Pros and Cons

So Cindy had been working diligently or more accurately, obsessively on costume prep for a good portion of last week.  I have no idea how many total hours went into the outfits for her and myself but it is way up there.  Her creativity in recreating the look of the two characters we were going as, Soldier 76 and Tracer was extremely impressive.  She made 80% of the costumes by hand.  She was working on stuff right up until we left on Friday morning.

After getting the chickens handled for the day we piled into the Prius and heading northward towards Tampa.  I had not been to Tampa in many years and never had much good or bad to say about it.  It took us around two and a half hours until we arrived at our hotel which was called Aloft, a hip sort of place.

I immediately was not happy that our only parking option was to valet at a cost of $20 a day.  The room was not cheap so getting add on expenses right off the bat didn’t make me happy.  We used a luggage cart to haul our large collection of props upstairs.  The room itself was very modern and cool with a flat screen tv mounted on the wall, modern accessories, nice view out the window and black slate floor in the bathroom areas. It was very nice.

The Con started on Friday so we wasted no time in prepping.  Of course the majority of the work that needed to be done was by Cindy both on her costume and getting me situated in mine.  Besides my putting on the costume, Cindy spray painted my hair gray and darkened the area around my eyes.  She once again did the face make up on herself to simulate Tracer’s goggles which takes quite awhile.

Finally after about 2 hours of prep we were ready to head to the convention center.  The skies looked like rain so we decided to get an Uber ride instead of walking the roughly half mile to the convention.  Since it was a “surge” time the ride cost about 50% more than normal.

We did not actually get to the event until after 5PM.  We headed into the main exhibit hall where all the vendors are set up.  It took no time at all until the picture requests came rolling in.  It seemed like once again there was a scarcity of people dressed up as Overwatch characters despite the popularity of the game.

At first I was trying to just put on the mask as needed since it limited my vision to a narrow slot in front of me.  However the picture requests were so fast and furious I wound up just leaving the mask on.  I used Cindy as a beacon in front of me that I would just follow through the crowd. Besides the limited vision I was also hot as hell.  In no time at all I had sweat running down my back.

We did not realize that although the Con ran until late at night, the main exhibit hall closed at 6PM meaning we only got to walk around it a bit.  To be honest, between all the picture requests and the crowds we didn’t get to really look at anything in depth on the show floor.

Once the main hall closed we headed downstairs where a bunch of things were set up in the smaller rooms that lined the halls.  Of course there were a ton of interesting costumes to look at which honestly is my favorite thing to do at these events, just people watch.

Cindy was having some costume difficulties throughout the show.  The complexity she added to her costume unfortunately brought additional fragility as well.  A number of things that were attached via glue gun broke loose.  Luckily she brought safety pins with that could be used to fix most of the problems. We hung at the convention center for several hours, posing for picture after picture.  Since this is the first time I dressed up for a con this was a new experience for me.  It gives you an idea of what it must be like to be an actual celebrity.  It was both cool and annoying at the same time.

We decided to walk back to the hotel Friday night in our full costumes.  Cindy was a bit scared by the idea of walking.  We saw some interesting things on the way like a bar owner in a screaming match with two patrons that appeared to be trying to skip their bill and some shady looking guys that bottomed out their low riding car pulling into a parking garage.  Walking in the warm and humid air in costume just brought on a whole new level of perspiration for me.  We were quite glad when we got back into the AC of the hotel.

We stayed up a bit on Friday catching some of the Olympic opening ceremony but then turned it off due to us both being exhausted.  We began a night of pretty miserable sleep thanks to bad acoustics and inconsiderate assholes allowing their children to run wildly up and down the halls after midnight.  Cindy called to the desk to report the noise but it really didn’t matter.  Pretty much any noise whatsoever in the hall seemed to amplify and broadcast into the room.  We woke up Saturday morning feeling like shit from a lack of solid sleep.

At first Cindy was saying she wasn’t going to dress up at all for Saturday.  She was bummed out about her costume failures from Friday.  I told her she would regret not dressing up so she reconfigured her outfit on the spot to a less restrictive version.  It still looked good.  We once again hailed an Uber to get us on site, we got there late morning.

