casbyness

Kuuru Pop? Not totally sure...

I remember on Saturday overhearing two Gold Pass holders joking that Friday's chill out room was so small that at the end of the day the staff simply threw it away into one of the bins at the venue :) That was amusing. I just hope nobody was still inside at the time!

Majorie Liu please! :)

Melissa Benoist and Bruce Campbell please! Ash vs. Evil Dead is serious business now, and Supergirl has survived a first series to continue even stronger. Oh and since Melendy Britt sadly had to cancel for 2016, please re-invite her!

Don't thank me, thank my inanimate empty wallet :) Between this and the Star Wars Celebration I think I exhausted the reserves, the reserve reserves, and all the emergency backups. Things got so bad my wallet had to separate its saucer section, engage LFCC using its main deflector dish, fire off all escape purses and finally initiate my bank account's self destruct sequence in order to defeat the costs of the past month "My God Bones, what have I done?"

Hey - me again. Just wondering aloud, could this have been what caused her to freak out a bit during the Saturday photoshoot? It was timed around 11am, just the right sort of window for her or her people to have seen it circulating between the morning autos and shoot, then react by going into immediate red alert mode: http://en.mediamass.net/people/famke-janssen/deathhoax.html I think I might have tracked down the number one suspect? If I was her bodyguard and had seen the initial posts, I'd probably have frisked anyone dressed as the Punisher as well! :)

Don't throw the Diamond Passes in the bin, those things are worth money. You could get a partial refund on your photos just by auctioning the Pass off :)

Ehh. Some people sponsor an animal for charity so they can donate towards a cause or people/person that they care about, without worrying much about the details of what they might get back besides the knowledge of what they've done. Other people sponsor an animal because they want to get the window sticker, certificate and monthly leaflets providing updates on what the animal is up to. Sometimes, people might be so embedded in the second type that if the certificate gets lost in the mail they'll phone to complain and demand another until they get a copy that they can proudly display on their wall alongside all the other trophy certificates they've collected by paying charities a bit of money each. They might do this even if the cost to the charity of reprinting and resending the sponsorship pack nullifies the value of the original donation. It all depends on the mindset, I suppose. Personally I'm in the first category when it comes to guests at conventions. I've already "written off" the money I'm about to spend as a donation to the guest and show-runners, in order to support both their respective works so that they all stay in business. Life is hard - both mine and theirs, so if all I get back from the experience is a glare and a botched auto or Polaroid then it won't bother me that much. Anything more than that is a bonus, really. I still did what I did, and know it, regardless of what the specifics of the encounter were. I didn't go to see Famke for me, I went for her. Not in the hilarious egotistical sense - I went along bearing gifts and things for her to sign that I thought she would react well to and be pleased by the sight of, as opposed to something I thought would bore or irritate her but *I* wanted in return for my hard-earned cash. Having a memento around to pass on in a few decades time (or sell on if things got really desperate!) is pretty cool, but I don't feel like I need the physical evidence in order to validate the experience (or, more importantly, myself).

Out of interest, I had to leave the talk on the hour to rush off to Berkoffs photo shoot (boy, if I had that time again I'd sure do it differently!) what did the interviewer say to insult Famke? It was a humorous slip on the guy's part, and to be fair he was already flustered by being put in a bad situation. The sequence of events was: - Interviewer/facilitator (I forget his name) asks for a final question, so long as it's short. A short question followed, leaving a tiny gap of extra time still to use up - Interviewer reluctantly and nervously agrees to one further question, so long as it's VERY short - Attendee proceeds to ask the longest and most complex question of the entire talk, made worse by the fact that what they asked had already been covered by previous questions (to paraphrase: "what was it like to work with Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Pierce Brosnen, etc and who would be your next leading man?") - Interviewer did a fine job of casually throwing out the first parts of the question and simple asked Famke who she's like her next male co-star to be. This had in truth also already been covered, but it gave Famke the chance to advertise her favourite male actor (Daniel Day Lewis), who I believe she's always had a thing for. So, good recovery by the interviewer, eh? - Not quite. He then commented (paraphrasing): "hmm,but Daniel Day Lewis is more of a gravitas/serious type actor, I don't think he'd ever do X-Men films..." - Oh dear. Typecasting much? - Famke then made a good show of calling the guy out and joking how he'd typecast her reflexively, not even thinking that she could also do other types of acting work. It blew over fine, but was a rough place to end the talk on and the poor interviewer instantly realised how big a faux pas he'd made just after rescuing the closing topic a few seconds earlier. Ah well. There are worse things that can happen... (EDIT: when I say "poor" interviewer I mean that sympathetically, not in the sense that he was bad at his job!)

