|
| Pre Convention Gallery - Thursday, August 31, 2006 |
ChrisReid: We all booked tickets to go to the new Georgia Aquarium. It's located a short walk from our hotels in downtown Atlanta.
LOAF: I've said it before and I'll say it again: Blonde has the best shirt in the universe.
Frosty: Sword Play ain't too shabby either.
ChrisReid: It's the biggest aquarium in the world.
LOAF: Sure, *this* world.
Frosty: It's probably the asymmetrical-est also. Just saying.
ChrisReid: Look! Fish.
LOAF: I kept thinking we'd walk around the giant tank and then see it from the top. And we circled and circled and... then there was a giant window.
ChrisReid: Tricky. This part isn't an aquarium at all. It's a giant touch screen. When you touch fish that swim by, text bubbles pop up with information about them.
LOAF: But each information was different, so you could touch the same fish forever and keep learning. The world of the 21st century is amazing.
ChrisReid: We found ourselves in a huge tube underneath the main tank. Silas looks hungry.
LOAF: There was a moving sidewalk, but it wasn't moving.
ChrisReid: The tank was full of stingrays.
LOAF: I like their little smiles.
ChrisReid: The aquarium is also the only one in the world to have four whale sharks.
LOAF: I'm sorry, I didn't get the number of aquariums or the amount of whale sharks.
Frosty: It must be fun to be gigantic.
ChrisReid: Crabs.
LOAF: Crabs... in love.
ChrisReid: There was a shark and stingray petting tank we all checked out. Two days later, the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, was killed by a stingray.
LOAF: How is the Crocodile Hunter like Dallas? Both killed by stingrays! But seriously, it's no laughing matter: don't go kill stingrays, because they're great.
Frosty: Unless you discover that they're incredibly tasty.
ChrisReid: They kind of hover near the surface and flap their wings until you touch them.
LOAF: I was going to touch a shark, but Halman ruined it. Now CNN is telling me that Stingrays are evil 'close relatives of sharks'. Damned liberal media.
Frosty: Nobody really believes when you tell them the stingrays would float to each person in turn and, staring at you, patiently wait to be poked. It was a satisfying experience all around.
ChrisReid: The petting zoo also had a slide.
LOAF: The slide was left over from the David Lynch Childrens' Museum.
ChrisReid: The shrimp petting tank seemed pretty dirty.
LOAF: There was all kinds of shrimp. Big shrimps, medium shrimps... small shrimps.
ChrisReid: It was located in a mock shrimping boat.
LOAF: But I'd rather have joined that pirate ship, than gone to Botany Bay.
ChrisReid: Penguin attack!
LOAF: Tremors, too.
ChrisReid: Apparently this is the largest piece of glass in the world.
LOAF: Actually, I read on the internet that it wasn't glass at all but some kind of special plastic that is even more see-through. I was going to for the obvious transparent aluminum joke, but it would have taken years to figure out t he dynamics of the matrix.
ChrisReid: Seals eat a lot.
LOAF: I'd like to sea her lion, if you know what I mean. Seal the deal... eh, this material is wasted on you.
ChrisReid: We got a group picture before entering Deepo's 4D undersea theater.
LOAF: You can tell it was before because we're all still very happy.
ChrisReid: At the very end, they had nice colored fish.
LOAF: I see three Finding Nemos and a Shark Tale.
ChrisReid: After the aquarium, we went to register and pick up our convention badges.
LOAF: For some reason the 'L' line was marked 'R'.
ChrisReid: Since Atlanta isn't overcrowded on Thursday, we went to Steak & Ale next to our hotel. I wish I was eating this right now.
LOAF: That is neither steak nor ale.
ChrisReid: Halman got snails to eat.
LOAF: Because he's a dynamic thinker.
Frosty: Clownboat.
ChrisReid: Another group picture.
LOAF: As usual, my pal Death gets the short end of the stick.
ChrisReid: Back at the hotel, Teo showed up with his nerf gun.
LOAF: We didn't see much of Teo. He was playing some kind of murder game the whole weekend. Or we were. I forget which.
ChrisReid: Here's Frosty making a batch of ice juice.
LOAF: The Kool-Aid was orange?
Frosty: These were the prototypes. By the end of the con, and after several handoff miscalculations involving impact-related spills, I had this mastered.
ChrisReid: All LOAF needs is irc, a tall glass of ice juie and a soft whale shark.
LOAF: My new whale shark is very, very soft.
ChrisReid: Before it got too late, a bunch of us went down to the gym.
LOAF: You actually photographed Halman doing a cartoon double-take.
ChrisReid: And then we rested up. The convention began the next morning.
LOAF: Go suck a sack of Frosty, sack-o.
Frosty: Those brown things are great. At one point I had accumulated 3 of them and 5 pillows. It was luxurious.
Continue to Day One
| 
