Comicon was awesome. The Eureka panel was funny and everyone in the audience seemed to enjoy themselves. The consensus from the cast and producers was that I did a good job moderating, and I felt like I managed to get out the talking points the network wanted me to get out under pain of death without making it sound or feel like I was delivering talking points.
Hey! Speaking of talking points:
- Eureka airs Mondays at 8pm with Alphas and Warehouse 13. Don't worry, Audience SyFy Seems Very Interested In Courting: there's still plenty of wrestling and ghost-hunting on other nights.
- This season, Stan Lee cameos (tonight!), and there's a freaking armada of awesome guest stars, including Wallace Shawn, Matt Frewer, Dave Foley, some guy called Wil Wheaton who I guess posts cat dialog on the Internet or something, and Felicia Day.
- The story arc in season 4.5 (or, as we called it, "the last ten episodes of season 4") is all about GD launching a manned mission to Titan, called Astraeus. There's also a little bit of a love triangle between Doctor Parrish, Fargo, and Doctor Marten (I love that Felicia's character is called Doc Marten, but she never once wears stompy shoes.)
- Also, the Christmas episode this year is going to be ANIMATED. I know everything about it on account of I'm, like, plugged into this shit, but I can't tell you anything more than that … except that you're going to love it.
Okay, talking points are over. I don't even feel dirty about it, because I freaking love Eureka, I'm incredibly proud of the show and my work on it, and I want everyone in the world to love it as much as I do.
Oh! You can watch Felicia's first episode at Hulu, if you're in the United States, not on an iPad or iPhone, and have successfully sacrificed the correct number of chickens and goats. (Way to make it nice and easy for people to enjoy things legally, Hulu. Cough.)
Eureka was my only official responsibility this year, so once I was finished with that, I was able to almost enjoy the rest of Comicon. I say "almost" because it was too crowded this year for me to do anything more than walk about 1/3 of the show floor before the claustrophobia of being surrounded by a million people drove me back into the streets of San Diego. Did it feel massively crowded to anyone else, like seriously more than last year, or was it just me?
I didn't make it into any panels, mostly because all the panels I tried to get into last year required multi-hour waits with the very real possibility of getting cut off ten people from the door (Comicon absolutely needs to clear the big halls between panels. The only people who seem to disagree with this are the ones who take up seats all day in panels they don't give a shit about so they can see the one panel they actually care about at 6pm) but I still had a great time, mostly because I took Ryan with me and we did everything together all weekend.
Saturday evening, I was a surprise guest on the Nerdist podcast … which means that I got to meet and sit on the stage with Matt Smith and Karen Gillan for an hour. It was awesome, and I'm sure Chris will post the show in the very near future. SPOILER ALERT: they're really nice people.
After the podcast was done, Ryan and I went to the SyFy party. I wasn't going to go to this party because I was afraid it would be really "Hollywood" and douchey, and I would feel weird and strange, but Felicia talked me into it. "You'll meet a lot of really cool people, who also happen to be people who will want to work with you," she told me, "as your manager, I think it would be in your best interest to go." There's one thing I've learned in all the years that we've been friends: Felicia is a genius, and she's never wrong about anything. I'm really glad I listened to her, because the party was awesome fun.
So now I have a choice to make: I can share some highlights, or I can try real hard to turn the entire weekend into a narrative piece that will most likely never get written because I don't have time. So … here are some Highlights from the rest of Saturday night:
- I met Allison Scagliotti, who plays Claudia on Warehouse 13. It turns out that we're in the mutual admiration society, and now we're best friends forever.
- I met and hung out with Alison Haislip, who it turns out is made from concentrated Awesome that was quarried out of the deepest heart of Mount Awesome, at the center of Awesome Island. If you care about this sort of thing, it may interest you to know that she's 100% real geek, just like me.
- Awesome business thing I shouldn't talk about.
- The other awesome business thing that may turn into me getting to write for REDACTED someday.
- I photobombed Felicia.
- I saw David Latt, who wrote and directed Jane White is Sick and Twisted. It's one of my favorite things I've ever been in, and I'm really proud of it. It was super fun to work with him and his wife Kim in the movie, and I felt sad that we lost touch over the years. We traded numbers and I can finally meet their kids. Oh, I also pitched David my can't-miss movie idea: MegaShark vs. MECHAShark, starring me and Debbie Gibson. Mostly, we just make out for 90 minutes, but there's shark stuff going on in the background and someone learns something. Bam! Nailed it.
