[ SECRET POST #6070 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6070 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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[Baldur's Gate 3]



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[Date a Live]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 56 secrets from Secret Submission Post #868.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

01. https://i.imgur.com/QIWASiw.jpeg

[(Anonymous)]

I believe you aren't from the US because only people outside the US who have no idea how fucking huge the US is, assume that you can easily drive anywhere to meet anyone who isn't already super close by lol

[(Anonymous)]

Right? I still haven't managed to meet up with people who are on the other side of the state line! Meanwhile I've got friends in Europe who are like 'yeah I was in another country over the weekend'.

[(Anonymous)]

+1000

Most of the conventions and meetups are in major cities, with all the congestion, traffic and expense that major cities in the US involve. If you don't live in or near one of those major cities, it can be at least a long day's drive to get there or much longer, depending on where you're going. That's not easy, especially if you're driving by yourself because you live in a small town, small city or rural area where no one else shares your interests.

[(Anonymous)]

There is no such thing as an easy road trip in the US. Having lived most of my adult life in Europe, I moved to America to be close to my elderly parents a few years ago. I’m an hour’s drive away from them. Next weekend I’m going on holiday three states away. It’s a 17.5 hour drive and I will have to break it into two days. My holiday spot is just four hours beyond the closest major city to my house. In the U.K. I lived outside of an average market town and was less than 10 minutes to the high street or the out of town shopping centre.

[(Anonymous)]

Which states?

[(Anonymous)]

My fandom friends are an "easy roadtrip" of 15 hours driving time away. That's JUST driving time, which is not really feasible if you don't want to endanger yourself and others, so it's a very tiring two-day drive, one way. The U.S. is very large, and outside of bigger cities, no, you don't necessarily have bunches of cons and meet-ups. A lot of people are in the same boat as you - in the middle of nowhere, etc. etc.

[(Anonymous)]

Easy road trip? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[(Anonymous)]

>easy road trip

I think you're thinking of the EU, anon. The US is too mcfuckin heug.

[(Anonymous)]

quietly sits over here in the "willing to take a 2-5 hour road trip to any one of dozens of cons in this region" corner. yall, please calm down. what OP assumes is not as unreasonable as some of you are making it out to be. is it 15 hours from here to DragonCon? Of course, but DragonCon is also 75K people and thousands of dollars in hotel costs, people who go there make it a yearly vacation destination. That's not the every other weekend jaunt OP is talking about. If you live in the central midwest you can get to...quick count...30 not-tiny conventions from Minneapolis to Columbus over the course of the year in less than 6 hours' drive, depending on where you are. As big as GenCon and as small as Anime Iowa. I've done as many as 8 in one year without leaving a tri-state region. Which was a lot, but I was young and capable of packing hotel rooms to save mmoney.

We really do have it good in fandom terms. I get you, OP. I wish I could tell you that all the cons suck and people are weird but we know that's not true. The only sad reality is that we still tend to spend most of our fandom time online and don't have near as many fandom friends to go meet as we'd like to. And when you get older, even the ones across the city are too busy with kids and jobs to meet up at the local arcade bar. I guess that's just life everywhere.

[(Anonymous)]

XD
This reminds me of a British manager I had who told me that he could drive through all of GB as a "road trip" in a day.
Meanwhile my lead at the time left for a 2 week vacation to drive through the Rocky Mountains west, making a short stop in Las Vegas to California (to Yosemite and then to San Francisco) and turn back around to come home.
He only traveled through 4...(maybe 5) states. LOL

The US is a HUGE country. Unfortunately, road tripping to a friend's place and then to a con is really hard to get done unless you or a friend happen to live in a place where a lot of cons happen (Cali, Nevada, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Illnois, New Jersey, Arizona being the ones I can think of at the top of my head).
Or you/your friends can travel.

Although, NGL, I do understand how lucky US fans are to have cons happen here. There are a lot.
But I do also know that it's pretty hard for poor fans in the US to participate. =( I can afford to travel and go to cons and be able to have fun now, but I don't really have any fandoms nor friends to go to cons to anymore.
But back when I was active in fandoms in my youth...it was really painful to see/hear friends talk about cons and events they attended. Feeling like those small cons were impossible dreams for me. I had no means to go.

I hope you can travel and go to a con and meet some friends one day, OP.

[(Anonymous)]

There are online cons or online versions of in-person cons. Which is certainly not the same, but perhaps more helpful than Americans being angry about long drives.

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who lives in the UK, I do agree that I get a bit jealous of all the Cons in America - especially when you get really specific ones that just would never happen here. There are conventions here, but no where near near the same amount.

Also getting merch through shipping is a pain. I don't even bother with getting fancrafts from Etsy unless its within the UK, because the shipping is ridiculous (I was contemplating buying stickers from a tiny fandom that just have nothing in terms of official merch - but getting a single sticker from America meant paying £15 for postage; and that doesn't include the potential additional if it gets caught by customs).

