Height differences that like are the most adorable.

:D Nice that after almost a decade everything worked out where your paths could cross.

I hope to meet more people at cons someday who I haven't been able to meet.

Is it weird to say that abandoned buildings can be really pretty? Sometimes I think photos of abandoned buildings make for creepy pretty photos.

Might be a bit weird to say, but I can totally understand why she can't call anyone a friend considering the state or paranoia and fear and mistrust Ceaușescu created.

Hope her family are able to stay safe, somehow.

:lol: yes, hope my family has good standing in the town and when/if I got they don't give me the evil eye :lol:

Did you do the director's cut too?

I like my tall guys. :D Yeah, it's funny 'cause for ages for some reason I thought and kept saying it was May 2008 when I first started watching Smallville and became a fan of Tom, but when I was working it out a little while ago I realised I was wrong and it was May 2009. :lol: I kinda wished it was 2008 'cause then it would be exactly a decade lol. After Lucifer he started to do more comic cons (thanks to Michael Rosenbaum's encouragement), London 2018 was his first UK one. Though he told he he had visited the UK before. I think comic cons were realistically the only way our paths could cross. He's made so many fans dreams come true by doing so many cons over the world now.

London Film and Comic Con 2018 was my first ever comic con. And then I got the con bug haha! I went to LFCC 2019 and met Tom Ellis, Aimee Garcia, Lana Parrilla, Robert Carlyle, Emilie De Ravin and Brendan Fraser. And then in December 2019 I went to Wales Comic Con to meet Tom again along with more Smallville cast with Michael Rosenbaum, Erica Durance and Laura Vandervoort. Comic cons are such a buzz and really awesome. Hectic, busy, exhausting, expensive but totally worth it. I hope you get to go to some soon. :)

It's really nice that they're still friends.

I agree about Cons being the best or most likely way to meet a favorite actor. And I feel it's the best way to have a decent amount of time with a person.

oooh cool Brendan Fraser


I used to go to Cons all the time. I went to San Diego in 2012 and NYC every year (because it's where I live). Then the pandemic hit and the companies started wanting attendees to wear masks, and I am not interested in wearing a mask so as soon as they drop that rule, I'll return.

I will quietly refer you to our recent "never meet your idols" conversation. :lol:

Obviously, in your case (and Liv's), it worked out, and that's awesome. I'm sure I'd be very happy to meet Brendan Fraser that way as well.

But I can't imagine how disappointed I'd be to find out someone I loved was actually a tool.



I remember seeing Chris Hemsworth and Nathalie Portman on the Graham Norton Show when the first Thor movie came out and it was a tale of differing heights. :lol:


The thing is, I don't think they're abandoned. I mean, maybe they were. We obviously didn't go door to door.

It just looked like I imagine a lovely old mansion would look if it hadn't had proper maintenance or repairs in a couple of decades. Except that it was all the houses that looked like that and not just one.

They had a serious problem with accessing basic things and, if the government gives you a house, I wonder if the government gets to decide what you can do with it... Or maybe the costs to maintain or repair a house are just too much?


Oh, I don't think that's weird at all. I know a lot of people from different former Eastern bloc countries, not just Romania, and even if most of them would have been fairly young when the Iron Curtain fell, you can see the impact the Soviet experience had on them. I think, even if they can't remember much of it themselves, their parents would have.

It's total generational trauma, with a bit of personal trauma thrown in there as well because they weren't babies either in 1989.

I hope her family are alright as well. Her grandmother's still alive. She lived through World War II, with first the German invasion, then the Soviet occupation. I can't imagine the toll seeing all of this happen has on her.


:shrug: You could choose to play it up, if it turns out your great-aunt's got the locals talking. I mean, it can be fun sometimes to play with people's prejudices. :lol:


At the risk of betraying just how old I am... :lol: I bought the director's cut DVDs. I only saw the original run of LOTR movies in theatres and wouldn't know if the director's cut was shown in cinemas. But I did buy... I actually bought both versions of the DVDs, the non-director's cuts for marathon purposes and the director's cut for when I would watch only the one movie at a time.

Yeah, Tom & Michael definitely became the closest friends out of the whole cast of Smallville, and I love it.

:nod: Absolutely. At the auto table, it will depend on how busy long queues an actor will have, but Friday is usually the quietest day out of the con weekend, and that first meeting I actually got to chat with Tom for at least a few minutes. I think the environment helps too, whilst cons are chaotic at times, everyone is pretty much very positive and just having fun.

