Weekend Roundup - Casetify Launch Party & Magnificent 7 Convention!

It was another downtown LA weekend! 

On Saturday night, we went to a store called Poketo for a Casetify launch party thrown by a friend of mine! Casetify sells really beautiful phone cases, and even lets you design your own! 

It was a great party, with free Salt & Straw ice cream (the Brownie cone was amazing), California donuts (we tried the one with mini M&Ms on top!), rose malt liqueur (surprisingly delicious!), and pressed juice from Press Brothers. We even got swag bags with a couple notebooks, pen, postcard, sticker, plus a code for a free phone case!

On Sunday, we went back downtown to attend a Magnificent 7 convention, for fans of the '90s TV show. This was the 3rd year for this fan-run show, and had been going on all weekend.

It was a pretty small group, maybe about 50 people, but they all seemed to be pretty die-hard fans. The panels that day included a Skype chat with a guy who runs a Steve McQueen museum, a panel with a screenwriter giving some basic screenwriting tips, and then the big event of the day, a panel with 5 of the actors from the show, followed by a photo session and autograph session.

I'm not that familiar with the show; I didn't watch it when it was on, but we crammed a season of the show during the past week. Since I didn't have much background on the fandom, I felt like an anthropologist watching these fans interact with the actors and each other. The large majority of people there were middle-aged women, plus a teenage-ish girl who commented that she liked to read gay cowboy erotica and asked/answered a question to the actor panel regarding which Hogwarts houses each character would be in, and I thought to myself, 'oh so that's what I would be like if I was a teenager in 2015.'

During a break, we walked around the convention center a little bit. There was a big Tony Robbins convention going on in the main part of the center, and they had some booths and exhibits outside the exhibit hall, so we checked that out, and then in another area, there was a religious/family/Hispanic show going on as well, complete with a nun selling fancy rosaries. Walking back to our car later on, we walked past a line of people waiting to get into a WWE wrestling match (is that what they're called, matches?), tons of whom had those championship belt thingies around their waist or over their shoulder. We witnessed 4 very disparate fandoms that day, all contained within the LA Convention Center/Staples Center area. Pretty interesting!