[(Anonymous)]

Which country are you from, OP?

[(Anonymous)]

I was into roadtrips when I was younger, but it takes 7 hours to get across the state of California and I’m just not into that anymore. That said, a round trip flight from NorCal to SoCal is about $130 so between the Bay and LA, I know I’m pretty lucky when it comes to fandom things.

[(Anonymous)]

Ninety bucks for shipping? Damn, that sucks. I’m sorry, OP. Shipping usually doubles the price of whatever merch I order from overseas, but I know we’re lucky because we don’t usually deal with customs fees.

I hope you’re able to go to a con in or near your country one day! I live about two hours away from LA and have gone to Anime Expo, but I’ve always found it really draining. My city recently started doing local cons and they are way more fun than AX. Sadly, I’ve never met any of my online friends. Not even the ones I’ve known for more than a decade. We’re all too far from each other.

[(Anonymous)]

Fellow non-American fan, throwing my sympathy! It's worse when you're from a non-English-speaking country so the fandom for what you like is very small and difficult to find...

[(Anonymous)]

Also, look, as someone who does live in one of the megalopolis parts of the US: if you live in a major urban area in another part of the world, you can probably also do fandom meetups! You just have to do the work!

I was a fan around here for years before I stumbled on a group of people doing regular fandom meetups; that has started up and died down a few times in the past two decades as different people got tired of doing all the work of planning and hosting. A few years after my first meetup a different group of fans put in the *incredible* amount of work to run and publicize a local fan-run con, about five years after the previous one had died to organizer burnout, and that helped a lot more in building connections among local people who were in fandom. If there's an advantage to being in the US it's only that fans of one sort or another around here have been doing that community organizing work unbroken since the SF clubs in the 1930s, so it's a little easier to get started.

I still don't know anyone local who's in my current main fandom, though, even though it's one of the biggest AO3 fandoms ATM, because none of my local fandom friends followed me there, and if other people in the fandom have made the effort to put together in-person meetups near here, I haven't found them yet. The only person I talk to about it whose location I know lives in Europe.

tl;dr : if you live in a rural area you're screwed for in-person fandom regardless of where you live. If you live in a really large urban area you probably *can* find enough local fans for a meet up or con (even if it's only a dozen people or so) but someone has to do the work to build the community and organize the meetups. (Also, you have to be willing to hang out with your local fans even if they aren't exactly the kind of people you'd hang out with if you had the pick of the internet.)

[(Anonymous)]

I flew to EU (Germ and uk) from not-US for a few fan conventions. Idk why anybody'd want to visit USA especially for fan events. This's just silly.

[(Anonymous)]

You all are so annoying.
It's still easier to ride 20 hours than fly for 20 hours and then ride some more. While managing currency where this fucking ticket to a con is half of your month's work. Oh. You are in rural USA? Now try being in rural Russia, China, Brazil or Australia. This countries are So mUcH sMaLlEr.
Also managing your fucking timezones is a bitch. Oh, I have so much fun having to learn when I need to post my fanart to get more than couple of likes /s Oh I just liiiiiiike coming here and make a comment in a middle of your night and never have a normal conversation.
OP was frustrated and bitching and people going "but America" on them is a top clown behavior

[(Anonymous)]

lol @ the Americans rushing in to tell hOw HugE AmuRiCA is while missing the whole point of the secret

OP, I feel you. At least Americans can go to cons because their country has tons of them and get things easily shipped to them.

[(Anonymous)]

I try to look at the bright side: I can't go to the cons and will never spend that much money on shipping + custom fees so in the end I save up money because I can't spend it! LOL BIG WIN FOR ME
Plus a bonus: thanks to the limitation of living in a small rural town in EU and wanting to participate in fandom and have good fandom stuff I can show off I got to pick up a few skills: English, drawing and sewing. I can't have prints delivered to me so I just said fuck it and began drawing myself. Sewing is not for cosplaying, but because I gift fandom related bags and accessories (usually napkins, towels etc) to my friends.
But yeah, still envying the USA people for their relatively inexpensive merch...

[(Anonymous)]

OP: makes wrong assertion about America
Americans: correct OP
OP: whines about Americans talking about America

This thread is wild and I love it!

[(Anonymous)]

Damn, a lot of sensitive people in this section 😧

[nanslice]

There are a lot of annoying Americans in this thread. However, I understand what you're talking about OP; I do live in one of the bigger cities in the US and there are about 8 conventions I want to go to in the coming year (and that's just the cons I want to go to; there are loads more that I'm not interested in).

Granted, I moved here from a very rural area of the US, so I also get where the Americans in this thread are coming from, but there's definitely a US-centric side of fandom and I think it's pretty disingenuous to claim there isn't.