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Wednesday, July 29, 2015
14 Adorable Pups Who Love "Harry Potter" As Much As You
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, July 29, 2015
The most adorable Potterheads you’ll ever see.
"I'm the real Harry Potter, but it's a secret."
"These glasses are all sorts of wrong on me."
"I'm actually just here because my human likes Harry Potter."
"I love my Gryffindor scarf!"
Can GeekyCon’s Founder Change Fandom For The Better?
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, July 29, 2015
“Oh, I want to learn how to shout orders in Dothraki!” Melissa Anelli, 35, is leaning over a small, round table, ripping a turquoise sticky note into tiny squares. She quickly writes something on one of the pieces and presses it onto a portable, platter-size whiteboard, which is already covered in neat, color-coded vertical rows. She’s trying to figure out where the panel about the Game of Thrones language might fit in the sprawling four-day schedule for GeekyCon, the annual fan convention that she co-founded (under the name "LeakyCon") in 2009, set to kick off in Orlando on July 30 this year.
“Should I go to that panel, too?” asks Sierra Fox, Anelli’s executive assistant, who is busy adding notes to a similarly mapped-out board on the other side of the table. Their laughter fills the small conference room of the shared workspace in the Midtown building that houses their tiny office. “I mean, if you’re going to start speaking Dothraki, I should be able to understand what you’re saying.”
If the fact that San Diego Comic-Con has 130,000 people in attendance during its four-day span and brings in over $135 million to the San Diego area is any indication, the business of fandom is thriving. The Harry Potter movie franchise has made more than $7 billion worldwide. Three of the top 10 highest-grossing films in history are Marvel superhero properties released in the last three years, and they have pulled in a combined total of more than $4 billion worldwide. Toy sales are expected to have a record-breaking year thanks to the pop cultural frenzy over Frozen, Minions, Jurassic Park, and the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You can’t swing a properly licensed replica of Mjolnir without hitting a Tumblr dedicated to your favorite Sweet Valley High book covers, a fantasy baseball league, and a group of people on Twitter talking about their favorite theatrical cast of Les Misérables. There’s never been a better time to like things, or more ways to show how much you like them.
Geeks might be inheriting the Earth, but not necessarily in a way that feels diverse or inclusive — especially at fan conventions. Blackface is somehow still worn. During a 2011 Game of Thrones panel at San Diego Comic-Con, actor Jason Momoa joked that he gets to “rape beautiful women and make them fall in love with me” as a positive aspect of working on the show. Groping, catcalling, and sexual harassment are so prevalent at many fan conventions that harassers refer to it as a sort of event of its own — “creeping at a con.”
Melissa Anelli, co-owner of the event-planning group Mischief Management and co-creator of GeekyCon, LeakyCon, and BroadwayCon, could change that. The former journalist has not only turned a love of Harry Potter into her life’s work — she’s done it by creating positive spaces in a male-dominated field that incorporate her naturally inclusive, feminist principles, and by encouraging fandom as a shared experience. Anelli is part of a growing wave of people inventing careers out of the nerdy things they love — and when you invent your career, you get to make all the rules.
Left: Cheri Root; right: James Dechert / Orlando Weekly / Via photos.orlandoweekly.com
Anelli’s status in the world of Harry Potter took a little while to take hold. She started reading the series during her last semester at Georgetown when her older sister insisted she needed something light in addition to all of her schoolwork. When she graduated with an English degree in 2001, bored and out of work, she started reading the series again and went searching online for more information on when the next book would come out. It was then that she found The Leaky Cauldron, a Harry Potter fansite named for the wizards’ pub frequented by characters in the book.
