#bleakmonday

maybe it’s not very practical or commonplace, but even the ritual of finding an album and setting it up to play helps me get into the headspace of “okay, i’m gonna be DOING STUFF now.”

Oh, what a good suggestion! I have a record player and a small selection of vinyl, maybe I'll put one on when I need to be working in the living room.

(she’s a dinosaur 🦖😊)

OH MY GOD SHE'S SO FUCKING CUTE

WOW IM PUBLISHING THIS BECAUSE I CAN'T BELIEVE I WOULD EVER SEE THE DAY AND YET IT CAME ON THIS DAY THE ONE WHERE I'M BEGGING FOR THR SWEET RELEASE OF DEATH

(In Reference To This Post)

I spent like 20 minutes laughing at this ask, and then an hour musing over the pros and cons of this.

Pros: 

Galadriel and Celebron as the Sigfried and Roy of Lothlorien, right down to the sparkly outfits, collection of tigers and dubious safety precuations.

IIRC, Glorfindel is originally from lothlorien, so imagine him driving up in like, a tricked-out cadillac with fins and a speaker that blasts custom theme music but also an engine that you’d normally find in a formula-one racecar to grab Frodo and just.  Flooring it from Smartsville to Tahoe while the Nazgul try to chase him down on Custom ATVs.

When the elves are singing thier mourning songs for Gandalf, it’s being done in the style of The Rat Pack

Also, the Great Lothlorien bard, Elve-is.

Cons: 

Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest is famous for it’s Bristlecone Pines, which are the longest-lived trees and quite possibly the longest-lived organisms on earth.

Legolas:  This forest is old.Legolas: Very Old.Legolas: ...Old as BALLS.

Bristlcone pines are my favorite tree for a bunch of reasons, but one of the main ones is that they live very high up and don’t grow very tall, so they end up walking through a forest JUST tall enough that Gimli can’t see over them.

I didn’t think I had much to say about it but APPARENTLY I DO. 

Without getting into the cultural significance and deep strangeness of the Hallmark Christmas Movie, which I have a post about slated for later in the year, my immediate instinct is to say, well, we have fan conventions for everything else, so why not? Hallmark Movies are a fandom like any other, if maybe with a different demographic from fandom as most of us think of it. And ChristmasCon seems like pretty much any other con – at first.

There’s a vendor room, celebrity autographs and photo-ops, events, panels, a concert, and a charity drive. That’s pretty much the template for most cons, at least the ones I’ve been to, both huge cons like Anime Boston and small ones like Gallifrey.

Except…the deeper you read, the weirder it becomes, and not just because it’s in New Jersey (which is just kind of funny, sorry Jerseyites). For one thing, it bills itself as “a convention like no other” when it is exactly like every other convention. 

It also appears to be a first-time con that may or may not be for-profit, but is not being bankrolled by the Hallmark Channel, which is a bit worrying from a funding standpoint (funding -- specifically the hotel bookings not reaching discount threshold and nobody having any kind of fallback for this, is part of what brought down Dashcon). Being fair, without Hallmark’s stamp they’ve booked some quite big Hallmark names. Still, plenty of failed cons in the past, like Tentmoot and Dashcon, booked big names too. 

Putting on a convention is a herculean task. I’ve seen how much work goes into it. And first-time conrunners, which is what they appear to be (possibly not, there’s not a ton of detail on the founders), usually don’t start with cons of quite this size. That said, their schedule is relatively conservative – one panel per time slot, and pretty much half-days – and there’s no real indication of the size of the con attendance-wise, so they might do fine. 

I kind of want it to succeed, to be honest, because it looks like it’s being run by four women who genuinely want to put on a great con for people who are fans like them. I always want cons to succeed when they are earnest and well-intentioned. But the reality is that a lot of cons turn into hot messes really quickly because earnest and well-intentioned is not enough.