Another Comic-Con has come and gone and I have to say, it’s just getting way too big for its own good. I remember a time when you could leisurely roam the exhibit hall at your own pace. But now there are more people than ever before packing the hall.You can’t really take any pictures ‘cause you have to constantly keep moving or risk getting trampled and you have to wait hours on end in line to “maybe” attend a panel. Everything is a line now. There are lines to enter booths, lines for booth freebies, lines for panels, lines to get into the exhibit hall, lines for parking, lines to buy stuff, and even lines for tickets to wait in lines for even more waiting.

And it’s nearly impossible now to plan out what panels you want to go to. The “Con” has a policy of not clearing out the rooms between panels which is both a good and bad thing. It’s good ‘cause it allows you attend consecutive panels being held in the same room one right after the other. This is all good if you actually do plan and want to attend those panels. However, others are also attending panels that they have no interest at all in. They are only in line or in the room to attend a later panel. That means there is less room now for those that actually do want to attend but can’t because someone else who doesn’t actually want to be there took their spot. It happened to me all weekend, many Twilight fans stormed the Disney 3D panel.

Don’t get me wrong. I had a lot of fun. I did get to attend some panels. I got a chance to explore most of the exhibit hall early, before the crowds, since I was helping out at the Pokémon Tournament Room. I also got some new books, including The Scott Pilgrim series. It’s a pretty good graphic novel, a little weird… but I kind of like that and it’s a pretty good story so far… and it’s going to be a movie coming out next year too.

We’ll see how next year goes. Prices for 4-day passes are going up to $100 but I doubt that will deter anyone from going. Hopefully they trim some of the fat out of Comic-Con and start sliming it down a bit before things get any worse. As it is, the San Diego Convention Center can barely fit the masses. They either have to start limiting the amount of people that can show up, or move to a much bigger venue (if one even exists).

I went to the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood with my friend this past weekend to check it out and it was a very good movie. If you enjoy programs like Nature or Nova on PBS, Earth is right up your ally. They display some of the most breathtaking scenery from around the world – from the Arctic, to the Rain Forest and all the way to the African Deserts. It’s truly a spectacular film to view and really gets you thinking about how much of the world is truly out there. You tend to forget this planet has much more to offer than what we see everyday stuck in cities.

I highly recommend watching this movie. Especially over at the El Capitan. It’s a little more expensive but you also get to see some live animals on stage before the show and get to ask animal experts you questions about the animals they show. Can’t wait for next year’s Earth to see Oceans.

Back in the day before WordPress, Face Book, or Twitter, before anyone knew what a blog or social networking meant or would become, there where very few ways anyone could really carve out a space on the Wide World Web without shelling out lots of cash. That is until Geo Cities came along…Geo Cities, as I’m sure is the case with most of that grew up in the early days of the dot com boom, was my very first exposure to any kind of HTML. I never gave much thought about what it took to make a web page work during middle school but started digging deeper into in High School when I got my first home PC (the original iMac… that little thing lasted me a good 10 years). That’s when I first discovered what HTML was and started poking around other sites to try to figure out how they pulled off some of the cool stuff they displayed on screen.

The only problem was I had no way of trying out any of it, until I discovered Geo Cities and the tons of pages regular old people were creating – one more flashy and annoying than the other. I built up most of my early training on Geo Cities. Building tables, playing Midi sounds, first experiments with animated GIFs and the first time building what can only now be considered a Blog.

It’s a shame that Yahoo recently announced that Geo Cities will be closing down later this year. So lets have a moment of silence for Geo Cities and remember all the flashing sprites, horrible tiling backgrounds, loud looping MIDIs that was (and still is) the web.