Here's an interesting panel from AnimeIowa:

Most popular Shonen anime can be placed
in the same world in a timeline of events
and we have connected the dots!

The idea of connecting multiple previously-independent fictional 'verses goes at least back to Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton family, which tied such disparate characters and ( Read more... )

InConJunction is central Indiana's original science fiction convention, and has been around for over forty years. For us it's a hometown convention, which means no hotel costs and minimum travel costs -- which is a real plus for a vendor ( Read more... )

This weekend is Archon in Collinsville, Illinois, one of the Metro East suburbs of St. Louis. It's one of the few old-school science fiction conventions that's still doing well, although in many ways it's morphing into something more like a media convention, much as Visioncon in Springfield, Missouri has ( Read more... )

Given the change of hotel, some of the glitches are to be expected. But I'd really failed to anticipate the logistical issues of getting merchandise in and out of the dealers' room -- and how much time and energy they would consume ( Read more... )

arhyalon has a wonderful article on her Substack about the problem of fanfic, in which she casts light upon the problem with so many recent unsatisfying sequels, a problem that has led me to describe a number of them as "authorized fanfic." She gives us not only a great deal of food for thought on what makes even authorized sequels fail, but also some ( Read more... )

This was actually a Capricon panel discussion topic, but I didn't have time to get to it over the weekend. However, it really meshes with the concern I've heard from a lot of long-time fannish friends, that old-school fan-run conventions are dying as the younger generation goes more and more to the commercially-run comic conventions and anime ( Read more... )

By now Chicon 8 is winding down. If we'd gone as vendors, we'd be well into packing up and loading out -- although given the issues related to parking large vehicles in downtown Chicago, it's rather hard to imagine a situation in which we would've gone, especially after how much money we lost at the last two Worldcons where we went as vendors ( Read more... )

Today I thought we were going to get the lawn mowing taken care of, and in the evening we'd be going to the monthly meeting of the local sf club. Except things didn't go quite as planned. First, we had some miscommunications with the new lawn mowing people, so that got delayed until tomorrow. And then I get a message on Facebook that the club ( Read more... )

Over the last several days I've been outlining a sort of "guide to fandom" to serve as a lead magnet for my retail business list. I think I have most of the basics mapped out, but thought I'd run it past some other people to see if I'd left out any major topics before I get things written ( Read more... )

As soon as I saw this panel discussion topic on the ICON schedule, I knew it was one I was going to want to cover, at least partly because I've worked at an archival depository, two decades ago. I've also done articles on the history of printing, back in the days when there was still a market for freelance-written articles for ready-reference ( Read more... )