BronyCon, Day 1 (part 2) · 10:10pm Aug 11th, 2019
Day 1 (Part 2):
Hi there! This is part of my blog series on the adventure that was the last BronyCon! If you're just joining us, you should probably start here:
Day 0
Part 1 of Day 1
Part 2 of Day 1
Part 1 of Day 2
Part 2 of Day 2
Part 1 of Day 3
Part 2 of Day 3
Day 4
Epilogue
So, where was I?
Oh, yeah, I fell asleep in my hotel room at 2:30pm. Right before, though: remember that $6 coke? Well, it was a rip-off, but it turns out it's not all bad. 20oz sodas as it happens include a free bottle, which can really come in handy sometimes when you're in desperate need. You can refill them with water as many times as you want so you always have some to drink, and being a known volume, they're an easy way to gauge how much you've had over time, which is something people often overlook at cons - gotta stay hydrated, ya'll! Especially important when it's hot and humid, like it is in Baltimore in August.
On that note, there was, as I'm sure everyone who went to the con remembers, that guy on the corner right across the street from the main convention center entrance with a big plastic cooler, advertising his wares in the usual big-city possibly-unlicensed-street-hawker fashion: "One dollar water! One dollar Gatorade!" the refrain rang out, day after day, all day long.
Bless you, dollar-water man. I'm sure you saved somepony's life that weekend. And all while undercutting the vending machines, too! So heroic.
But for my part, I still had my empty coke bottle, so I made good use of it. I filled it with cold water from my hotel room, and drank it all, then filled it and partly emptied it a second time. After filling up on 20+ ounces of water, it was nap time. I think I was out until 4:30 or 4:45. When I woke up, I felt much better.
Feeling thus restored to life, I was headed back to the con!
Returning at around 5pm sort of dropped me into a (rare at this BronyCon) schedule dead zone; it was too late to get into a 5pm panel, and there wasn't much else I wanted to do for a while.
This seemed like a great time to try to find and hang out with fellow writers. Just one problem: where exactly were they?
Well, that was interesting to unravel.
There were a few different points of interest for the fanfic writers of the community at this convention. Among them, one was the bookstore, and another was the actual hangout. But for me, sorting out which was which was complicated by another inadvertent consequence of having deliberately avoided planning much ahead of time before the con: for whatever reason, I'd somehow gotten Quills and Sofas (the actual hangout thing for writers) amalgamated with the Golden Oaks bookstore in my mind, and I mistakenly thought that the bookstore was its own separate thing from the regular marketplace. I also thought that this bookstore thing, naturally, was where the writers would congregate. Really paying attention there, I was. 
But no, Quills and Sofas and the Golden Oaks bookstore were two completely separate things, and after some confused asking around through Discord and e-mails and so forth, it became apparent that Quills and Sofas was where I wanted to be (which was just as well; I'd seen that vendor hall line and HOLY CELESTIA NO WAY. Nuh uh. Not happening).
Only thing is, where was that where? No one really seemed to know - I heard tell from similarly confused authors that Quills and Sofas was allegedly supposed to have been in its own area of the con space somewhere, so that those dorky writers can be dorks over there and not dork up the con for everyone else we could conduct our dark writery rituals in our own secluded cabal, but if this was the case, I, and seemingly a lot of other people, couldn't find it.
Eventually, it got figured out. No, we did not get our own room. Quills and Sofas, it transpired, was packed into the right-front corner of Pastel Pastures, the arts and crafts room. This was probably thanks to this year's BronyCon having to make due with like half the space of what it had at this convention center in past years. I don't think I've mentioned that in the previous chapters, but yeah, we had half the space to fit the largest ever turnout into. I was not being hyperbolic when I said that this year's BronyCon was a glorious spectacle and pandemonium. I mean, the whole place was a zoo, all four days. Not complaining, because personally I found that this added to the atmosphere and grandeur as befitted the last and greatest BronyCon, but it had downsides, in that it didn't make it any easier to find anything, especially when you were looking for something that had to share a space with something else, like Quills and Sofas did.
Worry not, though, because there's a happy ending. Eventually, after much drifting about, I found it! And it was great! I met a lot of people I've seen before at other cons, as well as a ton who had hitherto been names on FimFiction or Discord that I'd never had the opportunity to put faces on. I can't remember who I met in what order, but there were a lot of them over the course of the convention! I know there was, uh, let's see...
Oh no.
Here comes the part where I inadvertently and I assure you completely unintentionally sleight people by not remembering to name all the names. Welp, let's get this over with. I'm pretty sure I encountered, at various points throughout the weekend, at least these fine folks: Heartshine, Corejo, Monochromatic, Admiral Biscuit, Olden Bronie, ROBCakeran53, BlazzingInferno, Epic Yarn, Grand Moff Pony, Jet Setter, Georg, Reese, FanOfMostEverything, ponygrad, Somber, RBDash47, Majin Syeekoh, Horizon, Trick Question, Pen Stroke, Muggonny, PresentPerfect, Skywriter, Mitch H, Cold in Gardez, Soge, Pascoite, Caliaponia, and, ahhhh heck, I know there's more and I just can't think of the names right now and sorry if you're one of them that I forgot to list off.
