Bronycon 2013 · 1:24am Aug 7th, 2013
BronyCon was huge! I asked the reg staff how many people were attending. 8,400. That’s a few thousand more people than have ever attended any WorldCon (the big yearly science fiction convention). Still small compared to the 30,000 who attended the baseball game next door on Sunday, though.
I went toward the convention center, looking for ponies.
Me walking towards the convention center. Still no sign of these "cosplayers".
.
The convention center was guarded by Equestria’s finest
There were parties, panels, & a giant dealer’s room filled with swag! So I’m told. I didn’t go to any of those things except a couple of panels. I missed most of the con thru stupidity. I got there after registration closed Friday (late finishing the hooves for a costume I didn’t wear), & they wouldn’t let me into anything. I spent most of Saturday hanging out in Quills & Sofas or going places with people I met in Quills & Sofas, a writers’ hangout that Applejinx organized (in addition to half the writers’ panels at the convention). I had a great time hanging out with Professor Plum, who is British and therefore suave and able to make the word “horsecock” sound sophisticated. I didn’t remember until that evening when I checked his user page that I hated him. Oh, well. Guess I’ll call off that drone strike.
Benman & bookplayer
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Wanderer D & Obselescence
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Applejinx making his move on some devilishly handsome stallion
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Sat. evening the hotel borked my reservation, so I drove home. I left my badge in the car overnight, not even taking it into my house, just to make sure it would be in the car on Sunday. Then I went to bed & crashed hard, sleeping until about 2 in the afternoon, leaving enough time to drive back & see Wanderer D’s panel at 4pm.
I got in the car and checked that my badge was on the seat beside me. Traffic was terrible. Why is traffic around DC terrible on a Sunday afternoon? It took me 2 hours to get to Baltimore. D’s panel was half-over by the time I got there. And when I did, the badge was NOT on the seat beside me.
I spent half an hour searching the car for the badge. No luck. Called JMac to see if I could use his badge—he’d already driven home. Hung out by the entrance & tried to buy a badge off bronies leaving for home—no one would sell. Some bronies. Where’s the friendship? Went inside & spoke to con ops, waited 10 minutes to hear that they couldn’t help me. By that time the con was over, so I just walked into the convention center. There were still people checking badges on the way in, but all I had to do was walk around the other side of the escalator, which wasn’t guarded, and sneaky-stylie on through back to Quills & Sofas.
(Next day, found my badge in the trunk of my car.)
But I had come back on Sunday mainly to attend the writer’s dinner that Sunchaser had organized. He’d made reservations at the Cheesecake Factory. They took the reservation instead of telling him that they don’t take reservations. When we got there, they said it would be a 2-and-a-half hour wait. So we went to an Irish pub on the waterfront, because it was the only place that had room for 30 people on no notice.
Professor Plum, in the pub, with the fork
.
I recommended the crab cake to Prof. Plum. Sorry! It was not a devious scheme for me to get two crab cakes for the price of one. It just worked out that way.
Cap’n Chryssalid
Writers of horse words
Too many people to name (or get permission to name). Jake the Army Guy is holding the sign. I’m in the front row in a purple shirt.
Most Commanding Presence: The Descendant
Most Unlike their Avatar: Obselescence
Younger Than Expected: Pen Stroke
Nicer Than Expected: Professor Plum
Just as Nice as Expected: bookplayer
Most Work Making BronyCon Author-Friendly: Applejinx
Most Heroic Personal Life Story: also Applejinx
Authors I Recommend Against Picking a Fight With: Aquaman, Jake the Army Guy
Making the forehooves, which I didn't usually wear, was a disaster. I was following the instructions on this web page. It said to make them out of epoxy. Michael’s Crafts didn’t have epoxy, so I got modeling clay. Same thing, right? Wrong.
I made one hoof out of air-dry clay and one out of polymer clay, just to make sure the project would still be a failure even if one of those actually worked. Polymer clay is difficult to spread & join, but it’s strong & light. Air-dry clay is real clay, so you can smooth it & blend it easily with water, but then it collapses in on itself in a mushy heap. You’d need a screen mesh, not just a few wires, to form it on with real clay. And the resulting hoof is heavy and weak. Air-dry clay makes a huge mess that’s easy to clean up with water. Polymer clay leaves a few small stains on your fingers and under your nails which are impossible to remove until you shed and regrow that skin. Neither lets you build & bake the hoof in stages as epoxy does--you’ve got to get the whole thing done in one go. Sort of. I managed to build the polymer hoof in two stages, by baking the first stage only halfway, then spreading clay across the floor of the hoof for the second stage and spreading it out and over everything built in the first stage.
