties all across the loud floor, but no such luck. Arisia is old school enough that it’s still butthurt because Starbuck is a woman.

The second thing I noticed is that Steampunk was fucking everywhere. Bear in mind, I’m down with Steampunk. I love me some Nikola Tesla riding around in giant clockwork robots, but where the hell did this sudden popularity come from? Is it some kind of flashmob? Are there gangs of internet ruffians trolling 4chan’s /cgl/ and laughing their asses off on Skype?

As the night wore on there was a panel for talking shit about Rocky Horror. While talking shit about people is a cause I can thoroughly get behind, but the Rocky Horror panel was scheduled so that Frank N. Further, Rocky and Riff-Raff couldn’t come down and do some trolling of their own. But it’s not like I could attend the panel–I was sequestered in my hotel room watching OH GOD STARBUCK’S A WOMAN.

I spent most of Saturday morning working the con with minicomics. I watched my girlfriend’s panel about our friendly neighborhood comics group and then we stopped off at a baw-fest about how M. Night Shyamalan got the rights to Avatar: The Last Airbender. Later on that night there were a bunch of panels I wanted to catch–one about how DC Comics intentionally torpedoed their line of books for girls, another about how Warren Ellis really likes Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs and spending too much time online, and finally the one I actually went to was about book publicity.

We ducked out after that for dinner, ending up at a chinese food restaurant with a truly unfortunate name (The Hot Pot of Shit in Central Square, Cambridge, MA). That brings me to my favorite memory from Arisia: The Dracula vs Wolfman debate. I have no strong feelings one way or the other so I decided that I’d join whichever team had fewer men–and even with Twilight supressing their numbers–the vampires still came out on top, so I joined the werewolf team. The werewolf themed panelist had clearly spent the last couple hours sequestered upstairs being interrogated by Barfleet, but we still had a bunch of fat guys who’ve spent entirely too much time reading about folklore. My favorite exchange in the debate was roughly as follows:

Lady Dracula: Yeah? Well, why do werewolves go around imprinting themselves on little babies?

Wolfman: Whoa. Give that lady a point! That’s some old-school folklore.

My Girlfriend: No. Wait. She got that from Twilight!

Lady Dracula: …

Other Draculas: BURN THE HERETIC!

Ultimately we “agreed to disagree”, but only because the werewolves had so thoroughly bent the vampires over a table and reamed their cornholes.

Sunday held a couple of panels I was interested in. The Guilty Pleasures panel was pretty much just a bunch of middle aged women sheepishly admitting that they still read Laurel K. Hamilton and a couple people that were both ashamed and proud that they read the Gor books. I, for my part, thoroughly enjoy the Star Trek books about Captain Kirk coming back from the dead and beating the shit out of the universe and I love bitching about how terrible the Dexter books are. The webcomics panel wasn’t entirely fail, except for the fact that they only mentioned comics I’m already thoroughly aware of. Well, one of the panelists pimped User Friendly. He should have been thrown to the furries. The indie comics panel was mostly stuff I’m thoroughly acquainted with–but at any rate, everybody should be reading Finder. It’s the best book about Wolverine in the post-post-apocalyptic future on the market today. And the panel inspired me to hunt down copies of Sam Kieth’s latest comic.

There was some kind of Goth Twilight Party going on during this time, but the fact that it was Twilight themed scared off the Goths, and the fact that it was Goth themed scared off the Twilight fans. The goths themselves got together for their own panel later that night where they talked about how the looming nuclear apocalypse made them wear too much black in 1981 and they haven’t bought any new clothes since then.

But at any rate, that brings us up to Monday and the last few bits of failure. My girlfriend’s buddy’s band played, but who was still around at ten AM on a Monday morning? And the con lackeys locked the doors to the little theater area. The half dozen people who filtered in were themselves a miracle.

But ultimately my only regrets from this event were how my girlfriend prevented me from massacreing even a single furry, and she wouldn’t let me blow up the LOL Cats panel on Monday.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last couple days reworking the layout of Tacolicious.net in anticipation of a web2.0 makeover. I’ll finish that up in the next couple days…

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.