Letters From The Loft
Stuff From The Desk Of Chuck Thornton
DAY TWO - PAGE 4
We started tracking down the "fulfillment room", the place where you redeem your tickets for the actual objects. Because the Con has outgrown the Convention Center facilities, some of the functions that in the past had been located in the Convention Center had this year spilled over into neighboring venues, and the Fulfillment Room was part of that program. In previous years, it was on the second floor at the southern end of the Convention Center, and we could stop by there on our way out to our car. This year, it was located in the adjacent Marriott Hotel, the neighbor to the north of the Convention Center. We soon discovered that this was no hike to take after spending a couple of hours standing in a line. Consider the map below:
The red asterisk near the lower left was our starting point outside of the northern-most entrance to the Convention Center. (The green dot above and to the left of that is the second-story walkway where we got in line for the Walking Dead panel earlier that day). If you follow the yellow arrows from the asterisk to the red star on the right, you see the route we had to take to get to the fulfillment room. There's no legend to give the map scale, but I can tell you that each yellow arrow represents about 12 miles.
Or at least it seemed that way to our feet. On the way there, we discovered the source of the foamy figures we had spotted from the Walking Dead line earlier. There was a guy in an open asphalt area between the Convention Center and the Marriott, operating a tank of soap suds that was somehow generating foam human figures that would float up from the tank...
...creating a "Look... up in the sky...it's Soaperman!" type moment:
The name of this outfit is Flogos, and you can check out the type of stuff they do at www.flogos.net. Basically, they can float all sorts of customized shapes in the skies over an event to promote their clients' name and logo. It's good clean fun as long as it doesn't cause pedestrians to step out into traffic. If someone was paying the Flogos people for this day's shapes, I think it was a waste of money, because I have no idea what company or movie or TV show I'd associate with a generic human body shape (CSI, maybe?). More likely, Flogos was engaged in some self-promotion, hoping to pick up clients from some of Con exhibitors. If so, they should have been doing this in the Exhibition Hall, where a little extra soap could never hurt.
After watching the Flogos for a while, we resumed our march toward fulfillment. We snaked our way through quite a bit of the Marriott until we found the sign (next to an old cow skull) pointing toward the Fulfillment Room.
I know, I know, you're anticipating a punch line where the Fulfillment Room volunteers tell us that they're all out of the shirts (what we now call "being Timmed"). But that didn't happen. The nice folks there gave me all 3 shirts in the size I requested and asked me where I had picked up the cool Smallville bag. I said their best bet was to grab a cab to the Warner Brothers booth.
Then we walked all the way back to the Convention Center. We may have missed the panel on The Walking Dead, but by this time we were members of the organization, so we decided to get an early start to the next panel we were interested in so could sit down. It was billed as the "Peanuts 60th anniversary panel", and I'm always willing to reminisce about the genius of Peanuts, so we headed over to that room. We arrived in the middle of the preceding "Catch Up With Yen Press" panel. Since we had never heard of Yen Press, we had a lot of catching up to do. Apparently Yen Press is an American publisher that licenses and reprints Japanese manga properties, so while we waited for Peanuts, we were treated to a lot of news about characters with incredibly big eyes wearing parochial school uniforms.