Spending a long weekend among 50k+ of the geekiest and nerdiest and generally awesome(-est) people around takes a while to recover from, especially for introvert types like me.
This year my friends and I dressed up for the first time. Nothing grand, but my friend said we should wear bathrobes in the grand Hooligan tradition. Then I found these Star Trek bathrobes at ThinkGeek.
They were pretty awesome and got a great reaction from other people. We were the away team in bath robes. People wanted to take photos of us. It’s very interesting to be on that side of DragonCon where people are asking to take photos of you instead of taking photos of others in costume.
We also had some Jedi robes with us, but they didn’t get nearly the reaction that the Star Trek robes got.
DragonCon seemed a lot more crowded this year. One of my friends also seemed to think there were a lot more DragonCon newbies this year too. Registration was orders of magnitude better this year than it was last year. Kudos to the organizers for making changes to improve the registration process. To manage the crowds for panels and sessions, I think organizers moved the lines for the more popular sessions and panels outside, rather than have lines of people snaking around inside. That resulted in really long intimidating looking lines heading outside and around buildings. Made it a little easier to move around inside, but it was a little confusing.
As usual, I spent most of my time in the Space and Science tracks. All the sessions I went to were packed this year with lots of people being turned away once the rooms were full. Didn’t do much autograph seeking this year, and only made one trip through the Walk of Fame.
Lots of photos were taken, lots of cool costumes. It kind of seemed like there weren’t quite as many people in costume this year, although I didn’t spend a lot of time wandering around like I did previous years so I probably just didn’t see them.
My complete collection of photos for DragonCon 2011 and the parade are over in the gallery.