TomSka and Friends
Sep. 13th, 2023 11:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_tectonicRight about a year ago, in September of 2022, the almighty YouTube Algorithm suggested a video to me.
"Here," said The Algorithm, "I think you might like this."
And thus began a Journey.
The video was an episode of a series called TryHards, wherein three English boys (Thomas "TomSka" Ridgewell, Eddie "Eddache" Bowley, and Elliot Gough (and by "boys" I mean guys in their 30s (though Eddie is actually 40))) engage in various challenges. When the challenge is set, they have a week to complete it, and they each film their attempts separately, then get back together to watch the results, which are hilarious. (It's a format born of the pandemic, when lockdown in the UK meant they couldn't get together to film things the way they normally would, and the week is entirely notional; often they're filming at totally different times, and though there's a time limit, I don't think any of them have managed to spend an entire week on a challenge, given that they all have other things going on in their lives.)
"I think you might like this," said L'Algorithme, and boy howdy, was it spot on the money.
"Yes, indeed!" I said. "I like these boys, and I would very much enjoy seeing more of their shenanigans."
So I went back and watched the rest of the TryHards series. And then I started watching #CONTENT, which is the series that came before that, but I had to put that on pause because there was a lot of relevant context from the Last Week series that I wanted to watch first, and then--
Okay. So TomSka has been on YouTube since 2006. He is best known for asdfmovie, which is a series consisting of a sequence of very short absurdist jokes animated in a very minimalist style that went super-viral back in the day. It's very funny, and I chortled my way through the whole thing, but it's actually one of the last components of his body of work that I watched.
He's also done some other animations, as well as a bunch of live-action sketches in a style he calls "explosive comedy" (a frequently literal descriptor), which are very funny and which I love to pieces. All that is on his main channel TomSka. On his secondary channel, TomSka & Friends (nee DarkSquidge), he does vlogging and other stuff that's less scripted and produced. Eddie is Tom's co-writer and co-creator, and Elliot is Tom's video editor, and together they comprise TurboPunch studios.
In 2016, Tom did 100 episodes of a weekly vlog called Last Week, which is basically "here's what happened in my life this week." He followed that with a year of Last Month (same thing, but monthly), which he just restarted at the beginning of 2023. At the end of Last Week, he started up #CONTENT, "A crappy series nobody asked for," which is a lot of silly games with Eddie and Elliot and weird internet challenge memes and just shitpost-y dicking around.
Anyway, I love all of it. Immensely. As soon as I had finished TryHards, I basically fell into a deep ADHD hyperfixation and I. watched. EVERYTHING.
Everything on Tom's main channel, and everything on the secondary channel, and everything I could find elsewhere (interviews, collabs, recordings of panels at conventions, etc.). And then I branched out into Eddie's stuff on his channel Eddache (lots of video essay deep-dives overthinking cartoons and other media, plus a bunch of older short comedy videos), and all the other collaborators and regulars who show up in Tom's videos: Chloe Dungate / ScarfDemon's vlogs (Little Moments) and painting chats and Dog Logic cartoons, and Daniel J. Layton's vlogs and Baking With Layton, and Sammy Paul's Some Lovely Boardgames and Pretentious Monthly Scrapbook, and the Trueman brothers' Twin Joke, and I discovered that I like a lot of Dodie's music, and Jack and Dean, and basically this whole big chunk of the mid- to late-'teens UK YouTuber scene, just… all of it. Into my brain, now. Yes.
(I feel like around here I should try to make some kind attempt to explain why I fell so hard for it all, but I don't think I can. So I'll just say that I like it. A lot.)
So then I start thinking, I love these videos so, so much. I want to tell the people who created them that; I want them to know how much laughter and joy their work has given me.
I wrote fanmail, y'all. For the first time in my life.
I wrote a letter to Tom saying "Hey man, I really like your work and I think you're pretty cool. Thanks. Plz share this with the others." I mean, I said a lot more than that. Because I felt that if I was going to invest in actually writing and sending that letter, in trying to make a connection between fan and creator to reflect some of my enjoyment back to its source (and bothering with international postage), it deserved more than just "I like your stuff"; I wanted to say something substantive about what I liked and why I liked it, and to really express my affection for it. I wanted to write a letter that was thoughtful and heartfelt and genuine, that would make the recipient feel truly appreciated.
So I took my best stab at that, and sent it off.
I also joined a couple Patreons, because I wanted to support these folks' work financially, in the hopes that that might contribute to there being more of this stuff that I really like. I contemplated merch in the online stores (though sadly I didn't find much I felt inclined to buy).
And then I started thinking: I know from the vlogs that Tom checks his fanmail pretty infrequently. Who knows how long it will be until he actually gets that letter and reads it? Heck, what if it gets lost in the post? I wanted him to know. I wanted to shake his hand and look him in the eye and tell him how much I value his work. Him, and Eddie, and as many of those folks as I can.
It's really a shame, I thought, that we don't live in England, because then I could go to MCM to do exactly that. You see, MCM Comic-Con London is a twice-yearly convention (held in May and October), and Tom always goes to it. It features prominently in Last Week / Last Month, and he's done face-to-camera vlogs talking about how he does his meet-and-greets, and funny stories from cons, and how much he missed it when it was cancelled during the pandemic. And he's always got folks like Dan and Chloe manning his booth, and Eddie has been talking on his Patreon Discord server about his plans to go, and…
and…
What if…
What if I did go to MCM?
