Megacon, part one!

As always, Megacon provided an important lesson: placing dance/cheerleading and science fiction/comics/anime events in the same venue as a Mary Kay event is not going to make everybody happy, and by everybody, I mean the appalled Mary Kay attendees who walked around gasping about the crowds and saying that they just couldn't understand why grown people and teenagers would act this way (they were mostly appalled by the anime folk but weren't thrilled with the cheerleaders, either). Which is what you might call, Mary Kay people, ignoring your audience, or did you miss the makeup the attendees of both events were wearing?

(As if this were not enough, the convention center was also hosting a Disney Honors event, but those guys just came over and snapped happy pictures.)

The Mary Kay people might, however, have had a point about the crowds. Ok, they did have a point about the crowds. The Orange County Convention Center is admittedly large, but, beyond the slight problem that it was hosting at least four groups, at least two of which could easily be mistaken for each other, MegaCon had decided, yet again, to squeeze all of its retailers, signings, artists and writers into a single exhibition hall.

This has been a bad idea for some time; with William Shatner and Stan Lee on hand this year, it was an incredibly bad idea. I kept expecting the fire department to close everything down (actually three cops I encountered on the way out were suggesting just that). A couple of artists told me that despite the crowds they weren't selling that much because people couldn't see them or felt it was too crowded to stop and look.

Aside from the crowds, however, Megacon was its usual awesomeness of costumes, geekdom, robots, and Legos, including, and I kid you not, THE ENTIRE LOST SET AND EVIL ISLAND in LEGOS. I also had the chance to meet up with fellow Tor.com blogger and book reviewer of Grasping for the wind John Ottinger III and fellow aspiring writer Shaun Duke, who also blogs and reviews at The World in the Satin Bag and is about to start a dissertation on speculative fiction. Not at all surprisingly this led to awesome conversations all around (and yes, I urged both of them to attend IAFA next year – it's their type of thing.)

Alas, I had to cut my visit a bit short thanks partly to a certain basketball game by a little team from Gainesville that most of my readers would have no interest in (this is why I love you all) but which did deeply obsess my ride and thanks to lingering fatigue/dizziness from the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

My pictures coming up next post, but meanwhile, here's the ones by
the Orlando Sentinel.

Megacon, part two

So, some pictures not from the Orlando Sentinel:

( Cut for large images. )