Old FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

It is, admittedly, a little awkward to be conducting two different trip fundraisers at the same time. My only defense is that one of them would have been on the agenda all along, while the other was necessitated by a sudden, unexpected, and unique opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. Since one is ending while the other just beginning, it seemed a good moment to detail them both here.

Winding down is my STS-134 NASA Tweetup Trip Fund, which would be the unexpected opportunity.

Now that I’ve been bumped up from the waiting list to the actual list of attendees, I need to pay for the trip to Florida to experience the launch of the shuttle Endeavor in April.

When I was five years old (and in no small part due to the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY), when everyone else was answering “policeman” or “fireman” or “doctor” to the question of what they wanted to be when they grew up, my first real answer was that I wanted to be an “outer space moving van driver”, helping (and this part was very specific) families to move into orbiting space stations.

To get a sense of what a unique opportunity this is, see this map produced by a former tweetup attendee to see just how close we will be compared to the closest public access.

Please help me satisfy part of my inner five-year-old’s longing by contributing to this trip fund! (Any funds collected in excess of those needed to cover trip expenses will be donated to Mercy Corps, earmarked for Japan earthquake relief and recovery.)

All photos posted by me during this experience will be released under a Creative Commons license.

Things are in decent shape on this one, it still a little tight. Even if no further contribution to this fund are made, the funds that have been raised so far have at least managed to make the trip possible at all. You will be able to follow my experience of the final launch of the space shuttle Endeavour as seen from the press site at Kennedy Space Center on Outer Space Moving Van Driver, my trip blog.

Just getting started is my SDCC 2011 Trip Fund, a reprise of a similar bit of fundraising I did last year.

DISCLAIMER: Fundraising won’t cover all my trip costs and in no way is expected to. But I need to know if it would generate enough resources to put Comic-Con (mainly the hotel bill, the single largest expense) within striking distance for me this year. If it’s clear by June 8 that the trip is not feasible, ALL DONATIONS WILL BE FULLY REFUNDED.

Every year at San Diego Comic-Con, my primary activity is photography. (See my SDCC collection for examples, or my ECCC collection and my PaleyFest collection for similar work.) Since I don’t sell prints of my convention photographs, contributing to my trip fund is the only way to obtain one.

A donation of $30 or more entitles you to a photo print of your choosing from this year’s SDCC. Each additional $20 gets you an additional photo. ($50 gets you two prints, $70 gets you three, etc.) The more you contribute, the more you get.

In addition, anyone contributing at least $100 total is entitled to specify that one of their prints come from LAST YEAR’S photos instead. So If there’s something you wanted last year but didn’t get it, here’s your chance.

Last year, supporter contributions were a major part of my SDCC trip, something for which I am extremely grateful. It enabled me to focus on photography, not funds, and share my convention experience with others through my photos. If you choose to contribute this year, please know that you have my thanks and great appreciation for making this possible again. (And I look forward to seeing what photos you choose!)

As the fundraising pitch says, contributing to this fund is the only way I make available prints of photos I take at Comic-Con. This year I’ve added the extra incentive of allowing contributors of at least $100 to select as one of their prints a photo from last year’s batch.

It’s only through contributions that my trip to see the launch of Endeavour will be possible at all. And it’s only through contributions in exchange for photo prints unavailable in any other way that a trip to San Diego Comic-Con will be made possible.

In each circumstance, I am profoundly grateful for the support people have given in the past and, I hope, are interested in giving in the future. But if you can’t give to either fundraiser, no worries! You can still follow along with my shuttle launch trip blog and, as always, enjoy my Comic-Con photos (if I get to go) on my Flickr account.

Have questions about either fundraiser? Just click my name at the top of this post to send me email, or find me on Twitter.

After the general success last year of my Comic-Con trip fundraiser, this would be about the time I’d start thinking about putting one up for this year’s trip. Although I don’t yet have a pass (more on that in a minute), I did get a hotel reserved (the Omni again). However, a fundraiser remains at this point unlikely, and therefore so does going to Comic-Con at all this year.

Last year was made possible not only of by that fundraiser (in which people who look forward to my convention photography helped pay my way, and if they donated above a certain amount could claim a print of any Comic-Con photo I took that year) but by the fact that for the six months prior to the event last year, I was actually employed.

That’s not been true in any consistent way since. And a fundraiser alone would never cover all of the costs imposed by going to Comic-Con. The hotel alone is around $1200.

All of that said, here’s the current plan. Next week, I submit materials to get a press badge as a freelance photographer. No guarantee, and I have some other options if that falls through. I’m doing this because I don’t want something to happen that allows me to go and end up not having a pass.

But the big looming deadline for something to change is May 10. Hotel reservations not cancelled by May 10 incur a $100 cancellation fee, taken from the one-night deposit required when booking the room. The entire deposit is forfeited if you hold out until June 9 before cancelling.

Basically, a change in fortunes is needed by May 10, or I will have to cancel my hotel room and forego attending Comic-Con this year. In other words, if I’m not employed by May 10, there’s no Comic-Con. The formula for going remains “employment plus fundraiser”.

The only other way to avoid that May 10 deadline would be to have the money to reimburse the person who fronted my hotel deposit, so that they are not out of that money even if I blow off the hotel cancellation deadlines. I don’t see how that’s possible, so I have to operate on the assumption that May 10 is my drop-dead date.

It’s been argued that I should run a fundraiser anyway. But the two flaws in that are these: (1) I’m in the middle of a fundraiser to be able to take advantage of the unique opportunity presented by having been chosen to participante in the official NASA Tweetup for the final launch of the space shuttle Endeavour; and (2) the fundraiser is based upon producing photographs at Comic-Con, so I can’t raise money for the trip if the trip costs would never be covered by fundraising money alone.

(Or, technically, I could but only with the promise to refund contributions should the trip not be possible. I’m looking into the technical feasibility of this in terms of the fees involved.)

If you have any bright ideas — about funding a Comic-Con trip entirely, or just about covering that hotel deposit so I can ignore the deadline and give myself more time — while I continue my efforts to convince someone to give me a damned job, click my name atop this post to send me email.