I'm an adult. I have money. Airplanes exist. It wouldn't be the only thing we'd do, because there's no point in travelling overseas if you're not going to stay for at least a week or two, but is it so crazy and indulgent to have something fannish be the centerpiece of a big trip, when it's a thing that you love as much as I love all this stuff I've newly discovered?
So… we decided to go to London. For MCM.
We bought plane tickets early (partly with credit card points) for a two-week trip with MCM in the middle, on Memorial Day weekend. I ordered three-day passes to the con (which didn't get delivered until a few days before we left, causing a bit of anxiety, but it all worked out fine). We bought rail passes and booked hotels. I even found us a fancy new luggage set at a big discount at JC Penny! And we did this all well in advance over the course of a few months, so by the time we actually went on the trip, everything had already been paid for, so the only things we paid for during the trip were stuff like food and souvenirs. It was nice.
Anyway, back to February, and I'm updating that fanmail, and writing some more. Because if I'm going in person, I can just hand these letters to people who I don't have mailing addresses for, or at least hand them to someone who knows them. So I also wrote thoughtful and heartfelt letters to Eddie and Elliot and Dan and Chloe and Charlie (Tom's girlfriend).
I also thought, well, I'm definitely going to want something I can get a signature on, and I don't totally love the poster designs I'm seeing on the online shop. What if I made a poster of my own? Creators love fanart, and it's hard to come up with a more sincere statement of appreciation than "Your creative work inspired me to create some of my own."
Annnnnnd then I got a little carried away.
("Then is when you got carried away?" I hear you ask. To which I say: shush.)
So. I'm not a visual artist. But I am a scientist who visualizes data, and I think I'm pretty good at that. I wanted to pay tribute to the TomSka live-action comedy sketches, because I love them, and because although there's a "best of" poster design in the shop, it doesn't have all of my favorites (some of which are much newer than the poster), and its aesthetic isn't really my bag.
I decided that I would make a poster paying tribute to ALL the sketches and all the ways that they're interlinked with recurring characters, actors, and motifs, because that's one of the things I love about them, and because that's data and I am good at visualizing data.
So I made a playlist of all the sketches, and downloaded metadata and thumbnails for them, and compiled a database of people and their credits and appearances, and I watched all of the videos multiple times (such a hardship) to make lists of recurring themes, characters, objects, and ideas, and I gathered myself some data! And I fired up Inkscape and started tinkering with different ways to present all of this information.
And then, partway through, getting into a good groove with the poster, I thought, y'know, I've been hanging out on Eddie's Patreon discord server, and even interacting with him on weekly game nights –which is a hoot, and he's a swell guy– and I want to show him some appreciation, too. The sketches poster is really Tom-centric; maybe I should do something that's just for Eddie that expresses my appreciation of his solo work.
One of Eddie's videos is The Really Big Cat, and it is hilarious. It's a parody of the 1925 silent movie The Lost World, which was the first movie that had stop-motion animated dinosaurs. Eddie digitally inserted himself into the movie and replaced all of the dinosaurs with cats. He's said it's the thing he's most proud of, and I absolutely love it. The first time I watched it, it had me guffawing aloud, and as soon as it was done I had to immediately watch it again. So I decided that I would take one of the movie posters for the original film and edit it into a poster for the video, inserting Eddie in place of the male lead and replacing the dinosaur with a cat. So I got to work on that, in parallel with the sketches poster.
And >then, I'm thinking, okay, well, if I've made a poster for Tom and one for Eddie, I kinda need to make one for Elliot, too, right? TurboPunch is all three of them together, and it's hardly fair to leave him out.
So I came up with a third poster design. Since Elliot edits all of Tom's videos, and because he's talked about how much he learned from the experience, I decided to pay tribute to his heroic work editing Last Week. Which, just as a reminder, is a series that ran for 100 episodes, almost two years, and was released every single week through that period. (Plus a bonus episode.)
I decided to count up all the cuts, and make a plot that showed every single cut in every single episode of Last Week. (Ironically, although it's the most impressive-sounding, this is the poster that actually took me the least effort. I just wrote a script to download all the videos, ran them through a scene-detection program, plotted the data to an SVG file in R, and pulled that into Inkscape to add some graphical elements. It only took me a couple days.)
Like I said, I got a little carried away.
But I pulled it off. (Like I also said, deep hyperfixation. Memo to myself: if I ever wonder whether I actually have ADHD, remember that I had a hyperfixation that lasted for nine months and resulted in three works of art, an entire new skillset, and a trip overseas.)
I finished all of three of the posters, and I am quite proud of the results (click to (greatly) embiggen):
(Here's a link to the Google Drive folder with the posters in other formats.)
Getting them printed was a whole additional saga. Not an ordeal, there's just a lot of additional work to do if you want to take your digital art and make it physical. I originally planned to get the posters printed in the UK and pick them up there, so I sized them for A2 paper (420x594 mm), but then I started learning about converting RGB to CMYK for printing and color gamuts and I realized I'd want to get some test prints before I committed to multiple copies of each one.
There are details in the README files in the Google Drive folder, but long story short, I ended up getting them printed by shortrunposters.com, whose prices were literally a fifth of what I'd seen anywhere else, and because they seem to specialize in "hey I have a cool picture I took on my phone that I want to turn into a poster for my aunt's birthday," they handled all the color correction on their end and did a fantastic job of it, making all the stuff I'd learned about it superfluous. There was a hiccup where they printed extra copies of the Tom & Eddie posters, and none of the Elliot design, but I called them up and they made it right with no hassle and had the prints in the mail the next day, and I still had everything in hand several days before we left, so it was all good. Plus it meant I ended up with a couple extra copies, which in turn meant that I didn't lose anything when I made a few mistakes trimming them down from 18x27″ to A2, so it was all good.
