2022 New Year Updates
1. Melanie’s Extras: Mel’s extras – Brunch, Meet & Greet – will be going on sale at 10:00am (PST) 1:00pm (EST), 6:00pm (GST) on JANUARY 14th. We’ve had some problems with people mass buying thing, so we are limiting the sale of tickets to 2 per person. We apologize in advance if this time is inconvenient for anybody, but we’re doing our best here. We will be posting a link very soon.
2. Volunteer Applications: Rest assured that we have received your application (some of you more than once). We are leaving the application up until the end of the month and then we are slamming the door on new applicants. We will send out reminder tweets here and there in case anybody misses it. We will also be starting to contact people for interviews by mid month.
3. Covid. Goddamn freakin’ covid!!!!!!
(sorry…I’ll get myself under control now)
We are looking into the likelihood of requiring all attendees to be vaccinated. This is not something that we wanted to have to do, but, remember when this was #EDE2020? Yeah, so do we. At this point, it is absolutely stupid that we are still being held hostage by covid and if it boils down to a choice between requiring proof of vaccine and #EDE2023, well….
If this is not something that you can live with, we are truly sorry and we don’t want you to feel as though we’re taking something away from you, but with 500+ people in a space, we HAVE to put the safety of people first. The EDE team will be meeting to discuss this in the very near future.
4. We have officially sold out of Creator Badges and Peacemaker Badges. We are running low on Angel and Sheriff Badges. We have to always keep number in mind (freakin’ COVID!!!), so as we get close to selling out of those, we’ll let you guys know. At this point, your only chance of getting one of the Creator or Peacemakers is on a resale. We do our best to retweet anybody who’s selling a badge, so when one comes up, we make sure the seller gets seen.
5. Emy Taliana: She has expressed her desire to make her contributions as inclusive as humanly possible, so she will not be charging for her concert or her morning meditation sessions. That's kinda huge. Since we can't force her to charge folks, we will be informally passing a hat for people to kick down a few dollars here and there so the woman doesn't really become a starving artist. We will be dropping more info on the concert and meditation soon, so keep an eyeball out for that
6. There are still tickets left to a bunch of our extras, so be sure to peruse our tickets page. You might have missed out on some stuff, but not everything..........
7. I (Buffalo) will be heading out to Anaheim, at the end of the month, for a VERY short visit (I may actually be spending more time in the air and in airports than with my feet on the ground in California) to see what the haps is, so if there is something specific you need to know about the event location or the surrounding area or anything else Anaheim related, let me know and I’ll do my best to make a point of finding an answer to your question.
Lastly, on a more personal note….For those of you that don’t know, I’m been monikered “Buffalo” because I am from Buffalo, NY (closer to Niagara Falls than NYCity, folks) and that puts me on East coast time. 5 hours behind the UK and 3 hours ahead of California. I am also a public school teacher which puts me into bed at an embarrassingly early time and has me up at a terribly early time. I work in a school that is akin to one of those “before” schools that are the subject of so many “hero teacher” movies, except we never become an “after” school. Any time you catch yourself watching one and thinking, “It can’t be that bad” or “That has to be an exaggeration,” remember my words: It can and it is not. At home I have a high-energy, born-deaf pitbull who has an obsession with all forms of paper and cardboard and who prefers my focus to be solely on her. I (usually) affectionately call her The Whitemare, as she is something like a toddler on steroids almost all of her waking hours.
So what’s the point? Well, I’ll tell you the point. The point is that I can’t devote my days to monitoring Twitter (even during my quiet classroom times, Twitter is still a blocked site) and things are going to happen outside my purview. But, I do get to see most things when I am able to carve out some time…it may not be the instant it happens, but eventually…and I address them when I have time to devote to them.
I know that I have a tendency to come across as a bit of a goof from time to time, but there is another, much more no-nonsense side of me hanging around too. That no-nonsense side of me does its best to temper itself when something gets unpleasant (and when I get too “Sicilian”, I have other folks poking me in the side suggesting I might want to reword some things), so you guys don’t often get to see crabbiness. And what, do you ask, inspires crabbiness? Crappiness. That’s what inspires crabbiness and lately, I’ve been seeing a bit of it popping up in either responses to a tweet I’ve put out or with our name directly in it.
Now, I can take criticism. If my years in public school have taught me anything it’s that I’m could take a battering at any given moment. But I’m not talking about criticism. I’m talking about people who are just saying crappy, nasty, hurtful things just because they have an audience. I am officially saying that we – Earp Division Expo and all of us involved – are not tolerating ANY type of it. If somebody wants to spew nonsense out into the Twitter-verse, they can do it on somebody else’s timeline and in somebody else’s space. If we see anything mean or derogatory in our space, the comment will be hidden and the person blocked.
And that’s a non-negotiable. There is more than enough negativity flying around that we can’t control, and EDE is not going to provide a forum where any other negativity can hang out. We love this con, we love the people involved, the guests who are coming and the camaraderie of this huge found family. We’re not letting anybody poop on any of that.
And with that, I’ll see myself out. If you need anything or need clarification, you can drop us a DM through Twitter or Insta or an email at EarpDivisionExpo@outlook.com and I’ll get to you the second I have time. Promise.