Hi there,
In any other year the cycle of my work week would be sprinkled with various social interactions, my weekend would feature nerdy get togethers with friends, maybe LARPing or playing D&D or just having a movie marathon with my tribe. Best of all though, for me at least, has always been planning for events. Having conventions or other large gathers of geekery to look forward to, to plan for, to share with friends and family, those things make life fun. But 2020 has done its damnedest to take that away from us.
I am supposing that you, like me, have had most of your Fannish outlets snatched away by Covid. I also assume that you’d like your fandom activities back.
Anyone who understands fandom knows that right now, people who are responsible for creating the places we play in and the accoutrement of our pastimes are suffering, a lot. Convention crews, Festival companies, Theatres, Dojos, Vendors, Buskers, Artists, Actors, Musicians, Rennies, Haunt folks, Game stores, Laser tag arenas… I could go on. But basically the people and places who helped us have fun have been all but ruined by our forced distance from these things we love. Some have adapted, but many can’t. All they can do is hope that there will be some eventual return to normality and perhaps, assuming they weather this storm, a chance to rebuild from the ashes of their dreams.
Such rebuilding will require people who are passionate about fandom to take risks with their time and talents as they try to restart events and gathers once the various interested government parties allow for it. But, if we all wait until the all clear is sounded, then that means that there is less and less to look forward to while we live through these tough times, it means fandom will continue to wither, and with the average time to spin up a show being a year or so it means perhaps waiting til 2022 for events to be in full swing again.
I don’t want to to do that. Do you?
Hi, My name is Rion and I am the Programming Director for Evil Expo 2021, February 19-21 at the Westin in Princeton New Jersey. Yep, I said 2021. At this point the state government has ok’d events and we have secured the entire hotel for the event. We don’t know for sure that the State will still be open for business, but we want to help keep the magic of fandom alive, we want our artisans and merchants, our performers and creators to have outlets, and we want fans to be able to plan for future fun.
We will be complying with all State guidelines, and if the state says the show can’t go on, it won’t. But, even with that looming concern, we are willing to risk our time talent and treasure in the hopes that we will be able to run our show and give our Fannish family things to look forward to again.