Brendan Fraser was really nice. I didn't have much time to chat with him 'cause he had huge queues, but he signed my The Mummy and Mummy Returns DVD box set (which I had owned for years so it was really surreal getting it signed by the one and only). I went to his talk and he was so funny and had a lot of great stories about the filming of The Mummy.

That's cool you live close to San Diego and NYC comic con and used to go to them every year. It's a shame the pandemic hit so soon after I just started getting the bug, I could have seen myself going every year (if not every other year). I can understand not wanting to wear masks at cons. I still wear my mask at work, but I wouldn't like to wear one at a comic con. It would become stifling, even at a winter con. I couldn't imagine having to wear one at summer, the London Olympia was like a greenhouse in July there's no way anyone would want to wear a mask in that. Hopefully the rules will relax soon. I also can't imagine meeting a guest behind plexiglass, or not being able to get a hug in a photoshoot, it does take away some of the personal experience and I'm so glad I got the opportunity before the pandemic happened.

It's true, they do say never meet your idols lol. I may have been extremely lucky that everyone I've met so far was super cool, friendly, down to earth and genuinely happy to meet me. I've read some stories where fans were left disappointed with whom they met, but I think we have to remember that these people are only human and I'm sure they all have their bad days. Also, I've mentioned the word before, but comic cons can be extremely chaotic, they're loud, with thousands of people queuing up to meet you. It can also depend on how well the con is run and how well they manage the queues. I admit that's no excuse to being unfriendly to their fans, and there probably is a divide in celebrities who will do comic cons because they truly enjoy meeting their fans and want to make the experience really special or do it just for the money. Doing comic cons is easy money after all. Those who are just doing for the money will be more likely to be a tool. I think you just have to read between the lines. Yes, the risk of being disappointed by meeting your idol is there, but sometimes, you just have to take that risk. You might find you'll be pleasantly surprised. :)

I think we can all use a little more compassion, for sure. :nod: And that includes towards celebrities.

It's part of why I don't want to meet celebrities, especially the ones I like. What if they're just having a bad day? That happens to the best of us. What if I'm the one who comes off super annoying? That happens a lot, too. :lol: Believe me!

At a con, though, and I say this with as much compassion as I can muster... they're getting paid. They knew coming in what the job was. Be nice to your fans. Sign endless numbers of autographs. I understand that it's tedious. I know some people don't behave well and you can't blame people for having human reactions to that. I realize it's a chaotic environment.

But you have one job here.

Again, I'm super glad that Tom Welling and everyone else have turned out to be decent human beings. Obviously, being famous and being a nice/mature person aren't mutually exclusive.

But I've never been to a con and even I have heard to "horror" stories of celebs who are a little too up their own backside, you know?

:nod: I totally get what you're saying. And you're absolutely right, any celeb who comes to a con should know what the job is. Again, I think you can tell who genuinely enjoys going to comic cons and meeting their fans, those are the ones who'll go out of their way to make their fans' experience that more special, and those who just think of it as another job where they get paid. Those ones may put a front and be 'nice' to their fans as part of that job, but anything outside of that you know they won't go out of their way to always be nice. And then there are the ones who'll just act how they want. I tend not to read too much into those "horror" stories of celebs, (there's a whole bunch of celebs I couldn't care less about) but again I think it's quite obvious from how they flaunt themselves which ones are the ones who are a little too up their backside.

Yes, and that works the other way as well. Celebs have to respect their fans, but fans also have to respect that celeb's boundaries. I've seen stories where it was the fans that were rude and not the other way around.

I think you just have to be selective in what celebs you would REALLY love to meet. Check out some videos on youtube with fans filming/sharing their experiences when meeting those celebrities. The more good experiences from fans of a particular celeb you read/see, the more likely you'll get just as good an experience. Over the years up until I met him, I've never heard one bad word to say about Tom, from his cast members and fans alike.

Tom used to be a very private person. He once said in an interview that he doesn't like being a celebrity for the sake of being a 'celebrity.' He wanted to just go to work, do his job well and then go home and have some private time. He also admitted he hated doing interviews, especially if the interviewer spills on to more personal questions. Over the last few years though, Michael and his now wife Jessica have really helped him come out of his shell more, and whilst he still likes to keep stuff private, he's become so much more relaxed. Part of that had to do with the overworked stress and anxiety he experienced during 10 years of filming Smallville, which Tom and Michael talked about on Michael's podcast. If you said to me Tom would join social media 10 years ago I wouldn't have believed you, but in 2016 he actually did join instagram/facebook. He doesn't post there very often, but the stuff he does share is always very special. His wife Jessica also has an instagram account and posts there frequently.

