Interview with Johnny Weir

Sometimes I remember that I’m a professionally trained journalist and climb back out of my shell, and Do The Thing. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to interview one of my figure-skating idols since… god, since Johnny and I were BOTH kids (I’m only a few months older than him).

I remember Johnny standing up and quieting down the audience in the stadium when the Olympic judges robbed him of a medal, holding his bouquet and wearing his flower crown and being the better person. That was a pretty defining moment for me in general fandom; I was furious on his behalf, because of the homophobia of the judges and the commentators alike.

So, getting to watch him enjoy a little anime about figure skaters celebrated for their talents regardless of their orientation, that has direct shout-outs to him within the show, has been cathartic.

Read the Interview: http://thegeekiary.com/johnny-weir-watched-yuri-ice/40241

Now I’m going to need everyone to focus really hard on this image, okay? Believe it will happen.

FANDOM SPOTLIGHT: SPN Anti-Bullying

Welcome to our first Fandom Spotlight article! This series is part of our IndieGoGo campaign to bring you better coverage at San Diego Comic-Con. The first person to claim a Fandom Spotlight did so anonymously, and asked that we put the Spotlight on the SPN Anti-Bullying project. As we’re huge supporters of the account and frequently give them a Follow Friday on Twitter, we were very happy to do so!

We reached out to SPN Anti-Bullying and chatted with them about how they started, what their goals are, and how you can help with their mission. Geekiary contributor Emily Rose is the founder and a moderator of SPN Anti-Bullying, and was surprised and honored that an anonymous contributor chose to bring attention to the campaign.

Read the interview

#ProfoundLove Valentine’s Rewatch

What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than by suffering (and emphasis on suffering) along with two idjits too stubborn to admit they’re in love? We’re going to be having a Valentine’s Day party in the Destiel fandom, and want to watch a few episodes with each other to celebrate!

We had a poll on Twitter to select people’s top episodes for the rewatch, and came up with these five episodes. From the sparks flying with Castiel entering Dean’s life, through to a jilted lover, from “It’s been a long time since I’ve laughed that hard” to “We’re family. We need you. I need you,” we’d love for you all to join us as we celebrate Tumblr’s top OTP on Valentine’s Day.

Saturday, February 14th starting at 12PM US Central Time (convert to your timezone here)

•  12PM  4×01 – “Lazarus Rising”
•  1PM    5×03 – “Free To Be You and Me”
•  2PM    5×14 – “My Bloody Valentine”
•  3PM    8×17 – “Goodbye Stranger”
•  4PM    9×06 – “Heaven Can’t Wait”

Each episode lasts approximately 42 minutes, giving you 18 minutes at the end of every episode to take a small break!

Join us in live tweeting the event with the hashtag #ProfoundLove to meet other Destiel shippers and share in this story we love! Can’t watch? Hop in anyway! Valentine’s is all about the love, so post your favorite fics, fanart, metas, tropes, and caps.

#ProfoundLove Valentine’s Rewatch

What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day then by suffering (and emphasis on suffering) along with two idjits too stubborn to admit they’re in love? We’re going to be having a Valentine’s Day party in the Destiel fandom, and want to watch a few episodes with each other to celebrate! After asking around on Twitter, we’ve come up with a list of potential episodes selected for their shippy content. Now it’s time to pick which ones you want to see together!

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How you can help your show succeed

I’ve recently fallen in love with the show Dominion, on SyFy, and was asked what viewers both in and out of US can do to help the show build social media buzz, and generally how fans keep the show on the air. While this (overly-long) primer is directly aimed at that show, it holds true for any other television show you want to support. Hope it helps!

How to help Dominion succeed:

TWITTER:

Whether you’re in the United States or abroad, tweet during the Nielsen Window if you can at all! For three hours before, during the episode, and for three hours after the episode (local time) anything on the Dominion hashtag will help the show’s Nielsen SocialGuide ranking. SocialGuide covers four units of measure:

• Number of Tweets: Obvious. How MANY tweets we put out during the episode. Tweet, fans, tweet like the wind!
•  Unique Authors: How many individual Twitter accounts use the tag. (So even if you can just pop in once to tweet the tag on the go during the ep, you’re really helping out more than it seems!)
• Impressions: How many times each tweet was seen. This is why RTs help so much!
• Unique Audience: How many different people see each tweet. This is why it helps a lot when accounts with larger followings pop into the discussion, because it broadens the audience for the tweets (and retweets).

There are two brackets of this on SocialGuide: Live + Same Day (they measure Impressions/Unique Audience all the way until 5AM the next morning!) and Live + 7 Day (all the episode-timeframe tweets Impressions/Audience through a week). The ranking takes ALL OF THESE MEASURES into account. So it’s important we push this from all angles, not JUST the number of tweets, though that’s easiest for us to track!

