The Calm Before the Nerds

The very quiet north tower lobby seating area of the Marriot Marquis. In three days I expect this entire area to be awash in becostumed nerds, as ComicCon descends. This will not be a bad thing, but I do have to admit I like the quiet at the moment.

29 Comments on “The Calm Before the Nerds”

  1. It would be interesting to do time-lapse photography starting before dawn the day reg opens and ending at dawn the day after closing… the like, one-frame-per-minute kind of thing, watch the people ebb and flow…

  2. Oh, come on, you can do better than “The calm before the nerds.”

    Like “Something Nerdy this way comes”.

  3. Look at it. It’s so peaceful and nice looking. I’m guessing this hotel has hosted before. I don’t know, never been to Comic-Con. :( So, it must remember. Is it trembling John? Surely it must be trembling.

  4. It took about a year to get past a newbie functionary to someone in authority who knew that I’ve been a second-generation professional author for half a century, so I am indeed to have (again) a Guest badge upon arrival. But they never sent me a promised email about my free guest, so neither my son nor wife (both professionals who’ve been to prior San Diego Comic-Cons as pro Guests) want to drive there with me. So I’ll take a train, and search for someone to share a hotel room. Any old SFWA or TV of Film friends mutually of me and Special Guest John Scalzi have a suggestion?

  5. I hope that person off in the distance is applying ScotchGard to the upholstery.

  6. Have you seen Spider-Man yet? I saw it this weekend, and today realized you don’t have a paid gig where you’ll review it for us.

    Oh well. Carry on. Nerdish arrival in 3, 2…

  7. My somewhat limited experience with San Diego indicates a binary weather pattern: as depicted in your photo and TORRENTIAL, APOCALYPTIC RAIN. Fortunately, the former seems to dominate. As the say, the things that can kill you in CA are earth, wind, fire, and rain (and traffic, of course).

  8. I once attended an academic conference at the San Diego Convention Center. I overhead another attendee remark that it was weird to see the place used for something other than ComicCon.

  9. My somewhat limited experience with San Diego indicates a binary weather pattern: as depicted in your photo and TORRENTIAL, APOCALYPTIC RAIN.

    The Pacific coastal systems likes to dump their precipitation there in semi-tropical storms before reaching the higher elevation of the San Joaquin “Mountains”. I thought about relocating to San Diego after college, but my career took me back to DC before I landed in Austin. Only thing I really miss from SoCal is the ocean. San Diego’s beaches are a helluva lot more pristine than LA’s. The surf is nice this time of year too…

  10. My comrades and I are not staying anywhere NEAR as swank (or as close) as the Marriott. OTOH, it’s probably going to be quieter.

  11. There is something quite strange about a hotel (or actually any venue, I’ve found) in the days when the event you know it best for isn’t on. The silence, and lack of people in weird and wonderful (ad weirdly wonderful) costumes, is quite odd.

    Even stranger, actually, was seeing a hotel that I knew well as a convention venue used as a set in a (totally un-geeky) film.

  12. Now they’re off to ComiCon. Today, a paradise in the San Diego – tomorrow, a wasteland.
    [rolls his eyes and lets out a deep breath]
    Compared to Nerds, Attila the Hun was a Red Cross volunteer!*

    *Misquoting Chief Inspector Dreyfus

  13. HOWL (with apologies to Allen Ginsberg)
    I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by media, overweight
    caffeinated obsessed,
    dragging themselves through the san diego streets at dawn looking for a whedon
    fix,
    costumewearing fanboys burning for the transient heavenly connection to the
    starry guest-list in the machinery of marketing,
    who puberty and tittering and wide-eyed and buzzed stood up waiting in the
    supernatural confines of unmoving lines crowding across the hallways of
    vendors contemplating moola,
    who bared their brains to Comics under the DC and saw MARVELian angels
    staggering on four-color pages illuminated,
    who passed through comic booths with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Ark-
    ham and Bat-light tragedy among the scholars of gotham,
    who were expelled from the chatrooms for trolling & publishing bronie slash
    on the windows of the hotel,
    who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their phantom menace dvds in
    wastebaskets and listening to the Paul & Storm through their phones…

    ok, even I can’t keep this up.

    Hope you have fun, John.

  14. [Deleted because just because someone else posted an on-topic Howl parody is not sufficient reason to post an entirely-not-on-topic one. JvP, I noted to you before that the comment threads aren’t your personal cork boards. Please don’t post personal fiction here, unless DIRECTLY on topic, and even then, excerpt — JS]

  15. @ TurboNerd

    costumewearing fanboys

    Admittedly, I have yet to make it to a comic or SF convention, but I was under the impression the fairer half of nerdom was represented as well.

  16. I’m going to spend the weekend pretending CC isn’t happening. A bunch of the Hobbit cast/crew? All of the Firefly cast? Nope, fingers in ears, not happening, not happening, not happening.

  17. I just found out one of my best friends has a computer game trailer showing there – it’s called Little Cthulhu. Please watch it and then give him millions of dollars (this is how game designers make a living, right?) I haven’t the faintest how he wrangled it into the lineup, but it sure is a small world – we both live in Canberra, Australia. This is the same friend that once convinced me to buy a large dead octopus from a seafood shop and photograph it posed prettily on or near several local places of interest.

    (Incidentally, my “friend” is not actually me – I’m an all-out sf book & movie geek, with not a hint of actual computer gaming.)

    Louise Curtis

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