Wire frame to attach clay to. I used duct tape instead of solder for the joints. Much stronger.
After applying polymer clay. The platform in the back is to grip the hoof so it doesn’t fall off.
After baking, I realized that shelf to hold onto wasn’t going to work, so I strung some wire from side to side across the inside, anchoring it to that V in the middle, and bent it so I could put my fingers under it & hold onto it. Much better than the original design!
Detail of wire for handhold. Sock with heel cut off glued to inside front.
Here’s what the bottoms look like. The handhold on the underside of the clay hoof is broken; it only lasted for a few minutes of wearing.
Instructions said to bake the polymer clay 15 minutes at 275 Fahrenheit for each quarter-inch of thickness. I baked it for 8 hours & it still wasn’t set. (It did dry out after a day.) It had a nice black finish, but I found when I tried to sand it down that it was white just below the surface!
The air-dry hoof needed a day to air-dry, and I didn’t have a day, so I baked it in the oven at 175, & it cracked all over. No worries: I’d patch the cracks with Bondo!
But my Bondo was about 5 years old & dried out. I mixed it & smeared it in the cracks. It smelled like a chemical warfare agent. The instructions said it would dry in 5 minutes. I set it in the August sun for 5 hours, & it didn’t dry one damn bit. It was still just a stinky, gooey mess. So I scraped & sanded away what I could, then sprayed the whole hoof with black paint in the hope that would seal in the stench.
It did not.
This was too much work. Better to make a 3D design on the computer, print a dozen of them with a 3D printer, & sell the extras on ebay. They’d be lighter, stronger, & faster to make.
Great photos, Bad Horse! I also love the awards you gave out!
Ensemble Bad Horse
The idea of Quills & Sofas interests me greatly. I'd love to see a smaller con just for Ponyfic writers.
It's too bad you had a hard time getting in. Sorry about that and it's too bad I missed you. There were so many to meet that I just couldn't get around to everyone. Or everypony.
Next year will be better!
Dat second costume.
You are a brave man and I respect that.
Didn't know you were a (relative) local...so many people living in and around DC/Baltimore
D-damn... that's... kinda hot.
Umm, yeah. Perhaps the only bronycon recap post I've read through, so +1 for that.
>everything about this
i.imgur.com/pQmUAbE.png
Knowing about the "after dark" panel, I can't help but laugh sardonically at that business of a "family-friendly convention".
Anyway, that's a nice mask. I'm going to be on the fan fiction panel at BronyCan (not BronyCon) later this month, and had a notion to wear a skull-mask. But my fellow panelist said, obliquely, that he would be embarrassed to be seen with me then.
Sorry to hear about the clusterfuck. But you can take comfort knowing that next year can only be better.
Sorry about the clusterfuck. Had I known you were coming, I would've been totally stoked.
You know, I have a hard enough time wearing my frilly shirt to Renfest every year. You da man. (well, relatively speaking)
Dat. Suit.
Dammit, I MUST GO next year.
*Eyes next years tax return*
Haha wow, that costume.
I continue to be jelly of everyone who went this year.
1267792
You'd think so, but as far as Bronycon goes you'd be missing something
Don't think of it as 'a for-families' convention. It is not excluding the adult fandom, on the contrary. Think of it like this: virtually every event and panel were able to INCLUDE the target audience. The 8-year-olds are welcome. They are fans too. We don't have to slant all the programming toward them (though we had one amazing staffer, Cobaltu, who ran a kids-and-their-parents activity room all con that was so fun that regular attendees and a few notable musicians kept trying to crash it!) but the stuff we do CAN be shared, on the whole, by the kids MLP was originally made for.