And then there were the buttons. I wanted to do a little bit of branding, and make myself a pin-back button with the icon that I use on the Patreon Discord servers on it to wear at the meet-and-greets, so that if any of these folks ever ran across it online, they'd be all "oh, right, Beemer, the poster guy." I only wanted the one button, and I figured you could buy blanks to assemble by hand at a hobby shop, right? Turns out no, they don't make those. If you want to make a button, you use a button press, and those cost, like, a hundred dollars. Which is a bit much of an investment if you just want A button, singular.
Then I thought, hmm, our friend Matthew is a librarian, and he's told us about how nowadays libraries loan out a lot of things other than just books, like musical instruments and cutting machines. Maybe the library has one.
So I called him up (from the hobby store) and said "Hey Matthew, does your library have a button press?" And he said "No, I don't think so. Why, do you want one?" And it turns out that libraries have budgets for buying new things to add to their collections, and that they're just itching to get requests from community members, sooo… the library bought a button press and I got to use it.
And then, well, if you're going to all the trouble of borrowing the button press and making graphics to put on downloadable templates and learning how to cut them out and get them aligned and actually use the button press to make buttons, it feels like kind of a waste to make only one. So I made a bunch of them:
In addition to my usericon and signature, we have: the Turbo Punch logo; the icons I used for each of the Turbo Boys on the poster; checkers for Tom (because ska); the 'album cover' from Elliot's music video More Than Just Memes; Eddie's Eddache toon and a bit from The Really Big Cat; drawings by Charlie of Squidge and Pink (their dogs); a cool-looking graphical bit from my poster that represents different sketch series / sequences; for Chloe, a mermaid picture she drew and a picture of Kiki, her cat, who shows up a lot in her vlogs; and for Dan, one of his catchphrases ("If it's not real, it's not right), and "zest the whole motherfucker", which is a moment from the video Baking With Layton (Also TomSka!) that lives rent-free in my head. Jerry also got to make some buttons to promote his board game.
(Oh, and during Girl Scout cookie season I bought two boxes of Thin Mints and put them in my freezer to take to Tom & Eddie, because they've mentioned liking mint and chocolate, and apparently Girl Scout cookies are Not A Thing in the UK, which struck me as a crying shame.)
And then we went to England!
It was a lovely two-week trip. We spent most of our time in London, though we did take an overnight trip to Bath and a day trip to Brighton, both of which were excellent. We had other day trips planned to Cambridge and Dover, but there was a rail strike on, and we couldn't leave London on the days we'd planned those trips. Which we decided was just fine, in hindsight; we'd probably have been absolutely wiped out by two extra day trips. And it's not like we ran out of things to do in London!
MCM was three days right in the middle of the trip, Friday-Saturday-Sunday May 26th-28th. I got us weekend passes for all three days, which gave us early access: each day, the con was open a couple hours early for weekend pass holders. And that was great; after a couple hours we'd had our fill anyway, so we were able to leave just as the masses were starting to arrive.
On Friday, as soon as we were in, I made a beeline to the asdfmovie booth and queued up for the meet-and-greet while Jerry explored the floor. We actually formed a queue before the proper queue was opened, and while there was a bit of a wait, it wasn't to get to the front of the line, it was for the line to exist and things to start. I was actually I think second in the queue on the first day.
So once things actually did start and it was my turn to meet the Tomska himself, I went up and got a handshake and told him I really liked his work. I said something along these lines:
"Hey man. I'm Beemer. I'm a new and very big fan of you and you work. It really means a lot to me, not for any heavy reason, I just… I just really, really like it. Pretty much everything you've done in the past decade-plus. You have given me an enormous amount of laughter and joy, for which I am profoundly grateful. So I really wanted to come and meet you to shake your hand and say thank you."
("Something along those lines," who am I kidding. I thought about what I wanted to say for weeks. I had those words written down and memorized. If there were any differences on the day, it was just due to excitement.)
My fan-thusiasm was received graciously; Tom said thanks, and then asked if I would like a hug (he's a hugger), to which I replied "yes please." I asked if he preferred gentle, firm, or bear, and he picked bear, so it was a solid hug. And then we took a couple selfies on my phone, and I said thanks, and told him I'd be back tomorrow with stuff.
It was delightful and everything I wanted it to be.
I also went over to Eddie's table, which was behind Tom's, and got to have a bit more of an informal hi-how-are-you-nice-to-meet-you-in-person conversational interaction, and I told him much the same things, and he was similarly gracious.
(Oh, and also also I got to say hello to Chloe and Dan, who were working merch sales at Tom's booth.)
And then we went and spent the day… doing nothing, actually. I was going to talk about what we got up to for the rest of the day, but I'm pretty sure that's the day we decided to just have some downtime and relax in our fancy room in the yacht-hotel, so we didn't do much more than wander over to the food trucks and watch all the cosplayers on the lawn out in front of the ExCeL Centre.
