Shore-Leave 44 After Action Report Part 1

I started this Shore-Leave adventure by getting off of work at 6pm, then driving from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, spent the night at my sister’s house, then she dropped me off at the airport at 10am, and I arrived in Philadelphia around 12:45pm. After some confusion about how to get my rental car (all the buses said “Avis” which I guess I should have known they also own Budget?) I found myself with a “Chevy Malibu” which was a perfectly fine car, it’s the first one that I’ve ever driven with a backup camera (I hated it) and android auto (it was ok, but flaky). I was whelmed by the experience. I then drove about 45 minutes west to go to a comic shop (Comic Universe), but they were in the middle of sorting their back inventory and said they didn’t have anything Trek related, so I left without buying anything, the only shop that I did that with. I then drove the full 2 hours it took to get to my hotel, which wasn’t the hotel that the convention was at, but was instead about 30 minutes away. It stunk of mildew, but the room itself was ok, so I was able to comfortably sleep when I needed it, and oh boy did I did it the next few nights. By the time it was situated in my room, I loaded up my backpack with the books I was going to get signed later that night and headed off to the Wyndham Resort.

The hotel was initially a confusing mess of stairs, elevators, more stairs, lobbies, and yes, more stairs. The registration table was as far away from the front door as you could get and absolutely no one was checking badges for panels or the dealer room, but it was still super cool picking up my badge and having the media banner on it. I didn’t exactly use the media credentials all that much, but I did get a ton of selfies with authors and took some pictures of actors. Robin Curtis even winked at me as we passed each other in a hallway!

That first night was light on panels, but one big one for me was the Convention 101 where the STAT club’s volunteers spoke to a small crowd about the show. There’s about $180,000 in guest costs, about 2,00 attendees, and they have two classifications of membership that are either $35 or $25 each with varying degrees of rights. They’re the oldest fan run show in the country!

After Con101 I went to my first ‘real’ panel on “The Marvels” with Kelli Fitzpatrick, Laura Ware, Rigel Ailure, Christopher Bennett, and Kathleen David. It was a super interesting panel and exposed me to something that was going to repeatedly happen where audience members would try to start talking over panelists and steer the conversations to something they wanted to talk about. It was interesting to see how the moderators handled it without breaking a sweat, but was eye opening to me. There was a point where I was the only guy in the audience, which wasn’t alarming, but interesting to notice.

The panels were all set to start at the top if the hour and run about 45-50 minutes, so around 6:50 the Marvels panel was adjourning and some rumors that one of the elevators broke with guest inside were quickly circulating. The truth was pretty close to that, but they were only in there for a few minutes and the elevator was quickly fixed. While I didn’t hear of anyone else getting stuck IN an elevator, there were plenty of attendees riding around on their mobility scooters that weren’t moving quickly enough for the elevator doors and a couple people got smacked. The hotel quickly realized the problem and I kid you not, assigned an employee to attend to every elevator to be sure it was called properly and the doors stayed open long enough. Kudos to them!

From 7pm to about 9pm I sat out in the main lobby chatting with Greg Cox, who is an absolute delight to speak to and is incredibly knowledgeable about so many more things than just Trek. He just had a book come out the week of the convention, so of course I had a copy to get signed.

At 9pm, I sat in on my first “science track” panel, this one was put on by Adeena Mignogna and it was about “space junk”. Some numbers to throw at you: as of a few years ago there were over 45,000 “things” being tracked by various agencies, both public and private, with over 10,000 of those being operating spacecraft, 3,000 non-operational, and about 1/3 of the current ‘junk’ is from just 2 incidents. One from a Chinese event in 2007 and one from a collision of Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 in 2009. This was a real cool panel and Adeena was super enthusiastic about the hard science behind tracking it all. Turns out she’s not just an engineer but is also a fictional author with several books of her own and is about to have a story in an upcoming issue of Star Trek Explorer. I bought a book from her at the next event!

10pm rolls around and it’s time for the “Meet The Pros” event, which was a fantastic experience that I’m looking forward to attending again in the future. During the interviews that I did with all the authors before the show, Howard Weinstein offered to sell me some Trek comics, so I got a whole pile from him, a few of them I got autographed since I had the guy right there in front of me. Did I get a picture with him? Of course not, I was too busy being fan to think of my professional obligations! I did end up spending about half the cash I brought up with me on a huge pile of books, and I got nearly every single of them autographed. It was a super cool experience. I even got to speak to Michael Jan Friedman about “A Star to Steer Her By” which I’ve only ever seen the Kirk and Picard versions and never once have I seen the Sisko version, even on ebay. He didn’t have much memory of the actual publication of the book and thought they only did the two I’ve seen, but did think he had seen the Sisko version, at least in a demo. Alas, my search continues!