- I introduced Ryan to John Dimaggio, and this happened:
Me: "John, this is my son, Ryan. Ryan, this is John. He plays Bender on Futurama."
John [in Bender's voice]: "That's right, Ryan, I'm Bender. Doot de doot do dooo doo doo bah doot doot doo."
Ryan for the rest of the night: "Oh my God. John Dimaggio shook my hand, and sang and danced like Bender for me!"
Around midnight, we decided to go over to the Nerd HQ, because Nathan Fillion was there. Felicia has been trying to get us both into the same place for years, because we both want to meet each other, but it's never worked out … until Saturday (well, Sunday morning if you want to be pedantic about it, which I do.)
Felicia introduced us, and it was awesome. Then, after dancing like idiots (the only way I know how) for a little bit, Nathan hugged me and said, "When I was a teenager, you were living my dream." I told him, "When I was in my twenties, you were living mine."
Then this happened:
That's Ryan, turning the tables on Nathan and photobombing him for a change.
Shortly after that happened, this happened.
I guess it was about 230am at this point, and we were all exhausted. We walked Felicia back to her hotel, past people who were camped out waiting for stuff (See, Comicon? You're doing something wrong when people have to camp out for things), and around 3am, Ryan and I finally walked back into our hotel room, our bodies aching from dancing, our ears ringing from the music, our faces sore from smiling so much.
"Everyone you introduced me to tonight was just awesome," he said. "I'm so glad we went out and did all this cool stuff!"
"Everyone who met you told me how much they enjoyed your company, and that you were as awesome as my Twitter feed regularly says you are. That was pretty much the best part of the whole thing for me." I said.
We turned off the lights. A minute or so went by, and Ryan said, "Dude. John Dimaggio shook my hand, and sang and danced like Bender for me."
"Yeah, that was epic."
"Best night ever."
"Totally."
"Okay I'm going to sleep now."
"Me too."
"ZZzzzzzzzz."
Thanks for being awesome, Comicon. See you next year.
I already got this in Twitter form, but nice to see it in sentence/paragraph form. 🙂
Great blog post–really enjoyed it, as always.
Just as an FYI, Eureka actually airs at 8 p.m. (7 p.m. central), followed by W13 and Alphas. Wouldn’t want people tuning in too late to see you on the show tonight. 😉
@jaimepaglia has been so coy about what was going to happen for the Christmas episode on Eureka this year. Animated!?!? Pure awesomemazeballs…
Ryan is going to remember that experience for his entire life and has you to thank for it! That’s so rad! Way to go being The Most Awesome Dad in the History of the Universe!
I can’t wait for >REDACTED< 🙂 PS PAX IS IN ONE MONTH!
As a description of a con weekend, that pretty much rocks. It looks like y’all had a great time getting your geek on.
I’m surprised Comic Con doesn’t clear rooms between panels. I guess I’m just used to the fact that Dragon*Con has done that for years.
Whoops! Corrected.
I would like to know why Felicia Day is topless, that’s definately some side boob going on.
Amazing post! The pictures you shared were epic. Love them! So glad you took your son; he’s going to remember this for the rest of his life. 🙂
She isn't topless; she's wearing a strapless dress.
Dude, I’M smiling from ear to ear and I wasn’t even there. Looks like a blast. Glad you had fun!
Did the Syfy party have a supply of the rather disheartening, at least from a guy’s point of view, condoms they gave out at FedCon? http://www.twitpic.com/4r0gxw
Can’t help thinking giving a guy something that says ‘Imagine Greater’ on it in bed isn’t a good idea. Seems cruel.
Hahahaha. No, I didn't see anything like that.
Dude… this made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
So don’t you DARE scare us with a “dunno I have a tumblr and a Twitter so I don’t feel like writing this up for my Blog” posts ever again.
Posts like this one are like crack for geeks, nerds and dads all over the world. It teaches us how not to be dicks.
YOU have a mission. You are the chosen one 😉
ComicCon sounds like it has the same queue issues as DragonCon. I guess with the population of geekdom growing over the years it’s unavoidable that both conventions have become so insanely overcrowded. But, there still seems to always be fun going on. And, speaking from my DragonCon experiences, geeks are the nicest people in the universe, so that makes waiting in line, most of the time, fun.
And… win! So glad you had such a good time and also stupidly psyched to see you and Felicia and Nathan in the same place at the same time. Geekgasm indeed.
I can’t tell you enough times how great a dad I think you are. You and Anne seem to be (from your writings) great parents. With great kids. Y’all deserve the BEST. Everyone who met your son this weekend said how awesome he is. So, yeah. Thanks for sharing this family moment.
