Wrangling the post-event blues

As I’m writing this, I’m two days out from the end of Gen Con 2024, and I just saw the following post in the Fans of Gen Con Facebook group:

I need a term for the way I’m feeling being back at home and work and real life today. Is “AfterCon Blues” a thing? 🥺🥺

“AfterCon Blues”, or what I often call “post-event drop”, is very much a thing. You spend 2-4 days among a bunch of like-minded people, all excited about a specific thing – gaming, anime, LARPing, or something else you enjoy. You’re super excited about everything going on. You end up chatting with a lot of people you’ve never met before, maybe even make some new friends in the process. You go to lots of fun events, and maybe don’t get quite as much food/water/sleep as you usually do because you’re so very focused on all the fun that’s happening. You probably spend a little too much money on all sorts of cool goodies you’ve been wanting to buy for a while. Then the event ends, you go home, and it’s back to your normal day-to-day life: work, chores, pets who missed you very much while you were gone. You’re happy to be back at home in your own bed, but you miss the excitement of the event you just got back from, and you feel a little depressed. (Maybe even more than a little.) What do you do?

Well, here’s The Crafty Nerd’s guide to wrangling the post-event blues, based on my own personal experiences. Not everything here may apply to everyone, but hopefully at least some of it will be helpful to folks who are coming off of a convention, LARP weekend, or other event and are feeling a bit of that post-event drop.

Take care of yourself physically.

This is probably the most important thing to keep in mind. You may have been pushing your limits over the past few days, and likely didn’t feel it because of all that adrenaline and excitement fueling you during the event. However, I bet you’re feeling it now – you might be sore from walking many, many more miles than you usually do during a given day, and extra tired from not getting quite enough sleep. Chances are you might even be fighting off an impending case of the dreaded “con crud” – or, in other words, whatever virus was running rampant through the crowds at the event. (These days, it’s likely covid instead of your standard cold.)

Because of all of that, it’s important to take care of yourself physically when you get home. Take a day off work after the event to give yourself time to recover. Get to bed early if you can, or sleep in late the next day to help catch up on that sleep debt. Drink plenty of water or electrolytes to help yourself re-hydrate. And if you think you’re getting sick, make sure to take some extra time to recuperate if you can. Stay hydrated, get extra rest, and test yourself for covid to see if that’s what you’re dealing with or if it’s just a regular garden variety cold.

For me, I know that when I push myself extra hard, I’m likely to experience some bad burnout after an event like Gen Con, so I make sure to take a day off work afterwards and try to be extra gentle with myself. I typically let myself sleep in as late as I need to, and make sure to drink extra water to help me rehydrate because I know I’m terrible at staying hydrated well at big events. If I think I’ll have the energy to drag myself out of the house on my recovery day, I may even schedule a massage to help loosen up those angry muscles I’ve overused by walking 20+ miles while carrying a heavy backpack over the course of four days. I also make sure to eat a little bit more than usual once I get home to help make up for the fact that I’ve burned way more calories than my body’s used to burning.

Take care of yourself emotionally.

Post-event depression sucks. You’ve just come back from a great event – but you wish it were longer or happened more frequently. You may have seen friends you only get to see during this event, and you miss them already. You don’t want to go back to work, you just want to have another day of that awesome event.

Or, instead of post-event depression, you’re experiencing a post-event meltdown. You’ve completely drained your social batteries and are so overwhelmed that you just want to melt down and cry. It’s good to be home, but you did so much over the past few days and you just can’t anymore.

Or you’re dealing with both, which is a special kind of post-event miserableness that I end up experiencing pretty regularly. It sucks a lot. 😅 Whatever you’re going through, it’s important to take care of yourself emotionally, too. What does that entail, though? It’s different for everyone – for example, it might help some people to spend some time with friends and be social, while for others you might need some quiet alone time with your pets and some comforting TV shows. Think about what helps you when you’re struggling, and try and do that to help beat the post-event depression or mitigate the meltdown.

