Slightly more detailed SG10 report
Nov. 8th, 2005 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenayIt is entirely possible that I slept for too long this morning. No alarm set so didn't wake up at anything approaching a sensible time. I now have a headache that just won't quite, even with liberal doses of painkillers, coffee and chocolate. Hmm.
This just in:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
terrylbirch has arrived in Egypt safely and her phone now apparently deigns to recognise my number again :-)
So, the con. It was much fun and I apologise for everything that I will undoubtedly leave out of this.
Friday
Possibly I should start with Thursday evening, but I'm starting with Friday anyway :-P After pancakes at T's withyragg, sazzle_02 and descended_sg1, I toddled off to town for an emergency raid on Boots for disposable cameras and toothpaste before dashing away to pick up paranoidangel42 on my way to the con. Those who were expecting me in the bar at 5pm can blame my late appearance on my certainty that it didn't matter that I'd forgotten the map book. Turns out that I probably did. Um.
Found the hotel eventually and discovered that Beth and Kate had actually arrived before us. Shock. Picked them up and wandered over to the hotel with silly plastic toys and my stack of FDAS badges. Much meeting and greeting of friends occurred, including findingnicci_mac.
Somehow, my ticket number was low enough to get into the meet and greet session, as were PA, Kate and Beth's tickets, so we trailed in and found a table where we hooked up with a friend of Kate and Beth's who had a huge bag of sweets. Sugar is, apparently, the way to a Stargate fan's heart. Needless to say, our table was not empty and even a couple of the actors forgot their diets when faced with piles of Haribo. Heh.
Memorable moment from that evening was the lightsabre arch for Neil Denis' entry. Anyone who was at SG-8 will probably remember how well that young man got along with the Jedi Chefs, resulting in a lightsabre battle on the Sunday night that I wish I'd had my camera for. To honour this, the Jedi Chefs formed a lightsabre arch and it was a really great moment when Neil Denis walked in.
The various actors made their way around the tables, stopping to talk to everyone despite the amount of time it took. They always seem to ask who is there in a group and where everyone is from. In return, we always seem to ask how they are and thank them for attending the con. Just as a change, Dan Shea told fun stunt stories :-)
The meet and greet ended ar around 11pm to be followed by music and dancing. I retired to the bar with friends before returning to the hotel at around 1am. I rediscovered why I stopped watching Voyager early in the run - fifteen minutes in the middle of an episode told me everything I needed to know :-)
Saturday
Saturday dawned bright and early, but not as early as usual because PA and I made the wise decision not to virtual queue and therefore only had to make sure we were in convention area by 9.30am. Spent the weekend sitting at the back of the hall, but our aisle seats allowed us to run to the front for photos and we had a pretty good view of the talks from our seats anyway. Yup, we're converts to the non-virtual-queue way of cons now.
The programme should have begun at 9.30am, but we were on con time now so nothing ran to schedule. I think Bryan spent most of the weekend desperately trying to get it all back on schedule, but all of the changes that had to be made due to the fluctuating guest list last week were defeating him. We didn't care, though - the con was fun and the autographing actually went faster and more smoothly than I've ever seen it.
David Nykl was our firstvictim guest on Saturday. He was obviously nervous, but relaxed after a while and everyone loved him. He has got an extremely cheeky grin and this odd little giggle that is completely unexpected, but keeps throwing up many possibilities :-) I can't help wondering whether he's been reading fan commentary: apparently Zelenka's personal item was a still and at one point the possibility of an alcoholic, cross-dressing Zelenka in a gay relationship with McKay was mooted.
Neil Denis appeared next, showing no sign of nerves but possibly hung over after partying with the plebs. As always, the boy was larger than life and having far too much fun.
Erik Brekker is a mad man, but a born storyteller. He's played an occasional recurring character who I do recognise, aided by the helpful music vids that Wolk had put together for most of the actors.
An aside: where the hell was David Nykl's vid??
Anyway, back to Erik. Although he didn't get many questions (I suspect because many people didn't recognise him), it hardly seemed like he was on the stage any time because I enjoyed his session so much. He has hundreds of stories stashed in his brain and is equally happy to tell the personal stories as well as the acting-related stories. But it's the delivery that really gets to you: the facial expressions, the tone, the way he uses words all add up to make him incredibly funny
Alex Zahara was as brillain as ever. Between impressions, funny stories, general insanity and some profound thoughts, he's a fantastic con guest.