I've also not read one bad word about Brendan Fraser either, he's become one of the most popular nicest celebs you could meet and I can attest to that.

:lol: Yeah, I really just don't want to meet anyone. I'm glad some of them are nice people, but I'm quite happy to have them live their own lives and I'll live mine here.

Honestly, I wouldn't read too much into the "horror" stories either if they came from one person having the one bad experience. But the ones where it's not just the one person, and where some of the people confirming the bad behaviour aren't fans but people who work behind the scenes at cons... :shrug: I don't know. Not everyone's gonna be a nice person either. Just because someone's an entitled brat doesn't make them evil, but I still don't want to meet them.

:shrug: I tend to be cynical in general. I feel like we all try to put our best foot forward when around other people, especially if these people aren't old friends or family members or people who know us backwards and forwards. And I also think that professional actors can be very charming as part of their skillset.

I mentionned a while back on this thread that I had a very, very high opinion of Will Smith for decades until recent events. And I don't necessarily have that bad an opinion of him now either. I'm just saying I don't trust appearances easily. I don't think that makes me smart (or that I'm right, for that matter). I'm just saying I wouldn't trust that I was meeting the real person when meeting a celebrity, that's all. And, as a by-product of that, I'm more likely to believe their bad behaviour than their good oned. (Again, I didn't say this makes me smart or that I'm right.)

That's completely understandable. Not everyone is gonna want to meet these people and that's fine. Nothing wrong with just admiring a celeb from afar.

:nod: You're right, and you can't always assume that everyone is going to be nice. Yes, just because someone may not be nice doesn't make them evil, but who would want to meet anyone who's always rude.

You're never really going to know someone unless you're really close friends with them. I'd say it's impossible to trust on appearances alone anyway. You just can't, unless you know that person well enough. I think it's just one of those things, you can't really tell if you're meeting the real person when meeting a celebrity. It goes with the territory. For me, I just use my judgement. First impressions can count sometimes. :shrug:

Oh, of course. When I say I don't trust impressions... I'll totally judge someone who's rude to staff. Every single time.

I guess it comes that down to that boring thing everyone has. The bad stuff is easier to believe than the good stuff. :lol:

Fortunately, I don't think any celebrity's day is the worse for my not being in it, so it's all good. :)

It's funny though. I don't have crushes on YouTube vloggers, but I do follow a few and I have moments where I think "oh, we could totally be friends! Why aren't we friends?" And then I come back to myself and realize that real relationships are more complicated than the sum total of videos on YouTube, let alone the bits that those specific vloggers may publish.

:nod: I work in customer services so I know first hand of dealing with rude people.

I've only had a few celebrity crushes over the years but Tom has definitely been my longest and most dedicated haha.

I watch a few youtubers, one of whom has been vlogging daily for 12 years, and I've been watching them for about 8 of those years, so I kinda feel like I know them really well. They've built up a lovely community and everyone is really nice. They live stream a lot so it's great to be able to interact with them live. Sure, they only show a snippet of their lives and I know it's not like we're actually friends. But it's a similar thing to being part of a forum like :ff: we communicate and make good conversation with one another, become 'friends' but we don't really know everything about everyone here. Online relationships aren't quite the same as in person relationships. But it still has a great feeling of family here.

When I was a teenager, I was more prone to celebrity crushes... but even those were kinda limited. :shrug: At the risk of showing my age, social media didn't really exist back then. :lol: I'm not even sure we had the Internet. :lol: Actually, no, we did have the Internet. It was just very new.

But John Cho. :lol: Saw him in an episode of Charmed (the original) 20-something years ago. I can't say that I've watched everything he's ever done, but he's been my celebrity crush since then. :nod: Never met him and don't intend on going out of my way for that to happen either. :)

At the moment, I'm really into the idea of going on a cruise (hence reviving the Travel thread :lol: ) and I've been watching cruising vlogs almost every day. It's a distant plan, so right now I'm just trying to get as much information as I can before I even begin to decide what I want to do. Anyway, these vloggers all seem so nice and fun. :lol: I haven't been following them for ages, so it's not like I feel like I know them intimately. I'm just very charmed by their attitudes and knowledge...

