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I have a few minutes before things get hectic at the con so, hello post!

It's been a lot of fun so far, and this is really the first con I've ever been to (at least, of anything approaching this size, and not counting two high school misadventures). I enjoyed seeing all the cosplayers, and collected a decent but not overwhelming amount of free swag. I've been coveting the Captain America hoodies all weekend, but I'm not allowed to buy any more hoodies or coats until I wear through some of my old ones. I have a thing for outerwear.

The awesomeness of hanging out with friends and the hilarity of speed dating aside, I think one of the best parts of the programming was a panel on "The Never Ending Battle", a new PBS documenary series by the guys who did "Broadway, The American Musical" (which I also highly recommend). Never Ending Battle is about the history of comic books, and they showed us a bunch of rough clips from part one. I think it's going to be really entertaining, and more importantly accessible to non-fans. The producers approached the material with the new kind of respect one sees more and more in academic treatments of fandom -- one of the quotes from the filmmaker, Laurence Maslon, was "This is not a show where a mother will watch it and then try to throw out her kid's comic books." Cue applause. It has a lot of interviews from people who have worked or are working in comics, and addresses the treatment of women (at some length) and the horrific treatment of people of colour (at leass length, admittedly) in early comic books.

At one point they had Adam West read the origin story of Batman from the original comic, which some of the audience remarked on and LOLed at, and Maslon said they also had him read some of the monologues from Frank Miller's Dark Knight, which I desperately hope they include.

The con was, so I'm told, a lot bigger this year, and that's both good and bad. There was a comfortably crowded feeling to it, but it was hard to get into the popular panels. I know it's probably unworkable, but I wish there was a registration system or a lottery to get tickets to panels. It would mean you could go from panel to panel without queueing up for an hour or two just to get a seat, and would solve some hostility issues as well. Although chilling the fuck out would solve those too.

Anyhow. Onwards to Sunday and Adventur!

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Next time I do this I really will dress up like John Steed and photobomb pictures of cosplaying Avengers, as immelmanturn suggested. I have a genuine talent for accidental photobombings -- I've managed to walk through the background of people being photographed all weekend.

So if you see a startled-looking blond man in the background of C2E2 photos, be it Avengers, Super Mario, the multitudinous Doctors, or Deadpool, congratulations: you've found my photobombing. :D

I have had fun but I am ready to go home now. It's naptime. If I could take tomorrow off I could, but apparently I'm indispensible. As anyone who has taken a photograph of cosplayers this weekend has found out.

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Well, the con is over and I am back home, and there is work tomorrow. Which means, in this case, I have to figure out how to get fifteen people to an offsite meeting location without the usual chartered bus transit, because the idiot who arranges transit decided that forty-odd people didn't need a bus. Fortunately less than half of those are my ducklings, but not much less than half.

So we need to acquire five to eight taxis while competing with twenty-five other people for them. Each taxi has to have at least one person aboard who has a corporate credit card with which to pay the fare, and carry at least one (hopefully two) others as well. We'll need the same coming back to the office, at which point I will need to collect all the taxi receipts and reconcile them in our accounting system.

I suspect the term "buddy up" will be in the email I send to my teams tomorrow. It would be laced with a sincere amount of profanity as well, except we're still not the kind of office where I can swear over the intranet with impunity.

I think I got away from the con pretty cheaply, to be honest. I bought the Epic Action Figure, a replacement Brigadier badge because the last one fell off my bag a year ago as the cherry on the sundae of the Worst Thursday Ever, two small art prints (this one print, it's a painting of a woman in panties printed with the Chicago flag on them and a tattoo of the subway map on her back, it's astounding) and a cheap Captain America trade paperback. Twenty bucks; not too bad.

Though my feet may never be the same. Allllll the walking.