And again, we are a safe place for them to be, we can coexist with the original target audience because it's all ponies and goodness. Even the Ficwriters After Dark was handled in a way that if there had been a kid in there (there wasn't, no room: standing room only and we filled the room and overflowed out the door) it would not be a OMG panic situation, it would be 'hey, you shouldn't really be attending this panel' in a less alarmed sort of way. See the videos when they get out: we stuck within the overall PG-13 of the con, and it will continue to fit in the adult fandom interests within that PG-13 rating and will not have programming itself that's NC-17 (like showings of videos or who knows what).
We got all year to look at our beloved naughty pony content. I know I jumped on tumblr as soon as I was back! At Bronycon, we will talk about the meta-content of that stuff, like how to do it and make it work. That's always more interesting anyway, and every successful NC-17 creator is able to talk about their craft and not just the juicy bits of their content.
Second costume? My favorite too
but you must realize, anything on hooves would pop a boner seeing that (possibly including some of the mares). This produces a public PG-13 hazard with so much horsecock sproinging out among children, so it just can't work… sorry, Bad Horse. You're too sexy for the con, too sexy for the con, the bulges would go on and on and on and on…
pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/rsz/mlfw609_small.jpg
(Sorry to junk up your thread, BH, but this is bothering me.)
1268778
That's a relief, and I appreciate the thorough information. Still, I'm concerned it may be the start of a slippery slope. If these things grow a bit more pervasive each year, eventually the relationship between the adult fans and the family fans may turn sour. If that happens, I think we'll really have lost something important.
In your opinion, is there any way to guarantee this won't happen, and that the line will be drawn here?
1269121
I don't know. It worries me too. I present a VERY decent appearance at conventions, don't even go around cursing (don't drink or smoke, even) and I've still been troubled by the challenges of the situation.
I gave my novelwriting panel (which may not have suited everypony but apparently did its job of inspiring writers to forge ahead and dare to write) and was approached in Quills and Sofas by a nice lady.
She asked where my writings could be found, because her ELEVEN YEAR OLD KID had been so inspired by what I had to say.
I'm Applejinx. I'm known for writing the Trixieverse novels. Four complete books with very powerful narrative momentum (it's this I was trying to teach) and all of it based in character drives and conflicts, and nearly every bit of it is all-out clopfiction. I write very, very explicitly and convey character information THROUGH the events of sex acts, how they go wrong, perhaps how they are unexpectedly pleasing or illuminating or even bring the character to a better understanding of themselves or others. I'm doing it on purpose, because I want there to be clop I can care about, and I want the characters to see consequences like we've learned exist as adults. I want readers to see the sexually carousing ponies AS PEOPLE not just images or puppets enacting positions, I want readers to connect to the character as a person and think 'oh no, that remark just hurt her feelings and she's probably going to try to cover it up' or some such thing.
I told the nice lady, "please don't look up my stories. I am trying to write them for a more mature audience, and never intended them for eleven-year-olds".
I would hope that if the kid does actually read that stuff, they learn some things about hurting feelings, about the risks of pregnancy, about infatuation and fixating on a fantasy person and trying to turn the beloved object into something they're not, about how folks have emotional needs that they try to fill through sex… but mostly I hope the kid doesn't read my books.
And yet this is the only path we have available. We can only coexist and continue to put up tasteful warning signs, and trust the family fans to accept that there are areas within fandom that are not meant for them. Is this so different from regular life?
All I can say is, for now Bronycon will remain PG-13. I don't expect there ever to be a NC-17 track, even heavily guarded or late at night. The fact that adult-content creators can operate within PG-13 by falling back on their craft and desire to share the general side of their love for ponydom is not a problem or a slippery slope. It is evidence that most of those kinky sexponies have… oh god… "depths within them that you may not have plumbed"?
You can always joke about it when it gets awkward. The joking itself is evidence that we know there's a line. We'll joke when we accept there's a line and that we are staying safely on one side of it…
(Sorry for the off topic Bad Horse)
1269223
I am not saying anything judgmental here, and this is an honest question that I am asking because I'd like an answer, here or in PM, and is a question I would have asked at the After Dark panel had I been an attendee, of the entire panel, not just yourself.
I respect mature and explicit scenes as a part of a cohesive story, a pervading theme, and as serving a storytelling function themselves. I have read commercially published novels by respectable authors that use such in any and all 3 ways so I am not naive or unread, nor do I have strong political/moral opinions of such other than neutral.