I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for Tobias Mehler. I loved his character (Lt. Simmonds in season 2 episodes), but he was such a surprise guest (he didn't know that he'd be here until Thursday) that nobody had really had time to research and find good questions. Plus he was a little shy and overwhelmed by it. Nevertheless, he did a great job and by his talk on Sunday seemed to have relaxed into it a little. Not quite so much as David, but enough and it was interesting to hear his thoughts on growing up in Yellowknife.
Dan Shea was a blast. The guy fills a room and just loves his job. Most of his questions were about his stunt work, something that I find fascinating.
As an aside, we rarely get the SG writers, directors and other behind the scenes guys at cons, so getting actors who have done other things is great. For this reason, Joe Flanigan has been added to my list of trigger people for going to Peg One :-)
Dan Shea's talk gave us a small insight into the side of the show that we don't often get to see. He's rightly proud of his work on Stargate, particularly his track record of not injuring his people. I'm always impressed by these guys who put their lives on the line to entertain us and it's good to know that someone as competant and dedicated as Dan is working on that.
Cliff Simon was the last guy on stage and he was great. The Wolf guys used "You're so vain" as his music vid and it fitted his character perfectly. I'd half-expected the man himself to be reasonably vain, but he wasn't. He's done a lot of things during his life, from competetive swimming to the Air Force and onto performing at the Moulin Rouge as an acrobat. Lots of great life experience, but he doesn't take himself too seriously. He talked about Googling himself and discovering Jack/Ba'al slash - and reading it. Chatting with some FDAS members afterwards, we decided that he'd actually had to search pretty darned hard to find it because there isn't that much out there. He saw it as amusing more than titilating, but it was fun to see an actor who doesn't take himself seriously enough to be offended by it.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the relationship between actors and fanfiction. I definitely don't think that fans should confront actors with it and was not amused by a couple of fan questions about fanfic. I'm less certain about actors who choose to talk about it, as Cliff Simon did. He certainly didn't think we're weird, for which I'm grateful, and my gut is saying that if they choose to discuss it then don't worry about it. But still don't put it in the actors' faces because they need to be able to claim deliberate ignorance if they have to.
Our unusually low ticket numbers meant that Kate, Beth, PA,blue_adagio and I got our autographs that night. I managed to resist buying any extra photos and just got my large poster signed (it's turning into a "sign anywhere there's a space" deal there), although I probably would have bought an extra David Nykl photo to be signed if I'd been going through on Sunday. I always have a hundred clever things stashed in my head to say to them during these moments, and they all disappear the moment I'm within three feet of the autograph tables so that I just say hello and grin hopefully. I think that I did manage to wish a couple of them a good rest of the con, but I'm not sure.
Then it was back to the hotel for food and relaxing before the evening party/bar session. The Sheraton hotel is only five minutes from the con hotel but it's earned our loyalty. We usually stay at the con hotel, but the price, comfort and co-operative restaurant at the Sheraton have persuaded us to make return trips for any future cons at the Thistle. We actually managed to get PA fed in the restaurant without giving her anything that she can't eat - quite a success judging by the Thistle's less than stellar performace for the stewards meal the next day.
The fancy dress party was more painful than usual and I can't believe that I stayed through it. We left when the quiz started and took up residence in the lobby/bar area, where we had a fun time with many giggles and watched Kate on crack sugar. Note for the future: never, ever, under any circumstances give Kate dextrose tablets. And definitely never let her have two. She's much safter sticking to the regular, cut sugar rather than the pure stuff *snicker* Alex Zahara probably thinks she's insane...
Sunday
I asked PA to talk me out of getting a photo shoot with David Nykl. Instead she talked herself into joining me :-) Originally David was going to be doing the early Q&A session both days, but the organisers took pitty and swapped his Sunday sessions around so that he was talking in the afternoon. Which was a good thing because PA and I blew off the first session in favour of extra sleep (after checking that David was on in the afternoon, of course) and made it to the con in time to by our photo sessions and catch the end of Tobias Mehler's talk. The con was running late yet again, but that worked out in our favour because we would have missed part of Dan Shea's session if it hadn't.
Dan's session was great. He got some audience members up on stage so that he could demonstrate some simple stunds - punches and falls. Oh god, the abuse he was giving Michael Shanks was just hilarious :-) The kid who was pretending to get punched as being compared to MS: "Just stand their looking pouty and blue-eyed" *snort*
I don't think that Erik Brekker got asked any questions: we just let him ramble and tell more hilarious stories, which was way more entertaining.