The economics of your examples and those of a celebrity attending a convention aren't equivalent. An professional electrician's primary income and vocational reputation will live and die by the standard of their work and on-site behaviour. They've built their career around the electrician profession and customer feedback/word of mouth has the power to make or ruin them for life. They've worked hard to set themselves up, seek out customers, advertise and scrape together as much regular business as they can handle. Business that must go well, otherwise the phone will stop ringing. A professional actor's primary income is generated by their acting gigs. Parts that they might be (if a big star) handed freely or (of a small or new/ageing star) might need to fight tooth and nail to get via interviews, auditions, etc. Once famous enough, such an actor will constantly be receiving requests to engage in secondary activities - anything from attending a random wedding to guesting at a convention to sign autographs. These secondary gigs are like background noise. Yes - the actor is paid for them like any other job, but this work is not tied to their acting work, reputation as an actor or the advancement of their chosen profession. If anything, becoming infamous for bad behaviour during such sidelines probably benefits their core reputation, rather than impacting negatively upon it. Such antics certainly won't affect their persona in the same way that behaving unprofessionally on a movie set or upsetting a famous director/producer would. Showmasters goes to the actors to request their attendance at events. It's not the other way around (though I'm sure there will be a very small number of exceptions). The "work" an actor does is effectively downtime for them, a gap where they don't mind agreeing to engaging in something outside of their acting schedule so long as it's organised well and they're compensated for their valuable time. For your analogy to work, the electrician would need to either be doing the electrical work as a throwaway sideline that they were asked or begged to get involved with (e.g. their real job was building moon landers or inventing new electrical technology); or if they were a genuine professional electrician then the work they'd done for you would be a hobbyist sideline they pursued in (for example) making balloon animals at 10p per go as a way to relax and pass time between call-outs :) This is why guest areas at conventions are sometimes referred to as "celebrity zoos". The term is surprisingly apt - Showmasters run the zoo and it is they who will try hard to make events work and take negative feedback seriously, because ultimately it is they who lose out when things don't go well. In almost all cases, the guests themselves have no more professional stake in the feelings of attendees, the quality of their behaviour or anything but their own safety than your average zoo lion or polar bear. What are the zoo keepers or visitors going to do? Fire the lion? This isn't a buyer's market, the guests will just be as they are if there's a bad day where either their work ethic or manners falter and this upsets anyone then; oh well, it's time to go back to acting where they get paid £5m for five weeks work at their most beloved activity instead of £5k for a weekend of signing their name several hundred times while having their photo taken with another several hundred random strangers.

Famke didn't arrive until after 10:30am on Saturday which caused a bottleneck of Diamond Pass holders for the first half hour. After that point things went smoothly so long as you had a low-ish VQ number. For the vast number of attendees who arrived at Famke's queuing area at 10:30-11:30am: please try to research ahead and adopt a more serious approach to seeing high profile guests like Famke in future. I saw people appearing at 11:30am expecting to be able to join the queue, then acting out at the crew when they were handed ticket #500+ and turned away. Seriously, to get my low VQ number I arrived at 5am, practically ran to the VQ ticket holder upon entry and then waited nearby to ensure I was right at the front when my number range was called. There's a lot of competition for seeing the big names within a decent timeframe - if you really want that auto then you should either be buying a Diamond Pass or making a far more serious effort to get an early VQ number, not shouting at the poor staff when you don't get what you want. For my part, Famke was very nice to me but then I did present her with a Boston Terrier plushie (her favourite dog breed and the breed of her current dog too!) plus a copy of her movie to sign so I think I had set myself up for a positive reaction beforehand. I think between the end of the morning auto session and start of the photo shoot something bad must have happened. Perhaps something as simple as Famke not realising until it was too late that she wouldn't be afforded a respite between the two activities, but for all most of us know it could have been something more dramatic. It was clear from her talk that Famke is inexperienced with the whole convention phenomena. I think things would have been improved by the on-stage facilitator doing a better job of starting off with some Famke-promotion and official-sounding questions before the talk was opened up to the entire audience. Famke was obviously nervous and isn't the sort of person to break into long entertaining stories, she's also easily thrown off-guard by odd, repeating or difficult-to-hear questions. Also, being roundabout insulted by the facilitator during the final question didn't help matters either! I think before criticising a guest people should remember to approach the event with a mind to make life as easy as possible for said guest. If you're a big fan, shouldn't you care a lot about the guest's feelings and try to give during your interaction as well as take? A lot of the negative feedback I've seen seems to come from those who came with the intention of just paying to get something from Famke, as if she's just a soda dispenser and not a person. People who ask her to sign Goldeneye photos with "For 'XXXXX'" just so they can take those home like a war trophy and brag to friends over, never again paying any thought for Famke beyond what they could get from her. Anyhow, Since I didn't attend a photoshoot I don't share the uncomfortable memories of what went on there; but I think that the autograph sessions would have been far better (for her and attendees) if Famke had been set up with a proper booth alongside Jeremy Renner and Dolph Lundgren. Even if just for the sake of her concerned security and openly nervous agent who repositioned the floorplan standee to block photos and random staring from across where Ron Perlman's area would have been. Demand was clearly high enough to warrant a booth, and Famke (plus her staff) were in a very dangerous position during auto signing - the end of a long bank of tables with the only secure exit very far away, plus Ron's empty tables nearby for random attendees to congregate around in the hope of a photo or curious glance.

Have to say I did feel sorry for Gold Pass holders on Saturday, as it was clear even the first of them barely got any head start on us standard entrants and later GP holders didn't get any head start at all. Quite a few were complaining, for good reason.

Someone needs to make a simple video game, like a Space Invader ripoff, to give people a proper sense of what it was like for those crew members trying to cover five entry points and turn away/catch anyone who tried to enter paid talks for free. :) I ended up helping them out a little bit while waiting for a talk! Hopefully next time the area is secured with barriers. I don't blame the "intruders", the fact that some talks were free and the open nature of the stage area meant that many passer-bys simply assumed it was okay to sit and take part. Just about everyone who was informed otherwise took the telling off very well and just wandered away, I don't recall seeing anyone get fed up and protest after the situation was explained.

I thought he was a bit out of sorts when I met him for auto signing. He accidentally smudged his own auto a little (I don't mind). This was due to him checking through the comic I gave him to sign - I think he wanted to make sure it wasn't something dodgy just with an image of him on the cover (fair enough!) :)

Throughout Sunday, he looked like someone who was completely incapable of sitting still in a chair to wait for autograph requesters. A man of action! During photoshoots and conversations with fans, he was fine and looked happy. During lull periods at his table, he looked like he was listening to someone describe a car accident in detail. He was a funny contrast to nearby Terry Farrell :)