Getting Housed: San Diego Comic-Con Hotel Lottery Finished

Registration for hotels with the reduced rate negotiated by San Diego Comic-Con for the 2014 convention opened at noon Eastern Time today. It is now closed, after being inundated with requests from God knows how many thousands of people looking to sleep someplace more comfortable than a park bench across from the Hall of Justice, emblazoned with an advertisement for a bail bonds service you will soon desperately need.

And just like that, the long and arduous process to arrange a trip to SDCC 2014, which started in February with pre-registration, continued for some into standard registration in March, moved into procuring transportation to San Diego, and climaxed with today’s registration, is over.

Kinda. Because now the 36 to 48 hour wait to see if today’s hotel registration actually led to, you know, getting a hotel room.

Fighting Until The Big Sleep: SDCC 2104 Hotel Reservations This Tuesday

San Diego Comic-Con has a weird system of guaranteeing admittance, if you think about it.

First it puts you through up to two different nervewracking and emotionally draining online sales just to obtain passes to be able to walk in the door. If you get those passes, then you need to obtain yourself transportation from wherever you’re at to San Diego, which really requires you to strike as soon as you know you have said passes. For example, if you’re heading to San Diego from Boston as we are, you have the choice of pre-booking one of exactly two non-stop flights ASAP while they’re not sold out, or you can try your luck at, say, Travelocity, to battle with strangers for a cut-rate seat with layovers in three different cities, one of which will be Baltimore, where, if you leave the airport, you will be killed. Which you will be okay with, because once you see that “pan pizza” in the gate area, you would rather risk violent death than eat it.

None of this sounds weird at face value. The weird part, however, is that you need to spend all that time and money just to get to Comic-Con, all without a place to, you know, sleep. Because the last thing that SDCC provides is hotel room sales, meaning that you could dump literally $1,500 to attend Comic-Con, all to arrive in San Diego and spend your first hours battling the local homeless for one of the park benches outside the train station.

We won’t be fighting for pine slats close to the Amtrak ticket booth, because we booked an emergency backup room about 10 days after we arrived home from last year’s SDCC. But we will be fighting with the rest of you on Tuesday, because that’s when the convention puts its reduced rate hotel rooms on sale.

Kinda. In the sense that you (and we) can battle for a certain spot on the waiting list for rooms to be sold once the sorting algorithm decides if you can have one or not.

It’s All Over Bar The Shouting: San Diego Comic-Con 2014 Registration Over; Sold Out

So public registration for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con occurred today, and luckily, we did not need to be a part of it. As attendees last year, we were eligible for the pre-registration that took place in early February, and were fortunate enough to be able to score tickets for the full convention in fairly short order.

So today I was able to watch the madness, desperation, excessive glee and futile cursing happen by way of watching the #SDCC hashtag feed on Twitter, and it looked like a very similar experience to the one we went through for the pre-registration, albeit this time, the entire free fucking world could be involved. I saw a healthy number of tweets from people in Australia and New Zealand complaining that they needed to be up at 4 a.m. local time… and yet no complaints that they needed to Raid away swarms of hairy poisonous spiders to get to their computers to try to register. You will see me dead before you see me in Australia wearing less than a beekeeper’s suit and a Ghostbuster’s proton pack is what I’m saying, but that’s not the point right now.

The point is that we saw the normal complaints that one sees on Twitter during SDCC registration:

• The Web site told me not to refresh, but I did, and now I’m at the end of the line! SDCC sucks!
• The Web site told me not to refresh and I didn’t, but I think if I did, I’d be at the front of the line! SDCC sucks!
• I tried to register from an iPad at Starbucks and my Internet quit! SDCC sucks!
• I forgot about registration until 9:02 Pacific Time and when I logged in I was at the back of the line! SDCC sucks!
• I’ve never tried to register for Comic-Con before, have made no plans on how to succeed at this task, and can’t understand why I can’t just do this in ten seconds even though there are thousands and thousands of other people trying to buy the same ticket as me! I should receive preferential treatment! SDCC sucks!

