Category: Entertainment

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CNET writes about a new model of the Roomba automatic vacuum cleaner and its application of technology iRobot originally developed for mine sweeping (real mines, not the game), touching briefly on the state of the consumer robotics field. Amazingly it includes the following sentence:

On the other end of the spectrum, the Roomba cleans up the living room and, in all likelihood, could not be used by a mad scientist to take over the Earth.

It sounds like someone’s been reading recent Sluggy Freelance comics!

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There! Everything’s set for Comic Con. I had been really annoyed with myself last month when I pulled out the pre-reg forms only to discover I had missed the deadline by two days, meaning we’d have to… <reverb>STAND IN LIIIINE!!!!</reverb> *cue scream*

We had to stand in line for on-site registration a few years ago, and let me tell you, it was a near-disaster. We got there before the doors opened. By the time we got through the line, it was time for lunch.

The thing is, we’d been thinking about getting a hotel room in San Diego and going for several days, which would mean we could go through the registration line on a smaller day, with (we hoped) a smaller line. Combined with the fact that we haven’t really taken a honeymoon trip, we came up with this grand plan to take the whole week off, go to San Diego, do the touristy thing for several days and wander in and out of Comic Con at the end of the week. Various things conspired to cut this down, and we ended up planning half a week.

And of course the hotels are all booked.

I went back again tonight, to see what might have opened up and to look farther out. There are places charging $150/night for Wednesday and then $750/night for Thursday through Saturday. There are places charging $200 during the week and $1000 on weekends. The price difference is just insane! I almost wanted to sign up with one of the nice hotels for the first night or two and then head over to someplace else when their rates changed. [Edit: It occurs to me that this price difference probably isn’t an insane markup for weekends/a big convention weekend. More likely it’s the difference between a standard room and a deluxe suite, and while standard rooms are available for Wednesday, they’ve all been snapped up for the weekend, leaving only deluxe rooms open.]

The really cool thing, though, is that when I checked back at the Comic Con website for hotel info, I discovered they had added ONLINE REGISTRATION. *cue choir*

So we’re pre-registered after all (even if the form does arbitrarily choose who the primary contact is when you list more than one person. I filled out myself, then Katie and it tried to use her for the credit card info and email contact. So I started over, filled in her first, then me, and it used me for billing and listed my address for email contact… but it sent her the confirmation email.)

The hotel we ended up with — after a number of false starts that ended in “sorry, no rooms available” — isn’t fantastic, but it at least looks like it isn’t a total fleabag, and it’s reasonably close to the convention center. [Edit: It was the Super 8 in Little Italy.] We could probably walk if we had to, and it looks like we ought to be able to take the trolley, except for the fact that the %^$# trolley map is so abstracted I can’t actually tell whether there’s a stop nearby. (I figure driving on Saturday, at least, won’t save us any time.)

Vacation time? Check.
Registration? Check.
Hotel Reservations? Check.

Whew!

(Originally posted at LiveJournal, and brought over here because the rest of my con posts are here, and it’s an interesting look back at a time when you could get tickets and a hotel for Comic-Con a week and a half before the event!)

Current Mood: accomplished

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Time in comics is a strange, fluid thing. When you keep adventure characters in print over the course of decades, you don’t want them to get old. And so characters like Superman, who debuted as twenty- or thirty-somethings 60+ years ago, are roughly the same age today.

This is hardly unique to superhero comic books. The same is true of James Bond movies, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books, and even newspaper comic strips. (How long has Dennis the Menace been five years old?)

Still, it makes for interesting contradictions. If Superman debuted 14 years ago, he can hardly have met JFK, so clearly any stories dealing with him are no longer “canon.” On the other hand, if the story doesn’t depend on JFK having been the President at the time, the nefarious super-villain plot may still be part of Superman’s history. But sixty years of chronicled adventures crammed into fourteen years makes for a pretty busy life! (And how frequently does the US hold Presidential elections in the DC and Marvel universes?)

The time-squishing effect is easiest to see with flashbacks. Continue reading →

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I knew someone once who had no interest in science-fiction, and dismissed it with “That could never happen.” That seems to be the mainstream attitude toward SF — try to pit Farscape against Survivor and you know exactly what will happen — and yet they love to see films about the impossible. (Well, as long as the words “Star Trek” aren’t in the title.) According to the IMDB, 15 of the top 20 all-time grossing movies in the U.S. are science-fiction or fantasy — including the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy and four of the five Star Wars films (The Empire Strikes Back is #21). As much as people like to disdain Star Wars fans, there aren’t enough for the movies to do that well without the mainstream flocking to the theaters as well.

Now, I’m including The Sixth Sense, Spider-Man, and Pirates of the Caribbean, but even if you’d rather not, that’s still more than 50%. And the other five films include two movies about talking animals (Finding Nemo and The Lion King) and one about a guy surrounded by incredible coincidence (Forrest Gump).

Studios have clearly noticed the trend, since they keep making the films, but do you think the average Joe will notice how much sci-fi he actually watches? Nah, that could never happen.

From IMDB: All-Time USA Boxoffice as of July 7, 2004: Continue reading →

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