Multiple Redundancies: SDCC 2013 Pre-Registration Is Over
And that’s that. Preregistration for San Diego Comic-Con for those who attended as members this year opened at 8 a.m. Pacific Time yesterday… and closed at about 9:20 a.m. thereafter.
Unlike other years, which for us have entailed either obtaining our four-day passes for the currently-starting convention and immediately doing a 180 to get in line to obtain passes for the following year, or, as last year, setting an alarm for 4:30 a.m. to catch a cab to the Hyatt to the right of the San Diego Convention Center… and then walking to the end of the line near the Hilton to the left of the San Diego Convention Center to wait for five hours to purchase the next year’s passes, this was a relatively bloodless affair. Simply log into a particular URL with your favorite Web browser, upon which you pressed the Big Green Button, and were directed to a virtual waiting room, which told you what your place in line was. Every two minutes, the page would update, and tell you how far along you were. All in all, it was simple… except for the fact that it was anything but. Not if you wanted to make sure that you could go.
Amanda and I have been attending SDCC since 2006, and covered it on a formal basis for the first time last year. And we had no intention of not attending in 2013, although if luck didn’t break our way, we could have been frozen out. There is no guarantee of the ability to obtain press credentials for SDCC, not when the big boys from every major television network, basic cable network, expanded cable network, and Website that has ever published a piece about a superhero are all applying for them. We were turned down for press badges this year, probably by nature of being a publication less than a year old and that liberally uses terms like “Goatfucker.”
An aside: a buddy of mine who has heard my stories of Comic-Con told me, upon my return from this year’s convention, that he intended to attend next year. I told him, “Then you start planning right fucking now. Book a hotel today. Request your vacation time today. Book a flight as soon as they go on sale. Subscribe to Comic-Con’s RSS feed and know when things start to go on sale. Because if you are not prepared and committed, the only parts of Comic-Con you’ll ever see will be on our YouTube channel.”
And that is how we approached pre-registration yesterday. I went into my workplace to attempt pre-registration, while Amanda manned one of the hardwired, non-Wi-Fi machines here in the Home Office to make her run, We coordinated our efforts via Skype, with open Notepad documents containing the pre-reg URL (Since at times in the past, the links provided to registration sites that come from Comic-Con International don’t go to the correct site), and each of our CCI Member IDs and passwords.
How did it go? Well, here’s some of the Skype conversation we had when the starting gun went off:
[8/4/2012 10:57:59 AM] Rob: I’m already trying to refresh…
[8/4/2012 10:58:41 AM] Rob: Server’s already slow…
[8/4/2012 10:59:32 AM] Amanda: I got a “not found” on both explorer and firefox
[8/4/2012 10:59:40 AM] Rob: Keep going.
[8/4/2012 10:59:43 AM] Amanda: ok
[8/4/2012 11:02:11 AM] Amanda: I’m in the waiting room #7408
[8/4/2012 11:02:21 AM] Rob: Okay, STAY THERE.
[8/4/2012 11:02:34 AM] Rob: I’m not in yet.
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