Category: Entertainment

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San Diego hotel rooms for Comic-Con International go on sale tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM Pacific Time. Because they’ve sold out in a matter of hours the last few years — or, more precisely, because they’ve overwhelmed the reservation system while doing so — Travel Planners is instituting some new policies and a new procedure.

Last December they announced that they would require a deposit at reservation time, and a cut-off point in May after which it would no longer be refundable. This should help cut down on some of the “just in case” speculating that always happens. (Previously you had to provide a credit card when making the reservation, but they didn’t charge it.)

As for the procedure, here’s what used to happen: You would search for hotels, get a list of those that have rooms available, enter your name and contact info, then enter your credit card and get immediate confirmation. At every step, the server would be slow, and there was a good chance that you would have to start over. Yes, it would even fail at the last step.

The new scheme is wildly different: Instead of searching for a hotel, you’ll be asked to enter a list of up to 12 choices, in order of preference, and submit it. A few hours later, they’ll send you an email to confirm what you’ve gotten.

My first thought: this is exactly how it worked for me last year, when I got through on the phone instead of online. It’s also how reservations by fax used to work.

It’s annoying not to have instant feedback of course, but I suspect one of the main reasons the system breaks down is that it’s trying to handle so many complete transactions simultaneously. This way, the only part running “live” is collecting requests. Once those are all in, they can process them at whatever speed the reservation system can actually handle.

Plus, if they really want to minimize the load on their website, they can put everything on one page and minimize the number of graphics and scripts. Every image you have to load slows the page down. Every new page you have to load is another chance for the process to break down completely. When designing a web application, there are times to emphasize looks, there are times to emphasize convenience for the user, and there are times to emphasize simplicity in the actual process. This is one of the latter.

I guess we’ll see how it goes tomorrow morning.

Update: The request process, at least, went surprisingly smoothly. ← I’ve got some thoughts here on the reservation form and how the process worked.

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CBR’s coverage of the WildStorm panel at Emerald City Comicon yesterday includes a great bit in which, due to technical difficulties with the slide show, CBR’s reporter was put on the spot to ask the panelists a question:

“If you were stuck in an Office Max during a full scale vampire attack, what would you use as a weapon?”

They rolled right into it. Phil Hester would use a T-square, Kurt Busiek claimed that despite his best weapon foraging attempts he would end up with a stapler and go down quickly, Ben Abernathy would break some broom handles to use as stakes, Darick Robertson would use two drafting triangles as punching daggers, and Francesco Francavilla would assemble a cross out of whatever he found.

My first thought was actually the classic chair leg, but then I realized that Office Max would mostly have swivel chairs on plastic bases, and of course desks made up of sheets of particle board. Technically wood, but nothing you could easily turn into a stake.

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Ever since J. Michael Straczynski started selling his Babylon 5 script book series, I’ve been hoping we’d get a book with the scripts from the spinoff Crusade. Especially the scripts that were finished, but never produced, and would have set up the real story. That whole thing about finding a cure for the Drakh plague before it wiped out Earth? JMS strongly hinted at the time that it wasn’t going to be the main arc, but rather the mission that got the Excalibur out there and exploring, at which point they’d get caught up in the main story.

Two of the scripts were made available briefly on an e-reader site, using a Java applet that was specifically designed to make it as hard as possible to copy and paste anything (and incidentally made it a serious pain to, y’know, read it, which may be why the site is long gone). As I recall, they included a project to reverse-engineer Shadow technology, and the first hints that the Technomages used Shadow tech (before Jeanne Cavelos’ novels fleshed out that connection in detail.)

Anyway, we’re still waiting for the Crusade scripts, but here’s the next best thing: Crusade: Behind the Scenes [edit: dead link].

Characters, story, world-building, production issues and design, executive meddling, interviews with the cast and crew, photos, etc.

There’s a note at the end of the write-up:

CRUSADE: Behind the Scenes does NOT contain any of the show’s scripts. It is a compilation of interviews and images. The Crusade scripts, including those that were never filmed, will appear in J. Michael Straczynski’s forthcoming 3-volume series, “CRUSADE: What the Hell Happened”

Sadly, given the title, I suspect the script books are a joke. But who knows? Stranger things have happened with B5.

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Remember that mall mystery from a while back? There was a storefront under construction at the Irvine Spectrum with an “Opening Soon” sign, but no indication of just what store might be moving in. They opened in December, and I keep forgetting to post a follow-up.

As you can see, all is revealed:

Storefront with three symbols above it, but no words.

…or maybe not.

Unless, of course, you recognize the logos for Hurley International (middle), Converse (right) and…what’s that on the left? With the Nike swoosh on top and the…skateboard? Sunglasses? Something on the bottom?

It’s kind of a throwback to the old medieval-style signs that showed an image instead of a name: the Prancing Pony, for instance (to pull an example from LOTR). Only instead of recognizable images, they’re symbols. Pictograms, if you will, only decipherable if you’re familiar with the symbols already, and they’ve actually thrown an obstacle in the way by muddling the most-recognized logo (Nike).

It seems odd to deliberately use a sign that would make a store hard to name (never mind figuring out what they sell), but I imagine that their target audience is quite familiar with the logos and wouldn’t have any trouble finding the store.

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I was hoping to get a shot with the lit “TACO” clearly visible and darkened “BELL” fading into the background (closer to how it looked to the naked eye), but my phone doesn’t exactly provide much control over exposure. Still, you can get an idea of how it looked.

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I wasn’t aware that the term “will call” was used outside the theater industry, but a quick search on the term indicates that yes, it’s used in other industries to refer to a place where buyers can pick up merchandise.

According to Wikipedia, the term’s origin is in the usage, “I will call on you,” in the sense of physically visiting someone.

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