Portusdammerung!

Warning:  this post will contain massive amounts of squee and snark and mockery of organized religion christianity.  Please consider yourself warned.

I am super-tired and super-happy to be home at last!  Not sure what is the lesser of two evils - having a noon flight and getting back in the evening, or getting up at 4:15am to catch a flight in order to be home before noon.

Either way, I'm beat.

So, Dallas!  Was awesome.  I got to see the "Dallas" skyline, which I was excited about, LOL.  Our hotel was blocked in by the interstate, which meant expensive cab rides for things like...decently-priced food and grocery items.  Boo.

The hotel was ginormous, and kinda cool.  I forgot to take a picture of the "atriums", but you can see pictures here.  What was NOT cool was having a conference of BAPTISTS come in on Friday morning!  Not only Baptists, but food for dignity Missionary Baptists.  D: Whoever the event planner for the Anatole is, they might have informed one party or the other that their ARCH NEMESIS would be in attendance for half of their respective conferences.

Baptists + Harry Potter fen = holy hell.  Of course, the first thing that happens?  Some of our fen get kicked out of an area for posing in front of the Baptists' mock chapel (dumbarses).  Then a married pastor starts making unwelcome advances on a young HP person.  *eyeroll*  I'm sure he just had some pamphlets that he thought she should see.

Moral relativism still reigns supreme in the Southern Baptist Convention.  The dirty looks!  The people telling me they would pray for me (UH NO KEEP YOUR KARMA TO YOURSELF KTHX *seethe*).  Being smiled at and helloed to during my morning run, but sneered at when I was wearing my name badge.

ANYWAY.  Was tackle-glomped by Libbie upon arrival Thursday, handed a drink, and sent to my room.  A very nice room, to be exact.  Yay!  Met up with roommates, headed down to dinner the Welcoming Feast.  Libbie was wearing some awesome boots, which brought her almost to chin level LOL:

We met up with Sara, Megan and Penny during dinner, and met to discuss our Saturday panel presentation.  Diana brought her Harry and Hermione dolls for inspiration:

Since these are the dolls for PoA, we kept it PG.  :)

Thursday night ended with, what else?  DRINKS!  Sedona sunsets = Skyy melon vodka, Fresca, and a splash of cranberry juice.  Tasted like watermelon, mmmm.  And a not-so-rousing viewing of PoA (wtf people, you're with your PEEPS!  On with the inappropriate comments!)

Friday I got up and went to the gym early.  The gym was very nice, and there were cute guys working out there - bonus!  ;-)  There was an outdoor and indoor walking track, indoor and outdoor pools, a spa.  I could have stayed there another couple of days just for that.

The first panel I went to was "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: A Look at the Life of Severus Snape."  Maybe I'm a t00b, or just a snarky mean fandom person, but if you're going to do a panel on one of the (if not the) most popular and discussed characters in a fandom, you might want to prepare what you're going to talk about ahead of time.  There were about 65 people in the room, and the panelists' plan had been to "have you [the audience] ask us some questions."  *headdesk*  Admittedly, the panelists were not experienced HP fandomers, and I felt so so bad for them.  We got up and left about 15 minutes into people shouting over each other it.

At least it was assured that our panel would be better.

The second panel was titled, "Harry Potter's Post-Modern Popularity" by Ed Kern, who wrote The Wisdom of Harry Potter.  I enjoy his view of Harry as a Post-Modern, Stoic kind of hero; Harry is such a popular figure precisely because he fits the new archetype of morality - that there is no One True Path.  Also, that you shape your future and your past is only one part of that - and let us hope that that crappy Baby Boomer "blame your parents for everything that's wrong/that you do wrong in your life" mindset is fading into the background of the collective psyche!

After that, Shannon and I went to the Sixth Floor Museum, which is the former Texas School Book Depository in downtown Dallas.  It was an audio-guided tour, and it was awesome!  I'm not a big history person overall, but this tour did a great job setting up the milieu of the Kennedy administration and the world after the assassination.  We couldn't take pictures in the museum, but we did get shots of the Grassy Knoll:

View from the Grassy Knoll:

The Asian tourists in the foreground kept crossing the road - which is an on-ramp to I-35.  D:

The red brick building in the background is the Old Red Museum, which is a Dallas/Texas history museum.  We went there, too - it's been open a year, I think.  It's funny to see information on the Civil War in the south - they call it the "War of Northern Aggression" and in Texas, it's "The War Between the States."

Okay, people, the US won the war a hundred and forty-three years ago.  GET OVER IT.  :-P

A big tourist score was finding out the Taste of Dallas festival was going on nearby.  I had gator for the first time...eh.  Not like chicken, not like clams, I dunno.  Just eh.  But, I realized that I am spoiled because there were no craft beers!  It was Bud, Bud Light, Heineken and Dos Exxis.  Wut.

