Slept in late on Sunday, and then went to an Irish pub we remembered from the year previous for breakfast. A lot, it turns out, can change in a year and the food and service were both terrible.

We spent a couple hours aimlessly wandering the convention floor and then crashed a Green Lantern animated movie screening for the seats and the WiFi.

This was the first time I had stayed in town through Sunday, I had always flown out around midday on Sunday before, and I found the winding down con to be a bit depressing. You could see it dying and the town itself no longer felt the same. I began to feel like an unwelcome intruder.

Caught up with Liv and Hillary for sushi and shopping and then went back to the hotel for an evening of post convention decompression and calzones the size of my head. We went to sleep secure in the knowledge that it was the last time we would ever have to bed down, frightened and vulnerable in Hotel Hellmouth .

Overall

Overall the convention went well for us, caught up with all our old connections and made some new ones. By far the highlight for me was watching Jim Mahfood paint live. The hotel situation was terrible but we made do. Having Olivia and Hillary with us was a whole new experience, they attracted a lot of positive attention for us and were able to make connections that I wouldn’t have even seen. Next year I think I’ll try to get them to dress up as space marines and have them hand out ashcans.

Wrote this last section from the Salt Lake City Airport which claimed to have free WiFi although I could find no evidence of any such network. Every so often a large jet with it’s own WiFi network got close enough for me to leach off of, but any kind of solid connection to the net was impossible. The other lovely thing about the airport was that it seemed to have been designed with absolutely zero accessible power outlets. My NC20’s battery was getting low so I wandered away from the girls to see if I couldn’t tap into an outlet located on the roof or in some strange sub basement, and eventually I came across a large partitioned work station complete with power outlets. They looked to have been recently installed when the airport got sick of hearing travelers complain that their human rights were being violated by having no ready access to alternating current.

I had to stab a man in the kidney with a parfait spoon to get a seat at the work station, which was conveniently located right in between a smoking room with a broken and missing door and two women aggressively trying to sell me sky miles (“well I guess if you don’t care about free flights then we can’t help you”.). A combination of angry looks and waiving the bloody parfait spoon at passersby kept my seat secure while I charged the NC20 and tried to get down some notes for a new project.

The flight into Salt Lake was over rough air and solitary puker set off a wave of sympathy vomit throughout the cabin. Even states away from comic-con you could still spot the travelers who were obviously returning from San Diego. Had I bothered I could have probably identified a few more by smell. And that is the true legacy of Comic-Con International, a large persistent group stench- fortunately it comes off with a single shower- unfortunately a shower is a technology that about 100,000 of the attendees of the con has never heard of. Don’t worry guys, I’ll take an extra one for you.