But while you have your own admirable and even commendable philosophy of writing, and your own goals you set out to accomplish via your writing using the subjects and themes you have chosen to convey them within your stories, I have to ask: Due to the nature of the content you utilize as the main theme within your fictions, how do you know if you have actually accomplished that which you aspire to when it is undeniable fact that the vast majority of the readers of your work, the main gauge as to your success, are unavoidably afflicted with hormone induced bias?
How do you know your stories are accomplishing what you intended, or (sorry for any offense) that you are as good as you think you are, when most of your readers probably only appreciate them for the superficial aspects of the explicit sexual content, or at the least have their objectivity compromised by their enjoyment of said content?
1269598
Doesn't worry me. It's all subjective, and I'm also quick to think other writers are good when they're pursuing what they do with enthusiasm
I'm actually trying to veer back to the simpler days of my first book 'cos I've got a reader who would like to see things become a little simpler and less tangled in subplots.
Again, I am totally okay if folks are only in it for the ponyplot. What matters to me is that I'm making an effort to bring other levels into the mix, such as the idea that these ponies have emotional needs and differing points of view. When I aged up the CMCs and raised hell with them, part of my purpose there was to establish they could have desires and STILL be not mature enough to be on a level with the adults, and in fact there was never (and will never be) CMC activity with the adults. I had a flashback with another young pony who made a terrible mistake with an adult pony, and I established that this led to big problems.
I could argue that when you suggest 'it's undeniable fact that the vast majority of your readers are clueless to whether it's bad or good because they are just horny', you're being a meanie hurty-pants… but I do believe that most everybody is blinded by hormones lots of the time. The thing is, that's the point of my writing. So if the readers are simply caught up in being horny, that only confirms that my ponies are plausibly all caught up in being horny themselves. And it all works out
1269598 The only ways not to have that problem are to stick to writing simple, one-interpretation one-level-of-meaning stories, or pretentious dry hifalutin' academic ones.
1269641
Hmm not exactly what I meant. I was more concerned with how you define "success" since "popularity" is more heavily affected by bias in clopfiction than any other genre. Do you just still go with popularity and accept that it is what it is, or do you measure your "artistic" success another way to compensate?
If you are just writing to titillate then success is popularity, but when applying deeper subtexts and having more inspired intentions, it's somewhat important to know there's a point in doing so for your audience, no?
1269673
Unless you use sexual themes as subtext throughout and in tandem with a general interest story with explicit scenes placed intuitively as part of the plot rather than being the pervading theme and focus of the story. Like Heinlein did for instance. Or Eric Van Lustbader.
1269720 I'm not talking about sex scenes. A lot of people liked Mortality Report, but judging from the comments, not many of them understood it beyond the level of the plot. Detective & Magician and Fluttershy's Night Out each had a surface story that was easy to appreciate, and a character arc that only some people understood. I'd guess the situation for Applejinx is the same as it is for me: I read the comments, and I see that most readers pick up on the broad strokes, and a few (or sometimes none) on the things that mattered most to me.
1269720
I don't have success. It would be nice but y'all ponies are without exception far more popular than me. You have more followers than me and have NO stories posted at all.
I'm doing something different. I write for the folks who are amazed and delighted, and sometimes they let me know it. I told Bookplayer's husband about what I'd done with Fluttershy, where she'd become misled and believed Gilda was a pony-eater and she beat the crap out of Gilda (and my readers all hated her for it), and that she had to be sort of tamed and made to accept that it was okay for the world to have non-Fluttershy-okay stuff in it. Virtually nopony had bought my Fluttershy for a second, but Bookplayer's husband lit up and said YES. That is Fluttershy, inside. Because I used to be that way, and I recognize it in her, and I totally buy that presentation because I've been there.
I write for that. Folks can be enthralled by the eerie winds of different points of view they barely understand, sweeping through the characters, if they wish. Or they can just say I'm full of crap, which they also like to do quite often. I write for the ones who have that special understanding, and often I have particular touchstones for each character who keep me on track.