Neil Denis was funny and enthusiastic and had some interesting answers to some of the questions. Apparently the time that he'd like most to go back to is Ancient Japan. He's also a huge fan of his father, which I thought was lovely.
PA and I were out of the room for much of Neil's talk, though, because we were having our photos taken with David Nykl. He was lovely and stopped everyone for a quick chat after their photo. Sunday is definitely the day to do photos: much quieter than Saturday sessions so the actors actually have time to chat for a minute.
Cliff Simon...too funny :-) His Q&A sessions were definitly not PG rated *eg*
We got chucked out of the hall over lunch and a bunch of us ended up back at T's room, where we watched part of 'The Slipper and the Rose', which has got so much slash in that it's ridiculous.
David Nykl's talk was the first after lunch and he never left the stage after that - woo! There was yet more proof that he has to have checked out at least a few of the fan communities. I can't remember what the question was, but the answer started out "McKay and Zelenka are captured by aliens and made to do the classic..."
At which point he stopped, blushed and realised exactly where all our minds had gone. Definitely knows about *that* cliche *eg* I believe that he was going for the "fight to the death" scenario, but it never really got past a roomful of giggles. His included. All protestations about Zelenka not having a crush on Weir were soundly crushed when his reply to "Who does Zelenka like most on Atlantis" was Weir. Because she's hot.
And for those wondering, he is Czech and he does all of Zelenka's translation. Yay for multi-talented actors!
Alex Zahara appeared after a while and kept David up on stage, with the other actors gradually appearing and trading off questions so that we ended up with a mass panel before the closing ceremony with the traditional thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make it a great con. Some people were leaving straight after the con, so we spent a while trying to find people to say good bye and pick up photos before toddling off to dinner at the hotel again. Kate, Beth and Suzanne decided on McDonalds instead, but we all met up afterwards for Stargate Scrabble before returning to the con for the closing party. Unfortunately, the DJ decided to conduct a painful game of Runabout so we took up residence in the usual FDAS spot under the stairs, next to the door, where we could talk, play with silly toys and try to shoot balloons with plastic arrows in peace.
Monday
The following morning involved packing, good byes and breakfast in the room that PA and I were sharing before everyone departed to return to the real world. That's always the most painful part of the con - leaving behind your friends and admitting that the con is over again. But it was a fantastic weekend and I can't wait until my next con.
Just have to work out which con that will be...
::makes pleading noises in the direction of certain Atlantis cast members::
This just in:
terrylbirch has arrived in Egypt safely and her phone now apparently deigns to recognise my number again :-)So, the con. It was much fun and I apologise for everything that I will undoubtedly leave out of this.
Friday
Possibly I should start with Thursday evening, but I'm starting with Friday anyway :-P After pancakes at T's with
yragg, sazzle_02 and descended_sg1, I toddled off to town for an emergency raid on Boots for disposable cameras and toothpaste before dashing away to pick up paranoidangel42 on my way to the con. Those who were expecting me in the bar at 5pm can blame my late appearance on my certainty that it didn't matter that I'd forgotten the map book. Turns out that I probably did. Um.Found the hotel eventually and discovered that Beth and Kate had actually arrived before us. Shock. Picked them up and wandered over to the hotel with silly plastic toys and my stack of FDAS badges. Much meeting and greeting of friends occurred, including finding
nicci_mac.Somehow, my ticket number was low enough to get into the meet and greet session, as were PA, Kate and Beth's tickets, so we trailed in and found a table where we hooked up with a friend of Kate and Beth's who had a huge bag of sweets. Sugar is, apparently, the way to a Stargate fan's heart. Needless to say, our table was not empty and even a couple of the actors forgot their diets when faced with piles of Haribo. Heh.
Memorable moment from that evening was the lightsabre arch for Neil Denis' entry. Anyone who was at SG-8 will probably remember how well that young man got along with the Jedi Chefs, resulting in a lightsabre battle on the Sunday night that I wish I'd had my camera for. To honour this, the Jedi Chefs formed a lightsabre arch and it was a really great moment when Neil Denis walked in.
