Botcon 2010 (or, How I Spent 3 Days at Disney and Didn’t Have to Shoot a Damned Mouse)

Posted by katsuko on June 30th, 2010 filed in Fandom, Giant Robots, Reality Bytes

Blogger’s Note: This was originally typed up on June 28th and appeared over at LiveJournal. I’ve made a few edits to remove coding that only works on that site and reposted it here as well.

So I’m back in Tallahassee safe and sound (although Sunscream really wanted to just take a goddamn nap and fuck whether we were at a gas station when she did it about 90-some miles from home, but my girl started up again after I asked someone if they could give me a jumpstart…) and taking another day off from work just to rest and relax and get my usual Sunday chores done in the time I have so that me and Li don’t have to explain why we’re going to work naked for a couple of days. So I figured I’d write up a quick little post on my impressions of Botcon.

Apparently, Friday is The Slow Day so far as… well, anything but cruising the dealer room. I didn’t make it over to the Dolphin until around 11:30 with Sanjuno (hereafter referred to as “Twin”), her sister Miischi, Kitty, and Rosie with a bunch of pieces to be entered into the art contest, and a glimpse over the program didn’t really yield much that interested me. Also, due to BoA being overdraft-fee happy and shit on my paycheck from just before the con, I didn’t really have an excess of spending money for anything aside from meals and fuel and an emergency run to Best Buy to get a phone charger, doing much more than walking around the dealer room and window shopping was out. Given that it was noon and for reasons known only to her Kitty opted to join the already ridiculously-long line waiting for the dealer room to open up at 2, the rest of us cruised back over to Blue Tree. Twin and Miischi plopped for a nap, I did the emergency Best Buy run, and Rosie rolled back over to the Dolphin after we had a quick late-lunch.

Friday evening, we went to Medieval Times for dinner. We’d already sent Twin money ahead of time so she could pre-order our tickets, and we were asked to try to arrive at least an hour early. We managed to get there… at 6:45. I woke up Twin-of-mine and Miischi shortly after 5, and Rosie or Kitty – not sure which – called a few minutes after that to say they were on their way, then we heard nothing again until about quarter after 6. (Apparently, it takes nearly an hour to take pictures of a kid in a well-done costume and take a ten-to-fifteen minute drive back to the resort. Who knew?) ANYWAYS, moving on, we had a wonderful dinner and entertainment, and I’m hoping to come up with an excuse for me and Li to go to Atlanta for a day or so in order to visit the MT up there.

Saturday there were more things to do, although there honestly weren’t many things that caught my eye (plus, I was still a bit tired from the travel time down to Orlando from Tallahassee). We wound up being too late for the line to get Peter Cullen’s autograph (sadness!!) mostly due to sleeping in a teeny bit then having to wait while the slower members of our party were lollygagging to get moving. So, Miischi went off to gather her own quested-for autographs while Kitty went somewhere – still not sure where she wandered off to… meh, whatever – and the remaining three of us wandered the dealer room. Rosie headed deeper into the room whilst Twin and I scoured the booths on a mission to get her as many seekers as she could possibly afford and carry back to Ontario. The mission was fairly successful in that we located movie!Scream in his G1 colours, movie!Warp, movie!TC, several other Starscreams she picked up from the Club Booth itself, movie!Dirge, movie!Soundwave, movie!Ravage, and a few more that I honestly cannot remember with my fail!brain at the moment.

Finishing off on this and relocating Miischi and Rosie, the four of us decided to go play a round of mini-golf over at Fantasia Gardens, where we’d been parking all weekend because it was free rather than the 12 bucks the Dolphin charges. We looked around for Kitty but couldn’t locate her, and she called us after we’d left. She declined the invite, so it was just me and Twin and Miischi and Rosie utterly failing at the game… and it was fun! I had the highest score – yeah, I know that’s not the goal, but I lose with style, dammit – and walked away with a bit of a sunburn, but nothing tragic.

At 2 we headed back to the Dolphin and went to Peter Cullen’s panel, picking up Kitty as we went. It was fantastic, and I definitely enjoyed it. He is as awesome as one would expect him to be ♥ There was a lot of question and answer stuff, and we missed a little of it, but it was still fantastic! After that was the TFCC Roundtable, where they revealed some of the exclusives coming down the pike for next year. They all sounded fantastic to me, and I’m looking forward to them.

Then in the evening was the Hall of Fame Awards Dinner. In all technicality I should not have attended as I was there as a Protoform package attendee. HOWEVER, Miischi didn’t want to attend so gave me her spot instead. So Twin, Kitty, and I rolled over there about 7:30 to be fashionably late and had a wonderful dinner. The awards ceremony itself was also fabulous. This was the first year for the Hall of Fame, and the inaugural inductees were the perfect choices IMO. Human inductees were Kohjin Ohno, Hedeaki Yoke (and I had no friggin’ clue that the man has literally touche something for every incarnation of Transformers toys), Bob Budiansky (and thank you so much, Bob, for creating so much of the mythos I enjoy playing with), and – of course – Peter Cullen. Because you cannot have the Hall of Fame without THE voice of Prime. Speaking of, the robot inductees were Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Megatron, Starscream, and the fans’ choice winner Dinobot. The nominees who didn’t get in but who I’m pretty sure will be in the Hall of Fame sooner or later (probably sooner) were Shockwave, Soundwave, Grimlock, and Jazz.

Sunday morning was check-out time for Blue Tree, and we’d managed to get most of our packing up done the night before. There was still a bit of a mad scramble because some members of our party apparently thought a 10 am checkout time meant that they didn’t need to move their asses until 9, but it got straightened out. Rosie decided to head off for her home in Oveido since she hadn’t slept too much the night before, so we bid her goodbye and headed over to the Dolphin one last time. Kitty scampered off to somewhere pretty fast and Miischi went to see if she had any offers on the paintings she’d entered into the art contest, so Twin and I wandered about the room checking out the discounts and getting our pictures taken with Bumblebee (hee ♥) before I headed out about 11:15 to start back to Tallahassee.

All in all, it was a pretty good vacation from Tallahassee. (I was very happy to sleep in my own bed, though! And see my kitties… but Boo is still a bit pissed at me. Whoops.) Next year’s is in Pasadena, CA from June 2 to June 5, and I do believe that I’m gonna start saving in order to get the Primus package so I can drag Li along with me as well. She’s already started looking at prices for flights from Atlanta or Jacksonville to CA, so we’ll have to see what develops.