The Good and Bad of Dragon Con 2015

I've been attending Dragon Con for a long time. I've seen it grow and change quite a bit over that time. Both last year and the year before, I've done posts about the bad of Dragon Con. While I'm going to touch on the things that I think still need to be fixed, I'm also going to address old complaints that have been fixed for this year.

The crowds were massive again this year and while I didn't have as many issues with them in the past, it's something that the con is going to have to address at some point. I saw lots of badge checks to keep the hotels free of anyone besides con goers and hotel guests. We also didn't stay very late most of the con because of my health issues, so we may have missed some crowds.

Vaping was a bad for me. We were in line for the Walk of Fame on Friday for a while and one of the people nearby was vaping indoors. I'm very sensitive to that sort of thing but thankfully I didn't get too sick. Someone asked her to stop and she got very defensive saying that it was just vapor. Well, it is vapor and other things. I had thought that vaping was not allowed in the convention, but I saw a lot of it.

This isn't necessary a bad, but I wish that either the dealer's room or the Walk of Fame were open earlier than 1 pm on Friday. There are some panels going on before but Friday should honestly be a full day like Saturday and Sunday, especially with some official Dragon Con stuff starting to happen on Thursday.

The worst bad of Dragon Con was not something I experienced myself, but heard about afterwards. Apparently there was more than one sexual assault at the con this year. As a not so strong female, this makes me very uncomfortable. I am usually with my husband most of the con and we don't stay late, but it's not a good thing.

But on that depressing note, onto the good things that have been fixed in previous years!

We didn't get down to the con until Friday morning because we didn't want Emily to miss two days of school. Thankfully the badge pickup process is still great. It took us longer to walk to the Sheraton and inside the building than it did to get our badges.

The main issue we had last year was the bottleneck in the Marriott where you could head back to the blood drive and some track rooms, take the path to the Hyatt one way and take the path to the food court another way. It was a massive mess last year. What they did was put a divider and routed the traffic each way - it worked extremely well so no traffic jams happened.

I've marched in the parade for four or five years. This year the route was changed because of a new street car system they put in. The new staging area seemed to work a lot better than the old one - it was really easy for me to find my group. Plus longer parade makes more room for people to see it.

That's just an overview of the good and bad from Dragon Con - I'll be doing reports of each day over the next week or so!

Todd the Psychic

I will get to the Dragon Con recaps in the next couple of days. The con crud has been really kicking my butt hard the last few days. But I thought I'd share a little story that happened at the con.

Todd and I did quite a few panels on the Paranormal track. Most we were interested in, but we were also trying to avoid the crowds that were in the Marriott and the surrounding area on Saturday. The Paranormal track is in the Sheraton which is a little removed from the chaos.

The panel that ended up being the biggest bust for us was the ESP panel. It ended being an interactive panel and I learned that I'm not psychic at all. We had to try and guess what the pictures were in envelopes. At first, the lady leading the panel just held them up. But then she asked for volunteers to project the picture out to the audience with their minds.

I got nothing right on any of them - usually I was so far off that it was funny. Todd got a few things right on some of them, but mostly he struck out as well.

The next day, I had bought some mystery mini figures in the dealer's room. As a joke, Todd decided that he was going to use his ESP 'powers' to guess what figure I was going to get. The first two he got completely wrong, but on the Nightmare Before Christmas box he was right!

We were surprised but apparently Todd is a little psychic after all!

The Bad of Dragon Con 2014

Last year, I did a post about all the bad things about Dragon Con and I thought I'd do that again. While my con experiences were mostly positive, there were some negatives. I'll cover the good stuff in my daily recaps that I'll be posting in the next couple of days.

The biggest bad was the crowds. Friday felt more crowded than usual but it was still pretty easy to move around, especially early in the morning. Sunday was fine, crowd-wise, but we left early on Sunday because I got sick.

Saturday was awful though. The crowds were extremely thick. Saturday crowds have always been heavy in the eight years I've been attending Dragon Con, but it has gotten worse and worse the last few years.

We got stuck a couple of times in the same place. In the Marriott there is a junction where you can go right to go to the Hyatt, left to go to the food court or the women's bathroom and straight to go to the blood drive and some track rooms. First time we got stuck was around lunch time and we were trying to get to the food court. A line was being routed through there for some reason and once we got past the doors out of the Marriott the crowds thinned out.

Later that night we were trying to go straight to get to the Kaleidoscope track room because there was a panel I was on. Todd is good about bobbing and weaving through the crowds but we got stuck behind a pair of women who were in wheelchairs side by side!

I don't mind seeing wheelchairs and I try to give them space, but these women were causing a traffic jam because they didn't have enough sense to go single file in a highly congested area. Todd darted in front of them to try and get around, and one nearly ran him over! Luckily they didn't and we made it with a few minutes to spare to my panel.

I also had more issues this year than any other with people stopped at the top of escalators. Escalators keep moving but several people stopped and gawked at the top of them, nearly causing a pile up. This happened to me many times over the course of the weekend.

Lastly, the dealer's room in the America's Mart was a bad as well. They had it in the same place this year and it was still a hugely confusing maze. It also got very crowded and we didn't even try to go there on Saturday. At least this bad is hopefully going to be fixed - from what I've heard, they are moving it to another building in the America's Mart where it should be less of a maze.

All in all, the good did outweigh the bad and I'll go over the good in depth with my recaps of each day. But the crowding issues is something that Dragon Con is going to have to address sooner than later.

The Bad of Dragon Con

This year was my 7^th Dragon Con. Always there are good and bad things about the con. I’m sure if the bad outweighs the good, we’d stop going. But so far that hasn't happened. I’ll be covering the good things in my day by day con reports.

The biggest bad of Dragon Con this year were the crowds. Usually Friday and Sunday are less crowded, but there was a huge amount of people on Friday. And it got more crowded on Sunday when everyone went inside when the thunderstorms started. Of course, Saturday was insanely crowed as usual. Sometimes it was hard to move.

Since I had to work until 3:30 pm on Thursday, we had to get our badges on Friday. Last year, it took maybe ten minutes to get through the reg line and we had hoped for a similar experience this year. Alas, last year was a fluke. We got in the line that was wrapped around the Sheraton around 8:30 am. The line did move pretty fast and once we got inside, it only took about five minutes. The problem was that pre reg and at con reg people were put in the same line outside. It would have taken a lot less time if they had a way to separate everyone from the beginning. But we made it through in about 45 minutes so I was able to make my panel.

The last big bad of the con was the move of the dealer’s room to the America’s Mart. It seemed like a good idea because supposedly it would give more room for the dealers. But it was still really crowded and the layout was super confusing. We got lost and turned around a lot especially when we were trying to find the exit. It wasn't a great move in my opinion.

That was it for the bad. There was a lot of good of Dragon Con this year. I’ll be posting about each day starting tomorrow once I get a little more rest.