Anelli used the blog as her main source of Potter news and frequently sent the editors links to Harry Potter articles she found all over the web. In the fall of 2001, she scored a major coup by sending the site pages from the October issue of Vanity Fair, which featured an exclusive first look at the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone actors in full costume, the day before it officially hit newsstands. Anelli was a managing editor at The Leaky Cauldron by 2002 and gained full editorial control of the site by 2004, the same year she became a reporter for the Staten Island Advance, a daily local newspaper in her hometown. During that time, she met J.K. Rowling for the first time at a Harry Potter reading in London. “I love The Leaky Cauldron!” Rowling squealed when Anelli introduced herself, and later declared it her favorite fansite. Anelli started the popular PotterCast podcast in 2005 and, later that year, established her own LLC, Leaky Net. When she released her New York Times best-seller Harry, A History — an extensive look into the explosion of Potter fandom — in 2008, Rowling wrote the foreword. That year, The Leaky Cauldron’s forum had 75,000 registered users, up from 30,000 the year before Anelli joined.
Yet, while the all-consuming world of Harry Potter gave Anelli a place to comfortably blend her journalistic background with her pop culture obsessions, her work within the fan community was entirely voluntary. Then she met Stephanie Dornhelm.
Dornhelm, a California-based attorney, and Anelli first crossed paths in 2007 at Phoenix Rising, a Harry Potter convention in New Orleans. “There was this whole contingent of people [at Phoenix Rising] who were somehow affiliated with The Leaky Cauldron and many of us had never met before, so this was somewhat of a coming together of the group,” Dornhelm explains. Her father raised her on Star Trek and Star Wars, but Harry Potter was the first fandom she sought out on her own, gravitating to The Leaky Cauldron the same way Anelli had. At the Prophecy Convention, another Harry Potter–themed gathering that took place later that year, Dornhelm overheard that The Leaky Cauldron was planning a Harry Potter convention of its very own, and she jumped at the chance to help bring it to fruition.
Both women worked nonstop — and as unpaid volunteers — to pull off the first LeakyCon in Boston in May 2009. The recession had just started, and Anelli had to use $7,500 of her own money to get the convention off the ground; she says she’s still feeling the financial effects of it six years later, but it was worth it. Over the course of the three-day event, 750 Harry Potter fans lived out their favorite fantasy book series, attending events like “The Hufflepuff in All of Us,” “Wand Making and Lighting,” and “Snape Rehabilitation With Dr. Cynthia Cynical." Traditions were also born that year — like the Circle of Awesome.
“Basically there was this song ‘Dumbledore,’ by Harry and the Potters,” says Anelli, referencing the group widely known to be the pioneers of “wizard rock,” a genre of Harry Potter–themed music. “It goes slow and then it picks up into this great crescendo. Out of nowhere, someone actually grabbed me and said, ‘Melissa, look what’s happening!' There was just this giant circle on the dance floor [and] when the music picked up, everybody just rushed to the center, jumping up and down and singing about books. People were talking about that circle for weeks.”
Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News
Anelli and Dornhelm made things official and founded Mischief Management, an event-planning company that would eventually house all their conventions, after the second LeakyCon in 2011.“Melissa and I are like Kirk and Spock,” says Dornhelm. “She provides the inspiration and drives us all to shoot for the stars, and I am the one who brings us back down to Earth and helps implement her vision in a realistic way.”
However, they decided to make the new business their full-time jobs only after a remarkable thing happened during the August 2012 convention in Chicago. Actress Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood in the Potter films) got onstage to play bass with Harry and the Potters; the excited crowd of 4,000 completely flipped out, and didn’t stop screaming when Anelli and Dornhelm came out to say good night at the end of the show. “I started crying,” Anelli remembers. “I just looked at Stephanie and said, ‘Something is happening here, and we have to make it real.’”