The fact of the matter is that attending SDCC is, and has been since at least 2009, serious fucking business. I have written before that my co-Editor Amanda and I book backup hotel rooms in August of the year preceding SDCC. When we need to register, we do it from two separate locations, both with independent power supplies and wired Internet connections, and maintain constant communication to increase our odds of success. And we have made the pact that, so long as we can obtain at least Thursday and Sunday passes, we will attend SDCC, if only to make us eligible for whatever pre-registration is available the following year, so we get two bites at the registration apple. And I have said before that this might sound obsessive, but there are two types of people in this world: people who scoff at making paranoid, obsessive and redundant plans regarding SDCC registration, housing and transportation, and people who actually attend Comic-Con.

Zachary Levi Wants You To Pay Him $5 – An Alternative For When You, Inevitably, Can’t Get Into Comic-Con

Well, folks. It’s that magical time of year again. Open registration for tickets to the 2014 San Diego International Comic-Con will be this Saturday. The waiting room opens at 7am Pacific Time; that’s 10am for those of you on the non-earthquake and wildfire prone coast. You can check out their official blog for more detail. As with the preregistration sale, the EPIC Web site will begin organizing those waiting into random groups for ticket sales, so, in theory you can log in at 7am or 8:59am and supposedly have the same shot at getting through to tickets. We look forward to reading your digital tales of woe beginning around 10am PT, if last time was any kind of guide, on Twitter.

Meanwhile, there continue to be tons of free events taking place that week to attend as a supplement…or to soothe your heartbreak when you don’t get SDCC tickets. One of these is Nerd HQ, an event that will be taking place at Petco Park at the same time as the convention. Nerd HQ is produced by Nerd Machine, which is run by Zachary Levi. Here, let him tell you about it:

You can find more details about it over on his Indiegogo page. But, essentially, contribute $5 or $1000 and get your name on the Nerd HQ Wall Of Honor. All things are equal in the great Nerd Machine and lead to a great fund raising opportunity for Operation Smile.

Two Hours In The Tank: San Diego Comic-Con 2014 Pre-Reg Is Over

Pre-registration for the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con started at noon Eastern Time today for those who attended last year’s convention. It used a pretty radically different methodology to handle the sale than in previous years, but ended with the same result: with some people thrilled with the results, some people disappointed with what they were able to get, and yet others screeching with rage and hatred over glitches, technical roadblocks, and complete and utter frustrating failure.

Delayed And Limited Gratification: SDCC 2014 Pre-Registration Delayed Until Early 2014

Very little time here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office today. I am here alone with Parker, a cat who was neutered earlier today. And Parker is treating me in exactly the manner one would expect to be treated by a creature whose testicles I had removed by fiat. So I need to keep an eye on this little fella, who is currently only seemingly motivated by contempt towards me and the urge to lick his Hot Zone, in violation of doctor’s orders, to try and grok what terrible thing has happened to him.

However, there is one tidbit of San Diego Comic-Con news I’d like to report: pre-registration for next year’s convention for people who attended this year has been pushed back until after the new year.

Safe To Travel: San Diego Comic-Con Preregistration Not In November

For people who attended San Diego Comic-Con this year and have been waiting for word on when the pre-registration for next year’s SDCC would be coming off, all we’ve known since about August is that it will be happening “sometime between November 1 and December 31, 2013.”

Which was, and is fine – if the people at SDCC handle it even remotely like they did for the 2013 convention (which happened in August, 2012), all you need is access to a couple of computers with access to reliable high-speed Internet (at a couple of different locations in case one is hit by a bolt of lightning or a meteor or something), nerves of steel and an adamantium bladder so you don’t have to leave the screen until the deed is done. So they can do it pretty much whenever.

However, we are now less than one week away from American Thanksgiving, and there hasn’t been a lot of details released about exactly when this pre-registration is gonna happen. And if it happened during Thanksgiving weekend, it would be an apocalypse.

It would be an apocalypse because many of us travel to visit our parents during Thanksgiving, and have you seen your parents computer? Can you imagine trying to log into the pre-reg Website, competing against thousands of other people, on a malware-packed laptop rocking Microsoft Vista (Service Pack Yeah, Right)? Using a browser with about thirty different third party search bars on it? Over first generation “high speed” 512 KbS DSL? It would be easier and faster to start randomly sucking dicks at the bus station and hoping that some kind soul will pay you in SDCC passes.

Well, fear not. Because even though we still don’t know exactly when pre-registration is gonna happen, we do know that it won’t happen until after Thanksgiving.