Blogging about conventions
It is hard to believe that 2025 has already passed, but here we are. Was it a good year? Yes, and no. I managed to do some things, but failed with others. Surprisingly I visited fewer conventions than usually but some were pretty important ones.
2024 was a tough year. Full of joy and satisfaction, but also of sadness and frustration. Yet here I want to concentrate rather on the positive aspects, as this is what I want to keep remembering. I managed to visit 15 conventions – all except one I attended in person. There were also many other things happening last year!
Recently I wrote an article for the Journey Planet. Their “call for papers” for Famous Friendships theme was a temptation I couldn’t resist. Writing it was fun. I mean a lot of work, some if it hard but nevertheless a lot of fun. And I kept pondering – how to write more often?
When I look at my blog I have an impression it was a lazy year. But was it really? I don’t think so. At least I don’t feel like I got a lot of rest and time to be lazy. Yet what I see is that certain things did not go as efficiently as I would love them to. One of them being the blog itself.
I cannot believe it but it seems twenty years have passed since I joined fandom. Unfortunately I somehow missed the date. I should have been celebrating on 2nd March as my first convention – DOJIcon 2 took place March 2nd 2002. Twenty years – who would have thought? Certainly not me those twenty years ago.
The beginning of the year is a good moment to look back (and ahead as well!) and see how the previous year went. I did it last year and I am doing this now.
Last month I attended Imladris 2019 – my 200th convention. It was a great jubilee and I am so happy it happened to be at Imladris. Since then, I spent quite some time thinking about my time spent with fandom and how much I enjoy it.
A few years ago, I somehow learned about The Enchanted Duplicator. I found this book of extreme relevance even to nowadays fandom and I really enjoyed reading it. Knowing this, it may be no surprise for you to hear that when Geri Sullivan, the TAFF delegate, announced a trip backtracking the history of Irish Fandom (or parts of it), I had to participate in it. The tour took place on Thursday just before the Eurocon TitanCon (in fact, we had to miss first hours of the con).
I have been reading some Australian fanzines recently. I checked mainly Wild Goose by Roman Orszanski and iOTA by Leigh Edmonds. The 15th issue of the latter somehow reminded me of the fanzines I used to contribute to. Well, it is a good inspiration, I believe, especially since fanzines appeared as topic worth discussing during my GUFF trip.
I read a review of the Alita film today. And it reminded me that I had a nice fan art I obtained many years ago so I tried to look for it. And in the binder where the fan art was I had a bunch of letters in as well. They date back to the time when I joined a pen friend club. It was not a fandom-related activity itself yet at this time it was an important thing for my geeky self.