The second day, I had a backpack full of Stuff: the fanmail, and the boxes of Thin Mints, and all the buttons arrayed across the front. I did another round of meet-and-greets (hi again, I brought you stuff, more selfies, more hugs) with Tom and Eddie, and gave them cookies and letters. Also got some stuff signed: my copy of Art Is Dead and a custom Muffin Time card from Tom, and this book Eddie wrote a decade ago titled SCUMM (a combination murder mystery / adventure game parody). I gave some of the buttons to Chloe, Dan, Eddie, and Charlie (who was also there working the booth that day; got to say hello to her, too). Folks were charmed, as I had hoped they would be.
And since I had a way to carry it, I also bought merch! I got a skateboarding cow pin, and a Beep Beep Sheep (who says the line when you squeeze his nose), and a copy of the Sam Kills Christmas book, and a TomSka bobblehead (which was free; they were a big flop when he tried to sell them many years ago, and they still have extras cluttering up Eddie's garage, so they bring a few to every con and give them away to anyone who's enough of a fan to know about them and want one. I was hardly pining for one, but I figure they're weird and rare, and that's kinda neat, so why not), and some Eddache postcards (which he signed).
(Probably I bought one or two of these things on other days, but my memory is terrible.)
Jerry had picked up some con crud and spent the day convalescing in the room, so afterwards I went and wandered the neighborhood (just around the corner from the convention center) where the TurboPunch offices used to be.
This was a very weird thing about the trip: I had all these virtual memories of places I'd never been, but had seen in all these videos I'd been watching, so there were a lot of places that I sort of already knew when I went there, but being there in person kinda nailed them down and made them real. Lots of moments of thinking "oh, that's where that is! Wow, that's much closer to the other thing than I thought." And now that I'm back home, there's extra weirdness that I now sometimes see places in videos that I've been to in person, so the line between actual and virtual memories gets even more blurred. It's double extra weird to see folks who I know virtually / parasocially go for the first time to places that I've been to and they haven't; it's all backwards!
So I wandered around Silvertown and the Royal Docks recognizing places, looked at the Thames Barrier, walked along the river, and just did some low-key exploration, basically. Had a good time.
On the third and final day of MCM, I brought the posters.
With my clever husband's help, I came up with a fairly clever way to transport them, which was two pieces of hardboard a little larger than A2 size, attached at the bottom with a hinge made of packing tape, and a bunch of binder clips on the other three sides. It made a lovely portfolio case that held the posters flat and wouldn't let them bend or wrinkle, and fit (just barely) into the largest suitcase. (And it was cheap).
So I hauled this big flat brown thing into the ExCel, and waited in the meet-and-greet line (a dozen or so people in, this time), and when I got to the front I was like, "I made some art" and opened it up to show the poster.
Tom was, in his own words, floored. "You've floored me, and that never happens. I'm at a loss for words," he said. I think he said "holy shit" a few times, too.
"I have to stop looking at this," he said, after a minute, then kept looking. I asked if I he'd sign my copy (because I had a copy for him, but also one for me to get signed, plus one for Eddie, I think), and he signed it "this is fucking amazing." He then demanded that I sign his copy, and said he was going to get it framed.
I mentioned that I had posters for Eddie & Elliot too, but I didn't want to hold up his line so I'd cycle back through again and he said "Nah, nah, fuck 'em. I wanna see it." He said of Eddie's poster that "Eddie is going to cum," and then was equally impressed by Elliot's poster. "Who hurt you?" he teased when I explained what Elliot's poster was.
And, uh, I ended up in Last Month!
In the montage, there's the buttons on my backpack at 25:39, and then Thin MInts, and a picture of me and Tom at 25:47. There's a segment of cookie tasting at 26:08. But the big bit is Tom talking to me about my poster at 25:57!
Tom: "This is the most insane thing anyone's ever brought me. In, like, both a good way and maybe a bad way? Are you okay? Do you need help."
Me: "I'm good. 😀"
So… now I'm in a video on YouTube that has 150,000 views! Which is pretty neat.
Eddie absolutely loved his Really Big Cat poster and was very impressed by the other two.
"So is this your job? Are you a graphic designer?" he asked. (No, it's just the hyperfixation…)
I got his signature on the sketches poster, and on his poster, as well as "Awesome, 5 stars!" and "9/10 IGN"
Then I also got signatures from Chloe and Dan and Matt Ley, and Chloe and Dan both asked me to send them the digital file. And I ended up in Little Moments, as well!
You can see me at 17:40, but then there's a whole segment with me and the poster at 17:48!
I also got some secret lore from Chloe and Matt! Which is that in three sketches (IIRC, 17 Ways to Dump Your Girlfriend, First Contact, and one they weren't sure of but maybe it was from Dean Dobbs), they played background extras who were (out of sequence) flirting with one another, then having an argument, then not talking to one another. That was pretty neat.
So… yeah. I would call that a success.
And then we spent a week vacationing in London and Bath and Brighton! And it was great.
Then we came home, and while the trip was fantastic, it was also lovely to be home.
A couple weeks ago, I finally ordered some frames for my posters. They arrived last week, almost a year after I watched that first video, and now I just need to hang them up.
I'm still jumping on every new video as soon as it comes out, and continuing to branch out into related channels and find new things to love. Rewatching things, too. And I have some more creative projects percolating away in the back of my mind. And even though we were only there for two weeks, London now feels like a place that is comfortable and familiar to me. It's kind of like an entire new annex got added on to my mental architecture over the last year. It's wild.
So that's a big chunk of what I've been up to for the past year. I found a new fandom and got really into it and put the whole thing into my brain, and I made some art and had a magical adventure, and I got to meet some of the people from the thing(s) I'm a fan of, and some of them know my name now. It's weird and wonderful and it has made me very happy.
