Bronycon: Petrimix (everything) · 12:01am Aug 12th, 2019
So this is me, continuing to not make the "I'm back" blog because I'm not actually back (in that sense.) This is also me discontinuing the format that i had planned on writing those all in. Granted, me abandoning plans is nothing particularly new, but i figure that in light of everyone else having already written bronycon blogs i might as well be up-front about the whole thing (and not drag things out for longer than necessary.) Plus, the original idea was to write while the con was going on as a sort of a long-form-twitter thing, but as it turns out the con was way more awesome than I anticipated, and way more engaging, and i basically had exactly zero time to do any of that.
So what's left to talk about? Well, in terms of originality, not a whole lot. If you guys want interesting blog posts about bronycon, detailed and involved blog posts about bronycon, comprehensive posts about bronycon...there are plenty of those. Plenty of really good ones. You want a blog post talking about the meteoric rise in the prominence of MLP fanfiction vis-a-vis the bookstore? Look no further than here. Are you interested in a dialogue about the moral imperatives and other important lessons of interpersonal relationships as was exemplified by or otherwise related to the con? There's a blog for that, too. Interested in a super comprehensive recounting of events from someone involved in events until he worked so hard that his soul transcended his body and he achieved immortality through virtue of labor? There isn't anyone like that yet, but this guy came pretty close. There's a lot of blogs better than what i could write, with more content than i could write, written earlier than I'm writing this.
And yet, if I don't talk about Bronycon, it's a promise I haven't kept. Not to people expecting a blog follow-up (since this is explicitly a disappointment of expectations, as was mentioned above;) not to people who wanted to hear me talk about the con itself without any other strings attached, since I don't remember who, if anyone, asked for that.
Or rather, I should say "Not just" instead of "Not." Because it's other people that might want to hear what I have to ramble about here, possibly, but because I kind of owe it to the con, too. And to the cartoon pastel horse fandom in general.
"The con" meaning more than just "These three adorable faces," of course, but they also count on the virtue of being adorable mascots.
I'm sure that most people who've heard writers talk about Bronycon have heard people talk about Shakespearicles, who proposed a toast to a room packed full of writers. I'm pretty sure I was too distracted by the taste of crab and the heady rush of being surrounded by so many immeasurably awesome people to remember the full speech, but I don't think anyone there could ever forget the conclusion:
"Anyone who tells you that 'this is the end', is wrong! This doesn't end unless we let it. And I am not getting off this ride until the damn wheels fall off, and then I'm getting out and pushing!"
I wish you guys could imagine the external cheering. Heck, I wish you could imagine the internal cheering, too - I guarantee that the majority of people who left that night felt more inspired and optimistic than fatalistically depressed. I could read it on faces, see it in body language - and I want you to understand that this is coming from a guy who is normally hot garbage at picking up on body language and visual cues from other people. People weren't just content that night, or satisfied - they were invigorated. They were ready to look right at the vague, impending sense of doom that had been creeping into everyone's mind since season 9 started and kick it right in the daddy-bags.
There are many lines and phrases from Mass Effect that I greatly enjoy. "Daddy-bags" isn't as good as "Disingenuous Assertions," but it's close enough to count.
And I felt that in the remainder of the panels throughout the con. I felt it in the way people talked the day after, and before they headed home. And I can see the proof of it in the blog posts of other people. Talking about all of that would be getting ahead of myself, though.
So what should I talk about? Purely subjective stuff! Without the need to hold myself to one specific essay topic, theme or other overarching structure, I won't have to worry about reiterating points that other people made by default. Now, when I do 'em, It'll be entirely by my choice.
And let's do lists! Everyone likes lists! Especially countdowns! So we're going to do one of those.
TOP TEN TRUTHS PETRI LEARNED AT BRONYCON
Are you excited? Probably not this excited. It's okay, though. We can't all be as excited as best girl.
10: Y'all really like Wisconsin beer and cheese
Well, okay, this isn't necessarily a "y'all." I didn't physically get to have the opportunity to share it with that many people, because i didn't have the chance to get people into a situation where i could have given some away. But the thing is, I worried that my attempt at gift-giving was going to be seen as "too much." That nobody would want to partake out of politeness, distaste for the actual product, distate for the presentation, or other reasons to decline the gift.
Nooooooooooooooooope.
