Superman has landed, the Hulk is lurking around every corner and Batman is brooding all over San Diego today. Comic-Con has officially started, or at least the one in San Diego has. Lisa Halverstadt (superhero alias: Quester) looked out over all the other comic conventions taking place throughout the country and found the “Comic-Con” moniker has been co-opted for other major conventions that are drawing similar crowds. “New York Comic Con and Salt Lake Comic Con… closely rival San Diego’s size and firepower,” Halverstadt writes.
There’s actually some legal snafu between our Comic-Con and Salt Lake City’s, over their use of the name. Some of the conventions cater to specific comic book tastes more than others. But they don’t have what San Diego has: stars living in our backyard. “None boast as much Hollywood influence as San Diego,” Halverstadt notes.
• There was originally some question over whether Comic-Con was going to stay in San Diego, but those fears were allayed recently — for the short term, at least — and the Con is set to stay in San Diego through 2018. The dynamic duo of Halverstadt and NBC 7’s Catherine Garcia explain why that deal had a lot to do with negotiating over hotel rooms in our most recent San Diego Explained.
• Close enough to see the Convention Center but far enough away to be ignored by Comic-Con, one Barrio Logan business owner has decided to showcase the Latin-American side of comics and give a venue for Barrio Logan dwellers to celebrate comics. He calls it Chicano-Con, PRI writes, and he’s giving away thousands of comic books to attendees, using the tasting room and parking lot space from his brewery, Border X Brewery.
• If throwbacks are your thing, the L.A. Times has a doozy: a remembrance of every year of Comic-Con in one timeline.
• Comic-Con was hosted in Golden Hall once upon a time, San Diego Downtown Partnership noted on its Facebook page.
• Ever the bipartisan, Mayor Faulconer met with troopers from the Galactic Empire as seen in this photo from the U-T.
How the Internet Ranks Your School
If you’re shopping for a house using a popular real estate shopping website like Zillow, you might notice the site attempts to give each house’s neighborhood school a score. The scores can range from 1 to 10, and it isn’t immediately apparent where those scores are coming from. Mario Koran heard from one reader who was baffled when he found most schools had bad ratings. What gives?
Koran (superhero alias: The Kurve) dug into the scores and found they are being handed out by a website that calculates the scores based on test scores and graduation rates. “This ranking doesn’t account for other factors, like number of students in poverty, or number of English-learners,” The Kurve writes. And there’s another obvious drawback to how the scores are figured. “The data is old,” he reports, noting the sites are calculating scores from a test that’s not even given anymore.
Dispatches from the Internets
• After deleting a series of tweets bemoaning the Latino population outgrowth of the white population in California, local political operator Derrick Roach published a backhanded apology on Thursday, while also removing from his Twitter bio a line saying he was a “Chula Vista Council Aide.” He still lists “California Republican Party, Executive Board Member” on his bio.
• A man who beat his wife to death in Chula Vista was sentenced to 25-years-to-life in prison on Thursday. The president of San Diego’s police association, Brian Marvel, said on Twitter he doubts the man will die in prison. “No such thing as life in prison. Too many criminal apologists in high places,” he wrote.
• Chris Ward, candidate for City Council District 3, took to Twitter to announce record-breaking fundraising in June.
News Nibbles
• Mayor Kevin Faulconer and Chargers Special Council Mark Fabiani are still not on the same page as far as proceeding with a stadium proposal. (10 News)
• The number of approved marijuana dispensaries in San Diego now stands at nine. (U-T)
• Another casualty of drought: outdoor shower stations at California state beaches. (NBC 7)
• Not everyone is watching their water waste, though: the North County Transit District copped to wasting over 600,000 gallons of water in an undetected leak. (U-T)
• San Diego’s export economy reached an all-time high, nearly $19 billion, in 2014. (U-T)
• The new city manager of Encinitas, a city with a population of around 60,000, will be paid $238,000 per year under a newly approved contract. San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, in contrast, makes around $100,000 per year. (Encinitas Advocate)
• If you’re itching to get involved with the Comic-Con crowd but just can’t stand waiting in line, there’s a new smartphone app just for you. The app will let you order up someone to wait in line for you, and the business behind the app says that your proxies will be paid a good wage: $18 per hour. The app will continue to run past Comic-Con, though, so you can build in less line-waiting time in the rest of your life as well.
Seth Hall is a local writer and technologist. You can email him at voice@s3th.com or follow him on Twitter (via his superhero alias): @loteck.