Perez Hilton reports in Party Like a Vampire that convention booths are insufficient to entertain Twilight fans, so the series will be getting a large convention in Dallas dedicated to Twilight. The event is, perhaps not surprisingly, called TwiCon. It features a variety of comedy troupes who create respectfully humorous Twilight spoofs and a line-up of bands, most of which are inspired by the movie, but one of which, 100 Monkeys, is notable because it includes Jackson Rathbone who plays vampire Jasper Hale in the movie and its forthcoming sequel The Twilight Saga: New Moon later this year.

Popular Twilight fanfic site Twilighted is doing a fan fiction contest as part of TwiCon with a theme of romance 100 years in the vampire future. Would it be wrong if I mentioned that the only other individual fandoms which tend to receive dedicated conventions are Star Trek and Star Wars. And Star Trek really jumpstarted the erotic slashfic type of fanfic. I’m not sure whether it is technically accurate to refer to sexy fan fiction as a genre with a series of sub-niches, but it feels kinda accurate. Maybe if Star Trek is getting a sexy modern makeover, someone needs to write some threeway erotica fanfic involving Bella and Edward and Spock. Or not.

So, after knowing each other for nearly a decade, and working together on multiple projects, over many years, I finally finally got to meet Scott Owens of EroticBPM fame in person! We once almost met in the flesh when he got stuck at LAX on a layover, but I’d just finished being somewhere one good friend of mine was attempting to sleep with the husband of another good friend of mine and having to give a police report on some psycho who was incoherently threatening me outside a nightclub for firing a girl she just met and barely knew but had a crush on or something. So anyway, I didn’t think I’d be at my charming best when I got to LAX, which also happens to be my least favorite California airport.

Anyway, Forrest Black, who is in charge of the look and feel of all Blue Blood sites, and I visited Portland and stayed with Scott and his charmingly negative head coder Antisocial and his beautiful bride (who, in a flash of small world, turned out to be a model from some of the earliest naughty sets I published from photographer Tom Hunscher.) We had an amazingly good time just hanging out in their gargantuan Pacific NW headquarters with them and their three very cute and almost disturbingly friendly and well-adjusted cats.

We also got to see old friends from our DC stomping grounds. We shot new stuff of the always fun Voltaire and of Rachel Face. Rachel has a new clothing line and we shot that, as well as a whole passel of new hotties. Parts of the trip were really bizarrely and gratuitously stressful, but most of it was really super nice. Portland is so beautiful and the air is so clean and we got to go up on the volcano which is the largest within city limits in the USA.

But the point I really must make here is that, when I wanted to connect to the internet from EroticBPM HQ, one of the networks was named Quark. I asked Anti if this was after the software, the TV show, or the actual thing. Having a background in particle physics, he didn’t mean the software or the show, but I told him I was going to pull his Dork Card for being unfamiliar with the show. Rather than having to resort to such extreme measures, modern technology allows me to share the show with you all.

I first saw Quark on the US Military television stations while living in Germany, on either ACTA I or ACTA II I believe. Basically, the Department of Defense at least used to provide American television channels to US servicemen and diplomats abroad. I wasn’t really allowed to watch TV, so I didn’t see much, but I did catch some re-runs of a sort of Star Trek spoof called Quark which struck me as absolutely hilarious at the time. I admit it doesn’t really stand the test of time and might seem a little, err, dumb now. Anyway, without further ado, I present Quark for your viewing pleasure and personal edification:

To a current sensibility, the BBC’s Hyperdrive is really probably a better bet.