There is always one who ruins the hobby

Sometimes collecting autographs can be a depressing hobby. You work so hard for so long writing the perfect letter to your favourite celebrity only for something to ruin it for you. Many times over the years I’ve written to celebs only for them to switch to “fan mail services” which is just a nice way of saying “I can’t be bothered reading your letters anymore, here have a copy of my autograph”.
These services have always got my back up mainly because the celebrity clients that use them try to make out we are idiots. I have mentioned this before a few months ago and I won’t go into specifics but what I will say is this, if you get a letter from Studio Fan Mail there is a 99% chance your letter never made it to the celeb.
Then of course there are the other factors that can ruin it for you like spamming. Writing to celebs via a movie set or concert venue is a popular way to get the more difficult people. It’s a risk/reward type of situation and when you are rewarded sometimes it pays off big time. These via venue addresses are not out there for public display, oh sure if you look hard enough on the internet they are there but they have to be for other reasons. But that initial joy you get from first finding the right address and then sending off the letter can be destroyed when you discover someone has posted that same address for everyone to find. I’ve always been of the belief if you do the hard work to find the address then you should be rewarded for your effort. But when it’s out there for everyone, it gets hammered until it gets to a point where they no longer reply, ruining it for everyone. Of course it doesn’t always happen, but most of the time it does.
Then there are those other times, rarer than the ones previous stated but they are the ones that hurt the most; when someone who enjoys fan mail or always replies to fan mail stops because something has caused them too.  Today one of my favourite actresses Stana Katic had the respect to come online and say due to a security issue she could no longer accept fan mail. And to add to that she would not use a “fan mail service” because fans deserve the real thing.
In this case I’m lucky, I got Stana’s autograph in 2010 and its framed sitting on my desk but i know plenty who were still waiting to hear from her. I don’t know what the issue was but there are those fans that walk a very fine line and I just hope they haven’t crossed it.  Full credit to Stana though for respecting the fans enough to come out and say directly that she will no longer be replying. So many would simply stop and move on but she is so much classier than that. I just wish other celebrities would just take the same time and effort to save their fans the pain so future collectors don’t feel the same pain I have. 

A thank you to The Voice Australia (RT) @TheVoiceAU

So tonight the first season of The Voice Australia comes to a close and then the excitement of Monday nights shall disappear until Season 2 comes around. In a very short space of time this show has changed the lives of not only the contestants involved but the audience who have witnessed this show play out. People have allowed themselves to open up to new artists, different styles of music and make many realise that there are thousands of talented people out there waiting for that step up into the spotlight. Not only that but this show has sent the Australian charts into meltdown, right at this very minute the top 9 spots on the ITunes top 10 are filled with the final 4 contestants songs that they performed last night and the Aria chart now has songs by many from the show scattered through its lists. And despite the fact only one will officially be crowned the winner tonight I think most of those who have appeared on the show shall have very long & happy careers.

So I say thank you to this show for not only giving me some wonderful & an amazing people to listen to on a daily basis but for allowing me to make a heap of new friends. The power of this show to connect people over social media has been simply outstanding and reiterates a post on here I made last month, which online friends are just as real as those you make in real life. It’s just in this case much easier to connect because you can relate to things much more quickly. This show has also helped repair lives, allowed people to heal all through the power of music and I hope it shall continue to do so for many more seasons to come.
So finally congratulations to not only the four finalists but to everyone who has appeared on this show and to the coaches. Australia loves you and is forever thankful you graced our screens and I think it’s safe to say we are all looking forward to supporting each and every one of you for a long time to come.

