If you’re reading this, congratulations! You’ve managed to survive the first four months of one of the most cursed years in the history of humanity, AND yet another extended stretch between Otaku Ohana blog posts. I’d offer you a cookie, but it looks like the term “social distancing” is going to be part of our lives for a while longer, so to reward yourself, go support whatever local businesses you can instead, if you’re able. They could use the help.
So why have I been gone for so long? It’s a long story, and one that’s been sitting in my “drafts” folder for several weeks now. Maybe I’ll finish writing that and publish it some other time. Or maybe we’ll go another eight months between posts. I don’t know. The world’s gone crazy. KYAAAAAAAAAH
… umm. Ahem.
The point is, how are you coping with life these days? We’re entering another month of mandated sheltering in place; a month where we were supposed to have Free Comic Book Day and Kawaii Kon at that. The former is off the calendar for this year, while the latter is, for now, scheduled to do the Dragon Ball Z Fusion Dance with Comic Con Honolulu and take place Aug. 7-9, although we realistically could just be waiting for a legal “act of God” to kick in at some point.
There are a few ways to fill in those holes this weekend, though. Serving as a replacement for Free Comic Book Day is Alt FCD, a Facebook group that’s hosting streaming panels, comic creator Q&As, and — perhaps the biggest draw of all — a repository of dozens of free independent comics. The catch is that the group only exists for two days, today and tomorrow, May 1-2. So grab those comics quickly.
If you’re missing Kawaii Kon, there’s a virtual anime con, Anime Lockdown, taking place this weekend, with special guests Veronica Taylor (the original English voice of Pokemon’s Ash) and Kyle Hebert. Here’s their programming schedule; here’s a list of panel descriptions. They’ll be broadcasting live at twitch.tv/animelockdown until around 12:30 p.m. Hawaii time Sunday.
And then there’s Concellation 2020, the 32,000-plus-member Facebook group from which I bought the lovely con badge that you see at the top of this post. The tongue-in-cheek creation of Christopher Ambler, Concellation bills itself as “The SF&F con that’s always cancelled. Celebrate the con that never was – cancelled before it was even announced, Concellation 2020 is the event you wish you could have pre-opposed!” It’s been a great online venue to celebrate con culture and the various fandoms under its umbrella, and, for me at least, a nice way to break up a fair amount of doom and gloom that’s been constant on my Facebook timeline.
There’s so much more going on to keep people entertained in down times, but I’ll leave it at that for now. I just wanted to prove to myself that, y’know, I could still churn out one of these posts after so long. And apparently I can! Small victories. Hope all is well with you all, and hope to be back here again with another post sometime somewhat sooner…ish.
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