Convention Spotlight: Wizard World Tulsa - Day One

Hello again.  In my first post for 2016, I mentioned how I wasn't ready to review 2015 in full.  This is because I got the opportunity back in October to cover all three days of the Wizard World Tulsa Comic Convention 2015 for a pop-culture website for women, PaperDroids.

Update - My full coverage has been posted at PaperDroids blog - please read for coverage of all three days.

(All photos are my own.  Please let me know if you'd like to be credited as one of the below cosplayers.  Thanks)

Day One - October 23, 2015

Before Wizard World Tulsa, my convention experience was limited to the time I went about 8 years ago with my younger sister to a local anime convention inside a halfway crumbling janky-looking mall, in the pre-streaming anime days, when you had to buy dubbed DVDs from Sam Goody and Borders.  I went more recently with my friend to Dallas Comic Con Fan Days for Saturday only, where I dressed up as a casual Wonder Woman lugging around three to four merchandise bags at a time, and not generally knowing how to do “hero poses” despite dressing as superhero.  Would I be able to stand all three days of full blown convention put on by Wizard World in a different city four hours away? 

Day One, I got to the Cox Convention Center in Tulsa just as the door were opening at 3pm.  I didn’t take a costume this time, preferring to dress comfortably, but I did bring a back-pack with an empty water bottle.  The convention was nicely laid out, well-staffed and brimming with excited volunteers.  The building itself is very pretty inside and it’s hard not to go “ooh” and “ahh” immediately as you walk in.

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Re-reading and Re-watching: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two

Who could have known?  Who could have known that esteemed and hallowed British actor Alan Rickman would have passed away last week, along with David Bowie?  Both after battling forms of cancer. 

I first became aware of Alan Rickman when my dad made us watch Die Hard on VHS.  Before Die Hard, the most effective villains were either Emperor Palpatine or the Nazis, not even counting Darth Vader because he redeemed himself in the end.  All other villains, in my limited child-hood knowledge of movies, mostly came from the earlier Bond films and many made the most bone-headed moves that would later spawn the Austin Powers parodies.  

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Re-reading and Re-watching: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One

Hello there, I decided to break up the last book of the series into two parts, first reading Chapters 1 through 24, and stopping to watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One.

I started this project of re-reading and re-watching the Harry Potter series several years as a full-fledged adult.  The release of the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows occurred in 2007.  Films, 7 and 8, were released November of 2010 and July of 2011, respectively. At the time of this post, that marks eight and a half years from the last time I read Book Seven.  Eight years ago, I was 25.  If you had told me what would have happened in those eight years, I would not have believed you.  Not one bit.

I will explain why below, but for these reasons the last book resonates with me as an adult so much more so than when I initially read it at age 25.  At least the first half, anyway.

Again, spoilers to follow.

Book

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Re-reading and Re-watching: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Happy New Year, guys and gals!  I didn’t want to stop in my on-going series of re-reading and re-watching the Harry Potter series to do some sort of 2015 year in review.  Most of what happened you probably saw on my blog and to be honest, I wasn’t into reviewing the year, not just yet anyway.

So, to continue on, I have just finished the penultimate book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.  I’m re-reading from a more adult perspective ten years and some months years later from the original summer release of Book Six back in 2005.  Initially I started this project as an attempt to pick out more details of Houses Ravenclaw and House Hufflepuff since Pottermore, would later sort me into Ravenclaw and my best friend into Hufflepuff.  Like almost everyone else I was convinced I would be in Gryffindor. 

Book Six is one of my favorite books in the series, along with Book Two.  As soon as I finished reading Book Six for the first time, my mind was ablaze with the possibilities of what kind of object the seventh Horcrux would turn out to be.  Like my pronunciation of Hermione, the actual pronunciation of Horcrux was, way, way off from my interpretation.  (Why can’t they be Hor-cruz/Hor-cruise?)  Book Six has one of the better endings being entirely open-ended and somewhat cliff-hanger like, leaving ALL Harry Potter fans salivating in anticipation for the final installment. 

As always, spoilers to follow.

Book

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