Items

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  2020-06-06

  Fandom spaces forming international friendships during a pandemic 2020

  Due to the difficulty of making friends in person due to covid, I increasingly turned to online fandom spaces to find people with similar interests to me. The follow screenshot is from a tumblr group chat confirming the first international fan based Zoom call which I was part of in June 2020. CST refers to Central Standard Time, the timezone which encompasses countries of Central and parts of Eastern Europe. This was my first experience talking to people from overseas that shared similar interests to me on a video call. It lead to me join multiple groups across platforms such as discord to communicate further. It was the beginning of me gaining more international friends which have been a really important part of keeping an active social life during this pandemic. It was also an eye opening experience to hear first hand accounts of how people around the world were living through this global pandemic.
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  2020-01

  Lan Wangji The Forklift

  The coronavirus outbreak is a very serious situation, but fandom is managing to find cute ways to be both helpful and entertaining during the health crisis. Lan Wangji is a major character of a Chinese novel, cartoons and TV dramas. And now he’s being honored with a forklift named after him. The forklift is helping build the temporary hospitals intended to house people with the coronavirus.