con.txt thoughts and feelings

I had fun at con.txt, though I think I am still processing the whole experience. I met some cool fanpeople and got to hang out with some of my long-time fandom buds and talked about a bunch of fannish things for a whole weekend.

I guess some of my ambivalence is that it felt very much like a nostalgia trip for me. It's kinda nice to revisit a time in fandom where I knew all the references and felt connected to a smaller, tight-knit community, but I'm also wary of spending too much time there. I already feel like I'm one step out of touch with the youths, and I'm okay with that because that's just a part of getting older, but I also don't want to live in the past forever. I want to get better at embracing the new shapes and new things that fandom takes on.

And it's not something that I think I would get as much out of if I went to it every year or even every other year (maybe?). It's a nice thing to come back to every once in a while when you're feeling a bit adrift in the seas of New Fandom, but I feel like all the conversations I end up having at cons are very same-y, and I need a good amount of time between cons before they feel fresh and new again.

This has been an overly negative post for what was ultimately a good experience. I did come out of it with a renewed sense of creative joy, a desire to make things and to share them with fandom at large. Posting on AO3 can frequently feel like tossing things into a void and hoping someone catches it and likes it. Going to a con makes you more fully aware of the communities that you're connected to and of the other people who read it.

Of course, I don't actually have any specific things I want to write. Feel free to throw prompts at me.