The various actors made their way around the tables, stopping to talk to everyone despite the amount of time it took. They always seem to ask who is there in a group and where everyone is from. In return, we always seem to ask how they are and thank them for attending the con. Just as a change, Dan Shea told fun stunt stories :-)
The meet and greet ended ar around 11pm to be followed by music and dancing. I retired to the bar with friends before returning to the hotel at around 1am. I rediscovered why I stopped watching Voyager early in the run - fifteen minutes in the middle of an episode told me everything I needed to know :-)
Saturday
Saturday dawned bright and early, but not as early as usual because PA and I made the wise decision not to virtual queue and therefore only had to make sure we were in convention area by 9.30am. Spent the weekend sitting at the back of the hall, but our aisle seats allowed us to run to the front for photos and we had a pretty good view of the talks from our seats anyway. Yup, we're converts to the non-virtual-queue way of cons now.
The programme should have begun at 9.30am, but we were on con time now so nothing ran to schedule. I think Bryan spent most of the weekend desperately trying to get it all back on schedule, but all of the changes that had to be made due to the fluctuating guest list last week were defeating him. We didn't care, though - the con was fun and the autographing actually went faster and more smoothly than I've ever seen it.
David Nykl was our first
Neil Denis appeared next, showing no sign of nerves but possibly hung over after partying with the plebs. As always, the boy was larger than life and having far too much fun.
Erik Brekker is a mad man, but a born storyteller. He's played an occasional recurring character who I do recognise, aided by the helpful music vids that Wolk had put together for most of the actors.
An aside: where the hell was David Nykl's vid??
Anyway, back to Erik. Although he didn't get many questions (I suspect because many people didn't recognise him), it hardly seemed like he was on the stage any time because I enjoyed his session so much. He has hundreds of stories stashed in his brain and is equally happy to tell the personal stories as well as the acting-related stories. But it's the delivery that really gets to you: the facial expressions, the tone, the way he uses words all add up to make him incredibly funny
Alex Zahara was as brillain as ever. Between impressions, funny stories, general insanity and some profound thoughts, he's a fantastic con guest.
I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for Tobias Mehler. I loved his character (Lt. Simmonds in season 2 episodes), but he was such a surprise guest (he didn't know that he'd be here until Thursday) that nobody had really had time to research and find good questions. Plus he was a little shy and overwhelmed by it. Nevertheless, he did a great job and by his talk on Sunday seemed to have relaxed into it a little. Not quite so much as David, but enough and it was interesting to hear his thoughts on growing up in Yellowknife.
Dan Shea was a blast. The guy fills a room and just loves his job. Most of his questions were about his stunt work, something that I find fascinating.
As an aside, we rarely get the SG writers, directors and other behind the scenes guys at cons, so getting actors who have done other things is great. For this reason, Joe Flanigan has been added to my list of trigger people for going to Peg One :-)
Dan Shea's talk gave us a small insight into the side of the show that we don't often get to see. He's rightly proud of his work on Stargate, particularly his track record of not injuring his people. I'm always impressed by these guys who put their lives on the line to entertain us and it's good to know that someone as competant and dedicated as Dan is working on that.
Cliff Simon was the last guy on stage and he was great. The Wolf guys used "You're so vain" as his music vid and it fitted his character perfectly. I'd half-expected the man himself to be reasonably vain, but he wasn't. He's done a lot of things during his life, from competetive swimming to the Air Force and onto performing at the Moulin Rouge as an acrobat. Lots of great life experience, but he doesn't take himself too seriously. He talked about Googling himself and discovering Jack/Ba'al slash - and reading it. Chatting with some FDAS members afterwards, we decided that he'd actually had to search pretty darned hard to find it because there isn't that much out there. He saw it as amusing more than titilating, but it was fun to see an actor who doesn't take himself seriously enough to be offended by it.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the relationship between actors and fanfiction. I definitely don't think that fans should confront actors with it and was not amused by a couple of fan questions about fanfic. I'm less certain about actors who choose to talk about it, as Cliff Simon did. He certainly didn't think we're weird, for which I'm grateful, and my gut is saying that if they choose to discuss it then don't worry about it. But still don't put it in the actors' faces because they need to be able to claim deliberate ignorance if they have to.
