How To Survive Comic-Con Without Really Trying: 2013 Edition

We are in the final throes of preparation for heading to San Diego for Comic-Con 2013, which means we don’t have a lot of time today, but it does mean that we’re in the process of putting into place a bunch of the stuff that we’ve learned about how to survive what amounts to a six-day forced march through spectacle, excitement, a marked lack of easy-to-access Internet, crowded restaurants and line – dear God, the lines.

But as we did last year, we’ll share a few of the lessons that we’ve learned about how to survive the process. Now, since our time is limited today, I’m not gonna go back and read what I wrote back then, but simply vomit some stuff into the keyboard… which in and of itself will be good experience to prepare for a six-hour session of daydrinking in the sun at Dick’s Last Resort on 5th Avenue.

1) Lust For Power: Between laptops, cell phones and cameras, you are going to want to make sure you can charge all of that stuff. And hotels are notorious for only providing a couple of power outlets, meaning that if you don’t plan ahead, you will have a nicely charged camera, and a dead cell phone right at the moment you are arrested after spending six hours daydrinking at Dick’s Last Resort. So bring a powerstrip. They’re cheap, they fit along the side of any backpack or duffel bag, and they’ll up your power availability by five outlets. Also, since almost every device you can buy today can be charged by USB, get yourself a small USB hub. It’ll cost you less than ten bucks, and if you plug it into your charging laptop, it’ll let you charge up four or five more devices on a single power outlet plug.

And finally, spend about $30 bucks and get yourself one of these: a micro USB battery pack. If you do a lot of live-Tweeting, or if you take a lot of cell phone pictures, you’ll wipe out your cell phone by about 2 p.m. every day. One of these babies will completely charge your cell phone sitting in your loot bag over lunchtime. We’re bringing two this year.

And speaking of cell phone pictures:

2) Fuck Cell Phone Pictures. Get A Real Camera: Cell phone cameras are better than ever, but with that said: they still suck. The zoom is digital only, the flash is a shitty LED that never fires the second you press the button, and the controls are always wherever the hell they happen to stick them. Therefore, I have learned that the software put into a cell phone is to make it an acceptable camera, while the software put into a camera is to make it a good camera. And you don’t need to go apeshit crazy; God knows I’m not a photographer. But even an inexpensive still or video camera will give you generally better results than a cell phone camera, and it won’t suck the phone’s batteries while you’re taking pictures. And a lot of modern cameras have WiFi built in, which’ll let you connect and send pictures to your cell phone, so you can apply your filthy stinking Instagram filters to them.

3) Turn Left Or Right: You’re gonna need to eat while you’re at Comic-Con. Otherwise, you will die. And only a fucking fool eats at the convention center, where a piece of pizza will cost you eight clams and is indistinguishable from roofing tile. And while there are plenty of places out in the Gaslamp to eat – we’re fans of The Tinfish and Nicky Rottens – you will have the instinct to follow the crowd directly up 5th Avenue to find some grub. Which is fine, but what you’ll also find is that if you peel off to 4th or 6th Avenues, there are plenty of good restaurants that are gonna be vastly less crowded. Make no mistake, they will still be expensive – if you want to eat cheap during Comic-Con, there are plenty of inexpensive places in your hometown – but you’ll be able to get in and out in less than two hours.

4) Make Your Own Internets: It ain’t as easy as you think to connect to the Internet at Comic-Con. Sure, sometimes some marketing drone’ll hook up a WiFi router with free connections at the convention center, but those get quickly choked out under the weight of an eighth of a million people trying to upload old-timey filtered Instagram photos of the chick in the Power Girl costume. And while some hotels offer free WiFi, others (like ours) don’t, and even when they do, you’re fighting for bandwidth with a hotel worth of guys trying to download Blu-Ray rips of the latest season of Doctor Who. So call your cell phone carrier and set up the ability to turn your cell phone into a WiFi hotspot. Yeah, it might cost you a few bucks, but it’ll save you a few headaches when you’re in your hotel room, surfing for shitty cell phone video of the exclusive Hall H panel footage you weren’t able to see because you were standing in line waiting for a fifteen dollar cheeseburger on Fifth Avenue.

And, with that, we gotta close up the laptop, jam it into the backpack, print out the boarding passes, set the alarm for 4:30 a.m., and get drunk enough to go to bed in time to wake up at 4:30 a.m. So while we do that…

See you tomorrow from San Diego, suckers!