Tucked away on the corner of 18th Street and
Spring Street in Atlanta, Georgia is the Center for
Puppetry Arts. If you’ve been to
Atlanta but never visited the Center for Puppetry Arts, this or next year’s
trip down for Dragon Con would be very good times to consider rectifying this
particular oversight. Now, unlike the Georgia Aquarium,
this isn’t a sight you can see with just a short walk down the street from the
Dragon Con host hotels. It’s anywhere from a 45 minute to 1 hour walk depending
on who is doing the walking. You can drive to it in about 15 minutes, but what
levels of insanity would you have to be suffering under to cause you to
consider driving in downtown Atlanta?
If you don’t know, Previews
is the catalog that Diamond Comic Distributors use to offer the products they
distribute to comic book stores around the country. This is where you can view
and order (through your favorite Local Comic Book Shop) comic books, trade
paperback collections, t-shirts, books, media, and toys and other collectibles
from hundreds of different vendors that deal in geek-oriented merchandise. The
genius part is that you actually have to pay for your copy of Previews for the privilege of ordering
other things to pay for.
It’s like the Ren Fest except without the horse poo
smell.
So every month a new edition of Previews is sent out to comic book stores. Contained in the pages
within are products that might be currently available or could be released
anytime in the next year; but are typically about two months away. Most of this
month’s offerings are scheduled to ship in October.
Before I get into Dragon Con mode I
wanted to take a minute to review the summer blockbuster I had been
dying to see. The Meg isn't being well received or reviewed, but if
you're like me you don't let critics or naysayers stop you from
seeing something. Let this be one of those instances if you're on the
fence. If you liked Deep Blue Sea, you'll probably like The Meg. I
love Deep Blue Sea, and thought The Meg was a great example of what
can happen when a silly idea gets a good budget.
Located in downtown Atlanta across from Centennial
Olympic Park- just a few blocks diagonal from the Dragon Con host hotels -is
the Georgia Aquarium. Officially
opened to the public in 2005, it was the largest aquarium in the world until
the 2012 opening of the Marine Life Park in Singapore. Beating it out for sheer
size was no small feat. The Georgia Aquarium is home to several thousand
species of salt water and fresh water life from around the world, and it
contains over 10 million gallons of water to keep those critters alive and
swimming in. Just a little over 6 million gallons of that water are used for
the aquarium’s primary exhibit, allowing it to be one of only two institutions
in the world to house whale sharks. You’ll see swimming alongside the whale
sharks some of the largest manta rays you’re likely to ever see, as well as
more fish and more varieties of fish than you can likely count in one single
day’s trip to the Georgia Aquarium.
What’s sometimes still a surprise to me when at Dragon
Con is talking to my fellow con goers and discovering how many of them have
never been to the Georgia Aquarium. It’s even more surprising when they seem to
not even know there is a Georgia
Aquarium. Why? Well…
At some point in the past I announced on the now-defunct Needless Things PatronCast that my good
friend Jason Wilson – an award-winning documentarian – would be following me
around with a camera for a year or so.
He did. From October of 2016 up through last year’s
Dragon Con, Wilson was there to capture many aspects of my life as Phantom
Trouble maker and as Dave West, including my shocking unmasking at the live 1987 panel for the Classics Track.
We (mostly Wilson) are now in the process of putting
everything together. Or maybe in the process of finishing up putting everything
together. There are dozens of hours of footage and interviews and I’m sure it’s
quite a beast to parse it down to the best stuff. Or to a singular narrative.
Or whatever it is he’s doing with it. Aside from a couple of instances of, “You
know, maybe I don’t want this to be that
real”, I’m leaving it in Wilson’s capable hands because he has won an Emmy and
I have, as of yet, not.
I’m honored that Wilson would consider me a subject
worthy of examining and I’m extremely
proud of what we got done and of what I’ve seen so far. This thing is very much
who I am, in some cases warts and all. It sends one singular message that I am
aware of and perhaps many that I’m not – like I said, that’s up to Wilson. And
to the eventual audience.
I can’t say yet what our plans are for release, nor when
that will happen. Both of us want this to be the best feature it can possibly
be and nobody will see it before it is.
In the meantime, here’s the official trailer for Troublemaker. Please like, share,
comment, post, and above all, enjoy.
Preparation, you ask? Is this another article about
getting ready for Dragon Con that gets into all that advice about how it’s
important to have snacks, hydrate, get rest, shower, use deodorant, etc. that
gets written about and talked about every year? Well, outside of that sentence,
no, not really. This year I’ll be writing several articles talking about what’s
around Dragon Con, not in it. So, no,
no talk about how it’s important to have snacks, hydrate, get rest, shower, use
deodorant, etc. while at the con or even about getting in some exercise before
heading down to Dragon Con so that the (now five day) weekend doesn’t kick your
butt like Morten Andersen kicking the old pigskin. However, we will be covering
some of the same concepts, plus a few others that, while perhaps too late to
make them useful this year, may make future Dragon Con weekends a bit more fun.
As soon as I heard about Disney firing
James Gunn I messaged Dave to see if he thought the topic was too
controversial for me to write about. He said to go for it, and thus
the lengthy process of research and notes began. Because I'm angry, I'm
confused, and I think we need to talk about this. Of course, he then
proceeded to talk about James Gunn in the introduction to his most
recent podcast, but whatever, I had already put too much work into
this thing to toss it all out. I try to treat this site like I treat
my day job. I stay away from sex, politics, and religion.
Unfortunately, a lot of what led up the the scandal is politically
based so I can't not bring it up. Don't worry though, I'm not not
here to push an agenda on you. I don't have any answers here, and I'm
not trying to start a fight, but I do think it's a discussion that
needs to be had. Preferably a rational discussion. And if you're
easily offended consider this fair warning. I found some of the
tweets on Mike Cernovich's website, and am posting screen-caps of them here. I think people deserve to see what
we're really talking about.
