For my first Fanvid Friday, I went with one of my recent multi-fandom favorites: Starships by bironic. Wait, recent? How is it 7 years old already? (Explicit lyrics)
The wonder, excitement, terror, and fun of space fandoms are so beautifully synced with this upbeat song. And so many of my favorite starships are included.
I took a bit of a hiatus as life got busy, but I do love this blog and have had a few project ideas for it during its downtime. So I have picked it up again. I have also fixed the email subscription feature, so feel free to subscribe if you want to be notified of updates.
I’m planning to post 1-3 times a week. The 8th of every month will continue to feature a fannish license plate (I have a backlog of these with posts scheduled through 2022, though I may dip into fannish cars and bumper stickers at some point). Here’s the content I’m working on:
Made It Mondays: Featuring fandom-related crafts, ATCs, and other things I’ve created over the years
Top Ten Tuesdays: Like it says on the tin, these will be top ten lists on various fannish topics
Wildcard Wednesdays: Fandom posts that don’t fit anywhere else would find a home here
Throwback Thursday: A fannish photo or memory from my past I feel like sharing
Fanvid Fridays: I have been wanting to start a fanvid-a-day project, but recently decided that might be a bit overwhelming and too ambitious for this Hufflepuff. So, to start with, I’m going to try to post one every week for a year. I just like the idea of waking up to find a fun fanvid to watch while eating breakfast.
I may still have special segments from time to time, like I did with Christmas ornaments.
Being let go from my job allowed me to bring home the fannish items I had been keeping in my office. They are now merged back into my overall collection. Here’s a list of ten of those items. Welcome home, little ones! I missed you!
1. Hawkeye FUNKO POP- My favorite Avenger was a wonderful present from a friend. I have an older series Hawkeye POP, and I didn’t want him to face an identity crisis seeing his Endgame Part 2 self, so I took him to work to guard my computer.
Confession: I am going through Asana withdrawal. No offense to my glorious bullet journal, but it just wasn’t the same to finish tasks and not get a sudden unicorn or phoenix with which to celebrate the accomplishment. In May 2019, I signed up for Habitica and used it all of one day. So after I realized I was spending too much time on phone games each morning, I decided I needed structure by way of electronic tasks. Habitica jumped to mind, so I spent some time building it out to give it a proper try.
Habitica transforms your life into a fantasy game— sort of a combination of Dungeons & Dragons and The Legend of Zelda. You can set up one-time to do tasks, daily repeating routine tasks, and often-accomplished tasks. You can also set up rewards. I’ve got mine populated with everything from career work to flossing. Completing tasks earns you coins you can spend to equip yourself, enjoy rewards, or feed your virtual pets. Right now I wield an axe, I’ve got a growing bear to master, and I ride a purple gryphon mount. I’m living my best 8-bit warrior life!
After one week, I am now a Level Ten Warrior. I really wanted to go for Healer class, but the sorts of rewards (and penalties) for tasks Warriors get are much more suited to what I need in my life now. Earning surprise rewards like eggs and potions for completing tasks is almost like seeing that elusive Asana unicorn. Whispers: I miss you, unicorn.
To go along with my top ten list for this week, here’s an appropriate license plate I spotted around town two years ago.
I find watching good RPG shows to be just as entertaining as produced television shows, if not more. The episodes can be long (some are more than 5 hours), but that just means more time to develop and explore the characters and adventures. I end up falling behind easily, then binging to catch up. Here are some of my favorites in no particular order.
This was my first time at ConneXions, and I had a blast! It was a great group of attendees, though light in attendance on Friday and Sunday. I felt extremely lucky to have such a great slash con so close to my home. Still, I got a hotel room so I didn’t have to worry about traveling to and from every day. I was especially glad for this when a panel I suggested and offered to mod was accepted.
Sunday, Day 3:
I got up a few minutes earlier and had no problem getting to the Convention Center by Metro. The headache I had was another story, but it wasn’t too bad. I got in line for Stan Lee by 9am and immediately made friends with the guy behind me in line who happened to be Ace as well. We had some wonderful discussions 🙂 It made the hour and change just fly right by. As the lines started winding around toward the main stage, I ran across another friend of mine.
Even though I could have had a pretty good seat, I sat at the back so I could slip out a little early if needed in order to get in line for Garrett Wang’s Q&A. I even considered skipping Stan Lee, but I’m glad I didn’t. Stan Lee can never die, but he’s definitely getting older, and I didn’t want to miss a chance to see him in person. But Garrett Wang portrayed my favorite character on Star Trek: Voyager. Decisions, decisions! My new line friend advised me to skip out as soon as the Q&A started.
Saturday, Day 2:
I spent the night driving around dead bodies in the streets and saving my town and my daughter from tiny glowing balls that were trying to invade our bodies. So I woke up exhausted and shaken from my nightmare. But David Tennant was speaking at 10:30, so I got my butt out of bed. I hauled myself to the Metro and arrived at 8am. However, I just missed a train by 3 minutes and had to wait 17 minutes for the next one. Even worse, there was an issue with the trains when I tried to transfer and it was 40 minutes until the next Yellow train I needed arrived. So I didn’t get to the convention center until 9:35, which was when the doors were supposed to open for seating. As I arrived in the registration hall, I heard one of the best quotes of the con from one of the volunteers “David Tennant is by the garage door!” It was only to indicate that’s where the end of the line to see him currently was.
I hurried over to the pretty sizable line that was weaving from one side of the room to the other. I heard my name called and turned to see a friend from grad school I hadn’t seen in over 10 years! It’s great running into people at cons, but I was still in my one track mind of “must get to end of line!” During the next hour, nearly the entire room filled up with the line and, as far as I saw, every one of the 5,000 seats ended up being filled. The line volunteers were amazing, though, packing us all in there and keeping order. They would say things like “Welcome to the line! This is all part of the experience!” and “You’re doing great! You’re almost there!” VIPS got in first. Not including them, I think I was about a third of the way from the front. There was a WHOLE LOT of line behind me; I cannot imagine much of that portion got in.
Friday, Day 1:
I woke up about an hour later than usual and had a leisurely but efficient breakfast before heading off to the Metro. I began reading Pack Animals (Torchwood #7) by Peter Anghelides on the long ride to the Library of Congress. While walking from the metro station to the LOC building, I passed two women around my age taking photos of a group of people walking across the street, escorted by the police. I have been watching news nonstop for the past two weeks, but I didn’t recognize anyone in the group (and I’ve been watching a lot of news). Looked like it might have been a representative and her congressional aides, but I’ve no clue. Anyway, I got to the Thomas Jefferson Library of Congress Building a little before 11.
The Library of Congress put together a really neat pop-up exhibit only available for a few days, called Library of Awesome. It was filled with parts of the LOC collection, grouped by themes. It was a great reminder that the LOC preserves these parts of culture that are important to fans. The people behind me as we went through the different exhibit rooms were in the most AMAZING Wonder Woman and Black Panther outfits ever. There was also a brave young man in an amazing Fantastic Four outfit. There were so many great comics on display, I couldn’t begin to list them all. But I did take photos of some of my favorites. In one room they had clips from TV shows playing and I walked in just as Buffy was sacrificing herself (feels!), following by a clip of Doctor Who with the Tenth Doctor. It was a surreal to be standing in the largest library in the entire world, watching Buffy and Doctor Who and looking at first appearances of comic book characters in print! There was also a neat letter from Gene Roddenbery to Carl Sagan.