One last note on that: I owe the one person who is intentionally not on this list a big apology. Cold Spike, I know you really wanted to meet up, and it just never ended up coming to pass. I wish parts of the weekend had been just a little less chaotic so that it would have been easier to manage, and I'm sorry I disappointed. If you're ever at Everfree Northwest, I will make it happen. Pinkie Promise.
On a brighter note, there was something really cool in Quills and Sofas: typewriters! Old-school mechanical bits-of-metal-and-ink-ribbons typewriters! It wasn't my first time ever using one, but let me tell you, it's been a while. They were there courtesy of Admiral Biscuit and ROBCakeran53, and I think everyone got a kick out of them. I know some interesting and funny little gems were typed out over the weekend - alongside the numerous obligatory pages filled with "All work and no play makes Twilight Sparkle a dull filly," of course. I hope that someone (by which I mean I'm looking at you, Admiral) held on to the collected typewritings of the BronyCon 2019 fandom authors and might post the highlights at some point, maybe? Could we get that? Because I think it would be cool.
And yes, I wrote stuff on them. I left the originals there at the tables, but I remember them all well enough to at least paraphrase them pretty accurately, so I will share these typings, over the course of these BronyCon chronicles. Look for the first one at the bottom of this post.
Let's see, what else did I do on Thursday?
...You know, not a whole lot, at least that I seem to be clearly remembering. I know I was in the con space for the entire rest of the day, but it all sort of blurs together after that. I remember hanging out a lot with various of the cool people mentioned above, and I'm pretty sure I went to the 8:45pm "Fanfiction Foundations: Root Your Story in the World" panel. Strangely, and I wish this was not the case, I just can't seem to remember that much from the panel. I'm pretty sure it was a good panel, because nothing sticks out as not-good. So at least there's that.
Where things start to become a little clearer again is after that panel at maybe 10:30-10:40pm, hanging out back in Quills and Sofas. After running all day and into the night on basically just two hours of sleep from that nap in my hotel room, it was getting to be about time to wind things down so that I'd be some sort of alive on Friday.
Confession time: I'm being a bad example. At this point, I was flagrantly breaking the 6-2-1 rule for having a good convention experience (get 6 hours of sleep, eat 2 meals, and take 1 shower, each day). I already mentioned I was only on two hours of sleep, but it gets worse: I'd had zero of two meals. Eating at cons is... well, sometimes it's a "maybe" thing. Maybe you can squeeze it in, or maybe it just doesn't happen. All depends. Even when you're hungry, sometimes excitement tends to make you not feel it enough to realize you should go eat something.
But you should definitely eat something at some point! At least two points every day, in fact!
It was only now, at the end of the night, that I thought about this. In consideration of the hour, I also thought everything would be long closed and maybe I'd have to just live with some sort of overpriced snack thing out of a vending machine for the night, but lucky for me, my friend Grand Moff Pony intervened. He was going to get a nightcap, so he wandered me over to the Marriott's bar with him, since they were likely to still have food available. That was a good call. After looking over the bar food menu, I wanted to get their steakhouse burger, but they'd just sold the last one for the night (sellers running out of things was a very common theme this BronyCon, so it's hard to be exactly surprised). They still had nachos, though, and those seemed like just about a perfect option. There were so many nachos, in fact, that I actually couldn't finish them all. I tried, though, and while I did, GMP and I sat there in the bar bouncing around ideas regarding a thing he might try to write at some point. Leaving that vague on purpose to avoid spoilering someone else's potential story idea before they get the chance to do anything with it.
After eating at the bar, GMP and I went off on our separate ways. It was late at night and the skybridge access I tried to use and some escalators and stuff were closed down, confounding my navigation. I'd wanted to go back to the convention center so I could go through it to reach the main exit and walk to my hotel from there, but whatever, I just went around the Marriott and the Hilton from the outside to get back, then from the convention center, back to my hotel room at the Renaissance.
And believe me, by that point, somewhere around midnight, I was looking forward to the crash I knew I was way overdue for.
Because I knew Day 2 wasn't gonna be any less intense.
That'll be up next.
For now, though, I promised stories on typewriters! The very first one I wrote, mostly just to fool around with the novelty of this strange mechanical writing device, was very short. It went something like this:
All three of them stood in stunned silence, staring at where the barrel used to be. Slowly Applejack wiped some of the splattered applesauce off her face.
"Now what that really necessary?" she finally asked.
"Sometimes things gotta get blown up." Starlight shrugged.
"You gotta admit, it was kinda cool," Rainbow Dash said softly.
"Dang it, Dash, don't encourage her!" Applejack glared at Rainbow.
Just a brief scene - perhaps only a fragment of a scene, really. But it tells some sort of story. Make of it what you will.
Until next time! 
Heh. :)
Thanks for the reports!