I brought way too much beer for it all to be drunk, but plenty more got drunk than i thought would. And the cheese is flat-out gone; that i didn't share at my hotel room had claims jumped on it by other people, and I wouldn't be surprised if I heard news about A couple of guys getting into knife fights over what remained of the cheese.
Incidentally, this makes me much more tempted to bring and share stuff with you guys at future cons! Beer will probably be hard, because I'll likely be getting on a plane to go to EFNW next year and there are laws about traveling with liquids on planes that make me uncomfortable. The cheese will probably still be fine, though, so expect plenty of that!
Rarara taught me all I need to know about generosity. Also fashion and elegance, though I've yet to put those principles into practice. Someday, though...
And speaking of...
9: I'm very much not done with going to MLP conventions.
Gonna be honest: Up until...let's say the Wednesday of the convention...I was honestly thinking that I would be done after Bronycon. I go to conventions primarily for the people, believe it or not, and I wasn't sure that I would be able to see all, or even most, of the people I wanted to hang out with if I went to a con that was smaller or in a less fortuitous location. And if you have fun at a convention by hanging out with people you like, and you're not going to be having fun when you're at a convention with nobody else you want to hang out with, then why pay hundreds of dollars in travel, hotel, registration, etc. fees just to be unhappy?
Then I realized that a lot of you guys were planning on not making this your last convention. Not all of you, and I understand why the people who won't be making it to other cons, uh, won't make it to other cons. But a lot of you will - and I still want to hang with that lot of you people, very much so. I still want to have fun with you guys, and I don't mind doing that in an unfamiliar venue. If anything, that gives me more to learn about, more to have fun learning about, and more to enjoy in general!
This isn't to say I'm not going to miss it. I do miss it already, quite a lot. But I'm okay with feeling that way. There's still plenty of happiness to be had.
So anyways, let's not go to Trotcon
Following up on that...
8: I go to conventions primarily for the other people.
F r i e n d s h i p l a d s
That's not to say that I don't, y'know, do convention things when I go to conventions. I go to panels, and the panels are awesome. I visit the merch hall, and see plenty of cool stuff to either throw money at or seriously consider throwing money at although i was disappointed by the lack of a reasonably-priced Silverstream daki i mean what the hell guys. I catch other, larger-scale events from time to time, and those are basically a blast and a half. I try to get autographs from people within the fimfic community, who are people that I dearly want to meet that I don't have to spend three hours in line to get ten seconds of interaction with.
And it's also not to say that I'm not an introvert. This con, definitively, proved that I am. Thankfully, it only took me twenty-seven years to realize that the solution to feeling anxious when around a bunch of other people is to stop being around other people for an hour or so, recharge and dive right back into things. So that was a thing that happened, but overall I don't think that I missed all that much compared to other years, and I got to do everything that I wanted to do without feeling overwhelmed (the one exception being the time that i stayed up until 2:30 in the morning, which was more due to the panel scheduling than anything else, so no worries on that front.)
But yeah, when I go to conventions, it's because I want to hang out with people I'd normally never get to hang out at, at a venue that's incredibly convenient, fitting, suitable and enjoyable for that purpose. I know this is the place where I give a shoutout to everyone that I talked to by name, and believe me, I want to remember everyone. But while I know that there were over three dozen of you that I'm glad i got to talk to, if only briefly, I'll be damned if I can remember all of them off of the top of my head, and I don't want anypony that I hung out with to think that I forgot about them entirely by virtue of accidental omission.
You guys know who you are, though. And you're awesome. And I really can't wait to talk to you more online and see you again next year.
I lack the ability to properly demonstrate how happy you guys make me, so have best girl doin a heckin big happy
7: I shitpost when I'm not doing anything else.
Okay, for the record, This is a good thing. In this case. I swear.
See, though I wanted to spend a bunch of time in Quills and Sofas, and though I did end up spending a bunch of time in Quills and Sofas, it wasn't as if I was able to talk to everybody at every given moment. Shocker, that: people having other people they want to talk to, things they want to write, plans they made before that they want to follow through on! It's almost as if they have lives of their own! It's so ridiculous, I know, but there you have it.
thrice-accursed machines, enabling productive attitudes that could have been devoted towards feeding my insatiable ego instead! Shameful.
