MMT Day 2: Electric Boogaloo?

I'm going to try and keep this post a little more readable than the wall of text that was my last. I suppose that where Twitter forces me into unreasonable brevity, this blog is a proper avenue for being unreasonably verbose. Perhaps I can strike a happy middle ground? We shall see.

Day 2 of the Magical Mystery Tour was sans bus, but all of the joyous spirit that permeated the first day remained safely intact. Our numbers grew as well, as people just arriving from out of town filtered in for a day of fun before PAX proper.

We met in front of the WSCTC and hitched a ride on the monorail to The Experience Music Project/ Sci Fi museum. This is yet another thing which, despite being a Seattle native, I had yet to actually experience for myself. You'd be surprised how little of a city's tourist attractions you see when you live there. I suppose it's some sort of mental construct which curtails the need to go see awesome shit because you live near it. Perhaps it's for the best, though, because if they'd let me I'm pretty goddamn sure I would pitch a tent right next to the original Death Star model and camp the fuck out.

Almost everything about the Sci Fi museum was, as you might well have expected, dorky nerd's wet dream come true. I say almost due to one glaring flaw: upon entering the museum proper (just past the GORT statue), we were informed that you weren't allowed to take pictures.

I'll let that sink in.

Let me put this in perspective for you: There is a case in this museum. In this case, there are no less than seven robots. That's seven more than most cases in most museums! I'm not sure they fully appreciate exactly what they've got there when they prop R2D2 up next to the Terminator. How am I not going to take pictures of this phenomena, when it takes every fiber of my self restraint not to break the glass and have my illicit way with the robot from Lost in Space?

And that's just the robots. There's a full size Stormtrooper in there, and guns and jetpacks, and a statue that's supposed to be Charleton Heston but totally looks like Chuck Norris (and either way looking primed and ready for some ass kicking). And I think I mentioned that there was the original model of the Death Star, the one they used in the movie? There was a button in front of it, that caused it to light up and play the Imperial March. I kept looking for the button to blow up a planet.

Needless to say this rule cramped my style, somewhat, when I was forced to take crappy stealth pictures with my cell phone instead of with my camera (a la the one to the right, there). Unfortunately a member of the SciFi Museum's anti-fun squad caught me before I could nab a picture of the Death Star, but believe me, that's no moon.

Regardless of the draconian picture policy, though, it was still thousands of square feet filled to the brim with everything that we hold dear. Certainly worth a visit, if only to see how many pictures you can take before they catch you. My record is 3. I know you can do better, people. Fight the power.

At some point we were supposed to look around EMP, but as it turns out there was a gift shop for the SciFi museum. Despite the fact that I promised myself I wasn't going to spend ridiculous amounts of money on tourist trap items in my own damn city, I still ended up buying a t-shirt that said "Don't Phase Me, Bro!". Something about the brazen collision of geek culture references and internet memes warms my heart and loosens my wallet. It's like they got peanut butter in some chocolate, and it was so fucking awesome that they made an awesome shirt and sold it to me. Or something.

Either way I still consider this a win, because I didn't also buy every other item in the whole damned store.

Just outside the entrance to the store there was a TV display showing off a copy of Star Trek Scene It?, a DVD party game soaked in the delicious irony that if you're really good at it, you likely don't get invited to many parties.

To be fair, though, I was shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of other nerds relentlessly mocking the game while simultaneously failing at it for the space of at least an hour. For a taste of how awful I was, my first answer to a fade-in picture "name that character" question was Lando Calrissian, before I was politely informed that this was Star Trek. Either way 90 percent of the questions were damn near impossible, even to a group of accomplished nerds such as ourselves. I mean, how were we supposed to know that a ceti slug was missing from the photo when the only other thing in the photo is tongs?

So eventually we realize that there is, you know, a whole other tourist attraction we have yet to go to, but to be honest in the short amount of time I had to look at it I was underwhelmed. Perhaps I'm not enough of a music nerd or didn't have enough time to fully explore, but regardless I had barely taken a pitcure of the PAX Pirate (as he had come to be known) next to Michael Jackson's jacket and glove before we were off to meet the CCST back at the WSCTC and then depart for some R&R.


Speaking of R&R, it's getting a little late now, and the Pre-Pax Dinner and Pub Crawl deserve to have their stories fleshed out far better than I have the energy for right now, so I'll leave those for later. Until next time.