AROUND THE WEB:

Twitter is IMPORTANT, but it is NOT the only measure of social media activity. The image below tells you another VERY significant way that you can help the show.

IMDB:
Rate the show, and EVERY EPISODE of the show, on IMDB! It’s easy, and you can use your Facebook Account to log in. IMDB is an Alexa Top 50 rated website–one of the 50 MOST USED, MOST INFLUENTIAL sites on the entire internet. It is, quite simply, the number one resource for all things TV and movies. Rotten Tomatoes? It’s not even Top 500! When you rate an episode on IMDB, you are effecting how potential viewers see the show and whether they’re likely to check it out. You’re telling advertisers how popular a show is by how many clicks it’s getting, you’re telling networks how it’s being received, and you’re even helping actors/creators because IMDB often stands as their digital resume to the world. I can’t stress how important this site is enough. Do Dominion a favor and rate it whenever you get the chance, wherever you get the chance (TV.com, Show Ratings, Rotten Tomatoes, wherever!) but never skip the IMDB. You don’t have to write a long review on it (though you’re welcome to!) just use the star system and grade the episodes.

PLAY IT AGAIN!
Didn’t get the chance to watch the episode Live? Watch it within 7 days (within 3 if possible!). Nielsen tracks Live +3 and Live +7 as very important measures of show success. People tuning in on the DVR, as well as legal streams and downloads, are all VERY helpful to the show. You may not see the measure unless you go looking for it deliberately, but you’re still helping out even if it feels a bit late to. You’re ALSO helping out if you watch the show AGAIN through a different method. So, you see it on the TV? Go watch it on SyFy too! (Pro-Tip. If you DO have the patience to sit through the commercials, do so? They also measure how many times the commercials are watched, to report back to advertisers. So, mute it, wander off, get a drink, use the restroom, but if you can let those commercials run you’re helping. If you can’t, you’re still helping, but you can feel righteous in watching those ridiculous little ads and judging them if you do).

VIEW AND COMMENT ON ALL ARTICLES:
This is going to seem self-serving, because I WRITE some of those articles, but bear with me okay? Online news sites write news based upon what will get them viewers on the site. The reporters are often paid based on the traffic they get, and the site as well. If a topic isn’t drawing readers, it’s not going to keep being written about. I come from the Supernatural fandom, and we’re a loud, contentious, pain in the butt fandom more often than not (I say this with love, and full understanding that I am myself loud and contentious), but boy do we get ink because we voraciously read anything related to the show. Readers = Articles. Articles = Publicity. Publicity = Greater Reach. Greater Reach = More Audience. More Audience = Show Longevity. It’s a continuing chain, and it ultimately depends on you, the fans. When news sites send reporters to something like Dominion at Comic Con, what they’re doing is placing a bet on what will get them some audience — they picked THAT panel over others, they wrote the article, they put it online, and they wait to see if it’s going to get any readership. If it doesn’t, they’re probably going to bet on a different panel next time. It can be a really great thing for the show when we’re active and checking things out, or it can really make something wither away no matter HOW good it is.
(That said, I’m going to write about it either way because I write a lot, and write what I love. But go hit up all those news sites that gave some love to Dominion at ComicCon, and show them some love in return. Link to their articles, spread the word, get other people on there, have discussions in the comments or just leave an attaboy for the writer. You’ll see, it can go far!)

TRENDING EVENTS:
Trending events are different from the live-tweeting of the show. The goal of a trending event isn’t just to help the show’s SocialGuide ranking, as above, it’s to reach a new audience or convey a specific message. You will almost never see the show tag itself trend–that’s because it’s next to impossible to trend a tag that has a regular stream of traffic on it. Twitter’s trends are meant to be like a news ticker: they only capture sudden worldwide, national, state, city surges in traffic on a specific topic, otherwise you’d see common words/phrases/tags that we use every day, in every tweet, popping up as trending all the time. (I expect Twitter’s trending would be “LOL,” #GPOY, #YOLO, celebrity names, etc if they didn’t filter this way). So why do we trend things? Because trending puts the topic in front of the worldwide audience. For the duration of the trend, your chosen tag is in front of people who wouldn’t normally know anything about your show. It can catch interest, raise awareness, and when combined with the show tag all of those people seeing your tagged tweets greatly impacts the Impressions and Unique Audience of SocialGuide. The trick to trending is that you pick an episode-related or campaign-related secondary tag, spread the word on social media (Tumblr posts, Facebook posts) and spread it on Twitter through things like banners/spaced out messages (ex: “Use Tag “RenewDominion” during the event!” – don’t butt the hashtag up against the phrase) in order to make sure that traffic flow isn’t there before the event itself. Then, at a predetermined time (the start of the episode’s first/East Coast airing, usually!), everyone tweets the heck out of that secondary tag. Keep your tweets coming, pair it up with the show tag (ex: “Tom Wisdom’s smile is made of sunshine and roses! #Dominion #RenewDominion”) and go to town. Not sure you’ll be there to help? Set up a queue of tweets for yourself! Set the time, load it up with pictures, images, lyrics, your favorite things about the show, random commentary, whatever it is, and then let it go.

