Of Ficcers and Oxtails and Colm Feore

[talktooloose]

Interesting weekend in which I didn't really catch up on my rest.

Saturday seemed to be wall to wall duties in which I finally found two hours to draw but Saturday evening was very interesting. Dexcon is a yearly comics fanfiction convention held in Toronto. I knew I wouldn't be able to attend the whole weekend (and wasn't sure I wanted to) but the organizer, Dex, said I could drop by Saturday night. I did and I had an amazing, inspiring time including meeting one of my fanfic heroes, minisinoo.

I was wandering the large complex that is the Madison Pub and Hotelerie trying to find the group. Finally I stumbled into one area and immediately saw ten laptops and a bunch of X-Men acton figures. I figured these were clues!

I had a really delightful couple of hours with some brilliant, insane fanfic writers. I notice that I'm not really good in crowds. I tend to gravitate to a couple of people and stay with them. As a result, I only really talked with three or four people including minisinoo and an awesome woman who writes under the name of Tangerine.

It absolutely fills my heart with joy to hear people speak with such love and enthusiasm for their fandoms. I'm not sure what, but it means something that Tangerine is devoted to the goal of slashing X-Men's Angel with whoever. Something about getting to the heart of the love in his character, she seems to realize, will unlock important aspects of the universe. To me, this seems to be akin to decoding why a certain funk bassline makes everything okay or witnessing the beauty of a perfectly executed dive in the olympics. Or better yet, striving to be that diver.

Enthusiasm, you see, is the greatest of blessings. Anytime someone tells me "I'm bored," I know they're not going to be my friend (unless it's in the context of a dull day-job). The world is full of undiscovered magic and if you don't see it, you're not looking carefully enough.

Maybe next year I'll attend the con and see if I can get others like lux_apollo and to_cry_about to come, too.

I woke up at 4:00 a.m. Sunday morning with my brain exploding plot points of Days of Becoming. The revelations were accompanied by panic about how big the story was and self-judgements about it being a waste of my time and energy. But mostly I was enthused.

I spent most of Sunday with my brother, working on the ever-expanding bar-mitzvah video. But it was a pleasant, if exhausting time. Me, him and Snake took a mid-afternoon break to pick up Albert's Jamaican takeout and return to the backyard to eat jerk chicken, curried goat and stewed oxtail over rice and beans with Steam Whistle beer.

It was wonderful to see my brother actually taking an hour for sheer pleasure in his ridiculous roller-coaster of overwork.

In the evening, we finally collapsed in front of the TV to watch the first half of Stephen King's Storm of the Century which is possibly the best King ever filmed (apart from Kubrick's The Shining). Maybe because he wrote it for the screen and it's not just a bad adaptation of one of his books. It is a stern morality tale which keeps its cards close to its chest until the climax. The amazing Colm Feore (a regular at the Stratford Shakespeare festival in Ontario) is the very scary monster.

Comments

[lux-apollo.livejournal.com]

You met minisinoo? I must express heartfelt envy. I had no idea there was a fanfic con happening. I actually had time this weekend to go to something like that, too. Funny that.

Yeah, maybe next year. We'll have a grand ol'party or something.

Ah Colm Feore. I really have to get to Stratford this year and see something. Especially if he's in it. I still have yet to see a Stratford production that bested the production a few years ago with Paul Gross as Hamlet, though. Now that was theatre.

[lux-apollo.livejournal.com]

By the way... is your icon rocker *nekkid* or is it just my eyes going funny?

the best King ever filmed

[oceanabliss.livejournal.com]

Yo, TTL, missed seeing you this year. I thought they did an excellent job on "Carrie", was horribly disappointed in the the Kubrick "Shining", which King redeemed when he re-did it as a miniseries. Jake Halloran (if I'm remembering the character's name correctly), the cook, was a major character in the book who ends up saving our hero's life. In the Kubrick version, he walks in the door, gets literally axed and that's it. Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the lead character made him seem like he was nuts from the get go, whereas Steven Weber's performance was a lot more nuanced and truer to the book.

Just my take on it.