San Diego Comic Con - Friday

It turned out that yesterday's coffee was just the tip of the plastics using iceberg. When I went down for "breakfast", a three by four foot nook cordoned off for "hotel guests", I got to drink more coffee in a plastic lined cup, eat a hardboiled egg off a polystyrene plate (nothing to go with said egg except salt and pepper),  a bowl of Sugar-Os in a polystyrene bowl with a plastic spoon, and a sugar-filled sugar danish on another polystyrene plate. Only about ten hotel guests were daft enough to eat of this bounty, but even so the trash filled an entire plastic trash bag before we left.

Comic Con is a little more understandable now we know more about Cosplay. As well as people dressed as every imaginable video game, manga, anime and Doctor Who companion, there are a buttload of people with professional cameras and tripods. Now we know why - they're there to photograph the Cosplay characters. This means every time a particularly striking character and a particularly large-camera'ed man happen upon each other, they stop and go into a mating dance, which attracts others and then the whole corridor silts up - because Comic Con, man, is CROWDED. Any turbulence in a corridor jams the whole thing up.

We went to see DeviantArt's main lawyer talk about intellectual property rights (we're just crazy that way) and several fellows who had based their career on Blade Runner (funny to think of a film as ending up with a team of kind of Temple Guardians who maintain it and it maintains them). It's Blade Runner's 30th anniversary, which makes me feel old. They told a lot of anecdotes. We saw the entire cast, crew and catering staff of Spartacus talk and make fap jokes (with hand motions)...well, actually Lucy Lawless didn't. She was extremely classy.

We also did Star Wars origami, avoided the cast resin class after last year's snoozathon, and went to a panel of Sci Fi that would change our life. The presenters, i09, were wildly popular, but the selections were so very mainstream - Scalzi's Redshirts, that guy who wrote that book about stuff, and that other guy who wrote that other book about stuff - that I can't remember them.

We had fish at the very nice Fish Market restaurant, parked in the shadow of the Midway, and this boat came past while we were eating.

Quite a distinctive profile.

When we got back, via the world's most jam-packed tram, San Diego had gifted my car with a little flower from those poisonous native California shrubs whose name escapes me. The little black spots all over the hood are the remnants of yesterday's "rain" - large, black, sparse drops of soot fell out of the sky for a few minutes and made everything smell bad. Ah, San Diego!