Cheri Root
When I walked out of the bright, muggy morning and into the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando last July, it felt empty. As a lifelong reader of comics, I had attended conventions before; I stood in the hour-long maze to get into New York Comic Con in 2009, and got creeped out by strip mall sci-fi signing events in the '80s. I was ready for the immediate frenzy of bustling bodies and the long, snaking lines that greet you as soon as you walk through the door. Instead, a handful of young women stood smiling behind a small line of skirted tables, handing out LeakyCon badges to fully costumed attendees. A teenage white girl dressed as a Tom Baker–era Doctor Who, the long, multicolored scarf grazing the ground, complimented a young black girl on her gauzy, bright Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time costume as they picked up their badges. These strangers had the ease of two friends exchanging a quick bit of gossip between classes in a high school hallway; both smiled as they left and walked in opposite directions.
Rather than the marketing maze that bolsters most conventions — basketball-court-size banners hanging from the ceiling and bookmarks emblazoned with an author’s photo and next publication date — at LeakyCon, you’re immediately thrust into the best part of every convention: the vibrant audience making fandom their own via thoughtful, funny costumes and a shared interest in nerding out over pop cultural touchstones. Everyone was full of compliments for cosplaying; some even shouted quotes from their favorite TV show/movie/book across escalators at each other. A group of Hermione Grangers passed along hair-frizzing techniques to one another in the bathroom between panels; a Whomping Willow posed for pictures with a Gandalf. The scheduled meetups, broken down by fandom (Gryffindor, Sherlock, Teen Wolf, and so on), all had a friendly, welcoming vibe; you got a sticky ribbon for attending and people layered them on their badges like bright, rainbow-colored tails. It felt like camp.
And, more than any other con I’d ever attended, most of the attendees at LeakyCon were girls and women.
Cheri Root
Even though Mischief Management doesn’t keep track of the demographic information of its attendees, when I tell Anelli LeakyCon felt like the most feminist convention I’d ever attended, she agrees. “Convention space is a very male-dominated space,” she explains. “We didn’t realize that going in; we were just like, ‘We’re doing a thing!’ We came in like scrappy upstarts. Then we noticed that, hey, there are a lot of girls here finally finding a space to enjoy themselves.”
Pockets of various fandoms still struggle to accept that women constitute a huge percentage of pop cultural consumption, forcing an antagonistic point of view where there doesn’t need to be one. As was made loud and clear by last year’s GamerGate scandal, many girls and women are still being forced to prove their legitimacy in industries built around particular obsessions where misogyny is the standard.
Though Anelli luckily has been spared sexism from fellow fans, she laughed when I asked her to give me an example of misogyny she’s faced while putting together a conference. “I wish it was a joke!” she says. “But I just have so many.”
One time, at LeakyCon 2013 in Portland, Oregon, she and Dornhelm were paying a company to set up the hundreds of chairs needed for a panel, and Anelli thought they were being fleeced by the vendor. “I said, ‘I can do it faster than that! You’re overcharging us.’” When the man in charge smirked and said, “Go ahead,” Anelli started moving, setting up chairs as fast as she could. “We were arguing in between, and then he said, ‘Listen, hon.’ I said, ‘Hey, my name is Melissa. If you don’t like that, you can call me Miss Anelli, or ma’am.’” Her eyes are wide with disbelief. “That attitude of ‘sit down, little woman’ is everywhere.”
When I ask Anelli how she created the conference’s fun, feminist vibe, she insists it's unintentional. “It’s not something we set out to do,” she says. “We just set out to create something for all fans.” As she explains it, her desire for inclusion felt like a natural — and necessary — aspect of planning an event where everyone could enjoy themselves. She encourages trans-inclusive language, reads sites like Cosplaying While Black to follow the concerns of people of color in the geekosphere, and has hosted panels about race, class, and gender since the very first LeakyCon in 2009.
James Dechert / Orlando Weekly / Via photos.orlandoweekly.com
Anelli’s favorite LeakyCon moment happened last year on the dance floor. When the DJ started playing “Blurred Lines,” everyone stopped dancing and started booing. “I was so proud of my people,” Anelli says, smiling broadly. “That is the community we’re trying to create — people who hear a song about rape culture and go, ‘No, we’re not having that!’”