When it comes to taking care of myself emotionally, I tend to hang out in the online social groups focused on the event to help keep the excitement alive a little longer – with Gen Con, I spend a lot of time in the Fans of Gen Con group, and after a LARP event I’ll be more active on the group’s Discord server. Even when I’m feeling overwhelmed, interacting with people online doesn’t drain my social batteries nearly as much as in-person interaction, so this way I can still stay connected to folks without adding extra stress to my already worn-out self. If I’m overwhelmed as heck – which I usually am after an event like Gen Con – I need that alone time, so I make sure I’ve got time to decompress after the event. This year, my post-Gen Con decompression time involved throwing on some Star Trek, snuggling with Hannah, and occasionally poking through the goodies I got at the con. (And crying a little, because sometimes I just need a good cry to release some of that emotional pressure, so to speak.)

Find what works best for you, and make a note of it for next time.

Again, not everything I suggested here will apply to everyone. A lot of this is based on my own experiences, which are admittedly different than most folks due to being neurodiverse. However, maybe some of these suggestions will help, and might give you a starting point to figure out what will help you fight off the post-event blues. And when you do figure out what helps you the most, make a note of it for the next time an event comes around – this way, you’ll be prepared to take care of yourself should you start feeling a little depressed or rough after you get home from the next big convention or LARP game.

Gen Con 2024: I needed this

I’m currently sitting here in the Crossroads Corridor at the Indiana Convention Center, Doomslug hanging out by my side, waiting to see if any more folks from the Fans of Gen Con group want to come grab badge ribbons, and soaking in the last couple of hours of the Best Four Days in Gaming.

Plush yellow and blue slug wearing a miniature Gen Con 2024 badge with the name Doomslug on it sits on the floor of the Indiana Convention Center with a pile of The Crafty Nerd badge ribbons in front of it.

… yes, I made Doomslug her own badge, I know I’m ridiculous

I needed this. The past four days have been a lot, especially since I haven’t been to Gen Con since 2019, but I missed this so much that I’m actually on the verge of getting weepy right here in the middle of the convention center. (That’s probably due to a mix of exhaustion, overwhelm, and not getting enough food to fuel the 15k+ steps I’ve been walking per day since Wednesday, heh.)

I was a little nervous about coming back to Gen Con after not attending in person in so long. The past few years have not been great on my mental health, and I get overwhelmed a lot more easily than I used to – and I wasn’t sure how well I’d be able to handle being around approximately 70,000 other gamers, especially considering the largest event I’d been to before this was the Statewide IT Conference at work this year. (There were around 900 attendees there, if I remember right.)

Crowd of people socializing at The Stink, an event hosted by Indy Mavens on Wednesday at Gen Con.

Photo by Indy Mavens. Look who’s doing a tiny photobomb in the lower left corner!

Thankfully, the Gen Con community – or at least the people I interacted with personally here – is still as awesome as ever. I feel like this year more than ever, I’ve seen so many people out there taking care of their fellow con-goers. I saw folks posting in the Fans of Gen Con Facebook group that they found someone’s badge or other lost items and brought them to lost and found, con clerics wandering around to help with costume issues and basic first aid needs, and helping people find where to go for specific items they were looking for. I even did what I could to help by sharing hand sanitizing wipes, telling folks where they could find things like locking pin backs and fancy hand fans (I sent so much business towards the Geeky Endeavors booth during the con!) and even giving a spare mask to Liby of Bloomington Stitchery while they held down the fort at the Different Drummer Belly Dancing booth. (And tried not to go into awkward fangirl mode when I saw them there, haha. 😅 )

This was a weird Gen Con for me. It’s the first year I’ve flown solo for the most part, and my first Gen Con without Rana since we met in 2013. I ended up doing things differently this year – I didn’t take as many cosplay pictures as I’ve done in the past, and I didn’t sign up for a lot of events. I did, however, finally hand out some Crafty Nerd badge ribbons I bought in 2019 to hand out in 2020 – and that resulted in me talking to a lot more people than I normally would at Gen Con. (If you found your way here after snagging a badge ribbon from me, welcome!)