Hence, why some of you guys probably noticed me jotting stuff down onto a piece of paper. That was a regular occurrence in Quills and Sofas when I couldn't think of anywhere else I needed to be or anything else that I had to do at the moment, and was subsequently busy letting my idle hands be the devil's playthings. And if there was a lack of output, it's because i am a v-e-e-e-e-e-ery slow writer. Physically speaking, I mean; you guys already know about my update schedule. But yeah, I've always been really slow at writing in cursive, and even slower at writing in block lettering, so the transcription process from brain-to-page always takes a while. Unexpected positive side effect: it means that my brain's usually plotting out what I'm going to write next while I'm in the process of writing out one thing.
(And fun fact about my parents: They eventually recognized that I was never going to get faster at writing, and decided to force me to take typing lessons instead so i could communicate quickly and rapidly that way instead. Given that my WPM sits at 80 when I'm not trying at all and goes higher when I put in effort these days, I'd say that was a pretty smart move on their part.)
Anyways, the reason why I consider this a good thing is that it meant that my desire to write hasn't gone anywhere. I still have it. I still like writing, even if only just silly stuff. Heck, if I really felt disinclined towards writing, I wouldn't have put this blog up at all. And yet, here we are. If I like doing dumb stuff for dumb reasons that still requires the dumb part of my brain to exercise creativity in its own capacity and to subsequently share it (or leave the opportunity to have it seen open, at any rate) with other people, then clearly I still like writing in some capacity. Concrete proof that I want to keep doing what I've been doing. Concrete proof that I'm not "done." Bam. Logic. I'm ready to dab all over writer's block now.
Speaking of...
6: The difficulties I have had in writing before have been genuine.
I realize that this is weird in the context of what I had written above. Bear with me on this one, please.
My writing output has been glacial. That's not a secret. I mean, I wrote something right before Bronycon, but that was 12,000 words over seven months. Even if you're not comparing that to the truly prodigious output of guys like Skirts, it's still unreasonably slow.
And part of me always figured that it was out of implicit laziness. That i was just disinterested in something and didn't want to put in any effort. That the thing holding myself back was solely the fact that i was a garbage human being, and that any other excuse i could make to claim otherwise would strictly be just that: an excuse. Not the real thing. That part of me assumed that I didn't care about pony anymore, didn't care about writing anymore, and didn't feel the need to make myself try to care again because I was just that scummy.
And you know what? I probably still am lazy, scummy and worthless. These are valid hypotheses, and I'm not going to out-and-out discard them given the body of evidence to support them. But actually putting a story out there, actually getting inspired to write more, actually writing drafts and skeletons of stories and an actual full-fledged poem and actually discussing writing with other people and actually considering writing motifs and actually everything else, like...
I like writing. Writing is what I do, and what I want to do. I'm not holding back out of disinterest, apathy or lethargy; recently, I've been feeling none of those things, and more importantly feeling like this doesn't feel forced. This isn't a fake-it-'til-you-make-it font of inspiration and energy; it's genuine, natural, unforced. This is something I want to do, and do feel like putting effort into.
Which means that there's at least one other thing holding me back. And that's something I can work with. If nothing else, it's something I can take a look at not just as an excuse for a different source, but an actual, possible source in and of itself. This could be something I can actually fight, and hopefully beat, and win, and not let whatever it is thwart my desire to read and write anymore.
Fuck off, personal demons. I'm sick of your shit, and one day I intend to beat you for good.
Whoof. That got a bit dark, didn't it? Let's move on to something more lighthearted.
5: Hooooooooooly crap Fogo de Chao is incredible.
And not necessarily something I'm likely to do again. It's pricey! No surprises there, but I'm not exactly made of money. Still, I got into a very lucky situation involving restaurant week, other people being more on the ball about scoping out deals than me, and me being allowed to hop on a reservation train while there were still slots to be filled. $35 isn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but it's definitely manageable, and it can always be made more cost-effective by gorging oneself on high-quality cuts of meat. Which I did. Unabashedly.
And grilled pineapple. Holy crap, guys, did I mention how good the grilled pineapple was? I will *die for grilled pineapple*
So yeah, friday and sunday consisted of me and a few cool dudes going out to someplace I'd never imagined myself going to and eating the sort of things I'd never imagined I'd get to eat. Rare, even! That was also a shock. I'm normally accustomed to not being served meat that wasn't medium at juiciest, and I'll be darned if I even think about eating meat at the "charcoal" level ever again.
