What happens at Dragon*Con stays at Dragon*Con

I have arrived in Atlanta. My first Dragon*Con in 6 years starts tomorrow morning!!! 3.5 solid days of gaming and geekery starts morning!!! (That's right. For once, I am actually taking a proper holiday.) Stay tuned for some *awesome* pictures!

My hotel is near where I used to live, and seeing my old apartment complex upon walking out of the metro station felt very weird.

I have pre-registered for 2 games, though I might skip out on one of them because it starts at 10 pm on Sunday, and Monday after the Con ends I will need to prepare my slides for my cow synchronization talk at Georgia Tech on Tuesday. (Once Dragon*Con ends, I am going to switch to my academic visit mode, and I didn't get a chance to make too many of these slides yet, and this is an all-new talk.) The one I will definitely do is the 3.5 D & D adventure called "Into the Nexus" (which is based on the Weis/Hickman series of books on which you think it's based). The one I might not do is in a system called "Spirit of the Century". The adventure seems very cool, but I'm not keen on getting home at 3am on Monday. I'm also going to play in The Cheesegrinder, of course! My pseudodragon monk, who is immune to just about everything (though an anti-magic field would get rid of some of the immunities temporarily, as only some are due to race and monkhood) but can hardly do any damage at all, is ready to go. I finished 2nd overall 6 years ago, and the key is survivability, so we'll see how things go. In making this character, I had to actually look up weapon damage adjustments for tiny creatures! (And, yes, the characters are supposed to be cheesy too.)

As always, I'm also looking forward to the dealer room, the exhibit hall, and the art gallery. I didn't have a digital camera the other two times I attended Dragon*Con, so I expect to take tons of cool pictures. Lots of people will dress up in their finest geekery, so there is also great pleasure even in just sitting down, having some coffee, and people-watching. Plus I have several Firefly, Buffy/Angel, and Star Trek autographs that I'll try to procure. (And I'll try to get pictures taken with these people of course.)

Bring it on.

(By the way, these 3.5 days off constitute a tie for my longest vacation in about 3 years---well, it's tied with the 3.5 days off in a row that I took during my Shanghai trip.)

Day Watch

On Friday, I saw Day Watch with Katiya and her friend Alex (another ACM grad turkey). This movie is the sequel to Night Watch and (like the first movie) was very good. I am looking forward to seeing the final movie in the trilogy, Dusk Watch (or, as the book version is called, Twilight Watch).

Unlike what happened when I saw Night Watch, my experiencing watching the sequel was a little different. First of all, we went to Hollywood to see it at rhe Arc Light theatre, which is more expensive than usual but worth the extra cost. (We had dinner at Canter's right before the movie.) While having (Mike)^2 and Lemming's body for company with Night Watch (if you never read my first telling of that story, you should follow the link above... it was one of my more amusing posts) was fun and all, I have to say that the proper way to see these movies is with a hot Russian girl next to you. Hence, I watched Day Watch in the proper manner but not Night Watch. That's just the way it is. (Hmmm... I am wondering how Katiya would react to a certain "Snakes on a Plane" trailer that Lemming and I once saw...)

I'm not sure if there is much more I want to add, but there is a car scene that one can see in some of the trailers that is fantastic.

Also, Katiya mentions that both movies are missing several scenes from the Russian version and that there was some severe mistranslation with the subtitles to the point that some meanings were changed (e.g., "my neighbor" instead of "my daughter").

I'm interested in reading the books (well, the English translations thereof, which were all available at Vroman's when we went there yesterday).