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

#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

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

The Chewbacca Defense, Argumentum Ad Nauseam, and other manifestations of our Broken Base

So, that last blog post was interesting. Not just because of the article itself, either, though I think my point was made and well received overall by its intended audience, but because of the reaction to it.

The first comments were general support, enthusiasm, and an outpouring of why people are interested in the Destiel pairing. The straw man argument to move Castiel to the spin-off because of his popularity was dismantled, and I pretty much stepped back and let people talk. And then I made a tactical error, as far as preservation of smooth sailing is concerned. I called a hater a hater and asked them to stop, and painted a target on myself. It was fascinating how things changed after that.

WordPress isn’t Tumblr or Twitter. WordPress has a vast array of tracking tools, visitor logging, pingbacks and the like built into the back end of the site; it’s why so many popular blog sites and news sources and such use WordPress, so they can get information about their readers and know where they’re coming from and what they’re interested in.

I’ve never really cared about it before. I mean, the traffic to my blog hasn’t exactly been staggering because I rarely ever posted on it anyway. It was a holding place for links to other things I’ve done and for a couple of personal remarks. So, where did they come from?

The Destiew tag on Tumblr. SPN Anon Haven. A few individual J2/Wincest blogs and Twitters, where they were cross-posted with the intent of drumming up opposition. It’s interesting to note that even after that endeavor to send contrary opinions my direction, the majority came from one individual.

One IP address, using 17 different names, posted 26 times in the comments of my blog attempting to create the appearance of a majority. Even going so far as to sometimes post “I agree!” in another name on their own comments.

Julia, Elizabeth, Kelias, WinchesterSandra, Jjjjjj, Divinity, Alexandra, Serena, J2Bells, Fangirl09, Samantha, Kelios, Karola1001, Elaiyana, Viktoria, Sherley, Emily, IronMan.  These are all the same responder. Same IP address. Same email address. Same source reference link.

Please reconsider your behaviors. You’re unhelpfully making your segment of fandom look unreasonable and ridiculous and you’re attempting to force dichotomy where there is none.

See, while my post was empowering to the Destiel fandom, it was not me encouraging the dismissing of the opposing viewpoint. Why, then, was it treated as something that needed to be trolled in an attempt to force me to give up my opinion? When that tactic went sour, I was labeled a  “Crazy Pseudo-Intellectual Bitch.”

The sort of Proof by Assertion method that was illustrated in my blog comments is pretty much constant within the fandom itself. The attempts to belittle an opinion just by saying it’s a minority opinion or inflating apparent opposition are what prompted my commentary to begin with.

Supernatural is a Broken Base fandom. It’s been that way for a very long time, and every single episode, every convention, every interview tends to fracture the fanbase even further. We’re getting worse, and it’s pretty damn scary to begin with. Half the time if you look through responses to an episode from opposing viewpoints, you wouldn’t even be able to tell they were watching the same show.

It’s a problem.

I can’t heal a fanbase with a Kumbaya and a cup of cocoa, but I can point a spotlight at the tactics being used to force and further a “True Fans” mentality.

Supernatural Dallas Con: Days 2 and 3

The Geekiary

Richard Speight Jr and Matt Cohen

Day two of DallasCon began not with an introduction to his own duo panel from Richard Speight Jr, but Richard and Matt Cohen hopping into the audience and prowling the center aisle regularly, their hilarious act ready from the start. If you’re hoping to answers about the Trickster, about young John Winchester or Michael, or want to hear about their Supernatural experience you’re going to be slightly disappointed.

It doesn’t matter what the question is. The answer is “My spirit animal is an otter.” This became the catchphrase of the morning, and then every questioner was told to pick a number between one and 30, at which point Matt would read out a corresponding ridiculous Texas law. Did you know it’s illegal to own a realistic dildo in the state of Texas? Neither did we! But we know now. There are at least three…

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Supernatural DallasCon: Day 1

The Geekiary

Supernatural’s convention in Dallas is famous for “bringing the boys home” to Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki’s home state of Texas. As the last convention before Season 9 of the CW series begins and with several episodes filmed, fans are hopeful for more information from behind the scenes, are searching for spoilers, and are hoping for new tales of the pranks and antics that the show’s cast are beloved for online.

Friday afternoon’s events featured Richard Speight, Jr. – known better to the fandom as The Trickster or the Archangel Gabriel – opening the convention and staying for Rob Benedict’s panel to continue the duo act they’re becoming well known for in the con circuit. Rob has admitted that he’s nervous in panels (“neurotic,” Richard teased him), but together they became a non-stop comedy act that kicked off DallasCon on a positive and upbeat note, long before Rob’s panel was…

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A view from the Den of Geek

So, in a house where there are murals in bedrooms ranging from Spider-Man to Doctor Who to Rapunzel and the Harry Potter trio, I only feel it fair that my own space be as geeked as the rest of the place. So, as you read this blog or poke through my art or troll my fics in comments, here: this is where I’m doing all this from.

Everyone should build themselves a temple of their geekitude. This is just one wall from mine.

In Which I Embrace My Geekery

So, I am a geek.

While this is not precisely a staggering confession for anyone who’s met me, heard me speak, or glanced my direction, I have always attempted to hide just how much of a geek I truly am. I believe this may have to do with having been ruthlessly bullied and teased in school for my rather diverse portfolio of geekitude. And so, I toned it down for public consumption, disappeared onto the internet, and managed to express my general insanity in various forums and means.

This is actually the first time I have ever put it all in once place. For the most part, if you knew me in one of my online endeavors, you didn’t know me from the others. If I role played with you, I kept you out of my fanfiction. If you read my fanfiction, I kept you out of my art. It was all based on a complex demographically generated algorithm. . .

Alright, that’s utter bullshit. I was nervous. Rather difficult, looking back at it, to imagine it that way: I mean, I wasn’t ‘trying to be taken seriously as a scholar,’ considering I was writing literary criticism on superheroes as a manifestation of the changing national consciousness of the United States and presenting it. I wasn’t trying to be taken seriously as an artist considering I spend nearly as much time painting Harry Potter and Spider-Man on walls as I do making logos and business identities (yes that counts as art–I do awesome work).  And hell, many of my roleplay family have known me since I was 10, so it’s not as if I have to hide that I can write from them, or that I write based on fandoms.

I embraced a general stigma of being a broad-spectrum fangirl and multi-genre geek. And I should stop.

So, this will be my attempt to change that, letting all that madness out in one place. Exorcising those demons, as it were.

And yes, I intend to continue getting full mileage out of the fact that they made a movie about exorcising a woman who shared my first and middle name.

So, welcome. Let’s get this party started.