"Here," said The Algorithm, "I think you might like this."
And thus began a Journey.
The video was an episode of a series called TryHards, wherein three English boys (Thomas "TomSka" Ridgewell, Eddie "Eddache" Bowley, and Elliot Gough (and by "boys" I mean guys in their 30s (though Eddie is actually 40))) engage in various challenges. When the challenge is set, they have a week to complete it, and they each film their attempts separately, then get back together to watch the results, which are hilarious. (It's a format born of the pandemic, when lockdown in the UK meant they couldn't get together to film things the way they normally would, and the week is entirely notional; often they're filming at totally different times, and though there's a time limit, I don't think any of them have managed to spend an entire week on a challenge, given that they all have other things going on in their lives.)
"I think you might like this," said L'Algorithme, and boy howdy, was it spot on the money.
"Yes, indeed!" I said. "I like these boys, and I would very much enjoy seeing more of their shenanigans."
So I went back and watched the rest of the TryHards series. And then I started watching #CONTENT, which is the series that came before that, but I had to put that on pause because there was a lot of relevant context from the Last Week series that I wanted to watch first, and then--
Okay. So TomSka has been on YouTube since 2006. He is best known for asdfmovie, which is a series consisting of a sequence of very short absurdist jokes animated in a very minimalist style that went super-viral back in the day. It's very funny, and I chortled my way through the whole thing, but it's actually one of the last components of his body of work that I watched.
He's also done some other animations, as well as a bunch of live-action sketches in a style he calls "explosive comedy" (a frequently literal descriptor), which are very funny and which I love to pieces. All that is on his main channel TomSka. On his secondary channel, TomSka & Friends (nee DarkSquidge), he does vlogging and other stuff that's less scripted and produced. Eddie is Tom's co-writer and co-creator, and Elliot is Tom's video editor, and together they comprise TurboPunch studios.
In 2016, Tom did 100 episodes of a weekly vlog called Last Week, which is basically "here's what happened in my life this week." He followed that with a year of Last Month (same thing, but monthly), which he just restarted at the beginning of 2023. At the end of Last Week, he started up #CONTENT, "A crappy series nobody asked for," which is a lot of silly games with Eddie and Elliot and weird internet challenge memes and just shitpost-y dicking around.
Anyway, I love all of it. Immensely. As soon as I had finished TryHards, I basically fell into a deep ADHD hyperfixation and I. watched. EVERYTHING.
Everything on Tom's main channel, and everything on the secondary channel, and everything I could find elsewhere (interviews, collabs, recordings of panels at conventions, etc.). And then I branched out into Eddie's stuff on his channel Eddache (lots of video essay deep-dives overthinking cartoons and other media, plus a bunch of older short comedy videos), and all the other collaborators and regulars who show up in Tom's videos: Chloe Dungate / ScarfDemon's vlogs (Little Moments) and painting chats and Dog Logic cartoons, and Daniel J. Layton's vlogs and Baking With Layton, and Sammy Paul's Some Lovely Boardgames and Pretentious Monthly Scrapbook, and the Trueman brothers' Twin Joke, and I discovered that I like a lot of Dodie's music, and Jack and Dean, and basically this whole big chunk of the mid- to late-'teens UK YouTuber scene, just… all of it. Into my brain, now. Yes.
(I feel like around here I should try to make some kind attempt to explain why I fell so hard for it all, but I don't think I can. So I'll just say that I like it. A lot.)
So then I start thinking, I love these videos so, so much. I want to tell the people who created them that; I want them to know how much laughter and joy their work has given me.
I wrote fanmail, y'all. For the first time in my life.
I wrote a letter to Tom saying "Hey man, I really like your work and I think you're pretty cool. Thanks. Plz share this with the others." I mean, I said a lot more than that. Because I felt that if I was going to invest in actually writing and sending that letter, in trying to make a connection between fan and creator to reflect some of my enjoyment back to its source (and bothering with international postage), it deserved more than just "I like your stuff"; I wanted to say something substantive about what I liked and why I liked it, and to really express my affection for it. I wanted to write a letter that was thoughtful and heartfelt and genuine, that would make the recipient feel truly appreciated.
So I took my best stab at that, and sent it off.
I also joined a couple Patreons, because I wanted to support these folks' work financially, in the hopes that that might contribute to there being more of this stuff that I really like. I contemplated merch in the online stores (though sadly I didn't find much I felt inclined to buy).
And then I started thinking: I know from the vlogs that Tom checks his fanmail pretty infrequently. Who knows how long it will be until he actually gets that letter and reads it? Heck, what if it gets lost in the post? I wanted him to know. I wanted to shake his hand and look him in the eye and tell him how much I value his work. Him, and Eddie, and as many of those folks as I can.
It's really a shame, I thought, that we don't live in England, because then I could go to MCM to do exactly that. You see, MCM Comic-Con London is a twice-yearly convention (held in May and October), and Tom always goes to it. It features prominently in Last Week / Last Month, and he's done face-to-camera vlogs talking about how he does his meet-and-greets, and funny stories from cons, and how much he missed it when it was cancelled during the pandemic. And he's always got folks like Dan and Chloe manning his booth, and Eddie has been talking on his Patreon Discord server about his plans to go, and…
and…
What if…
What if I did go to MCM?
