I have returned from my glorious crusade to Manchester! (Summer Sun and first day of BUCK)

Yes, I have returned from my weekend at BUCK! The Brony UK Convention. It was awesome. I wish I had a thesaurus now as the word awesome is a little too used to adequately describe it. It was so good I'm honestly looking forward to it next year more then Christmas. Granted, it was my first convention so that may be part of the reason it was so mind blowing for me but I'll be damned if that was all there was to it!

It all kicked off the Friday before with the Summer Sun Celebration, a giant rave/party/concert at Manchester Central, an old train station that had been converted into a events hall. The line up was fairly impressive with names like The Living Tombstone, Acoustic Brony, Wooden Toaster and more performing. Plenty of alcohol to go around also helped but unfortunately I ended up leaving a little past twelve with a head ache. Still, A lot of fun releasing balloons into the queues crowed.

The next day and a couple of pain killers from a pharmacy later and I found myself confronted with the line to enter the convention...

It was a hell of a queue with over a thousand participants and yes it winds around the corner of that office block almost to its other side. The only ones exempt from the queue were 20% Cooler ticket holders...

OF which I just so happened to be one of!

As a 20% Cooler ticket holder I got to get let in early, a free BUCK sponsors t-shirt and a buffet lunch with the community guests of honour. For all of this I paid a whopping one hundred and thirty five ponds so I guess the t-shirt and lunch weren't really all that free. The honour of being acknowledged for helping make the Convention a reality was worth more then any freebies anyway, and I honestly mean that. I'll gladly pay it again next year should I be able.

However the early enter did come with an unexpected perk. I got to go to the vendors stalls before they were completely mobbed and achieved one of my personal objectives for the convention. I managed to bag myself this little feller:

A Changeling plushy.

After a slow starting opening ceremony that soon got everyone hyped up for the convention the cosplay started and might I say it was beautiful. Unfortunately my own camera wasn't too good and the lighting in the main hall quite detrimental to photography but I managed to get a few good shot here and there afterwords...

Yes, that last Vinyl Scratch is a guy, complete with base cannon and fake boobs.

However I did get one particularly cool opportunity to speak a bit with the professional cosplayer Yami Bjork who came over from Sweden sporting a very well put together costume of an armoured Princess Luna. She was kind enough to let me have photo with her.

I only got to speak with her briefly but I'm already very much inspired and planing a cosplay costume for myself going to next year's Convention.

There was also, on that day the charity auction dedicated to making money for CRY; Cardiac Arrest in the Young which is dedicated to discovering heart diseases in kids before tragic consequences can occur. I will now take a moment to embarrasses someone of particular note.

In case you don't know this Knighty, the figurehead of our little community and website. He is holding a plush toy of the OC Snowdrop from the animation of the same name.

He bought it at the charity auction for five hundred pounds.

I don't really know what to say myself but that is an act of generosity that would make Rarity blush. He's earned a whole new level of respect from me and while it wasn't the highest bid in the whole auction it was definitely one of the top few. I take my hat off to him.

After that there was the voice actors Q&A panel, it was fun but not too eventful but if you really want to know how that went then you could probably fined it on you tube somewhere. Oh, it is wroth mentioning though that Eile Monty, a very talented voice actor and singer in the community quite enjoys doing Granny Apple impressions...

To the point of signing 'I'm sexy and I know it' as such at the Summer Sun Celebration.

The lively music put out for the Luna Eclipse event made for a good wined down and chatting to another nearby listener I made my first new friend at the convention. I wish I had some good photos from the event but the lighting was messing with my camera so everything came out a blurry mess. However I can say I very much enjoyed the laser show put on by Laserpon3, tunes from Acoustic Brony and some fantastic swinging songs from the VIP guest Michelle Creber, the voice actor for Apple Bloom.

Well that was my first day. I'll have another blog soon covering the second but for now; good night.