Quoted:Do these people have jobs? Or do they just follow these nerdy conventions in the futile attempt of bagging a female dressed as some green or blue character who is piss drunk at the hotel bar?
Nerds...
Hotel rooms were running about $200/night. Badges were about $70 if ordered far enough in advance, $100 at the door. Fire of Brazil, a $50/person Brazilian steakhouse was full last night. Dragon*Con is BIG bucks, I've heard $500M in revenue for the weekend. I know the bar in the Hyatt alone probably pulls in seven figures in receipts a night. The management of the hotel conglomerate that includes the three main convention hotels built an entirely new skywalk between the Hyatt and the Marriott specifically designed for Dragon*Con traffic.
Yes, there are poor geeks for whom this is their entire discretionary budget for most of the year. There are also LOTS of professional businesspeople there, all the way up to C-level executives, neurosurgeons, pilots, etc... This year, for the first time, they had a functional firearms/weaponry display. I didn't make it, but according to Kevin Dockery, who was in charge of it and has an Army special operations background and has coauthored a large number of books with Navy SEALs, in addition the machineguns and suppressors he had paperwork for, they also had a simulated nuke.
A few years ago, I was at a party in one of the main hotels, one of the hotel security dweebs threw a fit and shut it down (and it was laughable, he brought three cops with him, only explanation is he thought he was shutting down a different party with underage drinking, for this particular party, three cops was either serious overkill or seriously outnumbered). Two days after Dragon*Con, the person hosting the party accepted a position as the international head of security for a major international financial firm. About six months later, he sent an advisory out that he had personally evaluated the professionalism and quality of security at that chain's hotels and found it lacking, and that no employees transporting corporate confidential documentation could use their facilities. Security dweeb's job application at a major Atlanta area police department was circular-filed with comments about personality issues. A senior executive at the hotel company took the fall to appease the major international corporation, and said security dweeb was later encountered applying for a job at a nightclub in a more rural area near Atlanta. Sadly, he didn't recognize the owner of the club as the same guy who had been checking ID's at the party... Oh, said executive for international financial company? Former BUD/S OIC for Hell Week. The other main organizers for the party were all active military officers, including Air Force pilots in a special operations squadron, helo pilots, Army MI officers, etc... Guests in the room at the time included a prominent neurosurgeon, New York Times bestselling authors, radio hosts, etc...
The standing joke is that nothing better go wrong in corporate IT on Labor Day weekend because all the IT guys are at Dragon*Con partying, especially from the Atlanta and Chattanooga IT markets.