Before heading there we had the non-complimentary hotel breakfast.  Again with what the room cost, throwing in a free continental breakfast would have been beyond reasonable.  Instead we paid $21 for greasy egg sandwiches neither of us enjoyed.

Well we knew Saturday would be much busier than Friday but that knowledge did not make the situation any better.  There were just walls of humanity everywhere you looked.  We went into the main exhibit hall and tried to merge into the current of people circling around the space.  It was pretty damn miserable.  Of course we again had picture requests by the dozens.

Everywhere you looked there were long, long lines.  The lines to get Norman Reedus’s (Darryl from Walking Dead) autograph and/or picture were some of the longest.  I just could not believe that many people were willing to wait in a line that long to pay $200 to spend 30 seconds with the guy.  The lines for food were equally morbid.

After being there for 2-3 hours we wanted to get some food.  The lines were still horrible even though it was now around 2pm.  We headed outside to check out the army of food trucks by the convention center, hoping they would be less busy.  No luck, the lines there numbered in the dozens as well.  It was frustrating to be in a situation with that many people.  We decided to take a time out and took yet another Uber back to the room to chill out for a few hours.  Once we got there we ordered a pizza and just tried to relax for a bit.  We were already tired from the lack of sleep the night before.

We decided we would head back between 5 and 6 but do it in normal clothes.  I still had the dark make up around my eyes and a Soldier 76 T-shirt that Cindy hand crafted but that was it.  We walked there this time.  It was still crowded but not suffocatingly so as before.  It felt a bit weird walking around without being asked for pictures.  It made you miss super hero life in a small way although it was nice being able to walk around in comfort.

We had more fun this time around exploring some of the rooms which included Cindy schooling me on Galaga, one of her favorite arcade games growing up.  She was really, really good at it.  We also got to bear witness to a very odd cosplay battle where three or four Spidermans took on a sword wielding Batman, a T-Rex, and Popeye.  The footage from that is down below.  All of the video we shot was from Saturday.  We had the GoPro strapped to Cindy’s arm so we could have film rolling throughout the day to capture some of the craziness.

We decided we had enough somewhere around 8PM.  We had a much more pleasant walk back to the hotel which included a detour to the beautiful river walk area that was nearby our hotel.  We finished off our left over pizza for dinner and called it a night.  In order to block some of the sound from the hall we tried piling some shit in front of the door.  It didn’t really make a difference, we still both generally slept like shit.

Once we got up we wasted little time getting packed up and out of there.  We skipped the hotel breakfast and instead grabbed sandwiches at Dunkin Donuts.  The DD was actually in a town just outside of Tampa.  The drive there took us through areas that ranged from sketchy looking to historical.

On the drive home we listened to some podcast that Cindy discovered where a woman tells real life stories in very interesting ways.  The story we listened to was about Bo Berghdal, the soldier that the US traded five Gitmo prisoners for.  The story revealed that the headlines that 24 hour news organizations jammed down the public throat were extremely inaccurate.  The media made it seem like Berghdal was a Taliban fan and had a pleasant time while being their hostage.  Actually the opposite is true, his existence during those 5 years in captivity was horrific and he tried to escape multiple times.  It’s just another example of the American public being all too willing to accept what the media tells them at face value.

The drive home had a major delay as there was an accident on I-75 that involved fatalities.  Traffic jam situations generally make me dislike people more than a lot of things.  As you approached the area of the accident there were multiple sign boards indicating that the left two of the three lanes were blocked.  You had to be blind to not see them.  So a logical, considerate person would get into the right lane to minimize the quagmire of cars trying to merge over.  Well of course most people don’t give a flying fck.  They deem their time as more valuable than others and stay in those lanes they know are closed in the hope to get a few car lengths further ahead.  It is reflective of society in general, fck the greater good, me first.

We got home around 11:30 and started unpacking.  Cindy headed out to tend to the chickens.  I wonder if they missed us?  The rest of the day was low key as I ripped video from the con, paid my bills and chilled out.  Today I have a few things on the docket, including getting back on my Ninebot One.  Should be fun.

You can see the videos we took from the Con below.  It was a fun time but Cindy and I both agreed we enjoyed the experience at Miami Supercon more.