I'm an adult. I have money. Airplanes exist. It wouldn't be the only thing we'd do, because there's no point in travelling overseas if you're not going to stay for at least a week or two, but is it so crazy and indulgent to have something fannish be the centerpiece of a big trip, when it's a thing that you love as much as I love all this stuff I've newly discovered?
So… we decided to go to London. For MCM.
We bought plane tickets early (partly with credit card points) for a two-week trip with MCM in the middle, on Memorial Day weekend. I ordered three-day passes to the con (which didn't get delivered until a few days before we left, causing a bit of anxiety, but it all worked out fine). We bought rail passes and booked hotels. I even found us a fancy new luggage set at a big discount at JC Penny! And we did this all well in advance over the course of a few months, so by the time we actually went on the trip, everything had already been paid for, so the only things we paid for during the trip were stuff like food and souvenirs. It was nice.
Anyway, back to February, and I'm updating that fanmail, and writing some more. Because if I'm going in person, I can just hand these letters to people who I don't have mailing addresses for, or at least hand them to someone who knows them. So I also wrote thoughtful and heartfelt letters to Eddie and Elliot and Dan and Chloe and Charlie (Tom's girlfriend).
I also thought, well, I'm definitely going to want something I can get a signature on, and I don't totally love the poster designs I'm seeing on the online shop. What if I made a poster of my own? Creators love fanart, and it's hard to come up with a more sincere statement of appreciation than "Your creative work inspired me to create some of my own."
Annnnnnd then I got a little carried away.
("Then is when you got carried away?" I hear you ask. To which I say: shush.)
So. I'm not a visual artist. But I am a scientist who visualizes data, and I think I'm pretty good at that. I wanted to pay tribute to the TomSka live-action comedy sketches, because I love them, and because although there's a "best of" poster design in the shop, it doesn't have all of my favorites (some of which are much newer than the poster), and its aesthetic isn't really my bag.
I decided that I would make a poster paying tribute to ALL the sketches and all the ways that they're interlinked with recurring characters, actors, and motifs, because that's one of the things I love about them, and because that's data and I am good at visualizing data.
So I made a playlist of all the sketches, and downloaded metadata and thumbnails for them, and compiled a database of people and their credits and appearances, and I watched all of the videos multiple times (such a hardship) to make lists of recurring themes, characters, objects, and ideas, and I gathered myself some data! And I fired up Inkscape and started tinkering with different ways to present all of this information.
And then, partway through, getting into a good groove with the poster, I thought, y'know, I've been hanging out on Eddie's Patreon discord server, and even interacting with him on weekly game nights –which is a hoot, and he's a swell guy– and I want to show him some appreciation, too. The sketches poster is really Tom-centric; maybe I should do something that's just for Eddie that expresses my appreciation of his solo work.
One of Eddie's videos is The Really Big Cat, and it is hilarious. It's a parody of the 1925 silent movie The Lost World, which was the first movie that had stop-motion animated dinosaurs. Eddie digitally inserted himself into the movie and replaced all of the dinosaurs with cats. He's said it's the thing he's most proud of, and I absolutely love it. The first time I watched it, it had me guffawing aloud, and as soon as it was done I had to immediately watch it again. So I decided that I would take one of the movie posters for the original film and edit it into a poster for the video, inserting Eddie in place of the male lead and replacing the dinosaur with a cat. So I got to work on that, in parallel with the sketches poster.
And >then, I'm thinking, okay, well, if I've made a poster for Tom and one for Eddie, I kinda need to make one for Elliot, too, right? TurboPunch is all three of them together, and it's hardly fair to leave him out.
So I came up with a third poster design. Since Elliot edits all of Tom's videos, and because he's talked about how much he learned from the experience, I decided to pay tribute to his heroic work editing Last Week. Which, just as a reminder, is a series that ran for 100 episodes, almost two years, and was released every single week through that period. (Plus a bonus episode.)
I decided to count up all the cuts, and make a plot that showed every single cut in every single episode of Last Week. (Ironically, although it's the most impressive-sounding, this is the poster that actually took me the least effort. I just wrote a script to download all the videos, ran them through a scene-detection program, plotted the data to an SVG file in R, and pulled that into Inkscape to add some graphical elements. It only took me a couple days.)
Like I said, I got a little carried away.
But I pulled it off. (Like I also said, deep hyperfixation. Memo to myself: if I ever wonder whether I actually have ADHD, remember that I had a hyperfixation that lasted for nine months and resulted in three works of art, an entire new skillset, and a trip overseas.)
I finished all of three of the posters, and I am quite proud of the results (click to (greatly) embiggen):
(Here's a link to the Google Drive folder with the posters in other formats.)
Getting them printed was a whole additional saga. Not an ordeal, there's just a lot of additional work to do if you want to take your digital art and make it physical. I originally planned to get the posters printed in the UK and pick them up there, so I sized them for A2 paper (420x594 mm), but then I started learning about converting RGB to CMYK for printing and color gamuts and I realized I'd want to get some test prints before I committed to multiple copies of each one.
There are details in the README files in the Google Drive folder, but long story short, I ended up getting them printed by shortrunposters.com, whose prices were literally a fifth of what I'd seen anywhere else, and because they seem to specialize in "hey I have a cool picture I took on my phone that I want to turn into a poster for my aunt's birthday," they handled all the color correction on their end and did a fantastic job of it, making all the stuff I'd learned about it superfluous. There was a hiccup where they printed extra copies of the Tom & Eddie posters, and none of the Elliot design, but I called them up and they made it right with no hassle and had the prints in the mail the next day, and I still had everything in hand several days before we left, so it was all good. Plus it meant I ended up with a couple extra copies, which in turn meant that I didn't lose anything when I made a few mistakes trimming them down from 18x27″ to A2, so it was all good.
