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Conventioning, verb: A term used to describe any activity related to conventions, be it attending, organizing, or otherwise participating.

Fandom already has several gazillion blogs (including this one), and several gazillion more pages on various social networks. But so far, with all the various social network sites (MySpace, Facebook, etc), there don’t seem to be any social networking sites specifically for fans. (Or if there are, nobody’s invited me!)

So I’ve created the Conventio.ning network. Although the main focus is on the world of conventions, all are welcome.

It’s very small right now, but I’m hoping it will grow over time. Please stop by, check it out, and be sure to invite your friends!

The Conventio.ning web site can be found at: http://conventio.ning.com/

It’s not unusual for a convention to cross multiple genres — most SF conventions book a few Fantasy guests and there’s certainly no rule which says gamerooms are the sole provence of gaming cons. But every so often I still run across an event which manages to combine things I hadn’t previously considered.

A few weeks I was contacted by the organizers of Scout Con. It’s a one-day Science Fiction event in Tampa being run by the local Boy Scout council.

Science Fiction and the Boy Scouts? Well why not? A good number of SF heroes seem to live by the motto “Be Prepared.” That aside, I think it’s kind of neat that a mainstream civic group such as the Scouts would think outside the box and hold a con. When I was in scouts, anyone who watched Star Trek or read anything by Isaac Asimov or Douglas Adams was regarded as somewhat unusual; so this sounds like a promising sign for the future.

Now if only I could get the Jaycees interested in doing something like that.

This being an election year, we’re going to spend the next nine months being bombarded with campaign ads. This morning it occurred to me that in convention dealers rooms, we’re probably going to see an abundance of T-shirts and stickers promoting various fictional Presidential tickets (e.g. “Picard/Riker 2008: The Team for the Future” or “Spock/Data 2008: The Logical Choice.”)

Those gags go back 10 or 20 years. Wouldn’t it be great to have a candidate from a more recent show? Then it hit me. We already do. One of the main threads in the first season of Heroes had to do with Nathan Petrelli’s Congressional campaign.

I didn’t have a lot of time this morning, but I’ve put together a few quick items on CaféPress. Check out the Fanboy’s Convention List online store. Based on feedback, I’ll decide how much more to do with that.

Updated 2-17-08: Apparently CaféPress considers “Petrelli for Congress” merchandise to infringe on NBC’s intellectual property. I had hoped this would be a permitted use, but so be it. It’s not the end of the world.

In the meantime, I’ve discovered what I’m guessing is an NBC-owned “Nathan Petrelli for Congress” site at http://votepetrelli.com/. The current status of the site seems to reflect the show’s story line. And who knows? Perhaps NBC is selling some “Petrelli for Congress” merchandise.

Joss Whedon has pretty much ruled out another Serenity movie, much less a revival of the Firefly TV series. The audience just isn’t large enough for such a movie to be the kind of blockbuster the studios want and he’s moved on to other projects.

Randall Munroe at xkcd.com however has come up with an idea for a really killer Serenity sequel, featuring a member of the Firefly cast.

Karen, a student at the Academic Magnet High School (reportedly the number 10 High School in the US) is writing a senior thesis on the topic of why people like to wear costumes. The student running the survey is herself a costumer.

If you’d like to participate, an online version of the survey appears at http://www.seniorthesissurvey.com

It’s not unusual for fans to build replicas of props in a favorite movie or TV show. You see that sort of stuff pretty much anytime fen gather. The really popular stuff – phasers, communicators, and the like – ends up being made available at the local toy store.

A more unusual event is when fans create something new that’s based on a movie and the toy companies decide to make that available too. Not because it was in a movie, not because there’s an established market for it, but because it’s just so right.

Take for instance the case of R2-KT.

Back in 2004, Katie Johnson was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Her father, Albin Johnson, was the founder of the 501st Legion Star Wars Costuming Club and when word got out, fans world wide started doing everything they could to support Katie and her family.

In April of 2005, Katie’s sister said she wanted R2-D2 to watch over her Katie the way he’d watched over Amidala in Episode II. The R2 Builder’s Club (a group that builds remote controlled R2-units) got involved and set out to build one, to be named R2-KT in Katie’s honor. When it became apparent that the droid wasn’t going to be ready soon enough, Andy Schwarz, one of the club’s members, repainted his own R2-D2 and dispatched him to watch over Katie until R2-KT could take over.

Katie passed away in November of 2005, but R2-KT has been accompanying members of the 501st as they visit kids in the hospital.

At San Diego Comic Con this week, Hasbro and Lucasfilms have released a limited edition R2-KT toy in conjunction with a $100,000 donation to Make-A-Wish. At a glance, it’s just a pink R2-D2 toy. But when you know the story behind the toy – it’s a lot more.

Links of Interest:

• Katie Johnson: http://www.heartofanempire.com/Katie/
• R2-KT Information Site: http://www.r2kt.com/
• Make A Wish Foundation:
  http://www.sc.wish.org/giving_pages/donate_by_phone.html
• R2 Builder’s club: http://www.astromech.net/

Cmdr Z recently passed along a link to a UK web site where participants can send in photos of their garden sheds. The site’s readers can then vote for the prestigious “Shed of the Year” award. A number of the sheds bear a striking resemblance to Doctor Who’s TARDIS.

This should come as no surprise to those of us who have gardens. Whether it’s a huge vegetable garden, or the tiniest postage stamp of a flowerbed, it’s a very familiar problem.

The sheer multitude of tools, stakes, fertilizer, pots, and so on needed to maintain even the smallest garden is so overwhelming that using a spare TARDIS is the only way to avoid having the shed occupy more square footage than the actual garden.

Back in August I gave my brother a copy of the Firefly box set. He’d heard of the show, but having no great interest in it, promptly put the discs to one side with plans to watch them “someday.”

“Someday” arrived last weekend.

During a phone conversation on Saturday, Dave told me he and his wife had watched the first several episodes. After some thought he agreed that it made sense for a frontier planet to have horses instead of cars (after all building new horses doesn’t require as much manufacturing infrastructure) but overall he was skeptical of the whole “spaghetti western” motif.

By Wednesday they had watched the first three discs and found themselves in agreement with those who feel that the Fox network executives who cancelled the show deserve to be consigned to “the special hell.” (The one normally reserved for child molesters and people who talk in theater.)

I got another email from him this evening. His daughters aren’t old enough to watch the show, but he’s taught them to sing “The Hero of Canton.”

(more…)

Technorati is loaded with blog entries about what happened when Flanvention was cancelled at the last moment.

Not only did the California and San Francisco Browncoats put together their backup event in a mere 24 hours, a number of Firefly cast members (including Alan Tudyk who had previously cancelled his Flanvention appearance) also showed up to show support for the fans.

An attendee going by the moniker of “TheOneTrueB!x” posted a Flickr stream with a number of good photos including Christina Hendricks (Saffron/Yolanda/Bridget), Alan Tudyk (Wash), Mark Sheppard (Badger), Adam Baldwin (Jayne) and, of course, Cap’n Reynolds himself, Nathan Fillion.

So despite the lack of the convention everyone had been planning to attend, it appears as though something shiny may have happened after all.