Our unusually low ticket numbers meant that Kate, Beth, PA,
blue_adagio and I got our autographs that night. I managed to resist buying any extra photos and just got my large poster signed (it's turning into a "sign anywhere there's a space" deal there), although I probably would have bought an extra David Nykl photo to be signed if I'd been going through on Sunday. I always have a hundred clever things stashed in my head to say to them during these moments, and they all disappear the moment I'm within three feet of the autograph tables so that I just say hello and grin hopefully. I think that I did manage to wish a couple of them a good rest of the con, but I'm not sure.Then it was back to the hotel for food and relaxing before the evening party/bar session. The Sheraton hotel is only five minutes from the con hotel but it's earned our loyalty. We usually stay at the con hotel, but the price, comfort and co-operative restaurant at the Sheraton have persuaded us to make return trips for any future cons at the Thistle. We actually managed to get PA fed in the restaurant without giving her anything that she can't eat - quite a success judging by the Thistle's less than stellar performace for the stewards meal the next day.
The fancy dress party was more painful than usual and I can't believe that I stayed through it. We left when the quiz started and took up residence in the lobby/bar area, where we had a fun time with many giggles and watched Kate on crack sugar. Note for the future: never, ever, under any circumstances give Kate dextrose tablets. And definitely never let her have two. She's much safter sticking to the regular, cut sugar rather than the pure stuff *snicker* Alex Zahara probably thinks she's insane...
Sunday
I asked PA to talk me out of getting a photo shoot with David Nykl. Instead she talked herself into joining me :-) Originally David was going to be doing the early Q&A session both days, but the organisers took pitty and swapped his Sunday sessions around so that he was talking in the afternoon. Which was a good thing because PA and I blew off the first session in favour of extra sleep (after checking that David was on in the afternoon, of course) and made it to the con in time to by our photo sessions and catch the end of Tobias Mehler's talk. The con was running late yet again, but that worked out in our favour because we would have missed part of Dan Shea's session if it hadn't.
Dan's session was great. He got some audience members up on stage so that he could demonstrate some simple stunds - punches and falls. Oh god, the abuse he was giving Michael Shanks was just hilarious :-) The kid who was pretending to get punched as being compared to MS: "Just stand their looking pouty and blue-eyed" *snort*
I don't think that Erik Brekker got asked any questions: we just let him ramble and tell more hilarious stories, which was way more entertaining.
Neil Denis was funny and enthusiastic and had some interesting answers to some of the questions. Apparently the time that he'd like most to go back to is Ancient Japan. He's also a huge fan of his father, which I thought was lovely.
PA and I were out of the room for much of Neil's talk, though, because we were having our photos taken with David Nykl. He was lovely and stopped everyone for a quick chat after their photo. Sunday is definitely the day to do photos: much quieter than Saturday sessions so the actors actually have time to chat for a minute.
Cliff Simon...too funny :-) His Q&A sessions were definitly not PG rated *eg*
We got chucked out of the hall over lunch and a bunch of us ended up back at T's room, where we watched part of 'The Slipper and the Rose', which has got so much slash in that it's ridiculous.
David Nykl's talk was the first after lunch and he never left the stage after that - woo! There was yet more proof that he has to have checked out at least a few of the fan communities. I can't remember what the question was, but the answer started out "McKay and Zelenka are captured by aliens and made to do the classic..."
At which point he stopped, blushed and realised exactly where all our minds had gone. Definitely knows about *that* cliche *eg* I believe that he was going for the "fight to the death" scenario, but it never really got past a roomful of giggles. His included. All protestations about Zelenka not having a crush on Weir were soundly crushed when his reply to "Who does Zelenka like most on Atlantis" was Weir. Because she's hot.
And for those wondering, he is Czech and he does all of Zelenka's translation. Yay for multi-talented actors!
Alex Zahara appeared after a while and kept David up on stage, with the other actors gradually appearing and trading off questions so that we ended up with a mass panel before the closing ceremony with the traditional thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make it a great con. Some people were leaving straight after the con, so we spent a while trying to find people to say good bye and pick up photos before toddling off to dinner at the hotel again. Kate, Beth and Suzanne decided on McDonalds instead, but we all met up afterwards for Stargate Scrabble before returning to the con for the closing party. Unfortunately, the DJ decided to conduct a painful game of Runabout so we took up residence in the usual FDAS spot under the stairs, next to the door, where we could talk, play with silly toys and try to shoot balloons with plastic arrows in peace.
Monday
The following morning involved packing, good byes and breakfast in the room that PA and I were sharing before everyone departed to return to the real world. That's always the most painful part of the con - leaving behind your friends and admitting that the con is over again. But it was a fantastic weekend and I can't wait until my next con.
Just have to work out which con that will be...
::makes pleading noises in the direction of certain Atlantis cast members::