In general, going to Gen Con this year felt like coming home again after a long, exhausting adventure. Things are different, of course, and I’m a very different person than I was when I last attended, but it was still so good to be here. I’ll be posting in detail about my Gen Con experience over the coming days, so if you want to hear more about my Gen Con 2024 adventure, stay tuned!

Gen Con 2024: t-minus 8 days

Gen Con 2024 is a little over a week away, and I feel like maybe I’m actually ready for the con! (Well, mostly ready, anyway.)

Costuming: a change of plans

It’s not entirely unheard of that I change my mind about costumes for Gen Con, but I don’t usually change my mind with a week to go until the convention. 😅 In my last post, I vaguely referenced recycling a costume for this year’s Gen Con – the plan there was to go as Ezri Dax instead of Jadzia, since I’m a lot closer in height and body shape to Ezri than I am to Jadzia. (Terry Farrell, who played Jadzia, is six feet tall – which I didn’t realize until I heard her mention it on an episode of The Delta Flyers recently. For comparison, I’m a little over five feet tall, so I was more of a mini-Jadzia when I cosplayed her in 2019, haha.)

However, drawing on all those Trill spots by hand is a labor-intensive process, and I don’t entirely have the spoons at the moment to wrangle creating temporary tattoo versions of Trill spots, so I decided to go with something easier: I’m going to dress as Ëlinyr, possibly for all four days! (She’s definitely got a big enough wardrobe to make that happen.)

Granted, Ëlinyr’s looking a little different than she was last time I talked about her much on the blog…

Photo of myself as Ëlinyr - I'm wearing elf ears, and a pair of tiny red horns are attached to my forehead. Red swirls are visible on my cheeks and forehead.

During the 2023 season of Kishar, due to some fey nonsense involving one of her partners, Ëlinyr ended up feytouched! Which involves some fun new makeup, horns, and a lot of body glitter, haha. If you’re at Gen Con and want to say hi, the easiest way to find me is to look for the elf ears, red horns, and red swirlies on my face. (I’ll likely be wearing a different red dress each day, too.)

Other convention prep: business cards and badges

I mentioned in my last post that I ordered some new business cards – they came in a few weeks ago, and I love how they turned out! Here’s Shallan from Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives series showcasing the old business card with the new one:

Close up of a desk mat featuring Shallan Davar from Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archives series, with two business cards for The Crafty Nerd on top of the mouse mat. One uses the old branding colors of dark magenta and gold, and the second uses the newer branding colors of teal and gold.

Hopefully I’ll end up handing out lots of the new business cards this year – I want to get back into the swing of regularly posting in the blog, and who knows, maybe I’ll make some contacts at Gen Con this year that’ll result in some new content for the blog.

I also dug out something I originally bought to hand out at Gen Con 2020, but we all know how 2020 went – so these ended up languishing in a drawer in my desk for most of the past five years… until now:

Gold badge ribbons that say "The Crafty Nerd" on one line and " I found her!" for the second line. Both lines of text are done in metallic purple font. One badge is set aside and has a yellow label stuck over the second line of text that says "That's me!"

Badge ribbons! Almost everyone at Gen Con loves collecting badge ribbons, and right after Gen Con 2019, I made these so I could hand them out at Gen Con 2020 as part of a “here’s what I’m cosplaying as today, come find me!” thing I was going to do.

Well, it’s four years later than I’d planned, but I’m still excited to trade these babies with other people who are handing out badge ribbons at Gen Con (like the person in the Fans of Gen Con group who made ribbons featuring the pattern of the old Indiana Convention Center carpet) or hand them out to folks who ask nicely! If you’re going to Gen Con as well and want a ribbon of your own, keep an eye out for my “That’s me!” badge ribbon at the top of my ribbon collection.