Shout-out to the other places I had dinner at, though. TNN served great crab, as per usual; heck, i try to get crab when I'm in Baltimare, on the basis that the city advertises crab as its specialty rather heavily, and heck, i like crab. Also shout-out to hooters for having surprisingly delicious wings. Now, there's this one doubting thomas who thought i couldn't handle the wings, but there have been things that have been harder for me to handle, up to and including the outfits of the people who worked at hooters (and the fact that, though i tried to hard as possible to look at faces and only at faces, i still felt like a pervert by the sheer virtue of being a paying customer.
I promise you guys, though, they were really good wings. If you can handle the embarrassment, I recommend going to one sometime, or at least the one in Baltimare.
I'll leave whether this was a spice-induced or embarrassment-induced blush up to you.
Also, on the saucier topic...
4: I may or may not be becoming memetic.
Not a major meme. The sort of meme that a guy with less than 200 followers gets. It's still a meme, though, and you know what? I'll take it.
C o n c e r n
So I'm not gonna post any links for this one, 'cause y'all in the know are in the know, and y'all that aren't probably don't need to be/shouldn't be/preserve your sanity. The tl;dr of it, though, is that once upon a time i wrote a crack/clopfic based around exploiting one particular concept for what was supposed to be lulz, but which ended up becoming for the heartwarmings. And yes, I'll opine that porn can be heartwarming. It depends on the porn. I may or may not write a blog about that later, I'm not sure.
But yeah, there was a porn, it had a concept, and I later ended up writing a sequel for it. Then, after seven months of writer's block, I wrote a threequel that basically had more interpersonal drama and character exploration than it actually did sex, much less kinky things. And apparently, people liked it.
I say this because at least one person approached me to talk about it. I say this because at least one person sent me a private message about it. I say this because people referenced it, told me they had read it, told me they had liked it, wanted to know if I was going to write more, wanted to know if they could talk about it. This one trio of fics, the ones originally conceived of as fluffy, are getting more attention from my peers than The thing that actually got me a RCL feature.
And you know what? I'm okay with this. It amuses me as much as it presumably amuses you guys. I'll act vexed and perplexed about it the same way I always do, because it is vexing and perplexing, but at the end of the day I ain't mad at all.
And no, I'm not naming any names, for obvious reasons.
No smooth transition for this one, so I might as well just cut into some cruxes of these particular issues:
3: MLP Music has been great for longer than I remember.
This is true of all forms of MLP fanworks in general, really. The horse words have always been good, and I'm intensely familiar with that fact. The art's been consistently good, the blogs have been consistently good, just...the everything has been really good. As far as fandoms go, Bronies are pretty kickass, and I'm not sure how much of that is due to the nature of the show and how much of that is due to the people in the fandom as a whole. In any case, I'll consider myself blessed to be a part of this whole shebang, and I don't regret it for a second.
But music, man...I don't think it's a secret to anyone else that I know that I'm pretty audiosensitive. Music hits me a lot harder, It's a lot easier to unnerve or soothe me with the right ambiance, and I'm pretty sure that I might like ASMR if I ever made a serious attempt at trying to get into it. So one would figure that I might listen to more pony music, right?
But, uh...while I never technically "left" pony, I ran out of people to hang out with who wanted to talk about it back at about the time season 2 ended, which was a function of college being college and roommates and life circumstances changing and all that sort of thing. I didn't really get back "into" it until I started hanging out with fimfic folks in a serious capacity, which was near the end of 2015. So there's a huge gap right there; after the gap, I didn't really have people actively filling me in on stuff (which is fine, it happens, I should have taken it upon myself to scout out more music,) and before the gap the faults in my memory make it more difficult for me to recall things from that far back (or in general, really.)
So when the people I was carpooling with put on some brony tunes, most of them were things I was entirely unfamiliar with. And some of the stuff was good, some of the stuff was great, and some of the stuff was oh my god
You guys know how many times I've listened to some of the songs I heard on the carpool? sometimes once or twice, sometimes five or six time, so on, so forth. You know how many times I've listened to this? An absurd number of times. A ridiculous number of times. It's not the only thing that I've listened to a ridiculous number of times since I came back from the convention, but it's the one most prominently on my mind and the one that's easiest for me to recall on a moment's notice because it is just. That. Good.
