And so the end of another SDCC Sideshow chat has arrived, signaling the beginning of the end for SDCC coverage madness.  The Comic-Con doors are closed and the cleanup begins after hundreds of thousands of people have taken in all the sites and sounds of the ultimate pop-culture event.  For those of us stuck at home, we had venues like the Sideshow chat to keep us involved as fellow collectors have a chance to share laughs, critique the latest offerings and trade industry information seconds after being announced on the show floor.  This year I had the chance to hang out with some familiar faces as well as make new friends, and I would like to thank the following fellow collectors and friends for making the chat a memorable one!

• Ozzfan
• MadCow
• Rozz
• Fury
• Nash
• Guru
• Kibi
• Zombie Killer
• Rogue
• HappyBoy
• Ray
• Eli (Winnipeg sucks, but you made me laugh)

I would also like to extend a huge thanks to Sideshow Marc, the host of this year’s chat, who did his best to handle chat duties as well as his network admin responsibilities while keeping the prizes flowing for the crazy chat fanatics.  And of course a big thank you to Sideshow for donating so many awesome prizes for chat trivia!  We had awesome prizes such as a Leia Slave PF statue, 2 Iron Man Stealth LSBs, 2 Oversized Vader VCDs, some scaled helmet replicas, some HT figs and a bunch of 12" figures from Marvel to Indiana Jones to Reservoir Dogs.  Lots of great loot and I look forward to getting my box of goodies (yeah, I hauled at trivia!).

Couple things I would like to mention though, and I don’t want to seem unappreciative… but there was a big lack of Sideshow participation in the chat this year.  This is the first time I see only 1 staff member running the entire chat, not to mention he was so busy that at one point we went about 8 hours without a single sign of SSC participation.  There was no discussion panel in the chat, no Q&A session, nadda…  the morning of the first day (Preview night) did see Alex and Chris for a little bit of chat, but that was it.  So I certainly appreciate the trivia sessions and I know Marc did his best, but there was definitely a feeling of a lack of participation by Sideshow in the chat itself.  Hopefully this can be rectified for the next SDCC and maybe we can get more chat folks involved!

The other bummer was the lack of a REAL IRC server this year… instead Sideshow went with a Javascript/PHP chat utility embedded in to the Sideshow site, and it was fairly horrible.  The interface was clunky and slow, and as soon as more than 20 people would join, it would bog down horribly.  Sunday night was really bad, with typed responses sometimes taking 10 – 15 seconds to show up on the screen.  Marc did his best to deal with it, but the interface clearly was not up to the task.  I also didn’t like the fact that there was no way to log the chat, so I couldn’t log stuff and then look over it later for information or links I may have missed during breaks or when I couldn’t be in front of the PC.  Please go back to having a real server and allowing people to connect either via a web applet or an IRC chat client!

So aside from the lack of Sideshow participation in chat and the icky chat application, it was a great time with tons of awesome fellow collectors and great prizes… so thanks again to Marc, Sideshow and community members that took the time to come out to chat with the rest of us!  See you at Spookfest in October!

Off to bed folks, we’ll do a final round up tomorrow!  Final web contest winners will be announced tomorrow and SDCC Sideshow Newsletter winners will be announced on July 30th!

Thanks,
Dan