I’ll get around to posting pictures of what we got for Christmas (Sol Invictus) as the kids stay still for them.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to join a few more Discord servers — you can indefinitely mute notification noises from entire servers “until you turn it back on”, which is great — that have to do with gaming. I figured that it couldn’t hurt to be a member of more than just, like… two servers, and as much as I like Supernatural I didn’t want to put all of my eggs into the Supernatural basket. It’ll still be there, but I don’t want it to be the primary (or only) reason that I use Discord. I’ve also found that I don’t have to feel as though I need to hide participation in gaming activities like I do participation in fandom ones from those who know me in real life, and the more problematic aspects of participation in certain fandoms caused me to begin doing this in approximately… 2012. So yeah. Not only do I not know anyone in person who would be interested in fandom — all of my friends are the faithful members of the “general audience” that gets slipped into debates — but it’s also not something that I would feel comfortable bringing up to them, and that’s not something that I feel bad about. I want to continue participating in hobbies and interests, being able to talk about more of those hobbies and interests with all of my friends without first having to scrutinize whether or not I “should” dependent on what type of friend they are… and as stated, I don’t want all of my eggs in the same basket.

For the record, I don’t see this as a “goodbye” or me announcing that I am leaving fandom or anything.

It’s just me announcing that I may not be quite as available to do fandom-related things as I had previously been because I want to engage in other hobbies and interests as well. I may not be “around” as often in that sense, and that’s okay. But for the people who have known me longer than my participation in various fandoms, especially those that have known me as a gamer, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of them.

We are beginning to spike once again because of the Omicron variant, which seems to be able to side-step immunity conferred by vaccines to a point. Google updates this… whenever Google updates this, but it is still deeply concerning. I think the United States is going to be in a pandemic for awhile because none of us, at least as a whole, are willing to quarantine, everyone is rushing to get their kids back into school so that they can rush back into work, the whole nine. (And the rest of the world isn’t much better than we are right now.)

For some reason, TikTok erroneously “flags” videos of kids without their shirts on… even if the kid in question is male, which would make the whole thing not a problem. I’ve been Mentioning them on Twitter about this because Bub doesn’t like wearing shirts a whole lot due to sensory issues, but I’m sure a lot of you can see where this will probably go since TikTok has the most horrendous customer service and they’re pending a class action lawsuit payout for fucking around and finding out. Anyway, people from “the other side of the Supernatural fandom” (imagine me explaining this to other people, which I don’t because I do not talk about fandom issues or fandom anything in real life, not even to men I date… they don’t even know what television shows I like because we just don’t discuss that, so they know nothing of what I do in various fandoms, and I’d love to keep it that way, especially because they would not care since that isn’t anything we would have in common) found out that I Tweeted TikTok and made a big deal about it on their Tumblr. I guess if you’re going to say shit like “You don’t deserve money even if they are being unfair.” you can pay my entire disability check for me, because God only knows that these people attend conventions left and right.

At any rate, I look forward to you paying my bills.

I also look forward to the continued realization that I will never meet these people in person because I will never attend conventions, especially Supernatural ones. I might make an exception for SatanCon when this pandemic is well and thoroughly over with though, but I mean… that’s Satan. That’s a convention for Satanists. My big thing is that a lot of conventions do not allow you to carry or have self-defense tools on you, even if they are legal in your state or the state in which you’re attending the convention, and I don’t voluntarily go places that don’t allow me to carry my mace and switchblade for extended periods of time. When I am not out of the house and they are not in my purse, they are and remain in a safe in my closet.

For the longest time, I had actually forgotten about this in that I didn’t think about it because my mindset was “conventions are just not my thing,” being sure not to make it seem like I was passing judgment on friends and members of the same fandoms that I am a part of for… exactly as I just said, them not being my thing. But then I did remember that someone made the offer of funding tickets for me to an anime convention “if it was ever something I wanted to do post-pandemic”, although he was clear that if I didn’t want to, that was okay, I could simply never bring it up and he would assume that I would enjoy other geeky pursuits. But I did go to a LARP convention eons ago with someone who knew that it was my first convention, thought that I might like it, but would have been and was completely cool when it began to be referred to in conversations as “not my thing”. (It was enough “not my thing” that I never blogged about it.)

I didn’t mind the food, and I was even bought a necklace that I joked would go with the other necklaces that I had amassed over the years that I had a difficult time wearing due to skin allergies. This person bought me this necklace to have something to remember the experience by, and in a good way. I didn’t mind the gesture, and I should still have the necklace to this day. But getting back to what I wanted to write about, the convention made me uncomfortable. It might have been the number of people in attendance, the fact that everyone was extremely social and lively, the fact that it was a LARP convention (although the person in question thought that I might like it being a geek, there was the knowledge that I could never get into things like D&D)… it was basically a trifecta that all seemed to come together to make the experience uncomfortable for me, and this eventually telegraphed in my body language and facial expression. We got to go home early, and… this person… conceded that it might be LARP conventions that weren’t just my thing, or it might be the fact that I am not an optimal con-goer. I have known other people that have gone to varying types of cons over the years, especially since then, but I might have been — or be — telegraphing that it would be best for me not to attend these. My body language and facial expressions might say it for me here.

I’ve given it some more thought as I write this entry, and although I concede that there might still be a convention out there that I would like more, I wouldn’t mind not attending any more of them. And that’s okay.

I don’t want someone to pay money for one of these on a gamble and then me be like “I want to cut out”.