My Gen Con schedule

I’m not signed up for quite as many things as I’ve done in past years, but that’s okay – I’d rather avoid overwhelming myself by packing my schedule with events. Here’s what I’ll be up to at Gen Con, for those curious:

Thursday, August 1st

  • 11:00 am: Bradley Beaulieu Book signing (if you haven’t read any of Bradley Beaulieu’s books, they’re great – I highly recommend the Song of the Shattered Sands series!)
  • 2:00 pm: Cross-Stitch: Make a Dice Tray

Friday, August 2nd

  • 1:00 pm: Cross-Stitch: Intermediate and Advanced Stitching

Saturday, August 3rd

  • 3:35 pm: Different Drummer Belly Dancers at the Costume Contest Pre-Show (I’m really excited about this – this is my friend Margaret’s belly dancing troupe, and my work friend Katie sang on a recording that DDBD will be dancing to in the costume contest pre-show!)
  • 5:00 pm: Mark Gunn: Sci Fi Irish Drinking Songs in a Kilt

Sunday, August 4th

  • 11:00 am: Star Trek: Into The Unknown Learn to Play

Aside from that, I plan on wandering around the convention center in costume, looking for awesome cosplays to take pictures of (with permission, of course!), and braving the Exhibit Hall to visit some of my favorite vendors and artists, and find new enamel pins to add to my collection. I’m also considering bringing the Sailor Moon quilt I bought in 2019, pieced in 2020, and quilted in 2022 to show off to Quiltoni at the Craft Hackers booth, since I bought the kit from her and am really proud of how it turned out!

I’m also going to try to do daily coverage of Gen Con like I’ve done in the past, in addition to the usual cosplay and haul posts – who knows, maybe I’ll camp out at the Starbucks at the JW Marriott with my laptop and write posts there like I did in 2013. I’m really excited about going back to Gen Con after so long – hopefully I’ll run into some of you there!

Gen Con: t-minus one month

I feel like I’m super behind on Gen Con prep this year, y’all.

And we’ve only got a month until the convention.

A still frame from the anime Sailor Moon, showing Usagi looking very panicked.

aaaaaaaaagh

I mean, I’ve registered for some events, which is something. And even though it’s technically a recycled idea, I do have a plan for a cosplay outfit. (Just one, though. And I need to make something for it and check to see if the wig I bought for it a few years ago is still in good shape.) I’ve got a couple of games I want to try out, and I’m planning on picking up a game I backed on Kickstarter, Cyber Pet Quest, at the convention.

And I finally got off my butt and put together a business card that matches the blog’s new branding, and ordered new business cards! (It only took me, what, two years?)

A digital version of the print business card I designed to match the teal branding of The Crafty Nerd I started using about two years ago.

Even with all this, though, I still feel like Gen Con snuck up out of nowhere. Maybe because it’s been five years since I last went to an in-person Gen Con, and my life is a lot different than it was back in 2019. Maybe because I’ve been pushing myself in too many directions all at once lately without enough rest, and it feels like time’s flying by as a result. Maybe it’s a combination of the two. 🤷‍♀️

I’m still beyond excited to be going to Gen Con again, though. And hey, like I said in my last post, maybe this’ll be the spark that gets me posting regularly again, rather than just looking at my Crafty Nerd desk mat on my desk and feeling vaguely sad about not blogging enough! 😂

Going back to Gen Con

Yes, I’m headed back to Gen Con this year! I bought a four-day badge, got lucky and got one of the mythical attached hotels, and waited patiently for my wish list of events to process yesterday and got into almost every event on my list.  

I know, it’s a little weird that I haven’t posted about it all until now, but up until event registration happened, it didn’t quite feel real. I didn’t think about what events I wanted to go to until last week. Heck, I still haven’t entirely decided on what cosplays I’m going to do, and y’all know how excited I get about cosplay. (I’m currently waffling between a couple of ideas that I’ll probably write about here soon.)  

A weird Gen Con 

This year’s Gen Con is going to be a weird one for me for several reasons. It’s the first year I haven’t gone as press since 2013 – which feels weird, but given that I haven’t regularly updated the blog in about four years, I didn’t even bother applying for a press pass this year. Maybe next year, if I can get back into the habit of posting regularly enough.  