I hope you have at least HALF as much fun at DragonCon. WE ARE ALL SO EXCITED.
Also, the photo of you, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day with RYAN PHOTOBOMBING is the best pic from ComicCon in the history of EVER.
All the photos are fantastic, its just fun seeing all the concentrated geek and awesome in one photo.
And as much as I enjoy Futurama, if I was introduced to John Dimaggio I’d probably want to have him talk to me as if he was Aquaman. OUTRAGEOUS!
Nevermind meeting Nathan Fillion or Felicia Day: I wanna meet Ryan. He seems like an awesome dude.
Loved your recap and I agree with all above, your son WILL remember this forever. How fun!
I literally started crying here. I don’t exactly know why…
This is way too awesome for my body to handle!
Do you want to adopt me?
What everyone else said +1.
Geekdom is oddly becoming trendy, so there’s probably a lot of overflow issues at cons, a lot being mismanagement and dollars flipping to the wrong hands. Sometimes the best cons are the ones run by fans. Remember Gargoyle cons? Totally ace.
He really, really is. I'm going to miss him when he goes back to school.
you make SDCC sound fun~ish. I am looking forward to hearing what you think of Dragon*Con. After you have a PAX pallet cleanser. at D*C rooms get flushed after every panel, and it is fan run.
Yay! I am so glad that I can read people’s reports of ComicCon. A friend and I tried half-heartedly to go — well, she tried a lot more whole-heartedly and could never seem to find the right number of sacrificial goats and numerology combination to make their site work for her. The last time we went, we had an awesome time, but the queue to get in for the Doctor Who panel and sometime hugely later the Torchwood panel was disheartening. The stuff you do get to see at ComicCon is incredibly awesome, but the stuff you miss because you’re queuing for something else for hours ahead of time is disappointing. But in disagreement to your statement about clearing the room, A)I’m not sure that it would work quite the way people want it to, and B) there were days when I was in Ballroom 20 all day long because there were 4 to 6 panels I really did want to see, some back-to-back, and I would have been gutted to have been booted out in between and possibly missed something I really wanted to see.
The picture is cropped perfectly to give that illusion however. I had the same thought initially.
Now I’m all jazzed for GenCon next week. Considerably less star power, but IMHO enough geekdom to go around.
I’m so bummed I didn’t get to go to comic con this year, but I will be at Dragon Con..LETS MAKE IT JUST AS EPIC AS SDCC…please? 🙂
This post is so full of awesome.
Jane White is Sick and Twisted is brilliant. I own it (though haven’t watched it in years) and occasionally tell people about its brilliance. I’ll check out the Nerdist podcast for sure.
In that photo of Felicia there’s definitely dress visible on the left just at the edge of the frame, though you have to look closely, as I did. It’s great to (finally) see a photo of one of the boys! Those of us who’ve been reading the blog since the start have read about them growing up. What a face. 🙂
Thank you very much for the clarification. Go redheads!
Comic-con DEFINITELY felt more crowded this year, which was frustrating. Still fun, but frustrating.
*sigh* Comicon got too big for me about 5 years ago, I had to stop going. And Felicia Day doesn’t help me get into all the great parties, so I’m on the outside when it comes to those.
Glad you had a Great Time though. And it is fun seeing the fun side of Comicon from someone whose reports are AWESOME.
Thanks for sharing.
The picture of you and Seth makes me happy, cuz that means I’m now only 3 degrees of separation from Felicia! Woohoo! Or something. I worked with Seth on a film in 1998; that counts, right?
And the picture of you, Nathan, and Felicia makes me feel all funny and confused in my girly parts….
On a more serious note, hearing about kids like Ryan really makes me want to have one of my own. I’m your age, though… getting a bit of a late start.
Isn’t that Adam from Mythbusters on the far right of the pic where you photobombed Felicia? Looks like he got you again, as he’s further back. Unfortunately, he’s not making a face.
You could have simply put “Felicia Day, Nathan Fillion, my son, and I all photobombed the shit out of each other. Hilarity Ensued.” and that would would have been an equally awesome post. Glad you had fun and really enjoyed the G+ updates you posted. Cheers.