I also go by re-reads. People re-read Trixieverse a lot, and I can easily compare the read counts in stats with other clop fics, and people don't often go BACK to stories they've read, even the most successful clopfics. I ain't quite Pen Stroke, but my actual reader numbers are way out of proportion to the followers and like/dislike ratios I get. But then, I always say I go for ten to one upthumb downthumb, which is already bad enough to ruin me for the feature system. If I'm not getting one hater in ten I figure I'm not writing anything distinctly enough. It SHOULD be outraging a few, if they truly see things that differently from me, and they should feel free to express that, because why not?
I have nothing they can take away by hating on me.
1269762
Oh. I was.
In general the issue you are talking about is usually remedied by informing the readers what to look for. This is why published works release to reviewers or give insight in their synopses. A few readers may notice things below the surface but almost none will look for them without being told to.
Clop on the other hand has bias as the issue, meaning that even with the readers scouring beneath the surface, the response will still be skewed by bias. And how an author who writes "more than just porn" is affected by the foreknowledge of this bias.
1269840
Thank you. This has greatly helped me understand your stance on your preferred genre and the challenges inherent. I can't say I can agree with much of your philosophy, but that is not what this is about. So thanks.
1269840 1270006
In my experience, subverting readers' expectations is a dangerous game. Some people like surprises, and some don't. And when you confront people with the truth before they're ready for it, they often react with anger. (For the record, I can kind of see the Fluttershy thing happening.)
It seems 'Jinx and I have a similar philosophy: Tell the truth as you see it, and damn the torpedoes. We just have very different ways of going about it. In a way, he's put himself in an even more difficult position then I have. It's easy to argue that a Dark story can make a point (George Orwell, anyone?) but people expect clop fiction to be, well, something they can clop to and forget about. So 'Jinx is caught between cloppers on one side, and on the other, people who dismiss all clop as shallow.
I guess what I'm saying is... Applejinx, since I know you can write Dark well, have you ever considered fully turning to the Darkfic Side? We have cupcakes.
I would have gone! But work. :( If it's in Baltimore again next year, though, I'll be likely to be there.
I like the first costume better; but I prefer guys in suits to guys in... suits.
1270070
You know I did a derail of Cupcakes, to let Dash survive, and to show what was left of Dash and of Pinkie when they cured Pinkie but found she remembered everything.
It proved too dark for the characters to really survive. Some grimdark just breaks ponies, and those aren't the stories I want to tell, though there can be beauty in them all the same.
I don't care about being dismissed because I already am. It's a sort of rebellion, I suppose. Nopony owes me any respect beyond what I can eke out through my work and how I deal with people. It's led to some astonishing results. If I had all the dumb cloppers write me off as a fool, and still had some of my celeb fans occasionally pat me on the head and tell me they liked me and my works, I would be quite content.
I'm a crit-snob. I only really care about the literary opinion of those who don't make lots of grammatical or stylistic mistakes. If someone loathes me but they aren't facile with English, I'm distinctly untroubled.
If someone loathes me and can accuse me of mistakes I didn't actively choose to make, I emit squees of delight and go fix the problems, no matter how much work that is.
1270006 1269840 I don't understand the distinction DPV is making with the word "bias". Applejinx writes a clop story, which will appeal to people who love clop, and which also has deep characterization which they may or may not perceive. I write a mystery story, which will appeal to people who love mysteries, and which also has deep characterization which they may or may not perceive. I don't see the difference between these things WRT knowing whether you've succeeded.
1270210
I think the idea may be 'clop means you can't have succeeded because at heart, these people only want to become erect'
I guess that's one way to measure it! Heck, you could measure it much more precisely. By degrees, if necessary. Or using the Mohs scale.
1270190
I think it has to do with theme. A downer ending can be desirable, if it's the sort of ending that best makes a point. It's about brutal honesty. A number of people, including Bad Horse, seem to appreciate my decision to never sugar-coat harsh truths.
Not many people said they enjoyed the story BH talks about there, but a lot of people said it made them think, so they were glad they read it.
For some reason it is very nice to put faces to some of these names.
Aww... what happened to the BH BDSM cosplay pic? It was awesome.
2615734 I figured you'd be the only one who'd notice.
Partly because people keep calling it BDSM.
2616243
...is it because I showed it in a Skype conversation and people PM'd you about it? Constantly? I was only plugging it's awesomeness.
But it's such an awesome cosplay--er, transformation. I mean true form.