It’s also going to be the first Gen Con without Rana since the year we met at the convention. In 2020 and 2021, we spent some time talking about how we were still going to go to Gen Con together even though we’d split up, and even talked about what cosplays we might do. It’ll be weird, being at Gen Con without her, especially since Gen Con was such a big part of our lives and was the reason we met. It’s going to be weird, going without her.  

In addition, this is going to be the largest event I’ve gone to since Gen Con 2019. A lot’s happened in the five years since then, and the first convention I’ve gone to since Indiana Toy and Comic Expo back in late 2019. I’ve been to a few work conferences since then, and went to the Kate Mulgrew talk in 2022 back when she came to visit the Captain Janeway statue, so it’s not like I’ve been a hermit the entire time. The largest of those events topped out at 900 people, though, and it was exhausting for me to be around so many people. Being around large groups of people wears me out way more than it used to pre-pandemic, and I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to handle Gen Con as a result. I’m not letting it scare me away from going, though.  

A good Gen Con 

Despite all the weirdness, though, I think it’s also going to be a good Gen Con. I got into almost all the events I had in my Wish List (sadly, the Mistborn CCG and Star Trek CCG demos I had on my wish list sold out before my list got processed), including two cross stitch classes hosted by Craftigurumi that I’m really looking forward to. (I mean, come on, this is me – did you expect me to go to Gen Con and not sign up for some sort of crafting class?) And speaking of Gen Con crafting, I’m even considering bringing the Sailor Moon quilt I worked on at Gen Con 2020 to the Craft Hackers booth so I can show Toni of Quiltoni the finished project, since I’m pretty damn proud of how it turned out and want to show it to her.  

I’m also approaching Gen Con with the understanding that I probably will get overwhelmed as heck, and won’t necessarily be running around everywhere as much as I used to, and that’s okay. Lots of my friends are going to Gen Con this year, so if I need someone to help me figure out food because I can’t brain, or just want someone to sit with me someplace quiet in the ICC while I take some time to wind down, I know someone’ll be able to help me out there.  

Also: it’s been too dang long since I did any cosplay, and I’m starting to get excited about exploring different cosplay ideas that have been bouncing around in my head. (And if I can’t really make any of them work, there’s always the old fallback of wandering around Gen Con as Ëlinyr – especially now that I’ve got better costuming pieces for her! But that’s a topic for yet another post.) 

Counting down the days 

Screenshot of the Gen Con countdown from the Gen Con website, featuring artwork of Genevieve the Dragon with the text "Countdown to Gen Con: 73 Days"

As I’m writing this post, it’s 73 days until Gen Con – about two and a half months until the best four days in gaming happens. I’m hoping going back to Gen Con will get me back into the swing of things with the blog here. It’s been way too long since I posted regularly, and I miss being able to say “yeah, I have a blog, it’s The Crafty Nerd” without being embarrassed by how quiet it’s been over here over the past few years. Maybe Gen Con 2024 will help me get past that. 😊  

What I’m Watching: 2023

After I wrote that post about the Doctor Who specials, I ended up wandering through the blog’s TV review archives – and realized I’d completely forgotten about the What I’m Watching series I did for a little while in 2019.

Then I realized I used to have a lot more variety in my TV watching in the past. (Then again, before 2020, my life was a lot less of a wreck.) I still watch a lot of TV, but there’s not much variety in my TV watching lately as there was in the past.

Do you want to know what I watched in 2023?

Star Trek. Lots and lots of Star Trek. (Plus a little bit of Babylon 5, and a bunch of Stargate SG-1.)

Collage of photos from the shows Stargate SG-1, Star Trek: Voyager, Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Let me explain why TV watching this year has been a never-ending stream of mid-late ’90s/early 200os sci-fi and just about all the Star Trek I can get my hands on. (I apologize in advance, as this is gonna get rambly.)

