Comic-Con: Down the Barrel

Posted on February 6, 2011

Comic-Con International sold out this weekend. The convention isn’t until July, which makes the January sell-out surprising enough…but tickets didn’t even go on sale until this past Saturday, and were all gone by the end of the day!

In past years, tickets haven’t been a problem. This year, they’ve become as hard to get as convention-rate hotel rooms. And those? The con hasn’t even announced when they’re going on sale.

This is the view from one of the escalators in the San Diego Convention Center lobby. One of my friends once referred to it as the “Death Star Cannon” view, inspired by the shot of the inside of the cannon firing near the end of Star Wars.

Update: TicketLeap dissects the technical bottleneck [archived] that caused the weekend’s sales meltdown. (TLDR version: Hostname lookups were turned on in the database, and it was blocking on DNS.)

Links! Alarms, Ghosts of History, Firefly Trek, WW2 Star Wars & More

Posted on August 7, 2010

Kelson

Serious stuff (news, usability, history, etc.):

Too many alarms can be as bad as none, if people learn to ignore them. Aesop knew it, but modern society keeps forgetting. (NY Times via NN Group)
Then and now: Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov blends World War II photos with images of the same locations today. I’m a member of a Flickr group that does this with more general timeframes, Looking Into the Past, though I’ve only contributed one myself. It blends the 1997 and 2007 views of the UCI Student Center.
The Internet Storm Center offers tips on protecting computers from lightning.

And not so serious:

Fantastic image: Firefly crew as the Enterprise crew. Classic Star Trek, of course. One thing that really struck me was the reminder that there’s really only one woman among the regular classic Trek cast: Uhura. Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Rand are there, but neither of them would really have had the kind of focus that Kaylee, Zoe, Inara and River have here.
Incredible custom action figure maker Sillof collaborated with Glorbes on a Star Wars in World War II series.
The webcomic SMBC presents: The Logogeneplex! I’m pretty sure I’ve read stuff that this was used on. (Warning: archives are NSFW.)

Spaceballs: The Beer

Posted on May 15, 2010

Kelson

The latest seasonal beer at Oggi’s* is The Schwartz, a Belgian IPA. And just in case the “May the Schwartz Be With You” tagline wasn’t clear enough…well, check out the poster:

Sorry about the image quality. I wasn’t sampling the brew, it’s just the phone camera in low lighting.

*Oggi’s (pronounced OH-jeez) is a chain of pizza & brewery restaurants in Southern California, mostly in San Diego and Orange County.

Star Wars Band Names

Posted on November 21, 2009

Kelson

I found out about the #starwarsbandnames meme from @BadAstronomer. It’s pretty self-explanatory: Take the name of a real music group and alter it to make it a Star Wars reference.

Some of my contributions:

Jefferson X-Wing (I figured it sounded better than Jefferson Death Starship, though someone later suggested Jefferson Star Destroyer, which is better.)
Obi-Wan Folds Five (This one actually got a retweet!)
Red Five for Fighting

And Katie’s (Posted on my account because hers isn’t publicly visible):