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Quotes from “Once Upon a Time,” a panel at Comic-Con International in which fantasy authors discussed whether epic fantasy requires larger than life heroes.

Brandon Sanderson: “I would say, if Tolkien did it, it’s okay.”

Christopher Paolini: “I write…Mary Sues, and that’s okay.”

Maryelizabeth Hart: “We’re gonna start with Patrick [Rothfuss] so he can’t argue with anyone.”
(later)
Patrick Rothfuss: “I just wanted the opportunity to disagree with myself.”

Megan Whalen Turner on the typical vagueness of prophecies: “What if there was a prophecy that said, ‘The One will come. And he will have a 63% chance of defeating…”

Brent Weeks on the X saves Y structure: “I mean, is there…nobody saves nobody?”
Megan Whalen Turner: “They all die.”
Brent Weeks: “And that’s George Martin.”

Panel held Thursday, July 22, 2010.

»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.

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Sometimes, weaving through the crowds at Comic-Con is easy.

Sometimes it’s like being herded.

Sometimes it’s like swimming upstream.

And sometimes it’s like playing Frogger, looking for an opening and moving with traffic even though it’s not going in the direction you want.

This being San Diego, perhaps tacking a sail might be more appropriate.

»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.

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While Katie got up early Saturday morning to wait in line for the Warner Bros. panel in the cavernous Hall H (her goal was Harry Potter, but Green Lantern was an equal or greater draw), I slept in a bit before going down to the Hilton Bayfront for Leverage at the Indigo Ballroom. I really had no idea what to expect, and wasn’t even 100% sure who was going to be there since I couldn’t find a description in the program.

I certainly wasn’t expecting to have to walk straight through the hotel, out the back, and along the edge of the waterfront to get to the end of the line.

Fortunately, the Indigo Ballroom is big, and they hadn’t started letting people in yet. So even though the line looked long, I still managed to find a seat 1/3 to 1/2-way back from the front. It was a bit nerve-wracking to start with, though, especially since a large part of the line was made up of people who were more interested in the Venture Brothers panel immediately afterward (many of whom no doubt had bad memories from a year or two back when VB was put in a room much too small for its audience).

Sighted!

As I neared the front of the outdoor section of the line, a shout went up, and people started waving up at the balcony. It was hard to see in the gloom, but several of the actors were out on a balcony. Tim Hutton (Nate Ford), Aldis Hodge (Alec Hardison), and Christian Kane (Elliot Spencer) started waving back, and as we took pictures of them, they took pictures of the line. Meanwhile, the Venture Brothers fans were wondering just who the heck was up there.

Everyone received a T-shirt on the way in, with the show title on the back and one of the character’s roles on the front: Hacker (olive green), Hitter (red), Grifter (gray), Thief (blue, I think) or Mastermind (black). I started with an XL Grifter, but traded it immediately for an L Mastermind — which will actually fit. No luck swapping it for a Hacker, though, which is what I really wanted.

They also had Beth Riesgraf (Parker), producer/writer Chris Downey, and guest star Wil Wheaton…who will be returning as Chaos this year in an episode called “The Ho-Ho-Ho Job.” (He said that John Rogers called him up and asked him to come back as the Grinch who stole Christmas.) Gina Bellman was the only member of the main cast who didn’t make it.

It was mostly a Q&A panel, with a surprisingly good mix of questions. (Too often, audiences seem to focus on one or two of the guests to the exclusion of the rest.) There were a lot of funny moments, and in the middle, they ran an extended segment from “The Gone Fishin’ Job,” which was set to air the following day.

Apparently there’s a show coming up in which you find out that each of the members of the crew tried to steal the same thing years ago, and they all met without realizing it. You’ll see what each of them remembers…and then what really happened.

Quotes

The best quotes — or at least the best ones I managed to write down — came from Beth Riesgraf and Wil Wheaton.

One fan asked what Parker would think of Comic-Con. Beth Riesgraf said, “She’d have a field day picking everybody’s pockets… so many costumes! This is her crowd.”

Another fan asked about progression of character relationships, and they explained that Parker and Hardison were taking things slow. Wil Wheaton piped in, saying, “I think the Internet has you covered.” Some time later, Aldis Hodge said something to Beth Riesgraf about pretzels, which neatly separated the Leverage fans from the Venture Brothers fans in the audience.

Regarding Hardison wanting to run his own crew, Aldis Hodge said, “I’m not taking on my own crew anytime soon, but maybe 27 seasons in…” A beat or two later, Wil Wheaton added, “27 seasons in, it would be Leverage She Wrote.”

Jumping off of Christian Kane’s singing and cooking, both of which have found their way into Elliot’s background, one fan asked whether any of the other actors had brought hobbies in to their character. I hadn’t realized that Aldis Hodge actually plays the violin and paints. Then Beth Riesgraf joked, “Well, I was really good at stealing stuff when I was little…”

As for favorite memories from the show, TIm Hutton immediately answered, “Food fight.” Almost overlapping, Beth Riesgraf added, “I was going to say the cold cut fight.” Someone asked her to elaborate, and she explained: “It’s a food fight, except you only use cold cuts.” “Good times!”

Finally, one of the last questions was: When do we see Hardison steal Comic-Con? I can’t remember what anyone else said before Wil Wheaton summed it up: “If ever there was a time when Hardison and Chaos would team up…”

Now that would be a fun show to watch!

»Saturday at Comic-Con.
»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.

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Saturday night we went out to see a production of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia at the Sierra Madre Playhouse. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a comedy about love, sex, math, history and the pursuit of knowledge. The show follows two main stories: the lives of a student and her tutor during an 1809 visit by Lord Byron to her family’s estate, and the present-day efforts of two historians to figure out just what happened during that visit. (One of them gets it spectacularly wrong.) It was a good production, though I got the impression that the actor playing Bernard was trying to channel Ricky Gervais.

Beforehand we had dinner at The Novel Cafe in Pasadena. Afterward we went looking for someplace where we could grab dessert or coffee, but Sierra Madre had pretty much closed down for the night from what we could see. Solution: a bottle of water, a soda, and a bag of cookies from the grocery store.

About that orange moon.

Along the way back, I dithered over taking the 605 or the 57 until literally the last moment, and decided to take the 605. Less than a minute later, I looked out the window to the right and saw…

…a deep orange half-moon just above the horizon, sitting tilted with the curve facing downward to the right. Just below it were towers of lights, almost certainly the distant skyline of downtown Los Angeles. The lower end of the moon was just starting to flatten out as we lost the view.

If I’d gone the other way with that 50/50 decision, or if we hadn’t taken the time to look for dessert or coffee, we would have missed that view.

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This afternoon I found myself entertaining the notion that Orange County, California had somehow switched places with Orange County, Florida. The weather was certainly more typical for Florida in July than California.

It was 90 degrees and sunny when I left the office a little after 6:00 pm, though the eastern half of the sky was dark with clouds. It started raining before I pulled out of the driveway. Just a little. I was halfway home before I decided enough of the raindrops were staying on the windshield that it would be worth turning on the wipers.

It was still spattering a little when I got home, but nowhere near enough to soak the ground. The drops were evaporating quickly. A far cry from the heavy rain and thunderstorms a few miles farther inland.

The rain’s stopped here, and the half-and-half cloud cover and sunset are giving the sky a dingy yellow color.

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I used to get annoyed when someone would send a complete screen shot along with their tech support request. I thought it was a waste of bandwidth when a simple text message would do just as well, and be faster to send, receive and display.

But the thing is, screenshots have their advantages. For one thing, they’re exact. There’s no risk of an error code being mistyped.

More importantly, a screenshot can tell you other information that the user hasn’t thought to mention. This is critical, because the reason people call tech support is because they don’t know how to solve a particular problem…and that often means they don’t know which information is relevant.

Like, say, the fact that they’re running another program which happens to conflict with the one that they’re calling about.

Still, I wish Windows would create a file instead of copying the screen to the clipboard. Users need to paste it into something, so they paste it into what they’re most familiar with: Microsoft Word — something even less suited for sending images by email than a .BMP file created by Paint.