J’accuse!

I will be at Fan Expo Canada in Toronto this weekend with Blind Ferret and Randy Milholland of of Something*Positive. I will be at booth #844. More info HERE.

Sorry for the lack of comics last week. School starts for Kiddo next week, so last week I took my family on a road trip to San Antonio. Kiddo’s never really had a proper vacation, so spending some family time together before she’s only with us a few hours a day for 9 months was important. I brought the Surface Pro and managed to get one come and one Lofi done, but Sea World kicked my ass. The drive from San Antonio to Austin, a little rest, then the follow up drive back to Dallas wiped me out. The good news is I have 3 comics and 2 Lofi’s ready to go for this week. Please to enjoy the continuation of this storyline.

In the same way sports fans act like their choice of shirts, caps and foam fingers influence the outcome of the game, we geeks (many of whom ARE actually sports fans… weird…) do tend to internalize the stories, characters and fates of our favorite shows. Geekery is rarely a passive act. Our curse is that we typically seek an active roll in the outcome of events that we can’t actually hope to influence. To satiate this need to participate we often seek to expand the universes of the things we love into new directions, new activities and new sub-fandoms that we can actually have an effect on.

I firmly believe this need arrises from equal parts love and selfishness. Or perhaps I mean self-centeredness. Is there a way of saying that without sounding so negative, because I really don’t mean to. It’s that we love a thing so much, so hard that we NEED it to meet our unreasonably high expectations. We need it to be at least as smart as our own head-fiction in order to continue loving it as hard as we do. It’s sort of a vicious cycle. Still, the need to own something, to posses it, embody it and act as an emissary for it to others seems somewhat selfish. I guess my point is that the average Rizzoli and Isles fan doesn’t get too worked up over Rizzoli or Isles. They probably don’t work for weeks on their Isles costume so that it’s perfect for RizzIslCon. They probably don’t… who the hell am I kidding? Rizzoliheads are probably some of the biggest geeks in the world.

COMMENTERS: When have you felt you most “contributed” to your fandom of choice? Was it introducing a new fan, writing fan-fiction, cosplaying at a con, organizing a themed event, or just screaming at the screen until the producers listened to your grand vision?

ANOTHER THING! 

Check out these Tetris earrings my wife made! 

Comments (13)

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@muinamir · 95 weeks ago

A decade before internet campaigns were common I orchestrated a fan-based grand scheme/trolling campaign to get a musician into People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful List, succeeded in spite of myself, and helped launch his career in a new and kind of weird direction. After all these years he may have finally forgiven me. 😀

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2 replies · active 95 weeks ago

hijinksensue· 95 weeks ago

Who was it?

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@muinamir · 95 weeks ago

*cough* http://www.joshuabell.com/

So, back in 1999 before people realized what a bad idea online polls are, People Magazine did an online poll asking who their viewers would pick for their 50 Most Beautiful list. This was of course immediately flooded by a lot of boy-band names and whatnot. I had just taken the reins as moderator for an unofficial Joshua Bell fan board, and I decided to abuse my newfound power by directing everyone to flood the poll with votes for Bell, for the lulz. We never made it to the top 100 in the results, but someone, somewhere, got wind of all this… not sure if his PR people saw it and decided to reach out to People, or if People was keeping track of the list, but shortly after the poll closed Bell appeared in a small side article in the magazine. He was now on their radar. The next year, he actually made their official list. That was about the time he was starting to attract fans outside of the usual classical music circles, and it (unfortunately!) set the tone for new levels of fannishness in the fandom.

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@muinamir · 95 weeks ago

Also, I’m revisiting new Dr. Who in order and having just finished the Martha arc I’m not sure I’d trust the writers to handle a non-white Doctor gracefully. That would require research to correctly identify the cultural attitudes towards race of the past-Earth settings he’d be dropping in on, and some better sensitivity to the legacy of those attitudes in present-Earth settings. If they ever break out of the mold, I suspect it’ll be to move to a white female Doctor or an androgynous/ungendered one.

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3 replies · active 95 weeks ago

meagankn · 95 weeks ago

TILDA SWINTON? That’s what you mean, right? Because I’d watch the shit out of that.

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@muinamir · 95 weeks ago

Oh yeah, she’s like the go-to example of how it can be done.

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Hotsauce · 95 weeks ago

I’d rather have minorites written ungracefully then have the current status quo of minorities being practically nonexistent.

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@kellyskritters · 95 weeks ago

Introducing my 5yo twins to, well everything… comic books, star wars, legos, star trek, bttf, vintage video games… when they embrace my love for all things geekery I am one proud Papa. One is a trekkie, the other a fanboy and I couldn’t be happier!

Soon we’ll visit our first con together, which sadly will also be my first con ever.

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Bruceski · 95 weeks ago

When Terry Pratchett announced he had Alzheimer’s, I organized some folks here in Portland to fold and send a thousand origami turtles. Never heard back about that, I hope they arrived okay.

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@DakkaKnight · 95 weeks ago

Every time I can make a Battletech writer/designer cringe when they ask what could go wrong with a rule change I’m proud of myself. It doesn’t happen often, but I enjoy making the game a better and more terrifying experience for everyone.

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@efin98 · 95 weeks ago

The writers will write what they want, they actors will act the way they want. The netowkrs only care about viewers, the producers only care about costs, the director only cares about making the show to fit his vision.

Any changes to the show were done by them, not the viewers. The scripts are written months in advance, the shows taped months in advance, the acting done months in advance- the only real impact you have is whether you actually watch the show or not, whether you buy the show’s dvd/blu ray or not.

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David S. · 95 weeks ago

I have the exact opposite effect: any show I seem to get into gets cancelled, so I realized if i were ever to campaign to influence a show, I may just get it cancelled that much faster!

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1 reply · active 95 weeks ago

Bruceski · 95 weeks ago

I constantly make the mistake of watching the first season of shows on NBC. Nothing gets a second season. That said, the reason is often because a lot of them are “neat idea for a miniseries, but you guys had no idea what to do with it for a whole season.” My Own Worst Enemy, for example. Guy has artificially-created multiple personalities to be a spy with an unbreakable cover, then they start flip-flopping when not supposed to? Clever idea, I can think of about six episodes’ worth of stuff before you run out.

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