This was originally going to be a reply to Dave’s comment on my last post, but it got so big it became worthy of a new post.
Food in Atlanta: my hotel is right across the road from Peactree Plaza, which has a huge food court. Lots of burger joints, but also Chinese, Mexican and pizza shops as well. The big thing I’ve noticed is that some burger joints don’t give you a choice of size – it’s large or nothing. Ones that do have small/medium/large etc everything is up one on the scale. So small is what we consider medium, medium is what we call large and large is enough to feed a family of 12.
DragonCon started today! The day after I got here was registration – so waiting in a queue for an hour or so to get my badge and program. Wasn’t too bad though. I spent the rest of the day walking around and exploring. Learning where the hotels are, and planning which panels and events I’m going to.
And today was Day 1 of DC. I went to a lecture on genetics and obesity which sounded really interesting but was actually boring and technical. And focused on rare genetic disorders rather than the common obesity problem. I also went to the Solar Obervation area, where a few solar telescopes were set up that you could look through and see what the sun’s doing. Was pretty cool.
I spent the rest of the morning taking photos of people in crazy awesome costumes. I’ll upload what I can soon!
Later today I’ll be checking out some astronomy talks, some robotics panels and hopefully get a few photos of the Klingon Karaoke.
Yes, Klingon Karaoke.
With actual Klingons.
This evening there will be telescopes set up to view the stars etc (although the light polution here will be pretty bad I think) and there’s an “all things Monty Python” event which I’ll try and get to.
Tomorrow: There’s three or four talks I want to see, but they’re all on at the same time as the DragonCon Parade – where all the costumed people parade down the main street. I’ve GOTTA go to that!
There’s also some skeptics and science talks on afterwards.
Having a blast!
Sounds like there’s heaps of variety going on. Do they have multiple lectures on at the same time or is it paced so you can attend every one if you really want. What’s the connection between sci-fi and the lectures? Have people come from all around the World?
There’s a TONNE of variety! There are about fifty ‘tracks’, or themes. Everything from Trek, Star Wars, Anime, Literature, Robotics, a Film Festival and Weapons. It’s not purely sci-fi, it’s “popular culture”. They also had Shatner, some of the cast of sci-fi shows like Eureka and Stargate Atlantis, but I steered clear fo them mainly because the lines were horrendous, but also ‘cos ther was other interesting stuff going on. I mainly kept around one little corner which had Skeptics, Science, Podcasting, Space and Robotics – we called it the Reality Section 🙂
But that was the difficulty – there were many times I wanted to go to a panel i the Space track, a lecture in the Skeptics track, a sciene or skeptic podcast being done live in the podcasting track etc… so there were some tough choices. On the other hand, it worked out kinda well because I didn’t need to check the schedule sometimes, I’d just pick a room and find a seat – chances were it was something interesting!
People came from all over the US, definitely. I know of another Aussie (Kylie Sturgess, see episode 20 of Science on Top!) and I was talking to a Brit who came over for the Con, but there may be others I just didn’t run into. I did hear they hit 60,000 registrations this year!