Goood! So I’m NOT the only one who wishes there was a film or show with Wil Wheaton, Nathan Fillion, and Bruce Campbell
(hell, throw in Eliza Dushku, Jonathan Jackson, & Vincent Kartheiser for good measure)
Sadly, the Seattle Pax last year ruined me for any Cons except Steamcon. We went for two days and spent way too long standing in line only to be disappointed EVERY SINGLE TIME. Then when I decided to get a 2 hour jump on the line to meet you, the little taped box was already filled with people! So when you were finally there I rode the escalator up, watched you interact with a few people and then said to my husband, “ok, I’m good now, thanks”, and rode the escalator back down. 49 years old and not being able to say hi and shake your hand, made me cry like a 12 year old. Silly, I know.
I may say no more cons, but now my husband is talking about going to something called ZombieCon next year. Ugh.
It makes me squee to know that other people, the people I get excited about, get excited about meeting people they admire just as much. The one thing I love about you Wil, is how much you are enthusiastic about life-I’ve watched you grow the past decade thru the inter-web blogs and such (not in a crazy stalker way-promise 😉 ) and it fills me with hope (and a great allegory) to share with others: find out what you love to do and how you can help the world and life will be surprisingly amazing. Thank you!
I love that Seth Green thanked you for making Comic Con so awesome. Was there a specific story behind that or was it just general being awesome?
Last year, PAX was mostly waiting in lines to get into panels and stuff for me. This year family commitments are going to prevent me from going.
The last Emerald City Comic Con, on the other hand, was awesome.
I think there is probably a con sweet spot between large enough to be really awesome but not so large that it attracts way too many people.
Does anyone else want to see the Wil Wheaton/Nathan Fillion/Felicia Day Action/Thriller/Comedy/Drama/Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Does it really matter? movie, with a cameo by Joe Dimaggio (and possibly Ryan as “Le Photobombé”).
No seriously why isn’t this on Kickstarter? THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN!!! GET JOSS ON THE PHONE!!!!!
In the meantime, Wil, Stay Awesome!
I have a theory about why they don’t clear the panel rooms.
I think they (ab)use the lines as overflow space. They plan for all those people waiting outside to get in. If they implemented a system whereby they distributed tickets for the panels, then there wouldn’t be thousands of people herded into lines for the duration of the con and they wouldn’t be able to sell as many tickets.
Of course, they’ve significantly raised ticket prices of the past few years, so maybe they’re going to fix that. (Haha, yeah right.)
Emerald City and Phoenix are, hands down, the very best comic/media cons running today.
Some epic photobombage going on there. Love it.
You have the coolest life ever.
They seriously don’t clear the rooms between panels? That blows my mind, especially since MegaCon does and theirs don’t even completely fill. I watched some streaming footage of the Nerd HQ panels and I seriously think I would have rather paid per panel (for charity, no less) for those rather than deal with the sheer chaos I saw photos of for the official panels.
I just want to thank you for the Twitter updates all weekend. Between you, Nathan, Felicia, Seth, various Mythbusters, and Zac Levi, my Twitter feed was an endless stream of Awesome without me even having to get on a plane.
Reading stories like this makes me want to make that trip across the country to Comicon even more. Eventually I am certain I will.
It’s been said numerous times already but I’ll add my own take: Your son seems like a great guy. An awesome guy. (Also, am I the only one who thinks there’s a passing resemblance between him and Callum Keith Rennie?)
If envy were a physical object, mine would be the Great Wall of China! SDCC was sold out when I tried to get tix! Glad you had fun!
It makes me really happy to hear things are going very much in your favour and that other Good People appreciate your work.
Definition of Nerdgasm – Wil, Nathan, and Felicia all in one geographical spot.
One of these days, I will make it to Comicon but I think I will wait for it to get into a bigger venue and be better managed. Millions of people jammed in one place is not my idea of fun either. I can’t believe that they don’t clear out the panel rooms between events. For shame.
The lines for the panels were ridiculous, but we did have fun in them. We didn’t camp out, but on average stood in line for 2 hours each day (not counting the 4 hour line for next year’s badges, but including the lines for Starbucks).
It was barrels of monkeys type fun, though there were times when we needed to leave the convention center because of all the people.
That said, I can’t wait until next year!
I have family in Phoenix (and actually lived there when I was a boy). I keep toying with the idea of going to PCC and visiting them at the same time.
I like the random not-photobomb background appearance of Adam Savage in your photobomb of Felicia Day. I can hardly imagine being in a place where your awesome photo of a cool celebrity person has more than one cool celebrity person randomly in the background. I can, however, imagine being in a place where awesome photos of cool non-celebrity persons have more than one other cool non-celebrity persons in the backgrounds — because that happens all the time.