First afternoon at Fan Expo

I’ve been inside Fan Expo for a little more than an hour now. At this point on Thursday afternoon, things are relatively quiet, but there’s still some fun stuff going on.

I left work just before noon, lugging my suitcase onto the train, and walked up Bay and Yonge streets all the way to Wellesley, sweating up a storm as I went. A nice lady checked me into my room, and I spent half an hour there organizing my stuff and cooling down before taking the subway down and figuring the right way into the convention center through crowd control – though the crowds haven’t really arrived yet.

Since I got here I’ve signed up for a Dresden Files RPG session tonight, walked most of the sales floor, and talked to a few guys at the photo sales booth about Kaylee cupcake dress pictures. Jewel Staite isn’t at this show, but I want to get that picture signed by Jewel and Jane Espenson at DragonCon. A fellow customer said that he got the picture at Jewel’s autograph table at Polaris last year, so I think I should be able to track it down in Atlanta.

I only bought two items so far – packs of trading cards, Firefly and Angel

What else? I scouted out the autograph situation a bit. Looks like John Barrowman and Juliet Landauwill be signing tomorrow, but I’ll have to wait until Saturday at least for Rose McGowan and Alan Tudyk. That helps me know what I need to bring to get signed. I’ve seen a few familiar faces around and chatted with Jason R briefly. The Toronto Browncoats fan booth isn’t where it’s marked in the programme; I wonder if they let TCON have their space for today.

It’s still more than an hour before Julie Benz’s Q&A session. I want to go find the ctv sprawl again and find out more about this ‘arrow’ show, and then maybe I’ll get in line early for Julie and read as I wait. Please excuse any typos in this post as the on-screen keyboard is not really meant for long composition.

A few pics of the convention center hall:

Fanart flashback #12: Coming full circle.

Fanart flashbacks index

Well, the day has come – I’m ending the fanart flashback tuesdays series here, and sharing two of the earliest fan wallpapers I ever made. These were from back in the fall of 2003, which was probably before I’d even heard of fanfic banners – though I’m not sure, because I was at Fanatics by then. Maybe I’d seen some but never really paid attention.

This first one is a fairly simple wallpaper for Smallville – almost a generic cover banner for the entire show, rather than trying to encapsulate a more specific message:

Award acceptance speech.

First off, once again I’d like to thank Brittany for giving me these two awards!

The Versatile Blogger Award: Link back to the person who gave you the award (already did), share seven things about yourself, pass the award to up to fifteen bloggers who you think deserve it, and contact the people you’ve picked.

One Lovely Blog Award: Accept the award, post it on your blog with a link to the person who gave it to you with a link to them, pass it to up to fifteen other bloggers who are new to you, contact the people you’ve picked.

However, I have to say that I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about passing them along at first… not that I don’t want other bloggers to feel valued and appreciated, but that the whole deal seemed a bit like a benign version of chain letters or something, and I’ve never been a big fan of spreading chain letters.

Having spent a little while mulling over the question, I’ve decided that it’s not really the same thing. For one thing, these awards seem to be pretty honest as to what they’re about, while chain letters always tend to have the ridiculous claims about what has happened to various people around the world when they got the chain, which presumably can’t have been true when the chain started, and couldn’t have been added in later unless someone took liberties with copying the letter exactly as they received it. But never mind that.

Also, these awards don’t seem to be as bully-ish about chain letters about passing them on. And this is the sort of thing that Blogosphere networking is made of, isn’t it? So – I accept the awards, and I will be passing them along, but not just yet. For one thing, I’m not sure who to award yet, so I’ll take my time and hand them out one by one. 😉

And, for my seven things to share as a condition of Versatile Blogger:

1. I love listening to country music.
2. I have many stuffed animal friends.
3. I collect PDAs and other electronic devices.
4. I’ve lost over 100 pounds in the past three and a half years.
5. I recently got a beginner driver’s licence for the second time.
6. I go to the Toronto Buffy/Angel fan meetups when I can.
7. I love Larry Niven’s Known Space/Ringworld books.