Alright, things have been complicated in the interim, so a whole bunch of cons have happened without benefit of a stenographer tapping away diligently in the corner. Honestly the slippery slope is pretty easy to get really far down before you realize what's going on. The next con happens before you write up one, and you figure you should record in chronological order so you've gotta do this one before that one and the queue keeps piling up so starting that one seems like an ever more intimidating task, so of course all the stuff you usually do goes by the wayside, including all the important little auxiliaries like making contact with all the people that I've met to keep up with them. I hadn't realized what a big part of my convention experience I'd made all this recording stuff out to be until I was a half-dozen cons behind and I was contemplating junking it altogether. It's still a tough call to make, honestly. I mean, it's been long enough that leaving the void-cons completely dark is a pretty tempting option. I've lost so much of the detail and nuance of them that making an account of them be at all compelling would be very difficult. I'm not sure I'd be happy with the final product. And of course the socializing stuff would fall flat in equal measure at this point. Poking a bunch of people to say "Hey, remember me from like a year and a half ago? No? Well can't blame ya I guess bye!" would hardly be a good use of my time.

All this is certainly not helped by the weird neuroses that I have when something important and ongoing looms over me. For a long time I've had this pattern wherein I'd tell myself that I'm not allowed to do something that I like until I do something I need to do that I've been putting off. For that incentive I'd usually choose writing, because it's something that I love, and something that tends to draw upon the same resource pool as the important work stuff that I have to get done. Since it's still a bunch of critical thinking and typing on a computer, I definitely shouldn't burn up all my writing juice on fun stuff when there's work to be done. That was a great motivator for me for many years.

That all kind of broke down in college though. Not only did many of my "supposed to do this" stuff become nebulous and extremely long-term, the short-term stuff like assignments and research papers also had huge writing juice costs. As a result, I did almost no significant fun writing in college, a time that I'd always assumed would be prodigiously filled with such things. I got out of the habit of it, and only came to realize that towards the end of my job search in 2017, a pursuit that consumed nearly all of that year. Now that I've got this new job and things are actually steadying out for me, I've realized that I've finally DONE THE THING, and I can put an end to these four long years of punishing myself. I know some people are into habitually punishing themselves, but if I haven't developed a taste for it by now then I suppose this would be a good time to hop off that hypetrain.

A conversation with ToraKiyoshi really cemented my present plan for me. When I relayed the details to him, he said basically "Probably better to skip the reports you haven't done. You'll have lost too much detail by now, but I have GOT to know how your trip to Casa Bonita went." I can dig that. That's absolutely a story that deserves to be told. So that's where I'm at right now. I'm going to type that one up, and then see where that momentum takes me. In all likelihood I'll do at least a brief rundown of all the shadowy, half-remembered voidcons, but really, there would be diminishing returns on digging into those too far. I just don't want to have that gaping hole staring me in the face every time I come back to this record, if I do decide to resume my routine of obsessively carving into stone every instant of every con I go to.

It really is best to do it now, as I'm sure to only lose more information with time. God willing, these things will pare down a little bit in general, just by virtue of me going to so many cons that they start to become routine to me, and there's not this explosion of flailing madness that I have to get down every time. At FC, a caravan of billboard-bearing station wagons drove by blaring a siren with a dude screaming out the window into a megaphone about what a good deal I could get on a new sofa this weekend and that event got like, a polite nod of acknowledgement from all those assembled. Nobody was really phased because it was like the fourth-weirdest thing that had happened that morning. Kind of the dreary sort of day where you only do one or two impossible things before breakfast. I'm getting ahead of myself though.

I guess the point I'm making is that cons are just a thing that I do now, and all the weirdness and bombastic insanity have just become so much a part of me that they don't stand out in the way that they once did. I weep for the loss of that sense of wonderment, but if it'll be enough of a simplifying force to keep these con reports going, I'm all for it. These have been wonderful records for me to have, even if only a scant few have read them. It's coming up more and more often of late that people I see bi-annually-ish will wonder precisely what our history is together. It's very convenient to be able to say "well let's go to the tape." I think it plays into my persona of being the straight man to the whole fandom's slapstick routine. It's also a really good journal for just like, me as a person. Even going back just a few years I see the differences in myself. These are basically time capsules of the person that I was so long ago. I'm sure such things will only become more valuable with time.

So, soon here follows, an experiment. One that, like many experiments, may explode catastrophically, or revolutionize life as we know it. The only way to know for sure is to pour some of this fizzy green stuff onto this thingy in here and swirl it around a bit.