CHECK IN TO WATCH THE SHOW:
Not a TVTag person? Me neither. But I’ll still check in when Dominion is on! Everything like that raises buzz just a bit more, and it feeds into the same cycle above as the news articles.

CREATE! HAVE FUN!
The show can be amazing (and it is), but I pretty loudly advocate for fandoms because fandoms are extraordinary. YOU GUYS are extraordinary. You’re already proving it by being here! So, write fics, make art, be brave and make friends! You’ll be helping the show by building community, by piquing people’s interest, but also you’ll be making the Dominion fandom even more awesome. It’s more important that you go out there and you have fun with it than you do any aggressive campaigning to pull people in–fun can entice people all on its own, and will create a sustainable online community from a bunch of people with obviously excellent taste in TV.

❤ to you all! – ExorcisingEmily

Dominion: Sins of the Fathers

Many shows start strong and peter out; Dominion has been picking up steam every episode, both in terms of advancing the plot and generating online buzz. Dominion’s cast and crew could certainly give tips to seasoned shows on how to engage viewers directly with humor, respect, and verve, with the show-r
unner, stars and crew easily accessible, responsive, and incredibly fandom-positive. Fan interactions aside, it’s the story that takes center stage every week.  “Black Eyes Blue” was a testament to how far the characters of Dominion have come in six short episodes, completely putting to rest my fears that the people would be overshadowed by the tome of mythology that Dominion has to draw upon.

Each character’s motivations and secrets are coming into play, revealing central conflicts which draw more from human experience than the “Heaven got pissed at Earth and declared war” story that began in the movie Legion and carried over into Dominion. While Legion relied heavily on CGI, body horror and effects, it’s not necessarily Dominion’s signature winged higher angels or ‘Eight Ball’ wall-crawling lower angels that are the true monsters.

Dominion offers a very human conflict, wrapped in an appealing package with themes that resonate with viewers. The ensemble cast portrays them to meet a range of human frailty and strength. In many ways, this is a show about the destruction and reconstruction of family. From Claire’s heart-breaking final scene with Clementine, to William’s rib-breaking scene with David, “Black Eyes Blue” pointed the spotlight directly at the divide between generations.

Read More on The Geekiary!

Dominion: Syfy’s Newest Post-Apocalyptic Show Takes Wing

Take Supernatural, Battlestar Galactica, Terminator, and blend well with Judeo-Christian iconography, and you’ve got the makings of SyFy’s new show, Dominion.

Based 25 years after the near-destruction of humanity at the hands of the lower-ranking angels of Heaven and the Archangel Gabriel, Dominion has hefty mythology to work through for viewers. Given it’s a continuation of a movie with generally negative critical reviews (“Legion,” released in January 2010), Dominion has a lot to accomplish as it gets its legs under it.

Don’t let yourself be scared off, though—if shows drawing from B-Movies as their premise were summarily dismissed, where would the Whedonverse be? Can Dominion do what Buffy the Vampire Slayer did and build a rich, sustainable storyline out of an admittedly campy flick? The jury’s still out, but here’s my spoiler-lite take on what works for the fledgling show, and what we still need to see, after viewing the first three episodes.

Read the rest on The Geekiary!

Supernatural Pre-finale Roundtable Discussion

This Supernatural pre-finale roundtable features Geekiary administer Angel, frequent contributor Emily, and special guest blogger Dot (blog).  We dive into some of the questions regarding themes from the seasons, thoughts about the finale, and what we hope to see in season 10.

Popping back up at the Geekiary for this round-table discussion of what we expect for the end of Season 9, what we hope for in Season 10, and the relationships and characters of Season 9! I’m a little critical again, just as forewarning to my readers, but it doesn’t mean I love the show any less.

All the love for Angel and Dot, as well, who I absolutely adore debating with on Twitter and Tumblr and podcasts alike!

Supernatural Design Challenge

“Family Don’t End With Blood,” a design featuring iconic items representing Team Free Will. Voting is active on the Supernatural Design Challenge, and five winning designs will be produced on licensed merchandise. You can vote for as many designs as you’d like! This one is the poster version of my t-shirt entry.

https://supernaturaldesignchallenge.com/designs/team-free-will-7.html