Dragoncon 2014 - The Non-stop Party

Thursday

Calamity and I were travel buddies for the weekend and we had the joy of getting to the airport for 5am to catch our 6am flight to start our journey. We landed in Atlanta after noon and went straight to the Hyatt to check into our room then meet up with our friends at Hooters. It was my first and last time going there. The food was bland and the service was horrible. We waited forever for our food and even longer for our bills which eventually made me miss out on a planned shoot.  Anyways, the rest of the day was spent wandering the event and eventually partying the in the Marriott at night.

Friday

Sharla

Friday morning I got straight into my Sharla costume for a shoot with Jason Chau Photography. It always nice to collaborate with new photographers :D Keeping with my trend of forgetting costume pieces, I forgot to put on my weird club thing on my left arm - which you can barely miss since so much is going on there. I changed out of it immediately after the shoot to easily move through the event.

Afterwards we grabbed lunch with a bunch of photographers and friends. It was nice catching up and meeting even more new people.

Calamity and I spent the afternoon browsing the dealers room.  There was so much to see although I was not a fan of the layout. I much prefer open warehouse like settings for dealer's room because they are easy to navigate. There is also a noticeable variety of goods in the dealer's room compared to the typical anime convention mostly: Lots of leather, quality kimonos, belly dancing attire, pocket watches, and corsets, corsets, corsets.

Friday night I had a great dinner at Ray's. It was little expensive but the food was great! I then spent the night hanging out with friends at the Marriott lobby again.

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Saturday

Stella Chuu and VickyBunnyAngel

Early in the day I was on assistant duty, helping VickyBunnyAngel get to and from shoots in her Diana cosplay. I managed to get a lot of photos of League cosplayers and Game of Thrones cosplayers because they happened to be having group shoots at the same time.

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Whale sharks

A sneak peek from JL7

Saturday evening was spent in the beautiful Georgia aquarium. I was lucky to shoot with both JL7 and SoulFire Photography before joining the cosplay contest. Although I think next year I'll skip the contest to enjoy the party and exhibit instead.

After the aquarium I mostly hung out in my room and called it early that night. All those late nights added up and I needed rest to survived another day.

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Sunday

My roommates are the best

Sunday was another casual day. I was out of costume and wandering the con and finally checked out the artist alley. There was so much talent in that room. I really appreciated the variety of artwork. I'm getting a little bored of the similar style many anime prints have now. Although I must say I was somewhat disappointed in the lack of diversity with the characters in the prints. You were lucky if you found a dozen prints with persons of colour as the focus out of hundreds.

Calamity and I did another run through the dealer's room, this time it was much busier and less enjoyable. The crowds are ridiculous for this event. I was a horribly busy as well at night once all the bars in the Marriott closed. Even with all that I still had a great time catching up with friends and saying goodbye to everyone.

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Monday / Overall

Monday is when everyone is nursing their hangovers and trying to check-out of their hotels. It was nice planning ahead and not having to deal with all that. We killed time around the con until 2pm then went to the airport for our eight hour trip back home.

I really enjoyed Dragoncon although the price tag for the event is pretty hefty - close to $1000 if you are from Canada. Some things to note if you have never attended, you can expect: partial nudity (so many pasties and people in underwear), people trying to hook up, many many drunks, large crowds (always bumping into people), and lineups for everything.

Cafe Momo in the foodcourt is the best, especially if you are health conscious and don't want to wait in lines. They have non-fired vegetables. Also, Atlanta is a good place to eat seafood, they have a good selection.

Costume-wise the variety was insane, although anime was hard to come by because it was an older crowd. If I were to return I would seriously consider entering one of the masquerades.