Later Friday, we went to Diana's book repair workshop, which was well-attended, and fun as usual.  I was tired and cranky and had some quiet time to recoup.

That's probably one of my few fen-like indulgences - I need to regroup and recharge alone.  However, I go to cons to see friends (not sit at my laptop like I do at home, ignoring the people beside me), to sightsee (instead of bragging that I'd spent 4 days in Dallas/Orlando/Las Vegas/Salem/NOLA without leaving the hotel), and to eat locally (rather than fast food or the overpriced hotel food).

Friday night - SNARRY meetup!  I am such a n00b lurker in this particular section of fandom; I never feel worthy.  But it was fun, especially having a couple incarnations of the potions master pose:

Snarky!Snape and Dead!Snape (SPOILER!)

To complete the evening of snark, we hit the Snapecast!  You can listen to it when it is posted here. 

My favorite "Snape":

(Nick's new pornstache doesn't lend itself to being a mental!Snape, but let's not let reality invade my Harry Potter weekend, eh?)

Friday night's movie watching was much improved by our arrival (Sedonas in hand) to watch OOTP.  I had to tell the people in front of me to leave if they didn't like our potty mouths comments - as if they'd never seen the movie before.

Saturday was another morning of running (outside this time, with the nutty christians other health-minded folks), then I took a taxi to the nearest grocery store.  Which was right next to the library, where I asked about getting breakfast.  The librarian told me to walk down to Cafe Brazil for food.  He looked at me kinda funny, and I figured out why: I was in the gay/barrio/ghetto area!  Wherever this area is in a city, I will ALWAYS find it, without fail.  I sat down to write my panel remarks (because even if only 5 people show up, you still need to have something worthwhile to say), and ordered this:

Mexican omelet, rosemary potatoes, cuban bread, and jalepeno jelly.  Heaven.

Whew.

How did I know where I was?  This was the store next to the library:

And near that, the STD/HIV clinic:

Our panel was in the early afternoon, so I grabbed a few things from the grocery and high-tailed it back to the hotel to frantically re-write my comments get ready.

I believe we ended up with 14 people, a feat considering the relatively small number of people who conceivably would be interested, and the fact that we were up against one of Ed Kern's sessions.

The consensus was that it went well.  Admittedly, it's a very niche subject with a large amount of splinter factions, but just talking about it in a constuctive way...the comments I got were "cathartic" and that it "was nice to be able to hear about it from people who aren't looking to make fun of you or try and 'convince' you that you're wrong."

Maybe we Pie-ers need a support group (other than alcohol).  :-)

My last panel was a discussion about "fic warnings" which taught me a few new acronyms that I'd never heard before.  Eep!

I pretty much crashed after dinner on Saturday...I don't do the Ball (even less so that I had to travel with all my luggage due to having 15-20 minutes to change planes in Memphis and thus no room to store dressy clothinks), and I sorta conked out.

Things that were super-cool:
--Seeing Maddie again; she is a very nice girl
--Everyone else, in general!  Yay!
--Snapecast!
--People liked our panel and it was well-attended
--Getting people into the audience participation aspect of the movies
--The dry dry heat of Dallas - 102* and it felt no hotter than 85*.  Dude, I'll take it!
--The hotel gym and spa, and it was only $10 for the whole stay!
--The vendor room had a great jewelry maker, and I got a nice bracelet - yay supporting local folks rather than B&N!
--Plot bunnies plot bunnies and more plot bunnies
--I watched Eli Stone, which was good TV (but I will probably never see it again due to my TV ADD)
--My doggie was so happy to see me, and every so often he looks up from his bone to smile at me

Things that were not super-cool:
--That the hotel was blocked in by the interstate, and you couldn't walk ANYWHERE
--Which led to taxi drivers trying to take us for a ride
--Almost 8 hours on the trip west without food due to those short layovers
--Which led to me to nearly lose the 4 Wheat Thins I ate on the plane from MEM to DFW (I had the barf bag in my hand urk)
--That "jalepeno" in Texas means "one step up from bell pepper" - they weren't spicy anywhere I had them!  :-\
--The extremely expensive restaurants in the hotel, forcing one to a) pay ridiculous prices (which I didn't) b) take a taxi to get food (still cheaper than the restaurant) or c) eat Pria bars (which I did) to get my nutrition.
--A horrible smelly guy (seriously looked and SMELLED like a hobo) on the plane from MEM to CMH.  His seatmate asked to be moved, because he was ready to vomit from the stench.  Ew.

So I have a month before Terminus, then Azkatraz next year, and Infinitus in '10, which will be my fandom (or at least my con) retirement.  Maybe I can get a gold watch or something.  :D

God, I don't want to go back to work.  Ever.