When I’m not doing well, I tend to gravitate towards TV shows I’m already familiar with and know that I love. (You might have picked up on that from that Doctor Who post I wrote.) It’s like wrapping up in a comforting blanket or slipping into a favorite sweatshirt. I know what to anticipate. And for the past year, my TV hyperfocus has been Star Trek on a pretty much endless loop, broken up occasionally by Babylon 5 and Stargate SG-1. It might be boring to others, watching the same thing over and over, but for me, it’s calming. It helps me unwind after a rough day, or calm down after a meltdown. (Yeah, that’s a new mental health thing I’ve been dealing with since the end of the summer – getting so overwhelmed with life that I just break down. I guess that’s what happens when I try to go from being an attic-dwelling hermit to trying to live my life like it’s 2019 without gradually trying to re-enter the world.)

Sure, I know that certain episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Discovery will make me break down in tears every time I watch them, without fail, but I’ve also watched both of those shows enough times that I know when those episodes are coming up, and I can let myself get weepy if I want or just skip over the episode if I’m not in a good headspace.

And since 2022 was pretty much obliterated by grief, and 2023 was spent trying to figure myself out again, I needed something comforting to watch at the end of the day to help me unwind from work, or distract me from post-LARP burnout when I got home from a long weekend at Kishar. (yes, I actually went to just about every Kishar game this year! But that’s a story for another post.)

So, I ended up gravitating to the most comforting show I could think of:

Composite photo of many Star Trek captains and characters, including Seven of Nine, Captain Kirk as played by Shatner, Captain Sisko, Captain Pike, Captain Archer, Captain Burnham, the holographic version of Captain Janeway, Ensign Mariner, and Admiral Picard.

Star Trek, in all of its incarnations. (Well, almost all of them, anyway. I have… feelings about Enterprise.) I mean, come on, are you surprised? It’s me. If you know me, you know I love Star Trek.

I spent the majority of the year making my way through the Delta Quadrant with Janeway, keeping Deep Space Nine running during the Dominion War with Sisko, navigating the distant future with Michael Burnham, exploring strange new worlds with Captain Pike (and at one point, singing about strange new worlds), and dealing with the less exciting parts of starship life with Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, T’Lyn and Rutherford. (I think T’Lyn is my new favorite Vulcan.) It’s exactly what I needed this year: familiar faces and stories, and some new adventures thanks to Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds.

The main cast of Stargate SG-1, including Samantha Carter, Jack O'Neill, Teal'c, and Daniel Jackson.And for the shows I watched that weren’t Star Trek, they were close enough that they’re enjoyable and comforting, even if I wasn’t familiar with them – like Stargate SG-1, which I watched for the first time ever earlier this year. It had the feel of late ’90s/early ’00s sci-fi that I love so much, and I found myself really enjoying the story and getting attached to the characters. Stargate SG-1 is a show I’d been meaning to watch for years – I’d seen scattered episodes on TV before, and it seemed pretty cool, but I’d never gotten around to watching it until earlier this year, when I tore through all eleven seasons pretty quickly. I need to re-watch it at some point, as right now the big thing that stuck in my head is the characters, and not so much the plot. I love Teal’c, who I nicknamed the show’s resident Vulcan Klingon. I love O’Neill being O’Neill. And I especially love how Ben Browder and Claudia Black found a home on the show after Farscape got canceled. Vala is sassy as heck, and I love her for it.

Main cast of season 2 of Babylon 5.Babylon 5 is another show that fits into the comfort watching category. I love the story. I love the characters. The background music is… a thing, and the graphics are a little rough in places, but overall, Babylon 5 ranks right up there with Star Trek when it comes to my favorite TV shows. I love how we get to see a little slice of everyone’s life aboard the station.I love seeing G’Kar and Londo’s interactions evolve over the course of the show. Londo himself has one heck of a character arc, and he’s one of my favorite characters in particular. I love pretty much all the main characters, and am sad that about half the main cast passed away, many of them at a relatively young age. (It’s such a big thing that it’s been referred to as the “Babylon 5 curse“.)