And then there were the buttons. I wanted to do a little bit of branding, and make myself a pin-back button with the icon that I use on the Patreon Discord servers on it to wear at the meet-and-greets, so that if any of these folks ever ran across it online, they'd be all "oh, right, Beemer, the poster guy." I only wanted the one button, and I figured you could buy blanks to assemble by hand at a hobby shop, right? Turns out no, they don't make those. If you want to make a button, you use a button press, and those cost, like, a hundred dollars. Which is a bit much of an investment if you just want A button, singular.
Then I thought, hmm, our friend Matthew is a librarian, and he's told us about how nowadays libraries loan out a lot of things other than just books, like musical instruments and cutting machines. Maybe the library has one.
So I called him up (from the hobby store) and said "Hey Matthew, does your library have a button press?" And he said "No, I don't think so. Why, do you want one?" And it turns out that libraries have budgets for buying new things to add to their collections, and that they're just itching to get requests from community members, sooo… the library bought a button press and I got to use it.
And then, well, if you're going to all the trouble of borrowing the button press and making graphics to put on downloadable templates and learning how to cut them out and get them aligned and actually use the button press to make buttons, it feels like kind of a waste to make only one. So I made a bunch of them:
In addition to my usericon and signature, we have: the Turbo Punch logo; the icons I used for each of the Turbo Boys on the poster; checkers for Tom (because ska); the 'album cover' from Elliot's music video More Than Just Memes; Eddie's Eddache toon and a bit from The Really Big Cat; drawings by Charlie of Squidge and Pink (their dogs); a cool-looking graphical bit from my poster that represents different sketch series / sequences; for Chloe, a mermaid picture she drew and a picture of Kiki, her cat, who shows up a lot in her vlogs; and for Dan, one of his catchphrases ("If it's not real, it's not right), and "zest the whole motherfucker", which is a moment from the video Baking With Layton (Also TomSka!) that lives rent-free in my head. Jerry also got to make some buttons to promote his board game.
(Oh, and during Girl Scout cookie season I bought two boxes of Thin Mints and put them in my freezer to take to Tom & Eddie, because they've mentioned liking mint and chocolate, and apparently Girl Scout cookies are Not A Thing in the UK, which struck me as a crying shame.)
And then we went to England!
It was a lovely two-week trip. We spent most of our time in London, though we did take an overnight trip to Bath and a day trip to Brighton, both of which were excellent. We had other day trips planned to Cambridge and Dover, but there was a rail strike on, and we couldn't leave London on the days we'd planned those trips. Which we decided was just fine, in hindsight; we'd probably have been absolutely wiped out by two extra day trips. And it's not like we ran out of things to do in London!
MCM was three days right in the middle of the trip, Friday-Saturday-Sunday May 26th-28th. I got us weekend passes for all three days, which gave us early access: each day, the con was open a couple hours early for weekend pass holders. And that was great; after a couple hours we'd had our fill anyway, so we were able to leave just as the masses were starting to arrive.
On Friday, as soon as we were in, I made a beeline to the asdfmovie booth and queued up for the meet-and-greet while Jerry explored the floor. We actually formed a queue before the proper queue was opened, and while there was a bit of a wait, it wasn't to get to the front of the line, it was for the line to exist and things to start. I was actually I think second in the queue on the first day.
So once things actually did start and it was my turn to meet the Tomska himself, I went up and got a handshake and told him I really liked his work. I said something along these lines:
"Hey man. I'm Beemer. I'm a new and very big fan of you and you work. It really means a lot to me, not for any heavy reason, I just… I just really, really like it. Pretty much everything you've done in the past decade-plus. You have given me an enormous amount of laughter and joy, for which I am profoundly grateful. So I really wanted to come and meet you to shake your hand and say thank you."
("Something along those lines," who am I kidding. I thought about what I wanted to say for weeks. I had those words written down and memorized. If there were any differences on the day, it was just due to excitement.)
My fan-thusiasm was received graciously; Tom said thanks, and then asked if I would like a hug (he's a hugger), to which I replied "yes please." I asked if he preferred gentle, firm, or bear, and he picked bear, so it was a solid hug. And then we took a couple selfies on my phone, and I said thanks, and told him I'd be back tomorrow with stuff.
It was delightful and everything I wanted it to be.
I also went over to Eddie's table, which was behind Tom's, and got to have a bit more of an informal hi-how-are-you-nice-to-meet-you-in-person conversational interaction, and I told him much the same things, and he was similarly gracious.
(Oh, and also also I got to say hello to Chloe and Dan, who were working merch sales at Tom's booth.)
And then we went and spent the day… doing nothing, actually. I was going to talk about what we got up to for the rest of the day, but I'm pretty sure that's the day we decided to just have some downtime and relax in our fancy room in the yacht-hotel, so we didn't do much more than wander over to the food trucks and watch all the cosplayers on the lawn out in front of the ExCeL Centre.
The second day, I had a backpack full of Stuff: the fanmail, and the boxes of Thin Mints, and all the buttons arrayed across the front. I did another round of meet-and-greets (hi again, I brought you stuff, more selfies, more hugs) with Tom and Eddie, and gave them cookies and letters. Also got some stuff signed: my copy of Art Is Dead and a custom Muffin Time card from Tom, and this book Eddie wrote a decade ago titled SCUMM (a combination murder mystery / adventure game parody). I gave some of the buttons to Chloe, Dan, Eddie, and Charlie (who was also there working the booth that day; got to say hello to her, too). Folks were charmed, as I had hoped they would be.
