Back From GenCon! Part Two: prepare for hot, stinky nerd photos!

The rest of GenCon was very good. The sales floor was reduced by 1/3 because they appended the Art Show onto 1/3 of the exhibit hall, which kind’ve sucked. Two of the retailers I really wanted to visit did not show this year, which made me a little frustrated but I found plenty of good stuff regardless.

Before I get to the pictures, my biggest highlight of this year were DEFINITELY getting to meet Dan Falconer, a concept artist from Weta Workshop that worked extensively on Lord of the Rings. He is a very bright and cheery guy, who had no problem talking to me for several minutes about his involvement in the films. We ran into him when we were wandering the Art Show and I spotted his concept drawing of Sting and Striders Hunting Knife at his booth. I asked him if he was selling prints of that artwork and he told me that Weta owned it so he couldn’t, about this time I realize that he was responsible for many of my favorite designs from the films.

Dan also decided to put on three seminars about working at Weta, the new Narnia movie, and Secrets Behind Lord of the Rings. We ended up going to two of his three seminars, all were lightly populated and very casual in nature. It got to the point that Dan recognized Tasha and I and thanked us personally for coming to his third seminar, which I thought was very cool of him.

My other highlights were briefly meeting Ed Greenwood, author of the Forgotten Realms Dungeons and Dragons universe. I basically just got to shake his hand and got a picture with him, but it was cool. True Dungeon was also a highlight, but I covered that pretty well in the post below.

Here’s and goofing around at breakfast. I don’t want to know what she’s doing with that banana.

These guys were also at our hotel, I have no idea what their shirt meant but the logo was hilarious.

As we arrived at the sales floor, we found that the gates didn’t open until 10 am. It appears that some of these nerds were able to reproduce, which still astounds me.

This view is of the sales floor, you see that Wizards of the Coast build a large cathedral set to plug their new game Hecatomb, the opposite side of it was a WWII scene to plug their Axis and Allies line of products.

This bantha miniature caught my eye because it was cool. No story here, and no, I didn’t buy it.

The first costume shot of the year… these two people apparently just like the medieval feel. I didn’t get the impression that they were supposed to be any character, but I didn’t really ask either.

This one I took a picture of because it was mostly apparent to me that this person was attempting to be a D&D character of theirs. Again, its best not to ask questions, so I didn’t, but at least the costume appears largely nice.

This is a good example of great half-done costume. I don’t know why you would go through the effort to make a Gandalf costume that is so accurate and then wear it outside without proper prosethetics to finish the job. Nice costume though.

This suit of Aragorn’s armor was for sale from an armor vendor for just about $700. If only I had another house payment laying around… *sigh*

This girl did a nice Hufflepuff wizard costume, I have to say the hat was a bit over the top. I SWEAR that this scarf was done by my prop forum people, but I found the booth she bought it from and they claimed to have hand-made the scarves. Nice costume on this one too.

And this, my friends, is an advertisement for Nair. I couldn’t focus on this guy’s costume because of the carpet that was trying to escape up his neck. Yikes.

There were some NICE Star Wars Troopers here this year. This guy had a GREAT clonestrooper armor done.

Here is the aforementioned picture of myself and Ed Greenwood. He seemed pretty nice, but was distracted by a few associates he was talking to. I asked him to snap this picture, we spoke for a minute or two and then I split.

OK, I have no idea WTF this is. It’s gotta be from something (probably Anime) but I contend that if you look like a cocaine addict you shouldn’t don samurai armor for any reason. Maybe this is what happened to Mr. Hat…

This dude was hanging around in front of the sales floor… he was giving off that weird pedophile “I’m dressed as the wizard Morlock that I created” vibe.

These guys were friends, I believe trying to attempt an Anakin/Vader duo. I liked the idea and the costume, my only complaint is the Vader guy was about 6 inches too short to pull it off. But kudos to him for trying.

This guy is a great example of why people shouldn’t wear their Green Lantern pajamas outside of the house. Or the third grade.

There were some really good Ghostbusters out there this year, a whole pack of 5 at one point. I think this was mostly because Ernie Hudson was a guest of honor this year. Nice costumes to the whole lot, they spent a lot of time on their proton packs.

I dunno what this was exactly. Could’ve been a generic orc, could’ve been Bossk from Star Wars, but really I don’t have any idea.

A really nice Tie Pilot. Great level of detail on this one, and the person inside the bucket knew how to give the character the appropriate feel. Nothing ruins the image of a monolithic killing machine like watching them accidentally scratch their crotch while in costume, and I’m happy to report this person did nothing of the sort.

I have no idea what this is all about. These two girls were dressed as some sort of stuffed animal killing amazons, and I have to say that it was sufficiently strange to nearly make disjunct and that takes A LOT.

Here’s me and Dan Falconer. You can see around him some of his contributions to Lord of the Rings, unfortunately this specific picture blocks his concept art of Sting. As I said before, nice guy, real class act.

Two people that really had their respective costumes nailed. Here we have a Stormtrooper and Boushh from Return of the Jedi. Again, they did a great job of selling the characters.

Apparently, they make Stormtrooper couples nowadays. This costume was getting a fair amount of attention, I have no idea why.

This guy had a GREAT Gandalf costume, all the way down to prosthetics and the proper gait. This is not the same costume as the previous Gandalf, and I believe this one won one of the Costume Contest divisions. Well deserved, what a cool getup.

No photo reel would be complete without the obligitory shot of my lovely wife, Tasha.

Just after my picture of Tasha above, Mario and Luigi wandered by. Very off the wall costume.

This guy came along after awhile, playing with his home-made robot. Little kids and adults had crowded around before long and this guy still maintained his creepy gaze over his pet robot hardly noticing those around him. Its these kind of nerds that give the rest of us a bad name.

This is a shot of the sign for Dan Falconer’s seminars that we saw. There was probably less than ten people in each one, so it was a nice chance to get an inside look and ask questions about the way things worked for Narnia and LOTR. It was a great time, for sure.

Shots from our late night D&D session in our room on Saturday night. As you can see from the level of Long Island Iced Tea in the bottle next to the night was enjoyed by all.

Also present at our D&D session was the aptly named Lady Not Appearing In This Film.

Before we left today I snapped a few pics of Ernie “No My Career Did Not End With Ghostbusters” Hudson. Whoopee.

Much fun was had by all, I have a CD with the high res pics available if anyone wants!