My Life In Fandom: When Folks You Know Approach Overnight Success

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that I once was a regular in the local SF fan con scene in Minneapolis, being familiar with many of the people running the local cons and their more-or-less unifiying organization.

The big local convention remains (for now) CONvergence, and it was (and, it pretends, remains) a big draw for talents with a national or international profile as CONvergence is (was) the highest-profile fan con in the region. I last attended in 2016, when the pronoun heresy took root, and already several former locals managed to use this convention scene to network their way into getting work in bigger media.

I'd mentioned before that author Scott Lynch comes out of this area, but he didn't need the con scene to get there; that was a fluke of the day that cannot be repeated now. On the other hand, someone who got started in this scene has started getting work--and by that I mean a gig in something you might actually have seen--and I didn't even realize it until I saw the name of the woman. The gig? The English dub of Gundam: The Origin. What was it? See below.

She was a shitlib then, and that means a Death Cultist now.

It's not like we were acquainted. We just crossed paths once or twice a year because we ran in the same circles, and I doubt she remembers me anymore than I did her before I checked to see if this was the same woman I once saw doing a hilarious GLAdOS impression at silly convention panels (and yes, she sang the song in that voice too; she had the chops then). It's akin to how I know Metokur is also a local, even though I am also certain we've never met; Jim's voice is a distinctive one that I would recognize had I heard it before. He and I had to have run in the same circles, which means that he too likely knows of Amanda even if he--like I--forgot about her as neither of us are in that scene anymore.

I really should not be surprised at these things anymore. I'll be 50 in a few years. People I once knew, or were acquainted with, should be in a position to boast significant achievements of some sort by now--even if they are "managed to not completely fuck up raising my kids" levels of ordinary--and a skim of the socials of people I once knew in that scene shows that some of them have (and most have been stuck for 20-30 years; fucking Boomers).

Oh, and one more thing you discover at this point: most people suck at their jobs, even if they have degrees to qualifiy for them, despite being on that job for 30 years or more because they never had a need to Git Gud so they never bothered and without that pressure they never will. (e.g. the horror of discovering an old high school classmate had become a public school teacher, meaning a Death Cult priestess out to brain-rape your kids, and yte she still managed to suck at both her purported and her actual job was quite the head trip.)

That's both sobering and comforting, so long as you're willing to exploit that fact to win over them.