How To Survive a Con

A few times a year, basement doors creak open and the geeks emerge into the sunlight, smelling of potato chips and shame, to congregate in some unsuspecting city.  They wear garish costumes, speak in strange tongues, and spend a few days indulging in bizarre ritual acts.  Heghlu’meh QaQ jajvam!

This is known more commonly as a ‘convention,’ and there’s one for everything. You like videogames?  There’s a con for that.  Like robots?  There’s a con for that.  Like science fiction?  Like to dress up like an animal?  You get the idea.  From comic-con to E3 to dragon-con to SXSW, there’s something for everyone.

Sometimes, a relatively normal person like you wishes, for reasons between you and your conscience, to attend a con.  To the unprepared, a con can be a strange and scary place – so here are a few tips to help you survive, and possibly enjoy it.

1.  Get there early.

Chances are, the con won’t take place in your home city, which means that you must travel.  Whether you take a plane, bus, or train, odds are it won’t be a pleasant trip, so arrive at least a day early.  This will give you time to acclimate, and recover from being trapped for hours in a metal tube with a few hundred of your fellow humans.

By allotting an empty day, you’ll diminish your jetlag and maybe you”ll see some of the city that you might otherwise miss.  Balancing your circadian rhythms will also make sure that you don’t experience a mildly unusual crowd of people in weird costumes as a David Lynch-esq nightmare sequence.

If this happens, you've made a mistake.

2. Be prepared.

If possible, buy your tickets in advance.  For many cons like comic-con, tickets are sold out weeks or months in advance, so buy early to avoid having to sell a kidney to a scalper.  Book your hotels in advance as well – you get better deals, and you’re guaranteed a room.  For the larger cons, local hotels are booked to capacity, leaving you to rent a corner of a cardboard box from a homeless man named Louis on the other side of the city.

Didn't book ahead.

Prepare, and bring necessary equipment.  Even though cons are mostly indoors, you’ll probably walk a lot (often in the middle of summer), so treat it as you would any long hike:  bring bottled water, snacks, etc.  Please note:  most cons, particularly E3 are packed with people with no other job than to give you worthless crap for free (known more commonly as ‘schwag,’) so you’ll probably want to bring either a stick for holding off the vendors, or a bag to hold the stuff.

Not pictured: value.

Look at the schedule in advance for events you want to attend.  Many of the lectures (in the case of comic-con) and shows (in the case of SXSW) get booked to capacity quickly, so arrive early to sign up.  Also, the larger cons are host to a bewildering array of different interests and topics, spread out over a huge area, so your odds of finding things that interest you are low unless you aggressively plan ahead.  Get to both the con and the events early, and  get a good spot in line.

3. Budget.

Pinch pennies like your grandmother.  Hoard like Ebeneezer Scrooge.  Hold on to every cent until it’s pried from your cold, dead fingers.  For any vacation, money tends to vanish at an alarming rate, and that’s more true for cons.

$17 for a hamburger? I think not!

Plan to spend substantially more than you think you will.  There are ways to reduce your expenses, however.  Most cons take place in major cities, which tend to have at least tolerable public transportation.  Check out the situation before hand, and make full use of it if you can.  It’ll save you money, allow you to see more of the city, and you run only a two percent risk of being eaten by homeless people.

To conserve money in other ways, bring your own food or eat outside the con.  The food vendors have a large, captive market unaccustomed to physical exertion suddenly doing a lot of walking.  No matter which con you attend, you are guaranteed that the food will cost more than your car.  By bringing your own food, you’ll spend much less, and you’re less likely to die of clogged arteries.

In the end, the most important thing is to keep track of and prioritize your expenses.  The key is to experience maximum enjoyment from your money.

4. Costume appropriately.

For many cons, particularly dragon-con, dressing up is half the fun.  That said, don’t go overboard.  The sad truth is that, if you’ve made it this far in the article without commenting on the bad grammar of our Klingon, you simply don’t have what it takes.  You may be proud of the Batman costume you spent all day designing, but your minor accomplishment will be utterly destroyed the instant you walk through the door.  No matter how much effort you invested, there is someone (quite a few someones), who will challenge and destroy your costume play ambitions.

And this is for a shitty movie.

The sadder truth is that neither you nor this guy will get half as much attention as the hot girl who spent ten dollars on colored underwear and a plastic tiara for her Wonder-woman costume.  This is the nature of the con universe.  Dress up, have fun, but keep it simple and don’t get too invested in it.

5.  Attend with friends.

Cons have lines.  Want to get into the new Paul Rudd movie at South by Southwest?  There’s a line.  Want to get in to have Bruce Campbell prank call your mother?  Line.  Want to play the latest contrived Halo acronym?  Line.  Want to (god forbid) get into an early screening of the new Twilight movie?  There’s a really long line.  The point is, lines and cons go together like ground glass and intestinal bleeding.  You’re going to spend hours in lines.  If possible, bring a lightweight collapsible chair, and attend with friends.  You’ll have company and at least one person to hold the fort while the others solicit autographs.  Friends also reduce the inevitable feelings of intense shame, and offer you some moral support when you try to find some way of explaining to your spouse what exactly you did last week.

There were people dressed up in costumes... and... uh, there was that guy from that movie... and, uh...