MoyaMobile-Canada's Trip To ScaperCon 2003

Page 6: Friday Part Three

Autographs

On returning to the convention, the crew found the guests autographing in the dealer's room. DRD-Kim took this time to get an autograph from Anthony Simcoe.

The Guests
Just as Virginia Hey was at Toronto Trek 16, the Farscape guests assembled at ScaperCon were all quite fan-friendly and fun. In our opinion, the best of the bunch was Anthony Simcoe, who seemed to be having a total blast all weekend. We strongly recommend seeing these guests at any fan-run convention that they attend.
One negative, of course, is the prices these actors were charging for autographs and photos. Perhaps we're just spoiled by the fact that Canadian fan-run conventions like Toronto Trek include one free autograph per actor with the price of admission, and the prices beyond that tend to be in line with what Canadians can afford ($20 Canadian per autograph, $5 for a polaroid, photos with your own camera free). The $20US per autograph was bad enough, but to charge $20US for a photo with your OWN camera seemed totally absurd. While I understand that actors started charging for autographs in order to protect themselves against people who were unfairly making money from their work on ebay etc., I can't understand why there's suddenly a charge above and beyond the associated costs for having your photo taken with the actors. Hopefully, this strange charging structure will not flow to fan-run conventions north of the border...

Farscape Bingo

Farscape Bingo was a great idea, poorly executed. Every player in the audience was given a game board with a variety of faces of Farscape characters, actors, and production personnel on it, and a cup of crackers to use as markers. The hosts pulled random names and said, for example "Under S, Rygel", much as in a standard game of bingo.
The problem? Unless you had a complete photographic memory of every person/character ever associated with Farscape, matching the names called out to the faces on your board was totally frustrating. The hosts tried to help, but descriptions such as "Oh, that's the guy with the funny head" didn't help much with a show like Farscape! :)
A note to anybody who ever wants to run a game like this: Either project the faces to match the names being pulled, or put the names under the photos on the game board. And for crying out loud, folks, always test a game like this before trying to run it at a convention to make sure there are no such problems, please!

Rygel demonstrates that in Farscape Bingo, crackers did matter!

Denny's
Those of us who attended Visions conventions in Rosemont through most of the 1990s had a tradition of eating at two specific places: One was Giordano's Deep Dish Pizza (which we would eat at on Saturday), and the other was the place we called "The Good Denny's". It was the Denny's that Crais, DRD-Andrew, DRD-Kim and DRD-Suse went to on Friday. On the way there, a wicked storm hit the city, and the team was drenched. Of course, as bad as it was for this part of the team, it was even worse for DRD-CrankyKate and DRD-Karenza who were still downtown and travelling back on the L train!

Crais spots a leviathan with an interesting nameplate...
Crais likes his coke with a shot of vanilla.
Then, having received his drink, he moves on straight to dessert!
The meal wasn't even finished yet when Crais had a strange urge to dress as the Red Baron...

BarScape
Friday night was spent at an event dubbed "BarScape", held in the hotel's lobby lounge/bar. We met many new people there, and spent a lot of the night drinking (surprise, surprise) and writing parody "Save Farscape" messages on napkins.

Crais tried to get Rygel to play Fluxx with him...
But Rygel had already had too much to drink, and was amusing himself by flashing passers-by.
A barfight broke out, but even slightly intoxicated, Crais was able to defuse the situation,
Finally, however, even Crais appeared to let the beer get to him...

In his drunken state, Crais admitted to DRD-Suse that his sexual fantasy involved Aeryn and a licorice whip.
Even after he ran out of money, Crais just wanted more and more beer.
At the peak of his drunkeness, Crais felt the strange urge to exercise randomly...
... Until he finally just passed out.
We're not sure what happened to the slogan napkins.

The Slogan Napkins
SAVE BARSCAPE! Bringing our show back one drink at a time.
SAVE FARSPACE! Dyslexics need their sci-fi too!
SHAVE FARSCAPE! John needs a haircut.
SLAVE FARSCAPE! Dominate your sci-fi.
SAVE SCARFACE! Oh, wait, not quite close enough. Nevermind.
Continued... Saturday