Tales from the fuckhouse (and other stories of BC19): Part 2 · 5:22pm Aug 6th, 2019
Keep in mind this is being written several days after the events that transpired. Things are gonna be fuzzy, and things might end up being recounted on different days than they actually happened. If I forgot to mention meeting you I promise it's not out of malice. It's just that there's a lot.
Thursday
I was up first thing on Thursday morning, the first day of the convention—well, not first thing given all the various arrivals of that morning, but whatever—to get my badge! The badge pickup started at 8, and since I showed up too late to get the previous day's badge pickups, I was eager to try to get to BronyCon in time to beat the line and—
Oh.
There's a reason why people were calling BC19 "LineCon" all four days it ran. All five days, in fact: the aforementioned Wednesday pickup time had a line so incredibly large that it had to be capped, over an hour before the registration time actually ended! So really, I shouldn't have been remotely surprised. (In my defense, I had gotten maybe four hours of sleep and I was tired.)
Luckily, I accidentally chose the one line in that mass which got tended to first. So within about half an hour, I had my badge! And now, with all of Bronycon available to me, I could... go back to the fuckhouse and try to sleep more. The first panel of any kind was at 10 AM, and it was only 8:30.
And then I couldn't sleep once I'd gotten back anyway, and also Pearple and Aragon were up, and we needed various things. Like towels. We did not have nearly enough towels, and also someone was missing a blanket, and some other things I don't remember needed buying. Thankfully, there was a Dollar General within walking distance! Twenty minutes of walking distance, in point of fact, under a brutal August sun. (We also got Gatorade. Aragon still hates it. He's wrong.)
We got back to the fuckhouse, discovered there were actually plenty of towels and we hadn't looked hard enough, felt stupid, and went to the convention for real this time. It was here that we discovered the vastly reduced scope of the building: a lot of the floorspace that had been part of the convention last year, simply wasn't this time. Sure, there was another convention downstairs (for Rubik's Cubes) that had taken up some of that space, but there was a ton of area that simply wasn't being used for anything at all! I have no idea what's up with that: maybe it was too expensive or something.
The rest of the group showed up, and Bryan gave me a copy of the key he'd made - because otherwise we were gonna drive ourselves crazy with trying to coordinate who had the single key at any given time. That's much smarter.
At some point I went to Quills and Sofas, which in previous conventions had been its own big ol' room for writers specifically. Now it was less than half of the Pastel Pastures room, so we were sharing with... [shudders]... artists. I kid, though: it was kind of cool actually, and we still had the typewriters from RobCakeran53. You know, the guy who wrote—
Rob also had a couple of cool things to give out: the first was a Writer tag I could, and did, stick to my Bronycon badge. It was very nice, and I'd missed out on getting one the previous year. It also, apparently, looks exactly like a sponsor badge, so I had to keep telling staff "no I'm not a sponsor, please don't punt me to the front of the line, this is wrong and I feel bad". The second thing he had was a label maker, to give out labels. Since he was out of writers' badges, I couldn't get any for Aragon and Pear (who were at the convention but still in line for registration), so I asked Rob if he could make them labels.
The labels were a bit shitposty: I told him that Aragon's should say that he was a writer or something, so his label read "WRITER OR SOMETHIN'". And when I tried to spell Pearple's screenname for him, he gave up and the label was "PEURPAL". Everyone absolutely loved them. Thank you again, Rob!
I met some other people, not all of whom I can immediately recall - certainly I have no clue when I met most of em. I think that on the first day, I ran into Present Perfect and Octavia Harmony and GaryOak - no, scratch that, I know I ran into GaryOak because he had a panel later that day and asked me to come. I think I also met Horizon that day? Could be? Oh, I definitely met Monochromatic for the first time, according to my Discord history, and she is very fun and cool but more on that later. And who else... Miller Minus?
Ugh, this is difficult. What I do know is that eventually I got my butt over to a panel about writing children in fiction. It was interesting! The panelists were Epic Yarn, BlazzingInferno, and apparently Bookplayer - I'm afraid I forgot, but luckily some other people I know remembered! But it was a really neat panel, and it was here that I discovered that I was really, really tired. I discovered it when I was taking notes on my phone, nodded off, and came to a moment later to discover the absolute nonsense that my phone had autocorrected out of my vague thumb movements. To be clear, I wasn't being bored to sleep - the panel was interesting! - I was just that tired.
Next up was the panel GaryOak was on. Also present were RobCakeran53, Skywriter, Horizon, and... one other person whom I honestly can't remember right now. And Pen Stroke showed up as well, and....
I was exhausted. I was so tired I knew I wouldn't be able to stay up for this panel. So as the panelists were explaining why comedy is good in general, I excused myself, went back to the fuckhouse, and conked out. For, like, an hour and a half. Then I got Mexican food, because I realized I hadn't actually eaten anything all that day - it was overly spicy for me, but it still helped!
I don't remember a huge amount about what else happened that day. I know I tried to get into opening ceremonies - by which I mean I took one look at the line and said "fuck this". I spent some time working on a flashfiction about Rainbow Dash, Derpy, and brony conventions under the guiding eye of RobCakeran in Quills 'n' Sofas - and then got invited to dinner and had to bail before the flashfics could be read. Sorry, Rob! I may have also gotten in touch with The Elusive Badgerpony at this point, I'm not sure: he's a cool dude.
The dinner I went to was at Shake Shack, which somehow had enough room for me and everyone else, including - I think? - Melesse Lindenya, who is a cool dude. Seriously there were like a dozen of us and the place was packed, so I have no clue how we all fit in. The food was good but the shake I got was bad.
And I don't think I did anything else! I'm pretty sure I went home after that, and shot the shit with the other peeps in the fuckhouse until we were too tired to do even that, and then we all went to bed.
That was in fact me at the Shake Shack. And I have no idea how people drink those shakes when they're like sold blocks of milk and ice cream or whatever.
You are a cool dude too, and I had fun talking to you.
Partly that, partly an event that got cancelled after it was too late to try to grab the space.
Also, I don't know where people kept finding all these restuarants. I spent the whole convention choosing between half a dozen crappy-to-middling fast food chains or the granola bars I brought with me.
We did definitely meet at some point! :D