So yes, this year was the year of comforting sci-fi TV shows. Hopefully in 2024 I’ll be able to branch out into watching other TV again – there’s certainly a lot of shows I need to catch up on, like Good Omens, The Witcher, and Wheel of Time. Maybe next year I’ll be able to properly bring back What I’m Watching, and not have it be Star Trek for months on end. 😁

Doctor Who: coming back to an old favorite

For long-time followers of the blog, you might remember that I used to be a pretty big Doctor Who fan. I eagerly awaited each new episode. I bought Doctor Who goodies at Gen Con. I knit both variants of the Fourth Doctor’s scarf and cosplayed as the Fourth Doctor for Gen Con 2013. I listened to Doctor Who-inspired music. I even had my very own sonic screwdriver! (It turned into an actual screwdriver, which was pretty awesome.) 

But by the time Peter Capaldi stepped into the TARDIS as the Twelfth Doctor back in 2014, I wasn’t enjoying the show as much as I used to. After one of the original showrunners for new Doctor Who left in 2010, the show lost some of its magic, and at the end of the Eleventh Doctor’s tenure, I decided maybe I needed a break from Doctor Who. I didn’t watch any of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Doctor’s episodes, and only started a rewatch of the Tenth Doctor sometime last summer when I was missing Rana pretty fiercely. I joined the Whovian Running Club in memory of Rana, too, but aside from that, I didn’t really get into Doctor Who much. I was really excited to hear that Jodie Whittaker was the Thirteenth Doctor, as I’d been wondering if the Doctor would ever regenerate as a woman, and that almost got me back into watching it… but not quite.

But then I heard that David Tennant was coming back to the show… as the Fourteenth Doctor. 

David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor standing in front of the TARDIS, looking at his hands with an almost confused expression on his face.

… wait, the Doctor’s never had the same face twice – what’s all this about?!

Now that… that got my attention. (That and hearing that Russell T. Davies was coming back as a showrunner.) The Doctor never had the same face twice. Never. I may not have been super invested in Doctor Who over the past decade, but hearing that the Doctor regenerated with the same face he had a couple of regenerations ago? That got me interested. I needed to watch the 60th Anniversary specials.

(It also didn’t hurt that it’s now a lot easier to watch Doctor Who than it was when I first got into the show. It’s on freakin’ Disney+ now! Disney and the Doctor still breaks my brain.)

I waited to watch the specials until all three were released – because honestly, I’m more of a binge-watcher these days than I used to be, and I didn’t want to wait between episodes. I wanted to get the whole story in one fell swoop. I was a little trepidatious going into it – almost ten years had passed since I last watched any new Doctor Who episodes. I know I’d missed a lot. Was I going to be woefully confused as to what was going on?

Donna and the Fourteenth Doctor in front of the TARDIS, over a nebulous purple, blue, and orange background.

The Doctor and Donna, back together again.

I shouldn’t have worried. It felt almost like coming home to the Doctor Who I first fell in love with. Sure, time had passed and there were lots of new things (seriously, when did the Doctor learn how to make force fields with the sonic screwdriver?), but even with 15 years passing between the last time we saw Donna Noble and her appearance in the specials, it felt like I was seeing old friends again for the first time in ages. The dynamic between the Doctor and Donna is the same as always, and the monsters ranged from terrifyingly adorable to just plain terrible. It was exciting and familiar, and I loved every second of it. And after the rough mess the last few years have been for me, I needed that. I needed to return to something comfortingly familiar that still had some new stories to tell. 

I won’t get into too many spoilers here, for those who haven’t seen the specials yet, but as someone who loved the Ninth and Tenth Doctors and their companions, this was a delightful treat that got me excited about Doctor Who again. And I’m really excited to see Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor – from the little bit we saw of him at the end of the specials, I feel like he’s going to be a very fun Doctor, and I’m curious to see where things go with him piloting the TARDIS. (Only six more days until we get to find out!)

Back in action! (Sort of.)

…wait, what? What’s this? A post?