The sad side of Autograph collecting

Its days like this when you wonder why you bother sticking with a hobby for so long. I have been collecting autographs since the year 2000, it started out as just some way for me to express how much I love an actor’s work but I didn’t think it would turn into the hobby it has. At last count I now have well over 1000 autographs in my collection and at least a third of them are from actors I admire. Whether it be background actors or your A list headliner I appreciate all of them for what they bring to the screen. It disappoints me when incidents like today happen, I received my photo back from Once Upon a Time actress Ginnifer Goodwin and my heart sank. I have been a fan of Ginnifers work for a very long time but when I saw she had switched agencies to Spanky Taylor I knew there wasn’t a chance that Ginnifer had even seen my letter.
When I opened up the envelope I wasn’t too sure at first, but after seeing an example from someone else who got theirs back a few days earlier my original doubts were realised that a machine had signed my photo. People have asked me how I know this. How can I tell? Well it’s pretty easy once you know how. Have you ever signed something and tried to replicate it exactly? Doesn’t come out exactly the same now does it? And this is where it’s obvious a machine has done it because every single autograph is 100% exactly every time. Every brush stroke, every mark all identical and when only one photo comes back signed it’s another obvious sign because 2 coming back would make it easy to compare. This is what’s called and Autopen, when a machine automatically does it for you. Of course many celebs do it and over the years I’ve learned to avoid writing to them.
Machines are not the only way celebs get around fan mail & autographs, preprints & secretarials are another. Preprints are obvious and easy to spot, you could rub your fingers all over the photos and that autograph is never coming off & a secretarial is where a celeb pays someone to sign their autographs for them.
I personally find secs worse than autopens because they even more so give the illusion that the celeb actually gave a crap. You could pour your heart and soul out and the celeb you are writing too may simply never see it. Of course you could be reading this thinking how on earth does she know? Celebs might get gifts etc or they might be too busy whatever. And of course sometimes that’s true; another Spanky Taylor client is Johnny Depp. Now you can only imagine the amount of fan mail that man would get, Orlando Bloom is another. But when mail is sent to these types of agencies gifts, heartfelt letters etc never make it to the celeb and so the only way you might catch them is in person or via a movie set.
What annoys me more is that I am prepared to wait; I am not one of these demanding fans who expect celebs to answer their fan mail around the clock. I know these people have lives and need breaks etc but would it kill them maybe once in a while take 5mins out of their day to appreciate their fans and not send these things back knowing full well they are fooling people? For me it’s now a simple case of adding another person onto the don’t bother writing to again list. People wonder why I am angry, well i'm not I’m just disappointed, it’s not fun knowing your letter that you put so much effort into never made it to its destination. People are also entitled to their opinion but this is mine and it isn’t going to change.

A reply to some of the Sanctuary negative press

On one of those rare days that I have had free in recent weeks, I spent most of it in front of my computer or phone checking tweet updates from the Leo Awards. These awards hosted by Amanda Tapping & Robin Dunne were the icing on the cake for Sanctuary. It pains me then when I read negative articles about the shows cancelation such as that written by Brody Gibson for boomtron.com (http://www.boomtron.com/2012/05/no-sanctuary-season-5-for-syfy). I didn’t want to write this reply and the chances of Brody actually reading this is slim but I thought it was necessary to point out a few things. “The Canadian-made series hasn’t been the most talked about science fiction program” What exactly do you consider most talked about? And where? When Sanctuary was at its height it was the only TV show of its kind that I saw people talking about. But not by the traditional means either, people would tell one person to watch it and then tell their friends to watch it and so the show spread. By originally starting on the internet before progressing to television it didn’t exactly have the same level of press traditional shows would either. But it had the fan backing from the beginning and that is all the actors & producers/writers ever cared about. Which brings me to the second point: “lacking the fan-support of such shows as Warehouse 13 and Dr. Who” Lacking fan support? Are you kidding me? Clearly this guy doesn’t look at the world wide fan support this show has. Not only that the two examples he has listed are completely ridiculous for a number of reasons.
Sanctuary would never be able to compete with a show like Dr Who in particular because that show has had nearly 50 years to develop its fan base. Of course Dr Who went off the air for a very long time before restarting in 2005 but even so the show had entered popular culture and was already a household name. I had never seen an episode of Dr Who in full till 2005 but I already knew what it was, which was always going to give the show the kick start it needed. Warehouse 13 heavily promoted by Syfy and is a mainstream show. It has a wide appeal but so does Sanctuary, & unlike Sanctuary Warehouse 13 never was moved from its timeslot, giving it a fair chance. On a global scale this show is highly popular; to give an example from here in Australia when Amanda, Robin & Agam all came to the Armageddon expo in Melbourne in October 2011 they were some of the most popular guests at the event. The show was screened and is still screened in many countries around the world and long after the show has ended its fan base still grows. And thanks to DVD sales the word of mouth from fans will still keep this show well and truly alive.
“Sanctuary should feel great pride for having lasted four seasons when by any stretch of the imagination they shouldn’t have even gotten one”
How are you to judge? Sanctuary pushed the boundaries of what you could do in television. The amount of awards and nominations this show has received especially in the technical side proves that it was a show that more than EARNED its 4 seasons. And to add to that the awards that it won today.
“You beat the odds” When I read this I thought of a saying my mother always uses “You create your own luck and forge your own destiny” And you know what? Sanctuary certainly did that.

