One-Two Punch: SDCC Hotels On Sale 2/26

Now that was fast: just a few days after selling out passes to San Diego Comic-Con 2013, the convention has announced that hotels in the downtown area will be going on sale Tuesday, February 26th at noon Eastern Time. This is fully a month earlier on the calendar than last year, when there was almost a month in between when passes went on sale and the opening of hotel reservations. So I don’t know if the people at SDCC are hoping that forcing people to fork out for passes and a couple of days worth of hotels all at once will help deter the bubblegummers who aren’t really serious about attending Comic-Con… or if they’re treating the preliminaries like a Band-Aid: just rip the damn thing off all at once and just get the pain over with.

Well, whatever the reason, here’s the deal. At some point in the 72 hours before Magic Hour, SDCC will be sending an email with a link to the sales site to badge holders. The site won’t go live until noon Eastern Time on the dot, and when it does, once you get in, you will need to pick six hotels from the list: no more and no less. This is different from previous years, when you could pick one hotel or all of them. And it is certainly different from, say, 2006, when I read the list, thought it over, went to lunch, came back, thought it over some more, and then booked a room with no trouble at about 4 p.m.

Bodies On The Road To San Diego: SDCC 2013 Tickets Sell Out In About 90 Minutes

So, you thinking about going to San Diego Comic-Con this year? Yeah, well, you can stop. Because it’s sold out.

Tickets went on sale via a specific Comic-Con Web site that they only publicized to those with Comic-Con member IDs who were eligible to take part in the general sales – those who got tickets via the early sale open to those who attended SDCC 2012, for example, were unable to get in on this to maybe get tickets for friends, loved ones, or anyone they’d like to drive into a forced geek march for four to five days.

Now, as we tried to establish in our report on how we proceeded in the early sale back in August, it is best to approach any Web-based sales event related to Comic-Con as if you are attempting to use the Internet to complete a transaction required to ransom your child, and that you are doing it from a location prone to network outages, power failures, and pre-nuclear electromagnetic pulse attacks. Comic-Con makes it a point to learn lessons from where their online sales and registration procedures fall down each year and plug those holes… only to find brand new holes that need plugging the next year.

Long story short: not everyone can get tickets, and sometimes the system to sell the tickets that are available falls down.

The sales Web site opened at noon. And we soon started seeing Tweets expressing… shall we say, displeasure. Apparently the waiting room went into overflow within a minute or so, and, unlike prior years when people complained that the URL to the sales site was bad and the server threw rampant 500 errors, this time around, it was complaints that the waiting room didn’t refresh,

I’ve seen reports from the well-prepared that the waiting room “line” hit over 6,000 people within three minutes. As for the less prepared and / or lucky?

Well…

Digital Rioting: San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Tickets On Sale February 16th

As we speak, we are watching the Super Bowl, taking place at the Super Dome in New Orleans and packed with people who spent a great deal of money and endured extreme personal hardship to attend in person.

Those poor dupes are rank amateurs. As anyone who had ever tried to attend San Diego Comic-Con knows. And will soon relearn. Because the sales of passes to the general public for SDCC 2013 starts at noon Eastern Time on Saturday, February 16th…

…and if history is any guide, will be sold out by 2 p.m. on February 16th.

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.

Lines Online: SDCC 2013 Passes For Previous Attendees On Sale Saturday

Update, 4:20 p.m. According to CCI, passes with Preview Night will, in fact, be available when they go on sale this Saturday:

Hi Rob,

Yes, 4 Day badges with Preview Night will be available. For badge pricing information, please use the following link: http://comic-con.org/cci/cci_reg.php

Thank you.

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As I intimated last night (But was frankly too drunk to elaborate on at the time), the word has gone out that advance sales for passes to San Diego Comic-Con 2013 for people who purchased passes for this year’s SDCC will go on sale online Saturday, August 4th, at 8 a.m. Pacific Time.

Here’s the deal: if you had an actual purchased pass for SDCC 2012 – press, pros and exhibitors need not apply – you’re eligible for the advance sale (You can find out if you can be in on the action here, using your SDCC 2012 member ID).

Future Shock

I was originally intending to write a pithy joke or two about this week’s comic take, but as I literally sat down to write, I received the email from Comic-Con International announcing that the presale for SDCC 2013 passes for people who attended this year’s SDCC will be occurring this coming Saturday, and Amanda and I have spent the last ten minutes figuring out how to divide our efforts across multiple networks to maximize our odds (helpful hint: I will be using my work Internet in ways that violate my employee handbook. And after I wipe my dick off, I will try to buy SDCC passes).

So fuck the jokes; we have been to our local comic store, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But SDCC presales or no, this is one hell of a week of comics. Biggest and bestest, we have Howard Chaykin’s first issue of his sequel to his classic (and filthy) 1980s classic Black Kiss, along with setup of the Rotworld crossover in Animal Man and Swamp Thing, a new issue of Avengers Vs. X-Men, a new Mark Waid Daredevil, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But before we can review it, we need to figure out how many browsers we can have refreshing at once on Saturday, and we need to read the comics. So until that time…

See you tomorrow, suckers!