The Highway to HELL

You know, this used to be a lot of fun. There were a few times where I thought about packing everything up and going home. Or at least going to the hotel bar for the rest of the con.

Friday. I stopped by Bruce and Mundee's to feed and water the cats and then it was a quick stop to top off the tank before going to the Skid Mark hotel in Dallas. Of course since they were rebuilding 30 I couldn't get on the Tom Landry Highway the way I usually did. All the on ramps were detoured but the detours didn't lead to 30. I should've taken this as a sign of things to come. Somewhere past Six Flags I finally find a ramp that heads east to Dallas and Project A-Kon 19.

After parking the car ($5) I stumble into the Artist Alley/Komiket and find Bruce and Katie and bum a couple of Advil off of Bob DeJesus. Soon Ed shows up and after some debate he takes me to ConOps to get a badge. At the elevators we're stopped by ConSec, they're trying to regulate the number of people per elevator. It's only Friday afternoon and already 6 elevators have been disabled by con-going hijinks. We finally get to ConOps and get me a panelist badge. Then we decide it's time to stop by the hotel bar and run down the clock before HELL. An hour and a half to show time I leave the bar and head back to my car to get my gear.

I make good time and get to the 3rd floor of the convention center at 8pm. There's already a line queuing up at State Room 2. I take a look inside the room: It's small. Smaller then the Houston where we'd been put last year and the year before. I take a stroll over to see what's in the Houston. It's Robotech. I don't look inside the Houston, I didn't want to know at that point.

I take my gear and find a seat across the hall from the door to State Room 2. Over the next hour I watch as the line for HELL grows and grows and grows. It becomes painfully obvious that there's way too many people and not enough room in HELL. As more people show up I get more bummed out. Bruce shows up and finds the ConSec in charge of the panel rooms. God bless those A-Kon staffers for trying, but they couldn't get HELL into a bigger room. God bless Bruce for trying to negotiate for a better space, too. But we were stuck with State Room 2.

Looking back I think State Room 2 was were we had HELL back at A-Kon 16. And like A-Kon 16 we tried to make the best of it. So, of course that meant that more things would go wrong.

In the past I've always gotten great sound at A-Kon shows. The A-Kon AV Staff are usually a top notch group of folks. But the folks I got for State Room 2 just weren't on that Friday night. Something that even the A-Kon staffer in charge of the panel rooms noted to me. I ended up getting AV assistance from someone in the audience, and I wish I'd gotten his name, because that volunteer pretty much saved the show. A thousand thanks to that anonymous guy, it's because of people like you that I didn't pack everything up and go home. Anonymous Audience Guy helped setup the video projector and when we kept losing audio he got the audio back. And we lost the audio more times then I can remember.

And that's how it went. We soldiered on thanks to Bruce, Avery and Katie. And a big thanks to that Staffer in charge of the panels who covered the door and tired to get us into a better room, we appreciate your patience for putting up with us and making a bad situation work. And of course, Anonymous Audience Guy, you rock!

I want to apologize to everybody who couldn't get into the show on Friday night. Things were beyond our control. I would like to encourage everyone who couldn't get in to the show, and even those who did, to e-mail A-Kon or post a note on the A-Kon forum and let them know what happened. So that next year everybody can get into HELL and have a good time.

Saturday night's A-Kon HELL? That's another story.