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Oct. 5th, 2026 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
friendlyrobotpalGod there is some old, old stuff on this webbed site. Dare I make eye contact with myself from 2012 and beyond
friendlyrobotpal
Welcome to the midlife crisis of blogging
Oct. 5th, 2026 04:20 pmfriendlyrobotpalAfter years of meaning to I've been dipping my toes into the local BDSM scene this year and it's made me nostalgic in a very particular, unexpected way.
The first time I encountered kinky people at all was at 2008's Eastercon (a UK SFF fan convention) in a conference hotel near Heathrow airport. We were a group of queer people who had independently gone to a post-watershed discussion about slash fic, and ended up congregating on some hotel couches afterwards to forge the traditional bond of complaining together about the panel.
Aside: I looked up the programme on the Internet Archive to reconstruct which year exactly this happened in, and the panel was titled "Slash & Pornography: Where Does Slash End and Porn Start?" and was apparently hooking into some sub-cultural anxiety about whether fanfic writers were producing pornography, and what that meant. lmao.
At some point somebody mentioned in their litany of deficiencies that there hadn't been any talk about kink, either. To me until then the term "kink" only really existed in a fanfic context, covering mostly the same meaning as an Ao3 tag would these days. I said something along the lines of "well, they did talk a bit about mpreg" (what halcyon pre-omegaverse days) and was quickly corrected: "no, I mean like real-life kink."
I do not recall particularly where the discussion went from there, but I do remember we all followed each other's LiveJournals (it was 2008). And I remember what a revelation it felt like to read their posts about their sexual exploits and fetish thoughts.
I regularly attended cons in the 2000s and 2010s, and occasionally took in an impact play workshop, but (to my certain detriment) I never got involved in any sort of offline BDSM community. I eventually lost touch with those convention friends, too, in the carousel of changing social media platforms.
I went to my first play party a few weeks ago, and honestly I felt like I had never left the SFF convention hotel lobby sofa lounge. I don't think I even felt any nervousness, the energy was so similar. The same kind of nerd: the same kind of focus for their own particular interest, the same earnest unironic enthusiasm, the same care and pride about gear and accessories. Honestly even some of the same aesthetics. (Additionally: a number of the same annoying opinionated kind of guy, the same predominance of white middle class people, more heterosexuals than anyone needs, etc.) It's all very familiar.
I stopped going to cons at the same time I left the UK, partially for money reasons and partly because the final Nine Worlds left me a little disillusioned. But as the internet gets progressively worse and I get correspondingly more analogue I do find myself missing the offline version of fandom. I just got myself a membership to Eastercon 2027 in Glasgow—I'm gonna scrape all my budget together and see how things are these days. I'm looking forward to it! I'm going to attend panels, potentially exhibit some art, probably stay up until 4am a couple times. And I'm not even going to be wracked by crippling social anxiety and pre-transexualism gender dysphoria the whole time! What a world.
A friend of mine sent me a meme last week that called upon millennials to choose their mid-life cirsis activities. For now I'm gonna put a bid in for being a slut nerd and long-form blogging. We'll see how it goes— might also still write a play.
The first time I encountered kinky people at all was at 2008's Eastercon (a UK SFF fan convention) in a conference hotel near Heathrow airport. We were a group of queer people who had independently gone to a post-watershed discussion about slash fic, and ended up congregating on some hotel couches afterwards to forge the traditional bond of complaining together about the panel.
Aside: I looked up the programme on the Internet Archive to reconstruct which year exactly this happened in, and the panel was titled "Slash & Pornography: Where Does Slash End and Porn Start?" and was apparently hooking into some sub-cultural anxiety about whether fanfic writers were producing pornography, and what that meant. lmao.
At some point somebody mentioned in their litany of deficiencies that there hadn't been any talk about kink, either. To me until then the term "kink" only really existed in a fanfic context, covering mostly the same meaning as an Ao3 tag would these days. I said something along the lines of "well, they did talk a bit about mpreg" (what halcyon pre-omegaverse days) and was quickly corrected: "no, I mean like real-life kink."
I do not recall particularly where the discussion went from there, but I do remember we all followed each other's LiveJournals (it was 2008). And I remember what a revelation it felt like to read their posts about their sexual exploits and fetish thoughts.
I regularly attended cons in the 2000s and 2010s, and occasionally took in an impact play workshop, but (to my certain detriment) I never got involved in any sort of offline BDSM community. I eventually lost touch with those convention friends, too, in the carousel of changing social media platforms.
I went to my first play party a few weeks ago, and honestly I felt like I had never left the SFF convention hotel lobby sofa lounge. I don't think I even felt any nervousness, the energy was so similar. The same kind of nerd: the same kind of focus for their own particular interest, the same earnest unironic enthusiasm, the same care and pride about gear and accessories. Honestly even some of the same aesthetics. (Additionally: a number of the same annoying opinionated kind of guy, the same predominance of white middle class people, more heterosexuals than anyone needs, etc.) It's all very familiar.
I stopped going to cons at the same time I left the UK, partially for money reasons and partly because the final Nine Worlds left me a little disillusioned. But as the internet gets progressively worse and I get correspondingly more analogue I do find myself missing the offline version of fandom. I just got myself a membership to Eastercon 2027 in Glasgow—I'm gonna scrape all my budget together and see how things are these days. I'm looking forward to it! I'm going to attend panels, potentially exhibit some art, probably stay up until 4am a couple times. And I'm not even going to be wracked by crippling social anxiety and pre-transexualism gender dysphoria the whole time! What a world.
A friend of mine sent me a meme last week that called upon millennials to choose their mid-life cirsis activities. For now I'm gonna put a bid in for being a slut nerd and long-form blogging. We'll see how it goes— might also still write a play.
