During w00tstock last week, I mentioned that I was turning 38 this week.

After the show, Anne told me that I was, in fact, turning 39. In the few seconds that it took me to do some math, I lost a year of my life.

Apparently, this is the sort of thing that happens when you get to be my age, which is … 39.

So happy birthday to me, NASA, Geddy Lee, and everyone else who was born on July 29th, especially those of us who escaped from our mothers in 1972.

Pretty much all of Comicon was awesome. However, there was one thing that was decidedly not awesome, and though I had initially decided not to talk about it in public, it's bothered me since it happened, so I wrote about it on G+ earlier today.

I'm cross posting it here, though, because it's important to me:

On the way out of the Syfy party on Saturday night, a pretty horrible thing happened. I wasn't going to talk about it in public, but I can't stop thinking about it, and I think this needs to be said.

When I was a Teen Idol*, and I traveled to New York for publicity all the time, it was fairly common for a handful of super weird people to hang out all day in front of my hotel, or in the lobby of my hotel, so they could pounce on me whenever I tried to enter or leave, and demand as many autographs as they could. It was really creepy and awful, and I always hated it. It was more than a little scary. I mean, who in the world spends an entire day sitting in one place waiting for someone? Oh, I know: crazy people.

So, crazy people, pay attention: If you camp out in front of my hotel while I am on location or visiting a city, if you camp out in front of a party I'm attending … basically, if you camp out anywhere so you can shove a stack of 8x10s into my face when I'm trying to enter or leave a location, I'm not going to sign them, and I'm not going to be nice about it.

I refuse to reward or validate that kind of behavior, and I'm done being polite about it.

When we walked out of the SyFy party on Saturday night, a pack of people — probably 12 or 15, I'd guess — appeared out of nowhere, and surrounded me. They shoved pictures into my face, thrust pens at me, and made it so that I couldn't even move. They separated me from my friends and my son, and, quite frankly, terrified me.

Let's stop for a second and think about this: in what kind of world is it acceptable to surround a person you do not know, separate them from the people they are with, and essentially trap them? Maybe in crazy entitled psycho world, but not the world I live in.

I tried to scrawl my signature on a couple of things, just so some of those people would move and let me keep on walking, but whenever someone took something away, something new immediately took its place. Somehow, +Felicia Day saved me. She reached through the mob, grabbed my hand, and said, "Sorry, we have to go meet some of our friends," before the literally pulled me away, to safety.

This is when the mob lost its shit. They yelled at me like I had done something wrong. They called me names, and they booed at me. (Seriously). A woman stormed up next to me and said, "If you don't sign these things for me, I'm going to tell Twitter what an asshole you really are."

I don't respond well to threats like that. Though my instinct was to explode at her, I took a deep breath, looked her square in the eye, turned on my dad voice, and said, "Really? Are you serious? We're done here." I quickened my pace, and for the next two blocks she followed us, screaming and ranting and raving about how she'd waited there for hours, driven all the way from someplace far, and that I basically owed her as a result of her choice. I eventually tuned her out, and I guess she went back to the Syfy party to harass whoever else came out next.

The whole thing was really scary, made me feel like a sideshow freak, and made me really, really angry. I was just trying to walk out of a hotel and go meet up with my friends. I didn't do anything wrong, and I'm not going to apologize forgetting upset about it.

This is important: I realize that just about anyone reading this on my blog isn't one of Those Guys. Please don't think the "you" here refers to, you know, you.

This is also important: When your motto is "don't be a dick," a certain kind of person is vigilantly looking for moments like this when you can be accused of violating your own motto, thereby proving to the entire world that you are, in fact, a giant lying pile of shit. I'm fairly certain that reasonable people can see who the dick was in this situation, and hopefully agree that it was not me. For everyone else: go fuck yourself.**

In Dancing Barefoot, I wrote about signing autographs at conventions:

Over the years, I've learned something from this experience: it's never about the signature. It's about that brief moment, that brief encounter with a Star Trek cast member, that is so important to the fans. That 30 seconds or so of hopefully undivided attention is what they're really paying for, and I always do my best to make sure they get their money's worth. Contrary to popular belief, sitting at a table signing hundreds of autographs for several hours without a break is hard. It's not just mindlessly scrawling my name; It's stopping and listening to the always excited, sometimes shaking, always sweating, sometimes scary dude who wants to know exactly why I did “X” on episode “Y” and would I please sign his picture in silver, because Marina signed it in gold and now he wants the men in silver and the women in gold, and I hated your character and here are 25 reasons why and I expect an answer for each one of them and I'm not leaving until I'm satisfied.

The crazy people who camp out don't care about that brief moment, that brief encounter. The crazy people only care about taking a piece of $Celebrity.person and possibly selling it, or hording it, or … you know, I don't even want to think about where that path leads.But that's why they behave the way they do. It isn't about our work, or about saying "thank you" or "high-five!" or anything about that. It's about entitlement and being crazy, and I will not validate or condone that kind of behavior ever again.

I realize that a crazy person who thinks it's entirely normal and not psycho to camp out in front of a hotel for hours and hours so they can trap a person isn't going to understand why I will not validate that behavior, but I need to make this clear for the future: I'm a person. I am a  human being and if you cut me I will bleed. I'm happy to sign things and take pictures with people in appropriate situations, but if some dude violates my personal space or freaks me out, and then gets mad at me when I try to get away from him, I'm not going to do anything beyond telling that person to go fuck himself, and I'm not going to feel bad about it. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman, I am not your bitch.

Finally: In before the inevitable "you're an actor and you chose this so you deserve what you get so suck it up because my life harder than yours because blah blah blah" comment (probably not here, but definitely at G+.)

*LOL.

**See? I don't even feel bad. (Well, maybe a little bit. I need to work harder on it, I suppose.)

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.