The only musical group truly deserving of the name "Tesla"
I spent the weekend in Atlanta for DragonCon with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
techempage and vivvianne1, and holy crap, was it awesome! (And expensive.) Of course, the weekend was marred upon our arrival in Atlanta when I tried to squeeze our rented Trailblazer into a too-tight parking spot at the hotel, snapping off the side mirror. That's gonna hurt. Of course, we wrapped some duct tape around it, got over it and went on to have a good time.
Some friends of vivvianne1 also came down, and they had made a bunch of S-Mart employee vests and badges. So half a dozen of us roamed around the con Friday night, yelling the second half of the S-Mart slogan for anyone who started it.
Shop Smart... Shop S-Mart! Okay, so they're not screen-accurate, but they did the trick.
I couldn't believe how many people were crammed into this con. We filled up the three biggest hotels in downtown Atlanta, and you still could barely move on some floors. The Hyatt was actually shut down twice by the fire marshal due to the crowding.
The con had some great panels, costumes, parties and other stuff, but the highlight of the weekend is no contest. The bold scienticians of The Geek Group have developed Tesla coils that play music. Yes, the coils themselves will play music by discharging electricity at various frequencies (or something to that effect). That description doesn't quite do justice to it, so I'll say this: it was wicked fucking awesome. The pair of Tesla coils were shooting bolts of electricity three feet into the air while playing music so loud that it could be heard as soon as you walked into the hotel.
I finally figured out how to post one of them new-fangled YouTube videos so I could share this with all of you. You should play it in full-screen mode (click the icon on the bottom right of the video box) to see it well. It's not a great quality video, but hopefully it will give you an idea of how badass it was like in person. (Soon afterwards, the audience halted the show long enough to clear out some chairs and make a dance floor.)
I've got some more photos from the con (mostly random shots of costumed folk) over on my Flickr page.
