Drewprops Bad boy Atlanta designer with so much time on his hands that he wipes it on his pants.

Look what my film industry friend Karen and her daughter Perri recently made: a gingerbread TARDIS!! I’ve known Karen since the mid-1990s when I began working in the film industry, and was amazed when I found out that she and her husband Scott had named their little girl after the Colin Baker era companion named Perpugilliam (Peri) Brown. You can click here to see more photos of their delicious gingerbread TARDIS at Perri’s Tumblr page devoted to Dr. Who.

For those of you who’ve been reading me here (and elsewhere) you know that I’ve rather become a fan of science fiction conventions and the people who attend them. I love that there exists a safe harbor in this world for the myriad nerds and social misfits who communicate their innermost feelings via witty T-shirts and long rambling tirades regarding the inefficiency of Model 7 dilithium articulation frames. I celebrate the fact that there’s a place where nobody cares if you look (and often smell) funny… a place where sexy actresses are paid to Continue Reading

Wow! 80% of the ennui and angst and critical assessments regarding our favorite annual event just went POOF! tonight when Joseph (one of the folks mentioned in my last post) alerted everyone to the fact that Troy Bradley, Director of Dragon*Con On Site Preregistration, has made an announcement on the Dragon*Con LiveJournal Community tonight that Dragon*Con will indeed be putting on her Big Girl Panties* and stepping up to a barcode system for next year’s pre-registrations!! This is huge and indicative that that Continue Reading

Updated Sept 5th, 2010 at 7:02pm – thanks to all of you who have contributed to the discussion!

It’s the Sunday morning of Dragon*Con 2010 and I’m spending my morning recuperating from having walked 5 or 6 miles around the East Coast’s fan-driven answer to Comic-Con yesterday. I woke up thinking about how much my beloved nerdfest has changed over the past five years and thought that I’d jot down some notes for later discussions with my friends who are also attending this year.

Truth is, I suppose the old girl has been changing ever since I first started going in the late 1980s, but lately it’s becoming hard to see what first made me fall in love with Dragon*Con. During a stopover at Trader Vic’s I participated in an impromptu panel called “Dragon*Con Might Just Suck” regarding how this year’s convention has been particularly lackluster. My fellow panelists Carl, Joseph and Timmy made some very good points and I’m distilling that conversation into the following five points:

• Invasion by Non-Fans
• Economy & Events
• Social Networks
• Scale
• Age

Before I elaborate on what the ‘con has become, let me Continue Reading

I understand that my pals The Cardboard Troopers had a wild time this past weekend. They arrived in Atlanta for the 2009 edition of Dragon*Con, but they couldn’t actually seem to find a trace of the convention and the hotel people kept looking at them funny. I sure hope that they come back for the 10:00am parade on Saturday, they always seem to enjoy that.

Which reminds me that last month the Fall issue of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine hit the stands and I was simultaneously delighted (97%) and mortified (3%) to read the article about me that staff writer Van Jensen composed after we met prior to my surgery this summer. Entitled “How Did That NERD on the Left Become That PIRATE on the Right?“, the article does a really nice job of catching people up with the kid who won the Batman contest back in the 80s… and the second page features a certain cardboard trooper standing in front of a line of “real” troopers at Dragon*Con.

Last week our friend Bob announced that he was going to sell a few old Star Wars toys he had laying around his house. This of course piqued my interest, as I’m one of those millions of children who were imprinted with the plans for the Death Star back in the summer of 1977. Like many of those kids, my formative years were spent poring over pre-production illustrations by Ralph McQuarrie and building my own models of the ships out of balsa wood and styrene. Looking back, I thought that I had a pretty great collection of lovingly-used Continue Reading

Do you know what hyperbole is?
Do you know who Kirk Montgomery is?
Do you know what you get when you mix the two?

I just heard an advertisement for the new Star Trek movie in which Mr. Montgomery is quoted as saying that the new Star Trek is “this generation’s Star Wars”. ORLY? I thought it was supposed to be this generation’s STAR TREK!!!!

Cretin.

::sigh::

Following this new variation on logic I can only surmise that:

• “House” must be this generation’s “Gone With The Wind”.
• The new Will Ferrell remake of “Land of the Lost” must be this generation’s “French Connection”.
• “Transformers 2″ must certainly be this generation’s “Citizen Kane”
• and who could deny that “Operation Runway” represents this generation’s “From Here to Eternity”??

Alls I know is that THIS generation have their heads up their collective asses and that Mr. Montgomery is leading the charge. Just like Humphrey Bogart in “Ironman 2″.

Now THERE was a classic.

Oh Netflix, you sexy little minx, you conduit to all my guilty pleasures, you must be nearly as exhausted as I am… or maybe you kids started celebrating New Years a little early this year? All I know is that after 15 hours of slinging pixels I arrived home, ready to crank open a little bit of Yu-Gi-Oh style monster-dueling before hitting the sack and five seconds into the disc I realized that you didn’t sent me Volume 8 and 9 like I requested, you sent me Volumes 9 and 10, which might seem Continue Reading