I'm not even sure if stuff like this is sleeper gems. They've existed all along. They've been great all along. And the fact that they exist on the internet is a barrier against being forgotten about or lost in the shuffle permanently. And there's so much of this to discover and rediscover and it's just so, so wonderful.
And that's a powerful thing about the fandom: the recognization that our work has quality, purpose and worth. In a lot of different mediums, obviously, but especially in the one that smacks me in the ears like a sledgehammer made of butter and concentrated smiles. Especially in the one that i can engage with every single day while out and about doing other things, and enjoy every single time because it's just that high-quality. And speaking of quality...
2: Our fandom has quality, purpose and worth.
Seriously. I've been a fan of a lot of different things, and I've seen a lot of different fandoms. I know what their creative output is like, what their general attitudes are, their memes, their labors of love, the things they're famous or infamous for.
Nothing compares to bronies. Nothing. We've transcended fandom into a lingering, sustained, full-blown phenomena. We've defined standards of quality and taste for close to a decade, defying expectations of failure and irrelevance, pushed through both the erosion of time and the disenfranchisement of others, and we're still going. We're still here. We're not going anywhere. And hell, when G5 happens, we're still going to be there, and we're still going to be doing stuff, and it's still going to be amazing. I'd say "what has fallen will rise again," but I lknow that the end of the show won't be an all-out fall for us. We've still got all the wonderful, nifty little tools that everyone involved in the creation of the show laid out for us, and I know that I'm not going to be the only person creating content in the face of it.
Never. Stop.
I honestly don't need to say all that much more, here. You all know what I'm talking about. You've heard people more eloquent than me talk about it. But it's true: we're not just sticking with ponies because of collective stubbornness, but because we genuinely have created wonderful things and continue to create wonderful things and likely will create wonderful things for a long, long time. Ten minutes of searching fimfic, or derpibooru, or a bunch of other different places is testament to that fact if you're looking for it.
We're just that amazing. You guys are all wonderful. I'm so lucky to have met you.
Shakespearicles summed it up better than I ever could. And I, too, am not getting off the ride.
1: At the end of the day, the show was a pretty good show.
It isn't the best show in the world. Perhaps not even the best among its competitors for attention in its demographic. It's not been consistently good, and there have been plenty of episodes or things that I've disliked about it.
But you know what? Seeing only the bad stuff is seeing the forest for the trees. There's been plenty of wonderful parts about the show, too, from the worldbuilding to the characters to the plots to the moments to the everything else. People have laughed, people have cried, people have gotten angry, people have smiled...people got engaged, is what I'm saying. It's an engaging show. Sometimes for not great reasons, and sometimes it fails to engage - but sometimes it knocks things out of the park, too, and there are a whole lot of wonderful things to take away from it at the end of the day.
You wouldn't believe how many people I've met that have said this episode makes them cry. I can't blame them.
There's a reason everyone got invested in it, I think. Plenty of them are good reasons. And I think that if I was offered the chance to start fresh and get into it all over again, I'd do so without hesitation. I can think of worse things to love, and worse people to meet through things that I love.
All of this, all of you, all of everything is worth it. Not "was," but "is." It's ongoing. There will always be more pony, in some form or another. And, hopefully, there will always be more of you, too.
Whatever form it takes, I'm ready to go out and get myself some more smiles. Who's with me?
-Petrichord.
Hanging out with you was a pleasure, and I'm looking forward to seeing you at the next con. I'm ready to jam some more Surviving Mars and Elysium while continuing to die horribly in Pandemic.
Anyway come to Trotcon5104173
i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/541/054/a5e.gif
It was a joy and pleasure to see you again.
And flinch at the prospect of being punched for the Loss Corgi pic.
~Skeeter The Lurker
It was great hanging out with you, Petri, and I think I can echo a lot of your feelings about things, particularly when it comes to writing.
I'll gladly grab some more beer/cheese when I see you next, or just need to have you recommend some more, given I'm like less than 30 minutes from Wisconsin.
Also, if you need any proofreading or someone to bounce ideas off of for that mane six drinking fic you mentioned to me, let me know, because I want to see it become a reality.
well said :D
It was great meeting you! We'll have to chill at Everfree next year
Some very valuable lessons indeed. Glad you had such a fantastic time.