In Search of Purpose

What the heck am I doing here?

There is no escaping reason; no denying purpose. Because as we both know, without purpose, we would not exist.

Thus spake Agent Smith in The Matrix Reloaded, which by several yardsticks was a terrible movie, but it definitely had its moments, and Hugo Weaving provided quite a few of those, as he did in the first movie. You didn’t come here for a movie review, though.

Or did you? I began this Substack almost by accident, with no clear notion of what I was going to do with it. I’m still not sure. Many of the things I could do here (book reviews and the like) are more suited to posts at The Other McCain, where I spend a fair amount of time mongling links and posting memes along with complaining about how the season is going for my Senators in Pete Ingemi’s Dynasty League Baseball league.

I don’t claim to any great expertise in any particular field, with the exception of income taxes, which I have made a part-time career out of over the last sixteen years, and science fiction, which I have been reading since the second grade, way back in 1968. I also have a fair bit of knowledge when it comes to certain odd corners of history, which has provided fodder for at least one post here already. Blogging about income taxes would be dull (although I would be happy to talk about it if people insist) so I guess that leaves science fiction.

As I said, I have been reading SF for most of my life, been peripherally involved in fandom since 1974 when I went to the World SF Convention in Washington DC (Discon II), and became more involved in it after marrying a former chairman of Minicon, moving to Minnesota, becoming an APAhacker, and eventually (ironically, after the divorce) becoming involved in volunteering at & staffing several local conventions in the Twin Cities. This culminated in my helping to found Anime Detour, the first anime convention in the Twin Cities, which has grown and prospered beyond any expectations I had for it when we started working on it in 2003.

In 2007 I moved back to the Washington, DC area where I grew up. I went back to Anime Detour a few times, went to Balticon with friends a few times, but mostly I was too poor to do conventions; they are, after all, a rather bourgeois kind of thing, since memberships and hotel rooms are generally not had for free. The DC area got too expensive for me, and so in 2015 I moved to Las Vegas; there I hung out with a couple of local fan groups, became very sick and then homeless, and by the time I recovered from those problems, I was done with Anime Detour for reasons not pertinent to this essay, but I had somehow become involved with the National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F), assumed the duties and fez of Treasurer, and resumed APAhacking in N’APA, the N3F APA. Somewhere in there I was peripherally involved with the Sad & Rabid Puppies, and am currently involved in trying to make Son of Silvercon, a Las Vegas SF convention, an ongoing thing.

So, I guess my purpose with this will be to talk about fandom, conventions, and related topics. Unless people really want to read about taxes. Speak to me in the comments.