And since I had a way to carry it, I also bought merch! I got a skateboarding cow pin, and a Beep Beep Sheep (who says the line when you squeeze his nose), and a copy of the Sam Kills Christmas book, and a TomSka bobblehead (which was free; they were a big flop when he tried to sell them many years ago, and they still have extras cluttering up Eddie's garage, so they bring a few to every con and give them away to anyone who's enough of a fan to know about them and want one. I was hardly pining for one, but I figure they're weird and rare, and that's kinda neat, so why not), and some Eddache postcards (which he signed).
(Probably I bought one or two of these things on other days, but my memory is terrible.)
Jerry had picked up some con crud and spent the day convalescing in the room, so afterwards I went and wandered the neighborhood (just around the corner from the convention center) where the TurboPunch offices used to be.
This was a very weird thing about the trip: I had all these virtual memories of places I'd never been, but had seen in all these videos I'd been watching, so there were a lot of places that I sort of already knew when I went there, but being there in person kinda nailed them down and made them real. Lots of moments of thinking "oh, that's where that is! Wow, that's much closer to the other thing than I thought." And now that I'm back home, there's extra weirdness that I now sometimes see places in videos that I've been to in person, so the line between actual and virtual memories gets even more blurred. It's double extra weird to see folks who I know virtually / parasocially go for the first time to places that I've been to and they haven't; it's all backwards!
So I wandered around Silvertown and the Royal Docks recognizing places, looked at the Thames Barrier, walked along the river, and just did some low-key exploration, basically. Had a good time.
On the third and final day of MCM, I brought the posters.
With my clever husband's help, I came up with a fairly clever way to transport them, which was two pieces of hardboard a little larger than A2 size, attached at the bottom with a hinge made of packing tape, and a bunch of binder clips on the other three sides. It made a lovely portfolio case that held the posters flat and wouldn't let them bend or wrinkle, and fit (just barely) into the largest suitcase. (And it was cheap).
So I hauled this big flat brown thing into the ExCel, and waited in the meet-and-greet line (a dozen or so people in, this time), and when I got to the front I was like, "I made some art" and opened it up to show the poster.
Tom was, in his own words, floored. "You've floored me, and that never happens. I'm at a loss for words," he said. I think he said "holy shit" a few times, too.
"I have to stop looking at this," he said, after a minute, then kept looking. I asked if I he'd sign my copy (because I had a copy for him, but also one for me to get signed, plus one for Eddie, I think), and he signed it "this is fucking amazing." He then demanded that I sign his copy, and said he was going to get it framed.
I mentioned that I had posters for Eddie & Elliot too, but I didn't want to hold up his line so I'd cycle back through again and he said "Nah, nah, fuck 'em. I wanna see it." He said of Eddie's poster that "Eddie is going to cum," and then was equally impressed by Elliot's poster. "Who hurt you?" he teased when I explained what Elliot's poster was.
And, uh, I ended up in Last Month!
In the montage, there's the buttons on my backpack at 25:39, and then Thin MInts, and a picture of me and Tom at 25:47. There's a segment of cookie tasting at 26:08. But the big bit is Tom talking to me about my poster at 25:57!
Tom: "This is the most insane thing anyone's ever brought me. In, like, both a good way and maybe a bad way? Are you okay? Do you need help."
Me: "I'm good. 😀"
So… now I'm in a video on YouTube that has 150,000 views! Which is pretty neat.
Eddie absolutely loved his Really Big Cat poster and was very impressed by the other two.
"So is this your job? Are you a graphic designer?" he asked. (No, it's just the hyperfixation…)
I got his signature on the sketches poster, and on his poster, as well as "Awesome, 5 stars!" and "9/10 IGN"
Then I also got signatures from Chloe and Dan and Matt Ley, and Chloe and Dan both asked me to send them the digital file. And I ended up in Little Moments, as well!
You can see me at 17:40, but then there's a whole segment with me and the poster at 17:48!
I also got some secret lore from Chloe and Matt! Which is that in three sketches (IIRC, 17 Ways to Dump Your Girlfriend, First Contact, and one they weren't sure of but maybe it was from Dean Dobbs), they played background extras who were (out of sequence) flirting with one another, then having an argument, then not talking to one another. That was pretty neat.
So… yeah. I would call that a success.
And then we spent a week vacationing in London and Bath and Brighton! And it was great.
Then we came home, and while the trip was fantastic, it was also lovely to be home.
A couple weeks ago, I finally ordered some frames for my posters. They arrived last week, almost a year after I watched that first video, and now I just need to hang them up.
I'm still jumping on every new video as soon as it comes out, and continuing to branch out into related channels and find new things to love. Rewatching things, too. And I have some more creative projects percolating away in the back of my mind. And even though we were only there for two weeks, London now feels like a place that is comfortable and familiar to me. It's kind of like an entire new annex got added on to my mental architecture over the last year. It's wild.
So that's a big chunk of what I've been up to for the past year. I found a new fandom and got really into it and put the whole thing into my brain, and I made some art and had a magical adventure, and I got to meet some of the people from the thing(s) I'm a fan of, and some of them know my name now. It's weird and wonderful and it has made me very happy.
