ArrowRon

I simply love all my photoshoot pictures, they all came out great! At other cons, I sometimes look kinda dopey, but never on these! Also great to get them right away, which means you can go back to the guest to have it autographed...and have another visit!

As a matter of course we always present ourselves and our Gold Passes at the volunteer running the queue. Most of the times we were told to join the back of the queue, even if it was 130 instead of the anticipated 30.

O dear, that's going to be difficult, as I have several. First and foremost of course, Stan Lee, who was simply great and graceful Then Gethin Anthony whom I have been dying to meet as I am a big fan of "Renly Baratheon" whom he portrayed so well. Juliet Landau with whom we chatted for quite some time about ourselves and herself and her husband Kate Dickie, for exchanging our views on the nature of the people of Westeros (which became a very interesting and thought provoking conversation) T J Thyne, who was easily the most engaging and endearing guest I have met in a long time. Even though we haven't really watched Bones, he immediately said: " then let' s talk about something else, tell me about you!" Slavitza Jovan, who shared a piece of quite profound wisdom from her acting coach with us: "There are no small roles, just 'small actors'" I can go on like this, but you catch my drift...everyone I met was great and wonderful in their own way...

LOL DMG, that is us sitting right there in the Gold Pass Palace . We had Comic Gold and let's be honest: without it we would not have been able to do what we did over this weekend: 15 or so photoshoots and I have lots count how many autographs as well as sit in on Stan Lee's special Q&A. The only problem we encountered was the virtual invalidation of the end-of-queue privilege especially on Saturday. The queues were so immensely long that even without the need for VQ there was little point in joining them and losing a lot of time. I seem to recall that the VQ system is designed to have a maximum of 25-30 people per queue, well, that obviously did not work on Saturday. It cost us the Jenna Coleman and John Hurt autographs and on Sunday the Carrie Fisher, as we simply decided to do something else instead of standing in endless queues. Doing the photoshoots with the Gold Pass was a dream, with the exception of Area E, which was somehow run differently. I had no idea what to expect from the Stan Lee meet and greet, and initially, it looked like something I know from other conventions: we all gather in groups, eat drink and be merry and the guest of honour is led around to mingle. When it became clear that Stan was too tired to do this so instead did a Q&A, I had some misgivings (I mean, how cool is it to sip wine with Stan Lee in your midst?) but in retrospect I am glad it happened this way, most of all for Stan Lee himself, who is after all 92 years old and had worked his ***off to give us all something of himself. But this gave us all an exclusive opportunity to interact with him, and I think this was better than the 'cocktail lounge' setup. This was nice, interesting, fun and I think the best anyone could do under the circumstances. At all times, the safety and wellbeing of the guest of honour comes first in my book, and I ma grateful for the fact that Stan insisted on doing this this way. The Gold Pass Rest area lacked chairs, as is obvious from the picture, but I don't care about that, I can sit on tables too. I love withdrawing to this place once in a while and get out of the buzz. It could do with a bit more TLC, that's true, though. In all the buzz we forgot to pick up the goodie bags, so, no comments on that.

I have many great personalisations, but I think the best one came from Gethin Anthony. We gave him a double picture of himself and Finn Jones, who last year had written on it something like "All my best love," and then his autograph. Gethin saw that and immediately wrote: "Dear ... but I love you more!". At that time Finn was sitting next to him, Gethin showed that to him and the four of us had a little group giggle about that!