Suddenly, there is a small buzz in the conference room. Anelli pulls her phone out of her pocket and frowns. It’s the first time she’s stopped smiling since I arrived. “I don’t answer unknown phone calls. It’s an artifact of being stalked.”
Until recently, only the people closest to her knew that she had been mercilessly cyberstalked for the last seven years. But last February, she candidly opened up about her experience to NPR’s Weekend Edition. The stalker first visited The Leaky Cauldron forums and harassed other people; when Anelli asked her to stop, the stalker set her sights on Anelli. She sent graphic rape and death threats via email and Twitter, and even mailed a package addressed to Anelli’s newborn nephew saying “Enjoy your family while you can.”
The police offered to help her get a restraining order, but since the stalker was based in New Zealand, she was told it wouldn’t do much good. The FBI eventually issued a warrant for the stalker’s arrest should she ever come to the United States, but the fact that this woman is still out there takes a mental toll on Anelli. She told me that she wakes up in the middle of the night, afraid she forgot to lock her front door. Though she actively interacts with her 28,000 Twitter followers and regularly answers questions on Tumblr, she can also sometimes be cautious about people who reach out on social media. She isn’t living her life in fear, but she’s fully aware that she’s in a dangerous situation.
True to form, however, Anelli has turned this jarring experience into a teaching opportunity. She’s now working with the Harry Potter Alliance, a fan-based activist group for which she also serves as president, to develop "positive fandom" guidelines, an effort to keep fandom a “safe, constructive, positive space” by pledging to ideas like “I will respect and celebrate diversity” and “I will practice self-care.” “It’s just the idea that we can be fans and be passionate and be amazing and also not be bad to each other," Anelli says.
The GeekyCon code of conduct is brief, but reminds you that the private event reserves the right to kick you out for any form of mistreatment or harassment. You don’t have to ask her to stand by her claim — Anelli will prove it. She kicked a talent agent out of the convention last year for aggressively blocking a doorway when she tried to end their conversation. When I asked her how it felt to kick someone out, she shrugged her shoulders a little. “Being a woman in this industry is hard.”
Left: James Dechert / Orlando Weekly; right: Cheri Root / Via photos.orlandoweekly.com
After Seeing A Boy Use Junk Mail As Literature, A Postal Worker Got Him All The Books He Could Want
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Special delivery.
Matthew Flores of Sandy, Utah, has a huge passion for reading. However, the 12-year-old told KSL-TV that he doesn't own books of his own, so he uses junk mail to supplement his reading.
Matthew told local mail carrier Ron Lynch that bus fares make trips to the library difficult.
So Lynch posted this photo of Matthew to his Facebook page and asked for donations. Lynch thought only a few of his friends would see the request, but as it turns out, the internet was watching.
"It's gone crazy from there. I've heard from the U.K., Australia, from India," Lynch told the television station.
24 Terrible Things To Say To A Writer, According To Twitter
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Because frankly, the best part about sitting down to write is cleaning your entire apartment.
I Was A Midwestern Teenage Foodie
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, July 29, 2015
“There was no internet, and there was no way of reliably knowing if there were other teenagers like us, out there every weekend, rabidly exploring international cuisine.”
Nathan Pyle / BuzzFeed
As a nerdy teenager growing up in a small town in southern Minnesota, I spent an awful lot of time sitting around unpromising all-night restaurants like Perkins thinking and talking about qualities that I didn't possess. Like many 15-year-olds, I wanted a girlfriend, and I came to the conclusion that I hadn't earned one just because I didn't do anything that the girls in my town would find interesting.
