Internet Celebrity: She's Doing It Right

So it might have caught the attention of my regular readers that I didn't update this blog at all last week. Sorry for any inconvenience that might have caused, although I have a hard time imagining any that might have resulted. I got some very distressing news on Monday and then had to go to work, so there was neither time nor energy to devote to a Monday post, and on Thursday I was assailed by a massive case of the I-don't-wannas, partially pain-induced. So I gave it up for Easter and decided to make a fresh start today.

First things first: According to several sources of variable reliability, today is Batman's 79th birthday. I'm not sure how one marks such an occasion but I thought I should at least mention it.

Moving on. It's a running mostly-joke on this blog that one of my aims in life is to become an internet celebrity. Today I'd like to tell you about my friend Lynn, who has actually accomplished it recently. I'm all finished being consumed by envy and hatred and can talk about it dispassionately. (That's a joke. She knows it, but I thought I should clarify for anyone who wondered if I'm really that petty.)

Lynn and I have known each other for a few years now, around six or seven I believe. She's one of my many internet friends with whom I became acquainted on account of our being mutually fluent in a language I like to call Incoherent Fangirl. It's a dialect of Geek. We only have a few fandoms in common, and her celebrity status is linked to one we don't share. It's perhaps a disgrace to my geek status that I'm just not a fan of Doctor Who; my husband is, and has been for a good twenty years or more, but it's honestly not my thing.

It's Lynn's thing, though. So earlier this month, when BBC America held a Who premiere mini-con in New York, she did what she always does when they do that: she packed up her collection of Who action figures, hopped a bus to New York, and spent several hours sitting in line.

In the process, she became an inadvertent media darling.

First it was the New York Times, which did a nice little write-up about the fandom's camaraderie. Lynn's figurines are in the picture at the very bottom of the article, although Lynn herself is not in evidence.

She can be seen (she's the cute bespectacled pixie) in this picture, which turned up in someone's Flickr collection of pictures from the event.

The action figures are at 1:03 in this video featured on Doctor Who Online. Lynn is then interviewed by Robyn Schneider at 3:44 about her previous adventures with the collection.

To quote the redoubtable Ferb of Disney's Phineas and Ferb, "Fame is fleeting, but the internet is forever." So I wanted to celebrate my friend's fame, however fleeting, in a blog post.

None of this is what makes Lynn cool. Lynn was already cool. She is one of the most internet famous people I personally know; multiple times I have acquired a new friend online only to discover that we both know her already. This most recently happened with our mutual friend Caroline, whose comment upon the discovery was "Is there anyone she doesn't know?"

Probably there are. But there are an awful lot of people who know her - the girl with the Doctor Who dolls.