Fandom Wars are Pointless

Sometimes you overhear the most random things when you are travelling on public transport. Two high school girls, no more than 16 got on the bus and sat in front of me. I wasn’t intending to listen but their conversation; well actually they were having a debate. But the fact was it was so loud I couldn’t help myself. Their debate was and probably is one of the biggest problems for anyone who loves their TV and that is fandom wars.
For anyone who doesn’t frequent the internet a great deal or simply avoids social media, a fandom war is where people on two sides fight for the TV show/book/movie etc, they love. In some cases it’s simply to prove their show is better than another or in another case where one group of people will be little another because they believe the rival show is a copy. Sadly for people like myself when you love more than one show it can be hard to take one side or another.  So instead you stand on the sidelines watching as friends become enemies and internet and social media forums destroy each other. Both these girls though were making valid points, one could see a value in debating differences and similarities in shows while the other could not see a point at all, and I tend to agree. Too many times over the last 5 years have I seen a show fans attack another when they see one minor plot similarity and claim it as their own. Too many times have I lost friends when they try to drag me onto one side of the fight or another and too many times have I just sat back and shook my head simply asking why?
What I have noticed is that the attacks have become a lot more personal in recent times, and no clearer example of this is during the Bones vs. Castle fandom war.
Now before I go any further I am not saying all Bones fans are bad, far from it. But there is a small minority who are giving the rest a bad name. This war has bothered me from the start, I’ve always liked Bones, I used to religiously follow the show for 5yrs until the show fell off the wagon a bit with the infamous dream sequence sex scene (could have been earlier but my memory is hazy). I still watch the occasional ep now & I still love many of the cast members but the show is not the same for me. So by default I have found myself on the Castle side of this war and have copped a lot of flak from people because of it.  But this is my thoughts on it, I cannot see how these two shows are similar, even my mother who watches both shows can’t see the similarity. The only thing that is similar is the chemistry between the two leads, nothing more. My mother last night gave me a different view point, she said Castle was more similar to The Mentalist and I can see that more than Bones.
The bus debate ended when one of the girls got frustrated & ended up getting off at her stop clearly disappointed that the other girl had not relented in her opinion at all. And that’s the thing about these wars, they frustrate, they annoy and in the end will make it impossible for people to remain friends. But like anything they are a by-product of the internet & TV and probably will never stop but sadly increase.  

Stop Hating on Delta!

Ever since The Voice Australia started & Delta Goodrem returned to our screams as a coach I have slowly watched as the steady stream of haters has increased. To this point I have held my tongue hoping against hope that once the show had hit the live rounds that there would be more focus on the contestants rather than Delta herself. But alas I was wrong and instead the hating has got to the point where I can’t take it anymore. I am not ashamed to say that I have been a fan of Delta’s ever since I heard “I Don’t Care” by accident in a music store back in the early 2000’s at the time I thought she was a breath of fresh air that the Australian music scene was in desperate need of.
From that point on her music has gotten me through a lot of personal turmoil and even now listening to her music puts a smile on my face when I badly need it after a long day. At the time of her own personal hell this country proudly embraced her and gave Delta all the love and support she needed to fight through her darkest hour. Yet where has all that love gone now? Sadly the other night I was stupid enough to troll through some of the hash tags on Twitter and what I found appalled me. Delta being called all the stupid and horrible names under the sun, yet she has done nothing to deserve any of them.
One of the things that has always annoyed me about Australia is our love of tall poppy syndrome, cutting someone when they are down and once they are down stamping them into the ground until there is no way they can come back. Sadly I am seeing people right across the social media space sharpening their knives trying to cut Delta down at any opportunity. Some claim she can’t sing, well if you don’t like her music simply don’t listen. Some comment on her choice of clothes, so she isn’t allowed to be an individual now? Others say she is full of herself, Have you even met her? Actually sat down at had a conversation with her? For god sake. The last one particularly irks me because to judge someone on what they see on TV is ridiculous. I may have never met Delta myself but I know plenty of people who have and what they all say is the same thing. Never has anyone been more willing to give their time & appreciate you coming to see them than Delta. After all how many musicians with her star power would stay signing autographs & chatting to people long after the shops had shut their doors? None that come to my mind. The woman has a bigger heart than many celebs I have ever seen and has changed so many lives, including mine that I think she deserves a little more respect than she has received.
The point of this post is simple; bullying a celeb on any of the forms of social media is pointless and stupid. How would you feel if someone you loved and admired was attacked and then stopped answering tweets or closed their account altogether? You wouldn’t like it. And I certainly as hell can’t stand the bullshit that Delta has been copping. If you don’t have anything good to say keep it to yourself and don’t ruin it for those people who consider themselves fans, because none of us can take it anymore.