Girls seemed to love boys who played sports, and while the local coaches somehow let me wander onto a field during regulation, I was too dreamy, distracted, and fearful to be a competent teammate. Girls liked music, but I couldn't sing or play an instrument, and I hated the music that was played on the radio, which was the kind that most girls seemed to like. Some girls loved boys who, like me, were neither jocks nor musicians, but in my town, these boys drove lifted trucks and went muddin' in the flats. Sadly, the lone vehicle I had access to, my mom's Volkswagen Golf, was not and would never be lifted, except perhaps by a tornado. And lacking Oakley blades and a feathered mullet, I didn't look the part anyway. Not that I was following any other popular fashion trends — I didn't look like Axl Rose in 1988 or like Eddie Vedder in 1992. At best, I looked like a rural Canadian's idea of Michael Stipe: lots of layers, lots of hats, lots of REI.
I knew if I wanted to have a girlfriend I'd have to try harder than most to bring something to the table. At home, I found joy in reading about 19th-century presidential elections and playing computer baseball games with fictional teams, and I suspected that each of those activities was somewhat hostile to romance. If Kevin Costner wooed starlets with sweet talk about Henry Clay, he kept it out of the press.
There was one thing I liked that I knew many girls also liked: travel. I wanted to see the world, and so did a lot of the Midwest's most interesting young women. The problem was, with the aforementioned borrowed Golf and my earnings as a janitor at the Steamboat Inn, I could take a girl maybe as far as Duluth before our parents would get mad. International travel and the other fervid promises of adulthood would have to wait.
Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
Somehow, an issue of Minnesota Monthly featuring new Twin Cities restaurants fell onto my parents' coffee table. I don't remember if my parents intentionally subscribed to it or if it just appeared in our home, passed on like rhubarb from a neighbor's garden. Either way, I read about the ethnic restaurants less than an hour away in the Minneapolis–St. Paul Metropolitan area, and I was transfixed. I had no context for these places as a diner. My parents' kitchen plated dishes that were perfunctory and sustaining; our lone occasional meal outside of the Midwestern comfort zone was "stir fry," and it would take a generous or benighted palate to confuse it with Asian cuisine. Here, at last, through Minnesota's versions of the globe's culinary pageant, was my chance to experience other countries. Although I would've gladly gone to any of these restaurants alone or with friends, I felt that with this issue of Minnesota Monthly as my flying carpet, I could share this whole new world with a special lady.
When I first proposed a date to Natalie, a young woman I met through the high school theater, I knew she had an interest in world travel, and therefore, possibly, world cuisine. It sure is a confidence booster, I discovered, to have an idea of what you actually want to do on a date before you ask a person out on said date. She said yes, and, like any reasonable person, asked what the hell my plan was for our evening together.
How about North African food, I said. I was sure she hadn't heard that one before.
Sure, she said. What's North African food, exactly?
I have no idea, I said.
Natalie and I ended up dating for the next two years.
What "Harry Potter" Sex Fantasy Should You Try Based On Your Zodiac Sign?
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Accio penis!
Zodiac thumbnails courtesy of Scholastic / Thinkstock
19 Things You'll Only Understand If You Grew Up With "Harry Potter"
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Harry Potter is still going strong in our hearts. But OG superfans will probably remember these things specifically.
Getting there as early as possible for midnight book releases and movie showings because you knew half your city would be showing up.
Graeme Robertson / Getty Images
And getting your costume in order because you know you had to be ON. POINT. And might even land in a newspaper if you pulled off the Dumbledore beard or those Weasley freckles.
Paco Serinelli / Getty Images
Not to mention becoming very well-acquainted with the concept of lines and how to survive them in style with your squad.
Staying up as late as humanly possible after getting your hands on a new Harry Potter book so you could finish reading before the world spoiled you.
Timothy A. Clary / Getty Images
24 Graphic Novels That Will Change Your Life
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, July 29, 2015
When visually creative worlds and powerful narratives collide.
ElfQuest by Wendy and Richard Pini
"It taught me a worldview that I didn't get from school or religion. It taught me to embrace life and all its rich experiences. It taught me to choose love and acceptance over hatred and bitterness (even when being bitter and hateful is totally justified). It showed a world where gender and orientation differences were simply accepted as normal and celebrated. It taught me to love and appreciate the natural world. All without being preachy or saccharine. It was a major factor in coming out and becoming the adult that I am today."