Haha, you're making me feel old too. :lol: Ok, so social media was just getting started as I was getting into my teens. Myspace and the very early days of Facebook. Those were the days. At that time I was in my boyband obsession phase, where I crushed hard on one member each of the two bands I was particularly obsessed with. And I joined my first online forum that was dedicated to those bands. I made a lot of friends and connected with people there more than my friends at school. We would chat a lot on Messenger too. Sadly we lost contact over the years, but that's just how it goes.

I remember John Cho in Charmed. It's a shame he was only in one episode as he was playing a character who had died and became a ghost but I loved his chemistry with Piper. (I didn't watch Charmed until around 2012 but I loved it). I don't think I've watched John Cho in anything else yet but yeah I can see why you would crush on him. :nod:

I've watched a few Disney cruising vlogs, but that's about it. I've been a bit hesitant about going on a cruise ever since the pandemic hit but it had been on one of my bucket lists for a while before. There's a lot of great travel vloggers out there, they have a lot of knowledge and very helpful with their tips and advice.

I think I joined :ff: initially for the Roswell (initial run) discussions... but I wasn't one to have crushes on the stars. I was more of an intense shipper. :lol: Even my one big boy-band "crush"... I mean, I was a fan, but I had no real desire of meeting him or anything. I was perfectly happy to watch him perform. :shrug:

To tell you the truth, I think part of the reason why John Cho's been my go-to crush for 20+ years is in part because I was never one to get crushes all that much. And he really impacted me on that one episode, and in everything I've seen him do since. And, not to lean into the racism, but people don't generally expect you to go "John Cho" when they ask who your celebrity crush is. Since I do find him incredibly handsome and charming, I certainly hope that doesn't make me some sort of wannabe woke person. But I like to go against expectations.

Initially the cruise vlogging thing was mostly about the food for me. Food's a big issue with with. I've got some allergies/intolerances and then some quasi-restrictions (of the "stop putting cheese on everything because I hate cheese" and "if it's spicy, my tastebuds just go on strike") variety. So, at first, it was all about seeing if there would be enough choices for me to eat.

And then, yeah, Covid. I have zero plans of going on a cruise in the near future, but I wanted to see how they were coping with that, because cruises already had a bit of reputation when it comes to hygiene.

Somewhere along the way, I just became a fan of some of these vloggers. And now I'm kinda hooked, even though there's a massive issue in that I follow mostly British and some U.S. vloggers and I'm French Canadian. The language isn't an issue, but trying to figuring the cost of stuff is, because of the distance and then the exchange rate...

I guess I've aways been one to meet my favourite celebs, as I've met a few of my favourite bands/music artists over the years. One was at a CD signing (McFLY was a big part of my teen years) and the other was waiting outside in the cold backstage after the concert for like over an hour. I got my tickets signed and had photos taken with a couple of the band members including the main singer. That was almost 11 years ago now and that band are still one of my favourites today as per part of my signature, Within Temptation.

I joined :ff: mainly for Smallville and Tom, (I actually joined another forum for the same reason and posted in both places simultaneously, but over the years I began to spend more time here because I found :ff: to be more accessible and a better atmosphere, though I did make a really good longtime friend over at the other one). But I also loved the variety of the fandoms here and it was just so great to be able to take part in more topics that I was interested in.

I can completely understand that. And yeah, he's one who you don't tend to see many people say that he's their celebrity crush, but I wouldn't necessarily deem that to be just because of his race. I think some people like to conform to the masses and say the more popular celebs when asked who their celebrity crush is. But that doesn't mean there isn't a range of racially diverse celebs in which the masses tend to crush on. So no, just because you found John Cho to be handsome and charming and has been your go to crush for so long definitely doesn't make you a wannabe woke person in the slightest. It's absolutely fine to go against expectations. You're attracted to who you want to be attracted to.

And not to be obvious, as both you and I know this, but it's not just about looks, it's about how a particular celeb carries themselves, how talented they are, and how one performance from them impacts on you like John Cho did for you and how Tom Welling did for me.

I'm lucky not to have an intolerance to certain foods. But it's a very good idea to look at what certain cruises offer in the way of food. Yeah, hygiene has been somewhat of an issue on cruises. I remember when the pandemic was barely just starting and an outbreak of covid happened on a cruise ship and people were stuck. I would have absolutely hated that.

That's understandable, you're having to do extra research in order to figure out how much it would cost for you when watching vloggers from other countries. :nod: