Bronycon 2014 · 4:12am Aug 24th, 2014
So you may be wondering: Bad Horse, how did you f**k up Bronycon this year?
The answer is, I was studying the program while walking to the con, stepped down a set of stairs that I didn't know was there, and twisted my ankle so badly that I spent almost the entire con in Quills & Sofas.
So I've been crawling on hands and knees around my house for the past three weeks, until I had to stop because it was destroying my knees. Now I have crutches and two wheelchairs, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. Today I was finally able to walk a little bit around my house. Tip: If you sprain your ankle, DO NOT "WALK IT OFF". I thought it was okay because it didn't hurt a lot, so I walked on it and injured everything worse. Sit down and put ice on a sprain, even if it doesn't hurt. If your foot is purple and yellow and half again its usual size, and the doctor says you will be up and about in a few days, he/she is an idiot and you should see a different doctor.
JMac escorted me to the emergency room. (Ferret tried to, but was not sneaky enough.) I stupidly saved cab-fare by crutching back to the hotel by myself through a sketchy part of Baltimore at 4:30AM. I thought all the sketchy people would be home in bed. They were not. Or maybe they were already on their way to work. On Sunday morning. Hmm.
Anyway.
Q&S is the best place in Bronycon, and all you mobile people who felt obligated to go to panels and stuff are just jealous I got to stay there the whole time. I met Eakin, Pav Feira, Golden Vision, maskedferret, PresentPerfect, JMac, Applejinx, Wanderer_D, Obs, Solitair, Skeeter, GaryOak, Blue Paladin42, RazedRainbow, Axis of Rotation, shalrath, Silver Moon, Biker_Dash, Your_Antagonist, Jordanis, and Clockwork Mage, among others.
I was theoretically available to help people with their stories or writing problems--the plan was to have the program mention writing coaches, but I don't think it did, and I didn't advertise. I did some coaching, but most of the folks who asked for my advice didn't really want my advice. They wanted me to tell them that someone else's advice was wrong, so they could keep on doing whatever they'd been doing before. It sounded like the undesired advice was in fact wrong, though without writing samples, it was just a game of he-said/she-said.
At dinner, TheJediMasterEd, who is the spirit of generosity (and should cosplay Rarity, but don't tell him I said that), bought my dinner, AND bought PegasusRescueBrigade dinner just to give me his seat, which was superior, being next to MaskedFerret. Then he presented me with this awesome evil Bad Horse top hat, in this awesome evil hatbox:
That is not a cheap polyester top hat. That is a wool top hat. Does it not make that IEC microcentrifuge look sharp and evil?
Sharp, yes. Evil? Most definitely. Give that thing a 'stache to twirl.
I would be game for setting a time, next year, that was strictly for Q&S self-improvement. When ALL THE WRITERS could converge and make ourselves available instead of the piecemeal solution we have now.
2395821 It twirls at 21,000 gravities, so it would have to be a very robust moustache.
Nice hat, but ouch about the foot. :(
2395841
I did you the honors:
i.gyazo.com/4ac441ebb30510023a1506c4d56e7417.png
That's a great hat.
But man, that sucks about your foot.
But yeah, I don't think "walk it off" combines well with "foot/leg injury".
I'm sorry to hear about what happened to you. At least I got to meet you during that dinner at Tir na nOg.
Welp.
You were in Q&S? I looked for you all over and just couldn't find you. Shame.
Still, I hope you can take some comfort in knowing that even when things go to crap, you can take something informative from it. And the way the others helped you is really exemplary.
Get well soon!
And very smart it looked on you, too!
Remember me, Senpai?
Quills and Sofas was quite the experience, actually. Arguably worth the con trip on it's own.
Sucks hearing that your foot has remained in such bad shape though.
It was definitely fun meeting you uh...Saturday night I think. Talk about downvotes and other amusing shenanigans was great!
Best hat. Did it ever end up on Obselescence?
2396808 No! And that was tragic. The hat was in the restaurant when Obs began his hat trick at the harbor, and I ran back up the stairs and inside (on my sprained ankle
) to get it, and ran back out, and it was over. My hat is still unsanctified.
2396785 DOWNVOTER! :
2396462 You're the guy who I said might be the last user on fimfiction, alphabetically. But checking, I see that in fact we also have
|12683||Zyrin|||19|2
|132004||Zyrine|||0|0
|132206||Zyros|||0|0
|15184||Zystral|||3|2
|26242||Zytharros|||45|89
|86246||ZzILuna|||4|2
|34973||zyx52|||0|0
|113469||zyzzyva|||2|4
|17619||zzRedzz|||0|0
|67743||zzahrizz|||13|0
|14579||zzuxon|||1|3
|22997||zzzena|||38|1
|7931||zzzzzzzzz23|||15|10
If you want to eliminate all those other guys, I can offer you a bulk discount.
Umm... I guess you can take comfort in that it could've been worse? I used to have this rather gothy coworker (I dated him. Once. It kinda sucked, actually C_C), and he decided to buy a pair of 12" black platform boots because edge. While at Otafest (Calgary's annual anime convention held at the university), he was walking around in these, went down a set of stairs, lost balance (a very easy thing to do in those kind of shoes), fell down, and fractured his leg up a bit. Not only did he have to get a cast, he had to get nuts and screws shoved in there. I guess he was cool with it; he ended up missing quite a bit of work.
I guess the moral is don't wear overcompensating shoes at conventions? You need to walk with purpose to get from event to event? BH, were you wearing overcompensating horse shoes? If yes, then did people at least take a shitton of pictures?
I dunno. I had imagined that you sprained your ankle fighting some overly muscled punks who were trying to rob you and you entourage because that would've been far more dramatic and cool. Now I'm sure Sombra is far more evil than people give him credit for ("Crystals? Grah! Stairs? Grah! Crystal stairs? GRAAAAAH!!!").
Knee pads! I use them at work because I kneel a lot out of habit. They make my knees less hurty =D
Crawling everywhere sounds kinda fun, like being a toddler again!
But joking aside, I hope you get better, eh?
If you get into any fights, punching is an option, as is headbutts, biting and scratching. Go for the face.
Going to church super early maybe? Benefit of the doubt, yo.
I bet if you had asked politely, they would've carried you back to the hotel. And stolen your wallet in front of your eyes upon reaching your destination. Never mind. (Be thankin' The Lord for these thy gifts)
I think Your Antagonist talked about the sketchy parts of town on his blog. Also, how much did you enjoy his Zecora cosplay? :] It's quite excellent, eh?
Also, did you convince JMac to get his Quizzical wood carving signed by absitavely everyone?
...I was totally right in shipping you two. An expensive black top hat as a gift is rather... nice. Like, very nice. Like, so nice it speaks volumes.
*looks at bookplayer's blog about writing blogs for cash*
*looks at her Bad Horse evil laser cannon suggestion*
*looks at fistful of Warhammer money and smiles all evil-like*
Monochrome evil gay horse love ftw <3
Also, I raise your centrifugal top hat with a black Stetsons on a Betty Crocker rice cooker.
i.imgur.com/gfSg5Df.jpg
Hat: $20 from Wally World. Rice cooker: I don't even know. It was a gift from God I guess. Asians need rice or we die of starvation.
i.imgur.com/BBxHafn.jpg
My bro decorated it with his Tac Gnol scarf. It prolly cost more than the Stetsons and rice cooker combined :S
2397017
Yes, we're an old lesbian couple trapped in the bodies of middle-aged men.
That's exactly what I did when I sprained my once twisted ankle during a hiking trip earlier this month.
Perhaps it wasn't in a shape as bad as yours, though, because not only was I able to enjoy my mountain trips for several next days (it would be beyond lame if I had to come back home after my second day in the mountains 
) but by now it is as good as ever.
Pro tip: always wear a set of good, above-ankle hiking boots when traversing mountains. It can save you several weeks in a hospital.
2396977
Sometimes you just want the ponies to somehow pull a magic hat trick out at the end when a giant meteor is on the way to obliterate everything, y'know?
I like how you completely fail to mention that I found you staggering about SAturday aft and practically had to make Karath SIT on you to make sure you weren't walking on your insanely swollen ankle...Nice touch.
Also where's my story in repayment?
2399800 Did I promise a story? I was incoherent. That won't stand up in a court of law.
What type of story? How about a nice bleak story about existential angst?
2400473 *Grins* I believe it was going to be similar to Misery. Since you felt I was clearly being detrimental to your health, by making you rest your ankle after it swelled to the size of a small apple and not allowing you to get up and hobble around like your were about to die.
2396977
How much of a discount are we talking?
2401975 20% off!
What you want to do with the remaining 20% of your soul is completely up to you.
You remembered me!
Yeah, giving writing advice without samples is often pointless. ASKING for writing advice without the asker offering samples can be a doubtful endeavor too.
I have a lot more cynical (and practically useful!) things I could say based in experience, but probably only Bad Horse will ever read this comment at this point.
5730145
In the distant future, billions of historians will be interested in 21st century Earth, and every person alive today will be the subject of at least one historian. One day, the historian writing your biography will read this comment. [1]
Hello, future historian!
[1] What I actually expect to happen is that there will be many running instances of a natural-language parsing algorithm that will spider archives of the web, extracting information about each person and storing it in a database. Later, when something makes the future's equivalent of a Google search query, the algorithms used to estimate the data used to generate the query answer will incorporate the data about you in producing the estimates to produced the query result. But that's basically the same thing, right?