Submitted by David Miz, Facebook
Dark Horse
Blankets by Craig Thompson
"I read this in the midst of a terrible breakup. I stayed up one night reading all 600 pages of it in one sitting, sobbing my eyes out as my own failed experience in love was seemingly poured out on the pages in front of me. Every stroke of his brush is thoughtful, deliberate, and full of emotion. It’s an exquisite example of the graphic novel art form and remains my personal favorite."
Shea Standefer, Facebook
Top Shelf Productions / Craig Thompson
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
"It showed me how to grieve loss — even when that loss is the person you were before something irrevocably changed you. The death of a point-of-view. I have Tempus Frangit written into a tattoo of mine to honor my friend Ariel who passed away suddenly. Words and art are the most powerful combination. Sandman is an incredible masterpiece."
Submitted by meghanjlee
DC Comics / Vertigo
"Harry Potter" According To People Who've Never Read The Books
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, July 29, 2015
No, Alohomora doesn’t mean “hello” and “goodbye” in Hawaii.
Describe what you think Harry Potter is about in one paragraph.
"Harry Potter is a boy wizard who people want to kill and he's in love with a girl wizard but the red-headed boy wizard keeps cockblocking and Harry is like 'wtf bro.' So Harry goes through life fighting all these monsters and the whole time he's still trying to wife up the girl wizard."
"A boy with a magic scar on his head continually saves his kind without complaining or taking a nap."
"It's about this self-obsessed boy with a unique scar who's all like "omg woe is me, I'm so different and special and my family sucks" and then an owl tells him he's a wizard, which validates everything. Then he has to go to this wack boarding school where all the other kids are just as crazy so he can figure out his life. He's also always being chased with a guy who has no nose and Hermione is constantly friendzoning him. I don't think he ever figures his shit out."
"A teenager gets sent to a magic boarding school, gets a scar on his forehead, plays something called Quidditch, and that's the extent of what I've overheard."
"A story about a kid magician that somehow managed to become bigger than Star Wars with the young ones."
"A fairy tale about kids running around casting spells all day, fighting weird-looking creatures becoming wizards so they don't have to pay back tuition."
"Harry Potter is about a boy wizard who couldn't be killed by Voldemort and he must protect the magical world from Voldemort's ongoing evil."
"It's about a kid who ruins school for all his fellow students every damn year."
Correct answer: Harry Potter is about a boy who must overcome many obstacles to defeat the dark wizard named Lord Voldemort.
Warner Bros.
Who is this character and how did he get the scar on his forehead?
"That's Harry Potter and he got it from a lightning bolt that another hating-ass wizard threw at him."
"That's Harry; I think he got that scar when Voldemort kicked him in the head or something when he was a baby."
"Harry Potter. He got the scar from a lightning bolt straight to the forehead."
"That's Harry Potter! He got the scar when Voldemort tried to kill him as a baby. Fun fact: It's not actually in the shape of a lightning bolt — it's in the shape you make with your wand when you use the killing spell."
"That is Harry Potter; he is pretending to be Jem from Jem and the Holograms because he heard the new movie is coming out soon."
"Harry Potter — and he probably got the scar from dicking around with magic."
"Classic running-into-a-table-as-a-child situation."
"This is Henry Parker and he probably got slammed into a locker."
Correct answer: This is Harry Potter, the main character of the books, and he got this scar after Lord Voldemort tried to kill him as a child. The spell backfired, leaving Potter with a lightning bolt scar.
Warner Bros.
What is the name of this majestic building?
"Pottermore Manor?"
"Alex's house."
"Hogwarts, which is magically hidden from the Muggle world. It's in Scotland, I think?"
"Baby North West's playroom."
"Hogfarts. JK. I know it's Hogwarts."
"Potterland."
"Harry's castle."
Correct answer: This is Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Warner Bros.
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