The Realm of Jinan

Dragon*Con 2008Filed Under: Fun Stuff, General

I went to Dragon*Con this year and it was an interesting and entertaining experience. If you do not know what dragon con is, it is the largest multi-media pop culture convention in Atlanta, GA. It mainly focuses on sci-fi, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and films in the United States. It is usually held every labor day weekend. You can visit the Dragon*Con website here.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn near turner field and took their free shuttle service to the convention which was being held in 4 hotels (Hyatt, Marriott, Hilton, and Sheraton). Here is a hint: Do NOT book the hotel 2 weeks before convention… If you do, good luck finding a hotel thats cheap.

Friday mainly consisted of driving up to Atlanta, getting into the hotel, going to convention and getting registered. Once we got registered we visited the hotels to get used to the layout as the weekend, we probably wouldn’t have a chance with all of the people. We went back to the Marriott and took some pictures before we went to some of the Panels (DMCA and Game Hacking) Friday night.

Saturday the Dragon*Con parade was at 10 AM, got their around 9:30 to find a good place to take pictures… that did not happen, it was already packed with more people coming in. After the parade was over we went to Sheraton to the Stargate Worlds Beta panel, since it was still in NDA that was a big waste of time. We also went to the Warhammer Online Beta panel shortly after. This panel was in a room that had a capacity of about 300 people and they were turning about another 100 people away since the room was full. We decided to go back to the hotel to dump pictures from our cameras and waited on the Holiday Inn Free Shuttle service to pick us up… That didn’t happen, we called and they were on the way. However, each time they came to pick us up, the shuttle was already full and had to drive past us. The guy I was with deleted some of his pictures since he took pictures of the parade in burst mode. After that we took more pictures in the Marriott until we went to Hacking 101 panel. Some very interesting stories were told here. One mentioned playing video games on a side of a hotel which turned into playing adult themed movies on a 3 story wall… next to an airport.

Sunday was an easy going day. Wasn’t much going on that I wanted to see so I got to sleep in. We mostly went to the dealer halls where they sell board games, weaponry, clothing and all sorts of fantasy stuff. That night we went to the Dawn look-a-like contest then after that the Cruxshadows concert.

Monday we packed up and came home.

As I said, it was a interesting and entertaining experience to go down there.

Striga’s Dragon*Con 2008 Pictures. These are not my pictures, as I am still working on a gallery to show my pictures (I am using this link with permission of my friend I went to Dragon*Con with).
Jinan’s Dragon*Con 2008 Pictures – These are my pictures I have taken with my Canon Power Shot camera.
Chilling Effects was talked about during the DMCA panel. It mainly shows what Take down and Put back notices are.
The Daily WTF website was mentioned in the Hacking 101 panel. A website that shows coding mistakes. Like bash.org for programming.

Tags: Atlanta, DragonCon, Dragons, Nerds