Yes, yes it is indeed a post! I am, in fact, still alive, and actually finally have the spoons to post something. I’m sure as heck not going to hit my “one post a month” goal I wrote about in my yearly celebration of the blog’s birthday (I still can’t believe that The Crafty Nerd has been around for a decade, holy crap), but I’ve at least got things to write about now that I’m actually regularly leaving the house again!

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Ten years of The Crafty Nerd!

Holy crap, y’all. The tiny little blog I started on a whim one cold February morning because I found out the domain thecraftynerd.com was available is officially ten years old.

I was thinking about it this morning too – I knew that the blog’s birthday was soon, but as always, I spaced out on the exact date until I checked my Facebook memories and saw all the previous “Happy birthday to the blog!” posts from prior years.

It’s actually hitting me pretty hard, realizing it’s the blog’s tenth birthday. Like, I was sitting at my computer on my lunch break on one of the rare days where I’m actually in the office, fighting back tears because of how emotional I felt over keeping this blog going for ten whole years. Sure, I haven’t been doing a great job of that over the past few years (thank you pandemic for throwing my entire life off the rails), but I try to post when I can. There have been many times over the past few years when I came close to just giving up and closing down the blog, but I didn’t – I stuck with it. And now here I am at the blog’s tenth birthday.

The Crafty Nerd has witnessed a lot during its ten years – including 261 blog posts, eight Gen Cons, 20 Kishar games (give or take), countless craft projects, two divorces, a pandemic, a whole lot of loss-related grief, at least 10 posting hiatuses, and a complete overhaul of the blog’s branding and logo.

What this year holds for the blog

Last year, I ended up doing a “new year’s resolution” sort of thing on the blog’s birthday – and while I didn’t really follow through on posting more or playing more games, at least I finished a bunch of craft projects – which is something!

This year, I’m going to give myself some blogging goals that I’m gonna try my hardest to meet.

  • Write more. About anything. Even if it’s only tangentially crafting or nerdiness related, if I feel vaguely inspired to write, I’m going to write. I need to get back into the habit of adding content to the blog regularly again. I thought about revisiting some old posts, like the one about the ugly blanket I made a while back and the one I wrote about Magic: Puzzle Quest, and doing a follow-up of sorts on those posts – maybe that’s a good place to start. If I can get at least one post out a month for this year, that’d be amazing.
  • Go to more events this year. Whether it’s just making sure I get out to all the Kishar games this season or re-entering the world of attending conventions, I need to get out and do nerdy things again. Going to the Kate Mulgrew event last October was amazing, and reminded me of how much I missed being out and about and going to conventions. So, I’m going to try to do that more this year.
  • Make more of a dent in the Corner of Shame pile. I managed to finish quite a few things in the Corner of Shame before getting distracted by new cross-stitch projects, and I want to go back to that pile later on this year and see what else I can get finished. Maybe someday I’ll manage to completely eradicate the Corner of Shame pile!

I’m not going to be too hard on myself if I don’t meet these goals, and try to celebrate any sort of wins that happen in the process. Even a little bit of progress is better than none at all, right?

So, here’s to ten years of craftiness and nerdiness – and hopefully many, many more.

A Captain’s Journey, and a crafty nerd’s dream

Let me tell you a story, folks. A story that starts back in 2014, when I first got introduced to Star Trek.

As most of you probably already know, Captain Kathryn Janeway is my favorite Star Trek captain. Janeway was actually my gateway into Star Trek – back in 2014, while being stuck in bed for a few days with nasty back spasms, I started watching Orange is the New Black while waiting for the muscle relaxants to finally kick in. I liked it a lot – and I especially enjoyed Red, the character Kate Mulgrew played. I got Rana to watch it with me, and she was really excited to see that Kate Mulgrew was in it. When she realized that I’d never seen Kate in Voyager, though, or that I’d never really seen much Star Trek at all, she pulled up some episodes of Star Trek: Voyager with Captain Janeway and Q (since I knew John DeLancie from My Little Pony), and I got hooked.

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