Jun. 10th, 2013

thewayne: (Cyranose)
We went to a ComicCon a week ago!

About two weeks ago we went up to Longmont, CO, to visit our friends Kris and Dave. Kris is having a very rough time of it, she's going through radiation therapy for the umpteenth time. She caught a news blurb that Denver, about an hour south of Longmont, was having a ComicCon our first weekend there! So off we trooped....

I honestly can't say that we did a lot. We all agreed that we wanted to see the Felicia Day panel which included Erin Grey, Zaboo, and Claira. And we really didn't see anything else. We spent a couple of hours in the dealer room, and I managed to achieve an objective that really rather thrills me. When we began making our plans, I was surfing their web site and found that comic creator Matt Wagner was going to be there. Most recently he's been doing the covers of The Shadow while his son does the interior art(!), but historically he's best known for creating the series(es?) Mage and Grendel around 1983, when I first started buying comics. Mage's Kevin Matchstick is perhaps the first, and pretty much only, comic action figure that I've ever bought, it came complete with a glowing enchanted baseball bat.

I liked Mage because it interwove a lot of different fantasy mythos tropes in an excellent story. Grendel, I'm honestly not as much a fan of because Grendel is an evil person/force in pretty much all the stories.

Well, I decided I wanted to get Wagner to sign copies of his books. It took quite a bit of exploration, but I managed to find the first two volumes (of three planned) of Mage and caught him just before he went to lunch. So happy camper +1.

We also found a nice t-shirt that said 'the couple that games together, stays together', so my wife and I now have complimentary shirts. And I found someone selling an awesome adult card game called Cards Against Humanity. It's not adult as in sexually-explicit, it's adult in that some of the cards have some moderately disgusting themes. It plays just like Apples To Apples, and you need a group of 4+ people to play, three people would just be boring. And warped senses of humor are a definite plus. The player whose turn it is reveals a black card, which will have one or two blanks. It might read something like "When I become a billionaire, I'll erect a monument to ______". The other players choose a white card from their hand of ten and play it face-down, you might end up with things like "Michelle Obama's forearms", "snot", "a space/time paradox", "Adderol". The player who played the black card selects the one that they liked best, for whatever reason, and the person who played that card gets the black card as, I kid you not, an "Awesome point". You can do things with Awesome points, but I won't get in to that here.

Anyway, awesome game. Highly recommended, assuming you have the requisite twisted sense of humor.

I pulled it out while Dave was in the bathroom, explained it to Kris, and she was initially a little dubious. Russet hadn't played Apple To Apples before, but she had played a game that I made called Karaoke Screams, which uses the same mechanic. Once Dave returned from his pilgrimage, we played for probably an hour and had lots of fun.


The Felicia Day panel was lots of fun, we had good seats even though we had to stand in line for over an hour. Afterwards, we were thoroughly shot and departed for dinner. It was quite a convention: George Takei was a GoH, Stan Lee was scheduled to appear but had to cancel to film a cameo in the next Marvel movie (I think probably the Captain America that's due next year) and they got William Shatner to come in Sunday only. One thing that I would highly recommend is that if you're going to attend an event like this for every day of the convention, and they offer VIP wrist bands for an additional charge, go for it. The only way we could have seen the Wil Wheaton panel, which was back-to-back with the Felicia Day panel, would have been to have VIP bands. And Takei's panel required wrist bands, which first went to VIPs and then the public, and the public bands were gone within half an hour Saturday AM.


So lots of fun!
thewayne: (Cyranose)
Epic is probably on its way out of theaters, unless you're in a major city. We saw this Saturday night and really liked it. Very good job with the physics modeling in the animation, I especially liked the scene with two characters and a deer. The story is simplistic, the original book was written for early teens, but even so, the story was good and it did an interesting job with fantasy, even though it wasn't really recognizable mythology.

Amongst the previews were Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, something that I'm thoroughly not interested in seeing.

Now You See Me is a magician/heist movie, and I found it quite interesting. Mark Ruffalo (Hulk, Avengers, Iron Man 3) is an FBI agent pursuing a group of four magicians called The Four Horsemen who are pulling some pretty impressive capers. The Four are initially backed by Michael Caine, multi-millionaire casino owner, and are also pursued by a magician debunker played by Morgan Freeman. I quite liked this and thought it was a pretty good caper flick.

June 2025

S M T W T F S
123456 7
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 9th, 2025 01:06 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios