Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Canadian ice skater Kevin Reynolds did his routine in the Canadian national championships using the theme music (Tank!) to the anime series Cowboy Bebop while dressed as Spike, one of the lead characters from the series.



According to the io9 article where I saw this, he placed third despite a fall during his routine.

Thanks to whumpdotcom, here's a wonderful marching-band performance of Tank!, the opening title to Cowboy Bebop:


I may be wrong, but I think the band's footwork is meant to evoke the actual opening titles:

Much of this weekend has been taken up with testing and filling in details of the Westercon San Jose in 2011 bid web site. While SFSFC had made the "go" decision about ten days ago, we didn't want to officially announce the bid until we had a web site in place and a way to accept memberships by PayPal. Of course, it's nearly impossible to keep such a secret among a group of eleven people, and things began to leak out, sometimes getting a tad distorted in the process. (This was one reason I firmly denied bidding for a Worldcon a few days ago.) We thought it important to get the word out this week, no later than Monday, before this year's Westercon, as we're planning the official kick-off party there.

( A 'lazy' weekend? )

For all that I got a lot done this weekend, I feel surprisingly lazy, but part of that is trying to save up strength for the trip to Westercon.

Sac-Anime is an anime convention in Sacramento. The most recent one (not the one its web site points to, which is next year), was July 13-15 at the Red Lion Inn Sacramento. (Note to people who haven't been to Sacramento since the 1985 Westercon: this is the "Sacramento Inn" that was the overflow for that Westercon -- I stayed in this hotel during Westercon 38. It was also one of the sites where Sacramento's Eclecticon was held over the five years that we had it.)

This apparently is a for-profit show run as a living for its organizers, which affects the tone of the event entirely, I expect. hazelchaz has his review of the con, which he was attending to promote Anime Los Angeles.

Anyway, it was this review that really surprised me, particularly this bit:

Some of the masquerade contest rules were really outrageous, especially the college rule. If a cosplayer graduated from college they are considered a professional cosplayer and may not enter.

What an amazingly stupid rule! It makes no sense on any level that I can see. Is it meant to be an age limit? If so, state it that way -- but it's still a dumb rule even if stated as an age limit, not an level-of-education-completed one. And what's the reason for it, anyway?

The reviews I've read make me glad I didn't make the trip up to Sacramento last weekend, even though I wasn't all that busy.